Month: August 2024

Big Tech’s AI arms race has a significant energy cost. For example, a study found that training OpenAI’s GPT-4 used up to 62,000 megawatt-hours, equal to the energy needs of 1,000 U.S. households over 5-6 years.

And, as Visual Capitalist’s Pallavi Rao details below, this can be seen when tracking Microsoft’s electricity use (in terawatt-hours) and related carbon emissions (in million metric tons of CO₂e) in the last four years.

Data is sourced from the company’s 2024 Sustainability Report, and covers FY 2020–23. Microsoft’s financial year runs from July 1st to June 30th.

AI Push is Putting Pressure on Microsoft’s Emissions Targets

In just four years, Microsoft’s electricity consumption has more than doubled from 11 TWh to 24 TWh. For context, the entire country of Jordan (population: 11 million) uses 20 TWh of electricity in a given year.

This electricity usage jump is accompanied by a 42% increase in total carbon emissions—indicating a relative growing share of renewable energy sources.

Note: Figures rounded.

Both trends coincide with Microsoft Azure’s use to train and run AI models, of which OpenAI’s ChatGPT is the most prominent.

In fact, Microsoft spent “hundreds of millions of dollars” to develop a super computer just for ChatGPT, which involved linking thousands of Nvidia GPUs.

Training AI models requires a lot of compute. The data centers built to provide said compute are more power hungry than those providing traditional email or website services.

In fact, just the construction of Microsoft’s data centers has accounted for 30% of the emissions increase between 2020–23.

This emissions increase comes after Microsoft stated ambitions of becoming carbon negative by 2030. Meanwhile, Google is in a similar quagmire. It, too, aimed for carbon neutrality by 2030. Instead, its emissions have risen 48% since 2019.

Authored by Terence Greene via The Mises Institute,

On the 11th of June, Rishi Sunak’s Conservative Party stunned the United Kingdom by officially declaring in their 2024 election manifesto that, if reelected on July 4th, it would pass legislation to reintroduce “mandatory national service” to Britain. Despite the Orwellian nomenclature, the plan called for conscription, plain and simple. More specifically, it called for all British people — both male and female — upon turning 18 to either serve for one year in the armed forces or complete 25 days of “community service” for an unstated number of years.

The reaction to this announcement was swift and sharp, with pundits voicing equal parts horror and confusion at the announcement. Why on earth would the Conservative Party — a party already set to lose the election — adopt such a policy? Firstly, it is peacetime. Secondly, only two days prior to the announcement, the Conservatives’ own defense minister asserted that the U.K.’s modern military needs demanded a volunteer force, and that conscription would undermine the morale of the armed forces. Yet, these objections presume that the Conservatives’ decision to reintroduce conscription was made for defense purposes. This, however, is a naïve and overgenerous presumption. In fact, this seemingly incomprehensible policy position was a strictly economic exigency.

It is no secret that the British economy has seen better days. Once the most prosperous country in the world, the United Kingdom today is but a shadow of its former self. A nation which surged to riches untold upon the mighty wings of liberalism, limited government, and laissez-faire capitalism now plummets toward bankruptcy, weighed down by an inefficient welfare state that has grown almost nonstop for 80 years in absolute terms, and has never been more economically burdensome. Said welfare state was implemented by the British Labor Party from 1945-51 and has been assented to by the British Conservative Party ever since, which — in the venerable tradition of its ideological leading light, Benjamin Disraeli — has time and again declined to challenge the key assumptions underpinning the welfare state, preferring instead to concede its fundamental virtue in the name of electoral expedience. While the Labor Party employs the rhetoric of egalitarianism to justify the expansion of the welfare state (always its expansion), the Conservative Party employs the language of paternalism, noblesse oblige and so-called one-nation Toryism to justify their refusal to ever seriously wrestle with the yawning black void nestled in the very heart of the British government’s finances.

As the ill-fated Prime Minister Liz Truss and Chancellor of the Exchequer Kwasi Kwarteng were to discover in 2022, there is no “growing” out of this disaster. Cutting taxes and pausing new additions to the welfare state is not enough, as this still requires massive loans to fill the fiscal breach. The U.K. has been relying on debt to kick the welfare-crisis can down the road for decades now, and following the enormous deficits of the covid years, British promises to pay no longer ring true (as evinced by the run on the pound following the September 2022 minibudget). Only two credible options remain to the British government: hike taxes and aggravate the brain drain, flat growth, and low rates of private investment already afflicting the country, or cut benefits and face certain death at the polls.

As this goes on, the local governments of the United Kingdom are folding like cheap suits, having been comically ill-managed for decades and now no longer having access to bailout funds from the central government as there are no longer any funds to be had, bailout or otherwise. For instance, the city of Birmingham, after having spent untold sums on causes as deserving as a giant mechanical bull statue (meant as an attraction for the 2022 Commonwealth Games they hosted, despite being warned they couldn’t afford to do so) and “inspirational” street names has, in its desperate need to plug a £600,000,000 financial hole, resorted to turning off streetlights and collecting rubbish only once per fortnight.

In the face of all this, what is a Conservative, one-nation Tory to do? Why, implement conscription, of course! Why is that the natural policy choice, then? Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises makes it clear, writing on pages 197-98 of “Nation, State, and Economy”:

“The first way [of covering war’s cost] was confiscating the material goods needed for waging war and drafting the personal services needed for waging war without compensation or for inadequate compensation. This method seemed the simplest. … That the soldier received only a trifling compensation for his services in relation to the wages of free labor … has rightly been called a striking fact.”

While Mises was writing in the context of conscription employed for the purposes of armed struggle, Mises nonetheless clearly explains why conscription is an attractive policy tool — owing to its simplicity — for governments in need of labor but without the capacity to pay. By way of conscription, governments can compel the provision of labor at rates of its choosing; rates which will, for obvious reasons, be well below the rate at which a noncoerced individual would provide said service of their own free will. To the self-satisfied and socialist minds of the British Conservative Party, then, conscription is in fact the natural solution to the real-time breakdown of British finances and service-provision. By employing conscription, the fact that it cannot find the money needed to pay garbagemen is a nonissue, as the youth can be coerced into doing the same job for far less than a garbageman. Or, if they’d prefer, they can always just join the military and pay what Mises insightfully called the “blood tax.” Thank goodness for options!

Of course, like all socialist measures, conscription necessarily wreaks complete economic havoc. Wages and salaries in a free market are the reflection of the value placed on certain services, those values being themselves reflective of the intensity of the satisfaction the provision of those services produces in the minds of those who demand them. Cities like Birmingham can’t afford to pay garbagemen because it does not enjoy a free market. Rather, it suffers under a hugely inefficient socialist economy which confiscates the money which would otherwise go to paying people to collect garbage at a rate commensurate with the value placed on such services and the hesitancy of people to take up that work. The fundamental problem is this: Birmingham’s politicians value boondoggles like the Commonwealth Games more than garbage collection, and while the people of Birmingham take the inverse view, they send their money to Birmingham’s politicians. Thus, Birmingham’s politicians get to buy what brings them satisfaction, and the people of Birmingham increasingly do not. Conscription, rather than ameliorating this state of affairs, can, in the long run, only aggravate it as Britain’s politicians — now commanding legions of unpaid youth — will (either due to corruption or incompetence) divert those young people’s efforts to activity which brings them satisfaction, not the British public. The result of this will be an even more broken economy, now not only poor but maddened, as millions of people are torn from their own lives, and the pursuit of their own dreams, to go trim the hedges of key Tory donors’ country estates.

The British people — having rejected Sunak’s conscription plan by sweeping Labor to a landslide victory this July — perhaps believe that they have wisely spared themselves from the draconian policy of a truly insane party. Not so. Rather, the Conservative Party is undoubtedly the saner of the two major parties. Labor thinks that by doubling down on the welfare state, Britain may be saved. However, the Conservatives know better. They know that there is no saving Britain, at least not in its current socialist form. Thus, after Labor has done its dash, injecting yet another virulent strain of deficit spending into the ailing veins of the British economy, and it’s the Conservatives’ turn once more to win a meaningless landslide victory, they will likely return to the policy of conscription. Yet this time, against a backdrop of crisis-level welfare dependency, budget-busting interest payments, recession, and piles upon piles of rubbish accumulating uncollected across each and every British city and township, ripening horridly in the hot summer sun, the country shall not look and see an out-of-touch party, oh no. They shall look and behold a party which was merely ahead of its time.

Former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher once remarked, “The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people’s money.” Well, it seems that “eventually” has finally come around, and all that is left to the party of Thatcher, of Winston Churchill, of Disraeli, and of Robert Peele, is the enslavement of its own people to serve as rubbish collectors and street sweepers. It seems inconceivable that 264 years after the Industrial Revolution first began in Britain, it today looks to the corvée system as the cutting edge of public policy. Yet, such is the measure of Britain’s fiscal woe. Such is the peril of socialism.

Earth Overshoot Day landed yesterday, August 1, in 2024.

This means that after only seven months, we have already used up all of the resources that the world can regenerate in a year. The last five months will be burning into resources that – with no Planet B – we simply cannot afford.

This year’s country overshoot dates, released by the think tank Global Footprint Network, reveal a pretty daunting prospect. Not only do they show the extent to which we are over-extracting the planet’s resources, but they also underline the extreme inequalities that exist between countries.

As Statista’s Anna Fleck shows in the chart below, Qatar, a relatively small and rich country, is a main offender for burning through resources the fastest.

You will find more infographics at Statista

In fact, if the whole planet consumed resources at the pace of Qatar, we would have hit our 2024 threshold by February 11. Meanwhile, Morocco, Kyrgyzstan and Guinea are three of the handful of countries that have overshoot days in December.

The consumption divide seems to be split between richer, industrialized countries and those with a lower-income. 56 countries do not overextend their natural resources and therefore do not have an Earth Overshoot Day.

According to the Global Footprint Network’s methodology report, the findings take into consideration how much land/resources a country has and how much is needed to meet its people’s demand for food, timber, energy production, waste absorption and space for roads.

Authored by Tristan Greene via CoinTelegraph.com,

Scientists and lawmakers in the United States, United Kingdom and European Union are ramping up efforts to advance quantum computing in the West after scientists in China observed what appears to be the world’s first room-temperature time crystals.

A team of physicists hailing primarily from Tsinghua University in China, with contributions from scientists in Denmark and Austria, published peer-reviewed research on July 2 detailing the creation and observation of room-temperature time crystals.

In the month since the paper was published, quantum research labs in the West have announced numerous initiatives to extend existing efforts in the field of quantum computing and to create new research partnerships.

Room-temperature time crystals

Time crystals are a unique state of matter originally proposed by physicist Frank Wilczek in 2012. They work similarly to other crystals, such as snowflakes or diamonds, which are created when specific molecules form lattice-like bonds that repeat through space.

In time crystals, however, the molecules bond in time. Instead of locking into a crystalline structure that repeats, a time crystal’s molecules flicker back and forth between different configurations like a GIF on a loop. 

Back in 2021, an international team of scientists working with Google’s quantum computing lab simulated time crystals using a quantum computer. This breakthrough demonstrated the potential for quantum computers to explore exotic states of matter and set the stage for the convergence of quantum tech and time crystals.

Now, in July 2024, the Tsinghua team appears to have created time crystals at room temperature. This, theoretically, allows time crystal technology to be employed in non-laboratory equipment and could serve as a massive accelerator for the development of useful quantum computers.

Quantum computing

The realization of room temperature time crystals could solve one of the biggest problems in the field: figuring out how to create stable qubits (sort of the quantum version of classical computer bits) that don’t require massive amounts of power and infrastructure to form and maintain.

While perhaps not directly related to the China team’s work, labs and governments around the world — especially in the US, UK and Europe — have signaled renewed interest in quantum computing since the room-temperature time crystals paper was published.

In the US, new initiatives have taken place at the national and state levels, with federal defense department think tank DARPA and the state of Illinois both recently agreeing to commit $140 million each to the development of a new quantum computing center in Chicago.

Across the pond, on July 31, the UK government announced plans to invest approximately $127 million dollars in the development of five quantum computing research hubs to be led by Oxford University.

On the same day, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology announced a multimillion-dollar partnership with the University of Copenhagen to share research and co-develop quantum computing solutions.

Global energy consumption has significant regional variations due to differences in industrialization levels, climate conditions, population density, and access to natural resources, as well as varying energy policies and economic activities across countries.

For instance, countries with colder climates may consume more energy for heating, while highly industrialized nations may have higher per capita energy usage due to their extensive manufacturing sectors.

This chart below, via Visual Capitalist’s Kayla Zhu, shows the top 15 countries by energy consumption per capita in 2023, as well as the consumption per capita for each global region.

The figures are represented in gigajoules (GJ) per capita and come from the Energy Institute’s Statistical Review of World Energy 2024 report.

Qatar and Iceland Consume Most Energy Per Capita

Qatar had the highest per capita energy consumption worldwide in 2023 at 817 GJ per person. Almost all of the country’s energy consumption is derived from natural gas, of which the country has abundant reserves.

Countries located in hot or cold climates that are also rich in a particular energy resource, such as Qatar and its natural gas or Iceland and its geothermal energy, made up many of the top per capita energy consumers in 2023.

These countries tend to consume more energy to heat or cool homes and often use more energy since electricity costs are often on the lower end. Along with this, many of the top energy consuming countries per capita have fairly low populations, with Canada and Saudi Arabia being the only nations in the top 10 with populations of more than 10 million.

A Regional Perspective

Looking at global regions, North America unsurprisingly consumes the most energy per person, at 240 GJ per capita, almost three times the global average of 77 GJ.

North America’s numbers are in contrast to regions like Africa, that consumes 14 GJ per capita, or even South and Central America at 58 GJ per capita.

According to the Energy Institute, around 750 million people worldwide, or 1 out of every 10 people do not have access to electricity.

Authored by Mattias Desmet via The Brownstone Institute,

Normally, I let my pen rest during the summer months, but for some things, you set aside your habits. What has been happening in the context of the US presidential elections over the past few weeks is, to say the least, remarkable. We are witnessing a social system that – to use a term from complex dynamic systems theory – is heading toward a catastrophe. And the essence of the tipping point we are approaching is this: the propaganda model is beginning to fail.

It started a few weeks ago like this: Trump, the presidential candidate who must not win, is up against Biden, the presidential candidate who must win.

After the first debate, it was immediately clear: Trump will win against Biden. The big problem: Biden and Jill are about the only ones who don’t realize this.

The media then turned against Biden. That, in itself, is a revolution. They had praised President Biden to the skies for four years, turning a blind eye to the fact that the man either seemed hardly aware of what he was saying or was giving speeches that could only be described as having the characteristics of a fascist’s discourse.

I’m thinking, among other things, of the 2022 midterm speech in which he, against a bombastic-dramatic backdrop and flanked by two soldiers with machine guns, more or less directly called for violence against the Maga followers. Not to mention the shameless prosecution and imprisonment of political opponents and the intimidation and excommunication of hundreds of journalists (carefully kept out of the media by journalists who sided with the regime).

Huxley would not be surprised that Biden claims in almost every speech that he had to save democracy, including his most recent speech. I’ve shared the quote of Huxley below before, but it doesn’t hurt to read it a second time:

By means of ever more effective methods of mind-manipulation, the democracies will change their nature; the quaint old forms — elections, parliaments, Supreme Courts and all the rest — will remain. The underlying substance will be a new kind of non-violent totalitarianism. All the traditional names, all the hallowed slogans will remain exactly what they were in the good old days. Democracy and freedom will be the theme of every broadcast and editorial — but democracy and freedom in a strictly Pickwickian sense. Meanwhile the ruling oligarchy and its highly trained elite of soldiers, policemen, thought-manufacturers and mind-manipulators will quietly run the show as they see fit.

– Huxley, Brave New World Revisited

In any case, the media’s love for Biden was suddenly over when it became clear that he could not possibly win the election, even not with a little help from the media. If you want to know how that ‘little help’ worked in 2020, look at one of the most important interviews of the past year, where Mike Benz – former director of the cyber portfolio of the US government – explains to Tucker Carlson in detail how information flows on the internet were manipulated during the 2020 elections (and the Covid crisis). The guy eventually got disgusted with what he was doing and now runs a project striving for online freedom of speech.  I would recommend everyone to spend an hour watching that interview. Such an explanation is what we need: calm, expert, nuanced, and extraordinarily revealing.

After the first debate, the media realized that even they could not help Biden win the election. They changed their approach. Biden was quickly stripped of his saintly status. The Veil of Appearances was pulled away, and he suddenly stood naked and vulnerable in the eye of the mainstream – a man in the autumn of his life, mentally confused, addicted to power, and arrogant. Some journalists even started attributing traits of the Great Narcissistic Monster Trump to him.

But even media pressure couldn’t make Biden change his mind. He was so far gone that he did not see the hopelessness of his situation. That did not change when the Democratic elite turned their backs on him. Barack, Hillary, Nancy – it didn’t matter, the presidential candidate who couldn’t win kept stumbling in a lost race.

Then things took another turn, a turn so predictable that one is astonished that it actually happened. An overaged teenager calmly climbed onto a roof with a sniper rifle, under the watchful eyes of the security services, and nearly shot Trump in the head. The security services, which initially did not respond for minutes when people tried to draw attention to the overaged teenager with an assault rifle, suddenly reacted decisively: they shot the overaged teenager dead seconds after the assassination attempt.

What happened there? There are many reasons to have reservations about Trump, but one thing we cannot help but say: if Trump becomes president, the war in Ukraine will be over. Anyone who does not attribute any weight to that should subject themselves to a conscience examination. And no, Trump will not have to give half of Europe to Putin for that. My cautious estimate, for what it’s worth: It will suffice for NATO to stop and partially reverse its eastward expansion, for Russia to retain access to the Black Sea via Crimea (something everyone with historical awareness knows that denying would mean the death blow to Russia as a great power and thus a direct declaration of war), and for the population of the Russian-speaking part of Ukraine to choose in a referendum whether to belong to Russia or Ukraine.

One of the biggest and most dangerous media lies of this time is that Putin started an ‘unprovoked war’ in Ukraine. I recommend a second interview by Tucker Carlson here (undoubtedly one of the most important contemporary journalists, one of the few who still fulfill the original societal function of journalism). The interview with professor and former top diplomat Jeffrey Sachs also has everything a good interview should have: given with great expertise, calm, and nuanced. Anyone who still believes that the war in Ukraine was ‘unprovoked’ after listening to it is kindly invited to explain themselves in the comments section of this article.

So, I repeat my point: with Trump, the provocation of Russia stops, and the war in Ukraine ends. Presidents who threaten to end wars are sometimes shot at by lone gunmen. And those lone gunmen are, in turn, shot dead. And the archives about that remarkable act of lone gunmen sometimes remain sealed for a remarkably long time, much longer than they usually do.

The media ultimately covered this historical event of the Trump assassination attempt surprisingly lightly. No journalist to be found pointed a finger at Biden because he had more or less literally called to ‘target’ Trump a few months earlier. Let alone the media admitting that they created the unspoken support in the population for this political violence. Neither did I find journalists who were greatly concerned that the overaged teenager was linked to Antifa – nothing wrong with Antifa according to them. I can imagine that the moral appreciation would have been different if an overaged teenager linked to the Maga movement had nearly taken down President Biden.

Anyway, we are not surprised. That reaction was predictable. We are used to the media. Some journalists even suggested that Trump had been shot with a paintball, others thought the most accurate way to report was that someone ‘wounded Trump on the ear.’

In any case, after the assassination attempt, the situation became even more dire for the mainstream: the presidential candidate who must not win is now even more popular, and his victory in a race with Biden is almost inevitable.

Then the next chapter begins. Biden suddenly changes his mind: he has come to his senses and drops out of the race. He announces this – of all things – in a letter with a signature that, even for his shaky condition, looked quite clumsy. Then he stayed out of the public eye for a few days. We are curious about what exactly happened there.

But the media are compliant again. Biden has now been sanctified again. Just like Kamala Harris, of course. They are already mentioning polls showing she will beat Trump. With a little help from the media, of course. Curious how this will continue, but I would be surprised if the rest of the campaign will be a walk in the park. Trump is not safe after the first attempt, that’s for sure. And to Kamala Harris, I say this: when totalitarian systems go into a chaotic phase, they become monsters that devour their own children.

It is hard to ignore: the indoctrination and propaganda model is creaking and groaning at all its seams. The Veil of Appearances that is meant to hide all dirty laundry from the public eye is tearing left and right. And that’s why the step toward terror is increasingly being taken. One can see something frightening in it, but it also heralds the beginning of the end of the propaganda model. No one knows exactly how long the endgame will last, but it is certain that the system is in deep crisis. From the fact that the Democrats ran with someone like Biden and then had to force him out in this amateurish and transparent manner, we can only conclude one thing with certainty: the desperation must be enormous.

What we are witnessing is nothing less than the failure of the greatest propaganda apparatus in history. And at that point, we also see a fact that people absorbed by conspiracy thinking make: they overestimate the perceived enemy not only as too evil but also (much) too powerful. In this way, one can only feel smaller and feel more and more powerlessness, anger, and hate, exactly the sentiments that will prove deadly in the coming years.

The general reduction of everything that happens to a conspiracy, not seeing a Reality behind the manipulation and illusions created, is itself a symptom of this time. Conspiracies exist. No one needs to convince me of that. And one problem of this time is that most people who identify with the mainstream discourse have a remarkable ability to deny that. And they have an equally great ability to ignore that they themselves eagerly produce conspiracy theories when it comes to Putin or Saddam Hussein or ‘extreme right.’

Conspiracy theories sometimes correctly relate to facts, and sometimes incorrectly. However, they do not provide a comprehensive explanation for global events. They do not touch the essence of the problem. The essence of the problem lies in rationalism and the associated human arrogance. And this hubris is certainly not the privilege of ‘the elite.’ It is even typical of conspiracy thinking itself, which ultimately attempts to capture the essence of social dynamics through a rationalistic construction. And precisely because of this, conspiracy thinking, just like the dominant discourse, falls prey to Babylonian confusion. Like the dominant discourse, they fail to bring true peace regarding the Real that increasingly imposes itself from behind the Veil of Appearances in this historical era.

In times when America is dangerously heading towards a civil war, the golden advice is: do not be tempted by the possibility of violence. Stay calm and composed. And continue to speak. Totalitarianism dehumanizes; the only remedy against totalitarianism is to always recognize a human being in the Other. Also in the Totalitarian Other. What is happening is historical. Stand on the right side of history. This is not the side of the Democrats or the side of the Republicans, it is not the side of Trump or the side of Harris; it is the side of humanity, it is the side of those who are not so convinced of their own words that they can no longer find any space for the words of the Other to exist.

Republished from the author’s Substack

Bloomberg Businessweek has published an ROI calculator that is supposed to help students assess if pursuing an advanced degree is worth the investment.

Using data from MBA graduates in the annual Best B-Schools Rankings, it considers factors like loan interest and lost income during enrollment to try and determine whether a degree from a certain institution is worthwhile. 

Highlighting one example, Bloomberg writes that the median cost of a degree from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania is $266,000, the highest among 77 US schools in the 2023 rankings.

Despite this, Wharton ranks eighth in the 10-year post-MBA compensation increase and 19th in signing bonuses. According to Bloomberg estimates, a typical Wharton graduate can expect a 10-year net ROI of about $678,000, with an average annual compounded rate of 9%.

Stanford Graduate School of Business, however, had the third highest expenses, about $250 less than Wharton. But, it led in the 10-year post-MBA compensation difference, at $295,000 compared to Wharton’s $220,000, despite a 32nd place median signing bonus. This results in an ROI of over $1 million and an annual rate of 11.9%.

Bloomberg did their own ROI analysis and found the University of Kentucky’s Gatton College of Business and Economics offers the best ROI among the schools listed, with an impressive annualized ROI of 23.8%. This is largely due to its relatively low cost of $46,500 and its accelerated 11-month program, which allows students to re-enter the workforce more quickly. Located in Lexington, KY, Gatton provides an exceptional return on investment, making it a standout choice for prospective MBA students looking to maximize their financial outcomes.

Following closely is Syracuse University’s Whitman School of Management, with a 22.0% ROI and a cost of $73,300. While more expensive than Gatton, it still offers a substantial return due to its strong post-MBA earning potential. The University of Mississippi also performs well, with a 20.7% ROI and the lowest cost in the list at $39,500. These schools exemplify how selecting a program with a high ROI can significantly impact one’s financial future, offering excellent returns compared to their costs.

The tool lets users put in their own data (or use median estimates) for any of 77 US schools or the combined median estimates. It provides a 10-year net ROI in dollars and an annualized ROI percentage. You can compare top-ranked schools with more affordable ones like the University of Kentucky’s Gatton College, which has median expenses under $50,000 and the highest annual ROI at nearly 24% due to its shorter 11-month program. 

While ROI is important, choosing a school or deciding to pursue an MBA also involves other factors like career goals, networking opportunities, location, and personal considerations.

Gale Nichols, executive director of the MBA program at Indiana University’s Kelley School of Business commented: “It’s important for a student to enter any education program with a whole heart, and feeling that this is the right decision for them. They have to be prepared to put in the effort that’s needed to succeed.”

You can use Bloomberg’s new ROI tool here. 

Authored by Frank Fang via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

Two senators have introduced bipartisan legislation to prevent Chinese drone technologies from operating on U.S. communications infrastructure.

Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.), who sits on the Senate Homeland Security Committee, and Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.), chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, introduced the Countering CCP Drones and Supporting Drones for Law Enforcement Act (S.4792), according to a statement. The measure was introduced as an amendment to the fiscal year 2025 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA).

The lawmakers explained that Chinese drones pose a risk because the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) wields considerable influence over Chinese companies.

“Drones made in communist China pose a significant threat to our freedoms and security and cannot be allowed to continue operating in American skies. Companies based in Communist China are at the will of Xi’s evil regime, meaning one of the United States’ greatest adversaries has total access to every bit of data collected by devices,” Scott said in a statement.

“It should terrify every single American that the Chinese Communist Party, known for spying, stealing, and espionage, could have access to footage of Americans, their land, their businesses, and their families without their knowledge.”

The legislation would prohibit Da-Jiang Innovations (DJI) Technologies, Autel Robotics, and other CCP-linked drone industry participants from operating on U.S. communications infrastructure by adding them to the Federal Communication Commission’s covered list.

The legislation would also set up a short-term grant program under the Department of Transportation to allow first respondents to replace existing Chinese drones and purchase U.S.-made alternatives.

According to the language of the bill, the program would be called the First Responder Secure Drone Program, with an appropriated fund of $15 million for fiscal year 2025.

Chinese Drones

DJI and Autel control about 90 percent of the global drone market; the two Chinese firms have commercial relationships with thousands of state, local, tribal, and territorial law enforcement agencies in the United States, according to Rep. Mark Green (R-Tenn.) and Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-Wash.).

In June, the two House lawmakers sent a letter asking the Departments of Homeland Security and Energy to declassify threats posed by Chinese drones.

“Drones have tremendous potential to support agriculture, make our communities safer, and grow our economy. Yet without further intervention, the drone industry could be susceptible to massive intervention from the Communist Party of China, directly threatening our national security and economy,” Warner said in a statement.

“I’m proud to introduce bipartisan legislation to restore American leadership in the drone industry and ensure that the CCP can’t wreak havoc by spying on Americans or otherwise disrupting key functions of drone technology.”

To tackle the threats posed by Chinese drones, Scott and Warner introduced the American Security Drone Act of 2023, which President Joe Biden signed into law as part of the fiscal year 2024 NDAA. The law prohibits federal agencies from purchasing and operating drones made by Chinese companies.

“Now, we must pass the Countering CCP Drones and Supporting Drones for Law Enforcement Act as a necessary next step to eliminate the threats we face from Communist China and further protect the security of the United States and every American family,” Mr. Scott said.

In January, the FBI and Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) issued a memo on cybersecurity vulnerabilities related to China-manufactured drones. The memo points out that different Chinese laws, including the nation’s National Intelligence Law that took effect in 2017, compel Chinese companies to hand over data collected within China and elsewhere to Beijing’s intelligence agencies.

Michael Robbins, chief advocacy officer for the Association for Uncrewed Vehicle Systems International, a U.S.-based nonprofit, issued a statement sharing the concerns addressed in the memo.

“In the interest of national security, organizations collecting sensitive information, including critical infrastructure owners and operators, must shift away from unsecure PRC drones and reliance on foreign supply chains,” he said, referring to China’s official name, the People’s Republic of China.

In 2022, the Pentagon added DJI to its list of “Chinese military companies” operating directly or indirectly in the United States.

Authored by Summer Lane via The Epoch Times,

Exposure to wildfire smoke may be linked to a higher risk of being diagnosed with dementia, according to a new study from the Alzheimer’s Association.

The study was conducted over 10 years and surveyed more than 1.2 million Southern California residents, according to a press release from the association.

“With the rising global incidence of wildfires, including in California and the western U.S., exposure to this type of air pollution is an increasing threat to brain health,” Alzheimer’s Association Senior Director of Scientific Programs and Research Claire Sexton, said in the statement.

California has been plagued over the years by wildfires, with the most recent inferno, the Park fire, scorching Northern California in Tehama and Butte counties north of Sacramento, consuming over 600 square miles on July 29.

Such wildfires expose Californians to a type of air pollution that includes fine particulate matter, or PM2.5, according to the association.

Their findings indicated that the risk of dementia was higher with exposure to wildfire smoke more than any other type of pollution, such as that from motor vehicles or factories.

“These findings underscore the importance of enacting policies to prevent wildfires and investigating better methods to address them,” Ms. Sexton said.

According to the Alzheimer’s association, researchers working on the study noted a 21 percent increase in the odds of a dementia diagnosis over a three-year exposure to PM2.5.

They analyzed over 1 million health records from Kaiser Permanente’s southern California members who were at least 60 years old between 2009 and 2019, they said.

Researchers additionally utilized satellite imagery and air quality monitoring data for the study.

Study author and neurology resident at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, Dr. Holly Elser, said in the statement that air pollution produced by wildfires accounts for over 70 percent of PM2.5 exposure in California.

There are three reasons why the particulates produced by California wildfires are acutely dangerous, she said, including that they are produced at hotter temperatures, are smaller than other similar particles, and have a higher concentration of toxic chemicals.

To combat the health risks associated with wildfire pollution exposure, the Alzheimer’s association highlighted experts’ advice to update home air filtration systems and to stay inside if possible during smoky days.

They also recommended wearing an N95 protective mask when outside.

Earlier this week, Delta Air Lines’ CEO criticized cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike and software provider Microsoft for triggering the ‘blue screen of death‘ across its network after a defective update. The IT outage, which went global, disrupted thousands of Delta flights and sparked travel chaos across the US for five days last month, resulting in an estimated $500 million loss.  

“We have expressed our regret and apologies to all our customers for this incident and the disruption that resulted,” CrowdStrike spokesperson Jake Schuster told Bloomberg on Thursday. 

Schuster said, “While its major competitors rapidly recovered from the incident, Delta rejected our repeated efforts to assist it in a speedy recovery.”

Delta Air Lines CEO Ed Bastian told CNBC’s “Squawk Box” on Wednesday that the outage cost the airline $500 million. He said the carrier would seek damages from the disruptions, adding, “We have no choice.”

“If you’re going to be having access, priority access to the Delta ecosystem in terms of technology, you’ve got to test the stuff you got. You can’t come into a mission critical 24/7 operation and tell us we have a bug,” Bastian said, referring to CrowdStrike’s defective software update that parazlyed its backend network. 

Bastian added, “We have to protect our shareholders. We have to protect our customers, our employees, for the damage, not just to the cost of it, but to the brand, the reputational damage and the physical channel.”

On Monday, CNBC’s Phil Lebeau reported that Delta hired top attorney David Boies to sue CrowdStrike and Microsoft for damages.

Given Delta’s move to lawyer up, it appears the airline will be filing a lawsuit in the near term. We suspect other companies will, too.

However, Joseph Gallo, senior vice president at Jefferies, told clients on Wednesday, “We don’t believe CRWD will be held liable” in court by Delta.

“We expect other companies impacted by the IT outage could potentially follow suit (helps with an image to customers of impacted companies), creating further headline risk in the near-term,” he said. 

Gallo continued, “We don’t expect CRWD to have to reimburse customers for the outage, but the litigation cost & distraction (CEO appearing before Congress) will certainly weigh.” 

Shares have nearly been halved since peaking around $400 in mid-July.

At this stage, and as CNBC’s Jim Cramer would agree, trying to call the bottom in price is akin to catching a falling knife… 

Cramer strikes CrowdStrike. 

Gallo is right. In the short term, a wave of lawsuits and hearings on Capitol Hill will weigh on shares.