China and Huawei propose reinvention of the internet New architecture would enable cutting-edge technologies but western countries fear more control for state-run internet services ....... China has suggested a radical change to the way the internet works to the UN, in a proposal that claims to enable cutting-edge technologies such as holograms and self-driving cars but which critics say will also bake authoritarianism into the architecture underpinning the web. ....... The proposal has caused concerns among western countries including the UK, Sweden and the US, who believe the system would splinter the global internet and give state-run internet service providers granular control over citizens’ internet use. It has gained the support of Russia, and potentially Saudi Arabia ........ Huawei describes the existing internet infrastructure that underpins global networks — known as TCP/IP — as “unstable” and “vastly insufficient” to meet the requirements of the digital world by 2030, including self-driving cars, the ubiquitous internet of things and “holo-sense teleportation”. ....... “The research and innovation of New IP is open to scientists and engineers worldwide to participate in and contribute to” ...... New IP will enable “fine-grained controls in the foundations of the network” and that the Chinese approach “will lead to more centralised, top-down control of the internet and potentially even its users, with implications on security and human rights”. ...... TCP/IP is to the wired world what DNA is to the biological one ...... a more efficient address system is needed for emerging technologies. ...... New IP would provide this, allowing devices within the same network to communicate directly with each other without having to send information across the internet. ...... New IP would have something described as a “shut up command”, where a central point in the network could effectively cut off communication to or from a particular address, according to a source who was present. He described this feature as a “fundamental departure” from the current network model which acts as an “agnostic postman that simply moves boxes around”............. The quote 'one which is very free and open and . . . government hands-off “ is an invalid statement. We are being monitored by all the devices and by all the intelligence services of the great Empire. We have the largest prison camp in the world. We don't have voting rights for those incarcerated. They have no voice - none at all while, during the court hearings and none during incarceration and none after releasing to the society back to suffer. A large number of eligible voters are 'unregistered' and ineligible to vote . We have 800 or so military bases ruling over the world - the people's lives, their communications, their movements are controlled - in short we regulate the world. We have the exclusive super power tools - the Military and the Monetary powers to conduct Wars. So even now the people are not free; the essential economic freedom is constricted. ....... Internet is a top down structure. Now controlled by the US. In the new proposal a kind of local autonomy is envisaged for local coverage. ........ Don't give sainthood to the Western Democracies, herein ruling elites are far removed from the people. I say in China meritocracy dominates over Democracy, but humanity is not lost. For the common folks in both Nations lives are of the same nature. ......... Yes internet has to evolve but definitely not by the Chinese who have practiced genocide with its people ( famine) and are perfecting the art of citizen control. ...... Oh please, all of this concern for privacy of citizens' internet use was revealed to be a thorough sham by Assange, Snowden et. al. They exposed what the NSA and GCHQ were up to while western governments hid behind this sham of privacy rights and other feel good what not.... At least with the Chinese, its unambiguous that one is being surveilled. I much prefer that to western subterfuge. ........
How to get stimulus money direct deposits will begin by April 17 and checks will start being mailed in three weeks. ....... The IRS announced it will create an online portal for people to update or input their direct deposit details. ....... freelancers, sole proprietors and gig workers are all eligible for the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) loans. ....... The disaster loans, which are for those in a state that has declared a state of emergency, have a 3.75% interest rate for businesses and 2.75% rate for nonprofits and will have to be paid back. If you apply for these loans, you are eligible to apply for a $10,000 grant that you would receive three days after applying. ...... Business owners and sole proprietors can begin applying for the PPP loans on April 3, and freelancers and individual contractors can apply on April 10 ...... PPP loans can be forgiven if the funds are used for payroll expenses, mortgage payments, or rent and utility costs within eight weeks of receiving the loan. ...... Part-time workers or those who are self-employed, including gig workers, contractors and freelancers, are now eligible to apply for unemployment benefits. ....... The amount each person receives will depend upon which state they live in, but those who apply and receive benefits should expect $600 on top of what their state provides until July 31. ...... Workers can receive payments for up to 39 weeks.
described the Covid-19 pandemic as a “global issue that overrides geopolitics concerns”.
China’s coronavirus ‘victory’ and Britain’s threat of a ‘reckoning’ show two countries out of touch with the post-Covid-19 future the Communist Party has declared “victory” over the virus, and bearing news that the war is not actually won could be a sure path to demotion. ........ a “senior [UK] government source” claiming that after the coronavirus crisis was over, China would face a “reckoning” and might become a “pariah state”. ....... wanted to go “back to the diplomatic drawing board” with Beijing when the crisis was over. ...... Britain is angry with China in a way that would have seemed bizarre just two months ago, when Johnson risked the wrath of Donald Trump by allowing Huawei to bid to provide elements of Britain’s 5G network. ...... both China’s virus “victory” and Britain’s threat of a reckoning suggest something more ominous: a lack of reality about the geopolitical future once the disease really has retreated.
....... The virus has devastated the world economy for the immediate future, and this creates a major issue for Brexit Britain, still due to leave the structures of the EU single market on December 31 with no idea what trading arrangements it will have with the rest of Europe or the rest of the world. ...... The model of “hard Brexit” pursued by the Johnson administration is based on the idea that the UK would be entirely separate from any of the world’s largest trading blocs, but simultaneously part of a network of free-trade agreements policed by the World Trade Organisation. ..... Rage against China is perhaps an understandable reaction in the circumstances. But it is a reaction that is unsupported by strategy. ........ the EU, the international entity with the most interest in raising such issues on the international stage, but with which the British government is still in a form of Cold War, even during the virus crisis. ...... any “reckoning” makes the likelihood of opening China’s markets, one of the prizes hinted at by Brexiteers for the past four years, much harder to achieve. ..... In a strange way, Britain and China find themselves in a geopolitically similar position. Both are countries which are globally admired for aspects of what they do. But they are both a long way from the sweet spot that would give them a globally plausible voice when the virus crisis is over.
Fauci: 'I don't understand why' every state hasn't issued stay-at-home orders
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Understanding the Economic Shock of Coronavirus
What both the left and the right get wrong about the coronavirus economic crisis Financial historian Adam Tooze on the lessons policymakers need to learn, and fast....... This is a very different sort of economic crisis than 2008, and if we can’t see it for what it is —
if we refight the last crisis, rather than this one — we will fail.
........ locked in past arguments .... The job is maintaining the economy on life support during a period of an artificially induced coma while we address the public health challenge. ...... The ultimate perversity is that their inability to imagine a future will not enable them to return to the pre-crisis situation. If people were to take Trump’s words literally and act on them, the result would be some apocalyptic mess on the scale of Iran, not Italy. ....... You have to move precisely in order to stabilize the situation. If we don’t, what we’re headed toward is unspeakable mass death and huge economic losses. ....... China is the dog that hasn’t barked in this crisis so far because of the success of [its] conservative strategy. There has not been a big movement in the Chinese exchange rate and very little action on the Chinese balance of payments. ......... Rising fury between the two largest economies during a crisis of this scale seems like a very dangerous situation. .......... the Trump administration is such a headless chicken, that there isn’t even a concerted nationalist pushback against the global stabilization efforts being pursued by the Federal Reserve and the International Monetary Fund. ....... the disarticulation of levels of power in the US government is such that you can have people pursuing security policy in one corner and you can have people pursuing global stabilization of the global financial system in another corner. And then you have the clown car performance in the White House. Sometimes, of course, these things interfere, but by the standards of the great Marshall Plan era, where all of the elements lined up, American power is grotesquely incoherent at this point. .......... in ’07-’08, the truly egregious bailouts were being delivered to the people who engineered the leverage and reaped the rewards that generated the crisis............. Three million people have lost their jobs in a week. And they’re not losing them in the big companies. They’re losing them in the thousands and thousands of small- and medium-size enterprises. We don’t really have a good model for doing stimulus for them. ....... The left wants reformist change and the right wants to allow the market process to operate unencumbered. Both of them, I think, are operating with a kind of unrealistic understanding of the nature of this crisis. If we’re looking at as many as 10 million jobs lost in a matter of months, these arguments go out the window and the argument for preservation of what we can still preserve becomes absolutely overriding. .......
the reality we’re facing, which is a scaled-up version of what we’re seeing in the hospitals of northern Italy.
........ in two weeks’ time, when the hospitals of DC and the hospitals of New York are running over and they are triaging thousands of people every day.
Coronavirus: I'm in lockdown with my abuser "How many days will be like this?" he'd shouted, throwing a bottle of the spirit he'd been drinking against the wall. Geeta's children scrambled behind her for shelter. ...... "Usually he saves his anger for me, but he has begun to yell at them for minor things like leaving a cup on the floor. I then say something to divert his attention so he can be angry at me, but the more time we are together, the less I can think of to distract him." ....
coronavirus has put women in danger.
It was only a few months since Kai had started therapy for the years of physical and sexual abuse she had experienced with her father. She says he had abused her since she was a toddler. She still hadn't confided the full extent of the abuse to her mother and sister. ...... It was early days, but Kai says the therapy was helping her and she felt more in control. She was feeling more hopeful for the future. ....... "He's here the whole time," she whispers, "during the day he watches TV on his computer in the living room. At night I hear him watching porn." ..... She knows he's awake when she hears him making his breakfast smoothie. "I hate it so much, it's so loud, the sound of the blender petrifies me. It's the start of my day, when I have to be vigilant."
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Inside China’s controversial mission to reinvent the internet Whereas today’s internet is owned by everyone and no one, they were in the process of building something very different — a new infrastructure that could put power back in the hands of nation states, instead of individuals. ........ The idea was to illustrate that the current internet is a relic that has reached the limits of its technical prowess. It was time, Huawei proposed, for a new global network with a top-down design, and the Chinese should be the ones to build it....... Governments everywhere seem to agree that today’s model of internet governance — essentially, lawless self-regulation by private, mostly American companies — is broken. ........ Despite the might of today’s internet, it has no regulator; instead, power is largely held by a handful of US corporations — Apple, Google, Amazon, Facebook. This lack of central oversight is the very thing that has allowed technologists to transform how we communicate and live but it has also enabled deep fractures in our social order, including the manipulation of public dialogue, the disruption of democracy and the rise of online surveillance....... many experts see the internet as a civic space that requires better public hygiene. Governments — whether democratic or authoritarian — are tired of being shut out and are agitating for more influence online......... The New IP presentation paints a picture of a digital world in 2030 where virtual reality, holographic communication and remote surgery are ubiquitous — and for which our current network is unfit. Traditional IP protocol is described as “unstable” and “vastly insufficient”, with “lots of security, reliability and configuration problems”........ Rather than a unified world wide web, citizens could be forced to connect to a patchwork of national internets, each with its own rules — a concept known in China as cyber sovereignty. ........ The advent of 5G — a much higher bandwidth network which will serve as the digital spine for a more automated world — has led to rising concern that products developed by Huawei will be built with “back doors” for spies in Beijing........ “New IP aims to provide new IP technology solutions that can support . . . future applications such as Internet of Everything, holographic communications, and telemedicine. The research and innovation of New IP is open to scientists and engineers worldwide to participate in and contribute to.” ....... “The internet is dominated by US companies, all data flows there. So, of course, they want to keep that power,” he says. “We are scared of Chinese repression. We are making caricatures of the Chinese in a borderline imperialist-racist way. But the internet governance today is not working. There is room for an alternative.” ....... “The risk is that if we fail to come up with a third model — one that empowers users and increases democracy and transparency online, and reduces the powers both of big tech and government security services — then more and more countries will tilt towards the Chinese model, rather than deal with the fallout of the failing Silicon Valley one.” ........ “The sleeping giant of democracy is finally stirring, lawmakers are waking up, but they need to feel the public at their backs. We need a western web that will offer the kind of vision of a digital future that is compatible with democracy. This is the work of the next decade.”
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Coronavirus: Chinese academics’ open letter urges Beijing, Washington to come together to beat Covid-19
Coronavirus: global trade braces for ‘tidal wave’ ahead, as shutdown batters supply chains A series of data points show where world trade is going, and the picture for air and sea freight is not a pretty one .....Supply and demand crises are coalescing on the high seas, as more countries shut their borders
China’s coronavirus ‘victory’ and Britain’s threat of a ‘reckoning’ show two countries out of touch with the post-Covid-19 future
RESEARCHERS ANNOUNCE PROMISING CORONAVIRUS VACCINE CANDIDATE THE DRUG IS DELIVERED THROUGH A BAND-AID-LIKE PATCH — NOT A NEEDLE.
Oops: Elon Musk Donated the Wrong Kind of Ventilator He promised life-saving ventilators. He delivered sleep apnea machines.
BILL GATES: US “MISSED THE OPPORTUNITY” TO PREVENT CATASTROPHE HERE'S HOW GATES WANTS TO STOP THE CORONAVIRUS BEFORE IT KILLS HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS.
