Sunday, August 14, 2022

OK...So Who's Having A Lovely Weekend??


Here's wishing you well; enjoy it while you can. For those of us who like a reality check every now and then here ya go. . .

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Good morning. Wishing you all a lovely weekend




These three @wsj charts highlight some key issues regarding US #inflation such as:

Headline vs core (i.e., lower energy vs more broad-based drivers of higher prices); and

Going forward, the greater influence of shelter and #wages.

Mohamed on Twitter (@elerianm)

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Preliminary Results for August 2022

Aug Jul Aug M-M Y-Y

2022 2022 2021 Change Change
Index of Consumer Sentiment 55.1 51.5 70.3 +7.0% -21.6%
Current Economic Conditions 55.5 58.1 78.5 -4.5% -29.3%
Index of Consumer Expectations 54.9 47.3 65.1 +16.1% -15.7%
Featured Chart (PDF)
Next data release: Friday, August 26, 2022 for Final August data at 10am ET
Surveys of Consumers Director Joanne Hsu
Consumer sentiment moved up very slightly this month to about 5 index points above the all-time low reached in June. All components of the expectations index improved this month, particularly among low and middle income consumers for whom inflation is particularly salient. The year-ahead economic outlook rose substantially to just above its average reading from the second quarter 2022, while the two other expectations index components remain at or below their second quarter averages. At the same time, high income consumers, who generate a disproportionate share of spending, registered large declines in both their current personal finances as well as buying conditions for durables. With continued declines in energy prices, the median expected year-ahead inflation rate fell to 5.0%, its lowest reading since February but still well above the 4.6% reading from a year ago. At 3.0%, median long run inflation expectations remained within the 2.9-3.1% range seen over the past year. Uncertainty over long run inflation receded a bit, with the interquartile range in expectations falling from 4.7 last month to 3.8 this month, remaining above the 3.3 range seen last August. Still, the share of consumers blaming inflation for eroding their living standards remained near 48%.

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Mohamed El-Erian: The better news on inflation must be sustained
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NEW FEATURE WOMEN-AT-WORK. . .Thanks to Motherboard

First note this issue - it is something that your Mesazono blogger finds frustrating almost all the time here in Arizona -  It is important to know the air quality in a specific location, because that can help decide what preventative measures to take to avoid being exposed to poor air quality levels. Though there are open source sites such as AirNow and IQAir that tell you air quality by city, until recently, there still lacked data on a micro level that would allow officials to address air quality on the same scaled-down level. 


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About - Aclima

www.aclima.io › about
aclima from www.aclima.io
Duration: 1:22
Posted: May 24, 2022

✓ MAIN STORY (with related content added,)

www.vice.com

The Woman Tracking America’s Most Polluted Cities

5 - 6 minutes

Silicon Ceiling - Motherboard 

Supported by Upwork. VICE News retains complete editorial independence.

Air pollution is one of the greatest environmental hazards that is both detrimental to our health and our planet. In 2019, 99 percent of the world population was living in places that did not meet the World Health Organization’s air quality guidelines. 

It is important to know the air quality in a specific location, because that can help decide what preventative measures to take to avoid being exposed to poor air quality levels. Though there are open source sites such as AirNow and IQAir that tell you air quality by city, until recently, there still lacked data on a micro level that would allow officials to address air quality on the same scaled-down level.  

Davida Herzl decided to address this gap by founding Aclima in 2007, a San Francisco-based startup that has pioneered a new way to map and analyze air pollution and greenhouse gasses. In the first episode of a new documentary series by Motherboard called “Silicon Ceiling,” we spoke with Herzl about her mission and journey in launching Aclima. 

“At Aclima we’re putting air pollution and greenhouse gasses on the map at hyperlocal resolution and scales that have never been possible before,” Herzl told Motherboard. “We do this with a fleet of vehicles that we instrument with sensors that measure a wide variety of pollutants to create the richest ever picture of the air that we breathe and live in. We have the largest fleet of its kind on the planet mapping air in cities across the countries and around the world.”

Aclima sends drivers around neighborhoods with cars equipped with an inlet that samples air, draws it through a set of tubes, and brings it to sensing devices, which then provide measurements that are stitched together to create the maps. 

In July, New York became the first state to team up with Aclima to quantify air pollution and greenhouse gasses like methane and toxins on an unprecedented scale. Aclima is measuring pollutants, gasses, and toxins block by block, in order to “inform New York’s actions, in collaboration with their partners, to reduce emissions and help address health burdens and inequities in communities disproportionately impacted by air pollution,” according to a press release. The data that Aclima gathers is thus allowing cities to respond to air pollution on a micro-level that addresses the fact that air pollution can even vary from neighborhood to neighborhood. 

“New York is creating a new model for the nation and the world that turns crisis into opportunity, lifts people up while drawing down emissions, and brings together the best ideas from frontline communities, the private sector and policymakers,” Herzl said. 

Herzl also spoke about the difficulties of being a female founder in the male-dominated industry of tech. She said that getting funding from venture capital companies was hard, because the amount of women getting funding is less than two percent, and half a percent goes to women of color. 

“One of the secrets to raising the amount of money that we have is that I went to diverse investors,” Herzl told Motherboard. “We have a significant amount of investors that are either women or funds that are led by women, and so diversity in the Venture Capital community itself is a critical ingredient to getting more money into companies run by women.” 

Herzl decided to pivot her attention from investors to customers in another response to the lack of adequate funding. One of Aclima’s first partnerships was with Google in 2015 to deploy the world’s largest indoor sensor network. They worked together to create the first ever indoor environmental sensor network in 21 Google offices across the world, that processed 500 million data points on indoor environmental quality, including comfort measures of temperature, humidity, noise, and light, and emissions like carbon dioxide. Four months after this partnership, Google equipped its Street View cars with Aclima’s mobile sensing platforms to take air measurements in cities starting with Denver and San Francisco. 

Herzl wants her story to inspire other female founders to keep pushing through barriers, no matter how difficult it may seem. 

“My advice to other women founders is to take the leap. Your values, your vision for the world is needed,” she said. “Technology ultimately, who builds it and why they built it, matters. It defines the future of our world, and when it comes to climate, it’s that much more critical that women entrepreneurs are at the front, and that we’re really helping to shape the futur

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KISSINGER NOW 99: U.S. on The Brink of War with China & Russia

 Introduction:

Statesmanship as a flawed diplomat dissects it

Leadership: Six Studies in World Strategy

Henry Kissinger at the age of 99 remains alert, a keen observer of global affairs. For all the flaws attributed to his behavior in his years in power under Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, he is by and large yet considered a foremost spokesperson on diplomacy. His books, written over the years, have been regarded, with good reason, as commentaries on the state of the world even as perspectives have changed all around since he left office.

Kissinger’s new work, Leadership: Six Studies in World Strategy, is the newest expression of the ideas he has generally held in his approach to politics on a global scale. Kissinger’s understanding of history, the earliest instance of which came through in the late 1950s, has been a remarkable study of the men and events he believes have shaped the modern world, especially the one which emerged following the end of the Second World War.

Leadership is, in large measure, a whole lot more than his admiration of the six individuals covered in the work. The admiration rests on what he perceives to be the strategies these individuals applied in shaping, sometimes reshaping, their nations and their ties with the world beyond their frontiers

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13 Aug, 12:21

Kissinger believes US at the edge of war with Russia and China

"We are at the edge of war with Russia and China on issues which we partly created, without any concept of how this is going to end or what it’s supposed to lead to," he said
Former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger Alexei Nikolsky/TASS
Former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger
© Alexei Nikolsky/TASS

NEW YORK, August 13. /TASS/. Former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger believes that Washington is currently on the brink of war with Moscow and Beijing, he said in an interview with the Wall Street Journal.

"We are at the edge of war with Russia and China on issues which we partly created, without any concept of how this is going to end or what it’s supposed to lead to," he said.

"You can’t just now say we’re going to split them off and turn them against each other. All you can do is not to accelerate the tensions and to create options, and for that you have to have some purpose," Kissinger added.

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Top stories

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Leadership: Six Studies in World Strategy by Henry Kissinger | Financial Times

www.ft.com › ... › World › Books
Leadership: Six Studies in World Strategy from www.ft.com
Jul 6, 2022 · The US elder statesman draws on his vast experience to profile six world leaders — and dissect what made them effective

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Henry Kissinger Is Worried About ‘Disequilibrium’

The 99-year-old former secretary of state has just published a book on leadership and sees a dangerous lack of strategic purpose in U.S. foreign policy

Henry Kissinger at his midtown Manhattan office in July. VIDEO: NATHANIEL BROWN FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
By Laura Secor
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At 99 years old, Henry Kissinger has just published his 19th book, “Leadership: Six Studies in World Strategy.” It is an analysis of the vision and historical achievements of an idiosyncratic pantheon of post-World War II leaders: Konrad Adenauer, Charles DeGaulle, Richard Nixon, Anwar Sadat, Lee Kuan-Yew and Margaret Thatcher.

In the 1950s, “before I was involved in politics,” Mr. Kissinger tells me in his midtown Manhattan office on a steamy day in July, “my plan was to write a book about the making of peace and the ending of peace in the 19th century, starting with the Congress of Vienna, and that turned into a book,

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Saturday, August 13, 2022

Bleeping Computer

 Got some significant time to take all this in 

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US govt will pay you $10 million for info on Conti ransomware members

By
  • August 11, 2022
  • 05:46 PM

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8 - 11 minutes

Conti ransomware

The U.S. State Department announced a $10 million reward today for information on five high-ranking Conti ransomware members, including showing the face of one of the members for the first time.

The Rewards of Justice program is a U.S. Department of State program where monetary rewards are offered for information related to threat actors affecting the national security of the USA.

Launched initially to gather information on terrorists targeting U.S. interests, the program has expanded to offer rewards for information on cyber criminals, such as the Russian Sandworm hackers, REvil ransomware, and the Evil Corp hacking group.

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    Hmm! OK (and two years later 2022?) . . .State Polls Fell Short in 2016. Here’s What Pollsters Learned | WSJ

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    COUNTERFACTUAL

     There's a lot of competing information out there

    Eighth International Army Games to get rolling Aug 13
    More than 260 teams from 35 countries will join the 2022 Games
    Read more
    Moscow to retaliate for expulsion of Russian diplomat from Montenegro — MFA
    "Russia will issue an appropriate response," the ministry said
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    Military operation in Ukraine
    Zelensky is either to face tribunal or return to comedy shows — Russia Security Council

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    Medvedev blames Kiev, West for attempts to stage another Chernobyl at Zaporozhye NPP
    Dmitry Medvedev dismissed the allegations Russia was behind these attacks as "one-hundred-percent nonsense"
    Read more
    Military operation in Ukraine
    Lawmaker views Russia’s control of Zaporozhye NPP as key to regional nuclear security
    According to Leonid Slutsky, Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky and his Western sponsors will have to bear responsibility for a potential nuclear disaster
    Read more
    Military operation in Ukraine
    Lawmaker views Russia’s control of Zaporozhye NPP as key to regional nuclear security

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    Russia slams diplomat’s expulsion from Montenegro as episode of West’s hybrid campaign

    Foreign Ministry Spokeswoman Maria Zakharova noted that the attempt to substantiate this step in a corresponding public commentary laid bare the absence of the reasons and logic of this demarche
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    Military operation in Ukraine
    Allied forces fully liberate settlement of Peski in DPR — Russian top brass
    Spokesman for the DPR People’s Militia Eduard Basurin told earlier that the allied forces were conducting major combat operations in the Donetsk area around the settlements of Maryinka, Peski and Avdeyevka
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    Coronavirus pandemic
    Russia registers 28,694 new COVID-19 cases in past day — crisis center
    60 coronavirus patients died of the infection
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    US Congress approves $430 billion package of initiatives to reduce inflation
    Congressmen interrupted the summer recess to vote on this package of initiatives
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    Main StoryMilitary operation in Ukraine
    13 Aug, 05:11Updated at: 13 Aug, 05:12
    Allied forces fully liberate settlement of Peski in DPR — Russian top brass
    Spokesman for the DPR People’s Militia Eduard Basurin told earlier that the allied forces were conducting major combat operations in the Donetsk area around the settlements of Maryinka, Peski and Avdeyevka
    © Russian Defense Ministry

    MOSCOW, August 13. /TASS/. The allied forces of the Donbass republics and the Russian army completely liberated the settlement of Peski in the Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR), Russian Defense Ministry Spokesman Lieutenant-General Igor Konashenkov reported on Saturday.

    "As a result of offensive operations by the allied forces, the settlement of Peski in the Donetsk People’s Republic has been completely liberated," the spokesman said.

    Spokesman for the DPR People’s Militia Eduard Basurin told reporters on August 10 that the allied forces were conducting major combat operations in the Donetsk area around the settlements of Maryinka, Peski and Avdeyevka. In Soledar and Artyomovsk in the republic’s north, the people’s militia forces were already fighting in the urban and industrial area, he added.
    Tags
    Military operation in Ukraine
    Military operation in Ukraine
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    Russian troops obliterate HIMARS launcher, ammo depot in DPR — top brass
    Russian operational-tactical and army aviation aircraft, missile and artillery troops continue delivering strikes against military facilities in Ukraine, Defense Ministry Spokesman Lieutenant-General Igor Konashenkov reported
    Read more
    Military operation in Ukraine

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