The Great Resignation initially started with people who could make more money on the dole than working, then spread to people who could earn more doing less somewhere else, and has now spread to longtime employees that are retiring early to escape the ‘new normal’ offered by the new corporations.
“The Great Resignation is almost like a train, where it’s built all this momentum and it’s hard to slow down, but certain workers are getting off the train and new workers are coming on,” said Luke Pardue, an economist at Gusto, which provides payroll, benefits, and human resource management software to small- and medium-sized businesses.
Rates of quits are always highest among younger, less senior workers — those who tend to be less invested in their jobs and whose lives are less stable. This was true during the early stages of the pandemic when these workers quit their jobs amid heightened demand to eke out better wages and conditions elsewhere (though those gains are unlikely to be permanent). But those quit rates have been declining. Data from Gusto, which typically works with companies that have around 25 employees, shows that the average tenure of people who quit has grown in every age group and in nearly every industry. In other words, older people who’ve worked at a job longer are also quitting.
The quest for immortality is a tale as old as tales themselves, starting with Gilgamesh and up to present day. Today, science is trying to turn back the theoretical evolutionary clock and reintroduce immortality to creation by re-engineering our DNA, and that’s just the start.
“But the story’s much weirder than we think,” Fink said. In a recent paper, he used math to demonstrate that “aging can be favored by natural selection.” That’s a shocking insight: It means that the first forms of life, which started billions of years ago, likely didn’t die…..
In Fink’s memorable phrase, “immortality — not mortality — is the natural state of affairs.” So how can we get back to this natural state? That’s where cell programming comes in…..
Several companies are trying to do this work, such as bit.bio, which recodes cells to attempt to find cures to diseases such as Alzheimer’s. In the long run, this revolutionary biotechnology might well enable scientists to reset cells for immortality.
“If the aging process is a mechanism inside the cell controlled by a transcription program, then we’ll be able to influence it,” hypothesized Forrest Sheldon, a LIMS junior fellow who collaborates with bit.bio.
But Fink and Sheldon cautioned that we’re still a long way from becoming immortal. Don’t book your vacation for the summer of 4500 just yet.
Biden Disinformation Czar appointee Nina Jankowicz has a checkered past when it comes to disinformation, including being an aggressive proponent of the Trump Russia Collusion conspiracy hoax and denying that the Hunter Biden laptop was in fact the Hunter Biden laptop.
The head of a new Department of Homeland Security initiative to combat disinformation cast doubt on the New York Post‘s since-vindicated story on the content of Hunter Biden’s laptop ahead of the 2020 election.
Nina Jankowicz, a Wilson Center fellow, will be the executive director of the DHS’s planned Disinformation Governance Board, Politico Playbook revealed on Wednesday. Homeland Security secretary Alejandro Mayorkas revealed in congressional testimony earlier on Wednesday that the agency is creating the board to target disinformation in minority communities, Fox News noted.
Even more food shortages may be on the way as a result of the recent heatwaves in India destroying wheat yields. India was supposed to increase its exports to offset the shortfalls caused by Russia’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine which had already reduced global wheat supplies.
March temperatures in India have reached levels never before seen in India according to records tracking temperatures since 1901, destroying the crop. Estimates range between 10% and 50% yield decrease for the season by local farmers.
Expectations of wheat exports from India were high, with 11-12 million metric tonnes expected to be delivered throughout 2022 and 2023. With such high expectations and unexpected disruption, a global food shortage seems to be coming.
Fertilizer shortages are spreading throughout the world, starting in Ukraine as a result of the Russian invasion, leading to a price spike of 70 percent in less than one year.
For the first time ever, farmers the world over — all at the same time — are testing the limits of how little chemical fertilizer they can apply without devastating their yields come harvest time. Early predictions are bleak.
In Brazil, the world’s biggest soybean producer, a 20% cut in potash use could bring a 14% drop in yields, according to industry consultancy MB Agro. In Costa Rica, a coffee cooperative representing 1,200 small producers sees output falling as much as 15% next year if the farmers miss even one-third of normal application. In West Africa, falling fertilizer use will shrink this year’s rice and corn harvest by a third, according to the International Fertilizer Development Center, a food security non-profit group.
…..“Fertilizer prices are up an average of 70% from last year,” said Timothy Njagi, a researcher at the Tegemeo Institute of Agricultural Policy and Development in Kenya, referring to prices in the country. “The fertilizer is available locally, but it’s out of reach for the majority of farmers. Worse, many farmers know that they cannot recover these costs.”
Prices have been climbing for more than a year for a host of reasons: runaway pricing for natural gas, the main feedstock for much of the world’s nitrogen fertilizer; sanctions on a major Belarusian potash producer; back-to-back late-summer storms on the U.S. Gulf Coast that temporarily shut-in production in the region; plus Covid-19 restrictions that have disrupted every global supply chain, including chemicals.
That tightening in the physical fertilizer market has galvanized China, the largest phosphate producer, to restrict outgoing shipments in order to build up a stockpile at home, further exacerbating the global shortage. Add Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which effectively cut off nearly a fifth of the world’s nutrient exports, and the fertilizer industry and its pricing mechanisms are arguably more broken than ever before.
The once-American ally, the Solomon Islands, is now going in another direction, which is leading them to accept Chinese Police becoming their street patrols, but under Solomon Islands supervision.
China’s police presence under a new security pact will boost the capabilities of the Solomon Islands but they will not use techniques seen in Hong Kong, the Pacific island country’s top diplomat to Australia said in a radio interview on Monday.
Already on guard about the pact because of concerns it gives China’s military a strategic foothold in the Pacific, Western allies are also worried that Chinese police sent there may use the same “ruthless” techniques previously used to quell anti-government protests in Hong Kong. read more
The Solomon Islands is “beefing up their capability” after local police were unable to contain anti-government riots in the Chinatown section of the capital Honiara in November, Solomon Islands High Commissioner to Australia Robert…
…..after lobbying unsuccessfully against a bill last year that will create an elected school board for Chicago two years from now, the mayor hasn’t taken advantage of her opportunity to have a say in who will serve on the Board of Education.
When Lightfoot fought the elected school board, she argued it was imperative for her to appoint the entire board since the mayor is largely seen as responsible for the success – or failure – of the schools system.
Lightfoot has less than a year remaining in her term ahead of the spring 2023 mayoral election, followed by the first school board elections in late 2024 and the new board taking control in early 2025. If Lightfoot wins reelection she would be able to appoint 11 members of the new 21-seat board to serve the first two years of her term. When the board becomes fully elected two years later, the mayor won’t have any say in its makeup.
Don’t count your chickens before they hatch — and don’t count your congressional districts before all the redistricting lawsuits are finished.
On Wednesday, the New York Court of Appeals ruled that the congressional map New York Democrats enacted back in February was a partisan gerrymander that violated the state constitution and tossed it to the curb. The decision was a huge blow to Democrats, who until recently looked like they had gained enough seats nationally in redistricting to almost eliminate the Republican bias in the House of Representatives. But with the invalidation of New York’s map, as well as Florida’s recent passage of a congressional map that heavily favors the GOP, the takeaways from the 2021-22 redistricting cycle are no longer so straightforward.
That’s because much of Democrats’ national redistricting advantage rested on their gerrymander in New York. The now-invalidated map included 20 seats with a FiveThirtyEight partisan lean2 of D+5 or bluer and only four seats with a partisan lean of R+5 or redder. It also included two swing seats, but even those had slight Democratic leans (D+3 and D+4)……
Back in March, Democrats didn’t have as large of an advantage by this metric, but they were still doing better than Republicans: I estimated at the time that redistricting would net Democrats around two seats in the midterms, while it would lead to a net loss of around three or four seats for Republicans (this was without considering the Republican-leaning national political environment). Now, however, Republicans clearly have the advantage on this score. I estimate that redistricting currently positions Republicans for a net gain of around four or five House seats and Democrats for a net loss of about four, based on the maps as they stand now…….
In its decision, the New York Court of Appeals endorsed the idea that a neutral special master — essentially, an expert in drawing political maps — should draw New York’s next congressional map. That would presumably lead to a relatively fair map, but the details and exact partisan breakdown are, of course, still a mystery; Democrats could still gain seats from New York’s map when all is said and done (just not as many as from their gerrymander).
Less than two years after Google dismissed two researchers who criticized the biases built into artificial intelligence systems, the company has fired a researcher who questioned a paper it published on the abilities of a specialized type of artificial intelligence used in making computer chips.
The researcher, Satrajit Chatterjee, led a team of scientists in challenging the celebrated research paper, which appeared last year in the scientific journal Nature and said computers were able to design certain parts of a computer chip faster and better than human beings.
Dr. Chatterjee, 43, was fired in March, shortly after Google told his team that it would not publish a paper that rebutted some of the claims made in Nature, said four people familiar with the situation who were not permitted to speak openly on the matter. Google confirmed in a written statement that Dr. Chatterjee had been “terminated with cause.”
The goal of this column is to present news from around the world that is not often – if ever – covered by more mainstream entities, using local sources wherever possible, but occasionally using news aggregators not used, again, by the mainstream media. Also, please note that we do use links to Wikipedia; while Wikipedia is well-known as a largely-useless site for any kind of serious research, it does serve as a launch-pad for further inquiry, in addition to being generally free of malicious ads. As with anything from Wikipedia, always verify their sources before making any conclusions based on their pages.
This column will cover the preceding week of news.
To make it easier for readers to follow story source links: anytime you see a bracketed number marked in green – [1] – those are the source links relating to that story.
North America
While the wave of bomb threats made against schools across the country continued this week, including to multiple schools in the state of Maine [1][2], there seems to be a shift underway, as fat more calls were phoned in, apparently by live people, with some arrests being made. [3]-[11] It is important to understand that stupid, bored people sometimes call in bomb threats for what they think is a “laugh”; that has been happening for a very long time. But in the case of the last several years, the number of these hoax-threats has been steadily increasing…and this week, we have seen at least two cases on the East Coast of actual, physical notes [12][13] being left on bathroom mirrors in student lavatories. This may be nothing — or it could indicate the possibility of some sort of “Slender Man“-style “creepypasta” being weaponized by some internet-based Fagin character, luring children into something that could result in a deliberate “Slender Man Stabbing“-style campaign.
Keep in mind, not all of these are hoaxes. On Wednesday the 27th, police in Porter County, Indiana arrested and charged a middle-school student [14] who was discovered to be carrying two IED’s in their backpack.
Turning to Europe, we have another wave of emailed bomb threats swamping over two dozens schools in the nations of Serbia and Montenegro. This has been an increasing issue within Europe over the last couple of years, similar to the waves of similar threats within the United States, as well as several other nations since at least 2015.
In Mali, five Malian Army soldiers were killed when their truck triggered an IED, during their pursuit of a hijacked tanker truck. Also, the Al Qaeda-linked terror group JNIM claimed to have captured an unspecified number of Russian “security contractors” from the “Wagner Group“, a PMC linked to the Russian government. Mali has been effectively left to its own devices in its decade-long war against Islamic terror groups, following its break with European and African nations after it announced delays in transitioning back to civilian rule, following a series of coups d’état that began in 2020. [1][2]
In Nigeria, steady attacks, including assassinations and arson attacks, continue throughout the country, as fighting against the Boko Haram group spilled over the border into neighboring Cameroon. [3]-[7]
Despite the seemingly numerous incidents listed as sources, this is actually a downward trend over the last several week. This may be related to the fighting in Ukraine, as Russian air units may be in the process of shuffling between the Middle East and the Ukrainian fronts.
In Afghanistan [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afghanistan], tensions continue to boil, as multiple bombing attacks against Muslim minorities and laborers continue, threatening to tear apart the fragile coalition of the Taliban [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taliban]. [1][2][3]
In Pakistan, meanwhile, the Baloch Liberation Army (BLA) have doubled down in the aftermath of its suicide attack on Karachi University, which killed three visiting teachers from the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and their Pakistani driver. The Balochi group warned that attacks against Chinese workers in the country. The Balochi are not alone, as multiple terror groups in Pakistan have staged attacks against Chinese citizens in recent years, in numbers that are increasing. The PRC has been increasing its “footprint” in Pakistan, as part of its neocolonialist “Belt and Road Initiative“, [4][5]
Elsewhere in Pakistan, multiple attacks killed and wounded several police officers, soldiers, and terrorists. [6][7][8]
In India’s conflict-ridden northern state of Jammu & Kashmir, scattered incidents continued this week, with IED attacks on vehicles and an attempted attack on a hospital, and a pepper attack on security forces personnel, in an apparent attempt to grab the soldier’s weapon. [9]-[14]
In the eastern state of Manipur, an IED attack damaged several road construction vehicles in the Thoubal District. Police investigations continue, but at press time, it remains unclear if this was an act by an insurgent group, or some sort of labor dispute. [15]
In the central part of the nation, the Red Corridor was largely quiet this week, with four Naxals being arrested in two separate incidents, and one incicent of Naxals burning a charter bus, although no injuries were reported to police. [16]-[18]
Finally, 4 NPA guerrilla’s were killed in two separate incidents in the Pacificarchipelagic nation’s long war against the Communist rebels. Elsewhere, three suspected NPA guerrilla’s were arrested and arms were seized in two incidents in the country.
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