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Category: economics – Page 36

The global battle over microchips | DW Documentary

Computers, cars, mobile phones, toasters: countless everyday objects contain microchips. They’re tiny, unremarkable and cheap, but since the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic, they’ve been at the center of a political and industrial tug of war.

Against the backdrop of the trade war between China and the US, “The Microchip War” spotlights all the aspects of this conflict. In the film, the world’s most influential actors in this industrial sector weigh in.

No one is in any doubt that microprocessors are as strategically important as oil. The battle over microchips could potentially redefine the geopolitical world order. In the United States and Europe, fears over a microprocessor shortage have led to a flood of investment pledges. After ceding microchip production to Asia in the 1990s, market leaders in the West are now trying to bring production back home and thereby regain control of the production chain.

This resulted in the adoption of new legislation in 2022: the European Chips Act initiated by the EU Commission under Ursula von der Leyen and — in response to this — the American “Chip and Science Act” initiated by Joe Biden. China, the US, Europe: major global powers fighting over tiny microchips. Pandemic and resource scarcity have fueled the desire for industrial reconquest and economic superiority.

But is this reindustrialization actually possible? Can the West challenge the foundations of globalization in this way?

#documentary #dwdocumentary #usa #europe #asia.

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The first results from the world’s biggest basic income experiment

One of the big questions GiveDirectly is trying to answer is how to direct cash to low-income households. “Just give cash” is a fun thing to say, but it elides some important operational details. It matters whether someone gets $20 a month for two years or $480 all at once. Those add up to the same amount of money; this isn’t a Side Hustle King situation. But how you get the money still matters. A certain $20 every month can help you budget and take care of regular expenses, while $480 all at once can give you enough capital to start a business or another big project.

The latest research on the GiveDirectly pilot, done by MIT economists Tavneet Suri and Nobel Prize winner Abhijit Banerjee, compares three groups: short-term basic income recipients (who got the $20 payments for two years), long-term basic income recipients (who get the money for the full 12 years), and lump sum recipients, who got $500 all at once, or roughly the same amount as the short-term basic income group. The paper is still being finalized, but Suri and Banerjee shared some results on a call with reporters this week.

By almost every financial metric, the lump sum group did better than the monthly payment group. Suri and Banerjee found that the lump sum group earned more, started more businesses, and spent more on education than the monthly group. “You end up seeing a doubling of net revenues” — or profits from small businesses — in the lump sum group, Suri said. The effects were about half that for the short-term $20-a-month group.

Virgin Galactic announces state-of-the-art spaceship hub in Arizona

Explore Virgin Galactic’s Mesa facility, a cutting-edge hub poised to revolutionize spacecraft manufacturing, boosting space travel capabilities and economic growth.

Virgin Galactic.

This move, detailed in a recent company release, outlines Virgin Galactic’s ambitious plans for its next-generation Delta class spaceships, aiming to boost production and flight frequency significantly.

‘The era of “do nothing, the boss can’t fire me“ is over’ says Ivy League professor Jeremy Siegel, as workers face down fear of layoffs

A stuttering economy, rampant inflation and a handful of mass layoffs later, it seems the tables may be turning.

According to Professor Jeremy Siegel, emeritus professor of finance at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, staff looking over their shoulders at laid off peers may have actually proved useful to the economy.

Volocopter stalls air taxi launch amid funding woes in Singapore

Volocopter plans to focus on cities expediting infrastructure, routes, regulations, and digital networks, highlighting global economic uncertainties and the crucial role of local partners.

Volocopter.

The eagerly anticipated initiative has been paused due to challenges in securing local partners willing to share the financial responsibility for the cutting-edge technology involved.

Progress in wastewater treatment via organic supramolecular photocatalysts under sunlight

Refractory organic pollutants, including phenols, perfluorinated compounds, and antibiotics, are abundant in various industrial wastewater streams such as chemical, pharmaceutical, coking, and dyeing sectors, as well as municipal and domestic sources. These pollutants pose significant threats to ecological well-being and human health.

The imperative to achieve complete removal of organic contaminants from water and facilitate water recycling is paramount for enhancing and ensuring sustainable economic and social progress. Addressing the efficient removal of recalcitrant organic pollutants in water is not only a focal point in environmental chemical pollution control research but also a pivotal technical challenge constraining industrial wastewater reuse.

Advanced oxidation processes (AOPs), especially heterogeneous AOPs, yield strongly including ·OH, ·O2-, and ·SO4- to oxidize organic pollutants under ambient conditions, are appealing wastewater treatment technologies for decentralized systems. AOPs often need excessive energy input (UV light or electricity) to activate soluble oxidants (H2O2, O3, persulfates), thus more cost-effective AOPs are urgently required.

New research maps 14 potential evolutionary dead ends for humanity and ways to avoid them

Humankind on the verge of evolutionary traps, a new study: …For the first time, scientists have used the concept of evolutionary traps on human societies at large.

For the first time, scientists have used the concept of evolutionary traps on human societies at large. They find that humankind risks getting stuck in 14 evolutionary dead ends, ranging from global climate tipping points to misaligned artificial intelligence, chemical pollution, and accelerating infectious diseases.

The evolution of humankind has been an extraordinary success story. But the Anthropocene—the proposed geological epoch shaped by us humans—is showing more and more cracks. Multiple global crises, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, , , financial crises, and conflicts have started to occur simultaneously in something which scientists refer to as a polycrisis.

Humans are incredibly creative as a species. We are able to innovate and adapt to many circumstances and can cooperate on surprisingly large scales. But these capabilities turn out to have unintentional consequences. Simply speaking, you could say that the human species has been too successful and, in some ways, too smart for its own future good, says Peter Søgaard Jørgensen, researcher at the Stockholm Resilience Center at Stockholm University and at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences’ Global Economic Dynamics and the Biosphere program and Anthropocene laboratory.