Nepal in a Dangerous COVID-19 Territory With the country now reporting over 105,000 confirmed cases and the latest...
Posted by Madhav Bhatta on Saturday, October 10, 2020
A Ridiculously Huge New Solar Farm Just Came Online in China Its 2.2 gigawatt capacity makes it second only to India’s Bhadla solar park, which opened late last year and has a capacity of 2.5 gigawatts. ....... the site is connected to an 800 kilovolt power line that will run 1,587 kilometers (986 miles) to the east across Qinghai, Gansu, Shaanxi, and Henan provinces. The ultrahigh-voltage line minimizes the amount of power lost in transit by using a high voltage of direct current, which flows through conductors more uniformly than alternating current. ......... there’s a whopping 113 cities with more than a million people. For comparison’s sake, only 10 cities in the US have more than a million people. ........ The Chinese Communist Party has an ambitious plan to build the world’s largest supergrid, which would connect six different regional grids and carry power from renewable sources from the west to the east. ........... the country would reach its peak carbon dioxide emissions in just 10 years, by 2030.
Long stimulus wait causes pain
IBM to split into two companies
IBM to split into two as it reinvents itself A new company focusing on legacy IT infrastructure will be named and spun off next year. .......... “We divested networking back in the 1990s, we divested PCs back in the 2000s, we divested semiconductors about five years ago because all of them didn’t necessarily play into the integrated value proposition,” Chief Executive Arvind Krishna said. .......... Today, hybrid cloud and AI are swiftly becoming the locus of commerce, transactions, and over time, of computing itself,” Mr Krishna wrote in a blog post. ........ IBM, which currently has more than 352,000 workers, said it expects the separation to cost $5bn.
SPACEX IS BUILDING A MILITARY ROCKET TO SHIP WEAPONS ANYWHERE IN THE WORLD The new contract is further evidence that SpaceX is leaning hard into military partnerships. Earlier this week, the private space company won a contract with the military’s Space Development Agency to manufacture four missile-tracking satellites.
MICROSOFT SAYS ITS EMPLOYEES CAN WORK FROM HOME FOREVER Most significantly, the change allows permanently-remote workers to live anywhere else in the U.S. ........... Unfortunately, there’s some fine print. Just like with Facebook’s similar announcement in May, Microsoft employees who move to a less-expensive area might lose part of their income or benefits.
Who’s the Tax Cheat: The Lady in Jail or the Man in the White House? Donald Trump knows that taxes are for the poor. .......... Trump may have illegitimately claimed a $72.9 million refund that the I.R.S. is now trying to recover. ....... hair styling is not a deductible expense and that, in any case, Trump’s hair expenses for his “Apprentice” TV shows should have been reimbursed by NBC — in which case Trump may have committed criminal tax fraud. ........ Sure enough, Trump properties then charged the Secret Service enormous sums for hotel rooms and other fees while agents were protecting Trump. ........... The larger point is not that Trump is a con artist, although he is, but that the entire tax system is a con. .......... The five counties with the highest audit rates in the United States, according to Tax Notes, are all predominately African-American counties in the South. .......... zillionaires claim enormous tax deductions for donating expensive art to their own private “museums” located on their own property ....... Trump is still holding on to the almost $73 million that he appears to have bilked out of the I.R.S. a decade ago, even though the I.R.S. is contesting his maneuvers. For wealthy people like Trump, taxes become something like a long negotiation. ......... the failure of wealthy Americans to pay their fair share forces everyone else to pay an extra 15 percent in taxes. .......... almost one-fifth of American families with children report that they can’t afford to give their kids enough food ............ 70 percent of tax underpayment is by the top 1 percent and conclude that tougher enforcement by the I.R.S. could raise $1 trillion over a decade. .......... Each additional dollar spent on enforcement brings in about $24.
