Moneylion director Chris Sugden sells $2.15 million in stock
The U.S. fiscal outlook has dramatically deteriorated since the last time we ran a surplus in 2001, and President Joe Biden — like Democratic and Republican presidents before him — shares some responsibility for our high and rising debt. But it’s not too late to start turning things around. During his time in office, Biden approved more than $4 trillion of new 10-year borrowing, debt-financing everything from COVID relief to infrastructure spending to student debt cancellation. This borrowing helped lift inflation to a 40-year high and push interest rates well above recent levels. It also added to an already high and rising national debt. As a result of borrowing approved by the last four administrations, along with the built-in growth of our health and retirement programs, the national debt will soon approach record levels as a share of the economy. So too will the cost of interest paid by taxpayers on the national debt, which already exceeds spending on Medicare or national defense. And deficits will total about $2 trillion per year . But Biden’s fiscal record isn’t all bad. Coming out of the COVID pandemic, he oversaw a tremendous economic recovery, which has helped limit growth in the ratio of debt to gross domestic product. The president also negotiated and signed into law the bipartisan Fiscal Responsibility Act, which restored appropriations caps and is projected to save $1.5 trillion over a decade. And the Inflation Reduction Act, though a mixed fiscal bag overall, included important reforms to lower Medicare drug prices and improve tax enforcement. Now, with just under two months left in his term, Biden has the opportunity to build on these fiscal successes and make right some of these fiscal failures. That starts with protecting his legacy on tax compliance. Every year, households and businesses underpay their taxes by $600 billion. The combination of tax cheating and honest mistakes adds tremendously to our debt. Every president from Reagan through Trump proposed to increase funding to the Internal Revenue Service to reduce this “tax gap.” Biden actually succeeded, persuading Congress to appropriate $80 billion to the IRS to upgrade its information technology, improve its customer service and strengthen its enforcement. Unfortunately, this funding is under threat. Congress has already rescinded more than a quarter of the funds to pay for other spending, and an end-of-year appropriations deal could go further. Another $20 billion of cuts from the IRS would reduce tax revenue by more than $65 billion, according to the Congressional Budget Office. Biden should insist against this, threatening to veto any effort to reduce IRS funding, which only encourages further tax cheating. He should also work with Congress to address excessive payments under the pandemic-era employee retention credit, which has cost many times more than intended and turned into a lightning rod for fraud. Beyond the IRS funding, Biden should insist appropriations levels stick to the caps that he negotiated on a bipartisan basis. There will be tremendous pressure from both parties to spend more. Republicans will want to increase funding on defense, Democrats will want to increase nondefense funding, and both will insist that these incremental changes will have little effect on the fiscal outlook. No question, this country has many unmet needs — both when it comes to national security and to our domestic priorities. But Congress should fund those priorities by cutting spending elsewhere. There is tremendous room to cut waste, improve efficiency, and scale back or eliminate projects and programs that aren’t worth their costs or aren’t working. Failing to abide by spending caps this year would make any future enforcement harder and would send the signal that Congress can spend without restraint. Biden should put his foot down. There’s also much that the president can do through executive action. He could start by withdrawing his various student debt cancellation schemes. These policies are costly, inflationary and poorly targeted — most of the benefit will go to those with graduate degrees and very high lifetime earnings. Student debt cancellation is also likely to boost tuitions and reduce the quality of higher education, as schools will be able to charge more and deliver less if potential students know they are unlikely to be responsible for much of the cost. These executive actions also clearly go beyond the powers intended for the president, which the Supreme Court and other courts have recognized by declaring some of these schemes illegal and putting holds on others. On the other hand, this administration has appropriately and intelligently used its clearly defined authority to begin to tackle fraud and other excesses in the Medicare Advantage program. Biden officials should do more here where possible and work in the transition to help the incoming Trump administration understand the importance of a well-run and cost-effective Medicare Advantage program. Most important, Biden should use the presidential bully pulpit to make the case for paying for new priorities, reducing our debt and securing federal trust funds. Social Security is only nine years away from insolvency, while Medicare is only 12 years away. We cannot afford for future administrations to ignore these challenges and continue the cycle of borrowing for everything. We need leaders to level with the American people about the challenges ahead — challenges Biden understands well. And it is not too late.
Calls for TikTok suspension after shock election result in Romania
Cal Baptist makes cross-country trip to battle Darius Johnson, UCF
Trump convinced Republicans to overlook his misconduct. But can he do the same for his nominees?IBM has come up with a way to make training and running generative AI models five times faster and much more energy efficient by swapping out copper wires for beams of light to connect data center components. The paradox of our digital age is that as computers become smaller, the problems become bigger. As chips cram on more transistors until they number in the billions, they've made possible the massive data centers and the processing power needed to make modern generative AI models possible. However, these models require more and more processing power as they evolve, the data centers have become major energy consumers, and the chips themselves are pushing not only at the limits of their technology, but the laws of physics. Two technological and physical bottlenecks for these data centers are the simple copper wire and the speed that electrons can flow along it. These are one of the major reasons electronics are so compact. It isn't just for convenience. It's because as computers become faster and more powerful, the time that data takes to go from one component to another becomes a major performance factor. In fact, data in the form of electrons have become such a bottleneck that most CPUs spend most of their time sitting idle and consuming energy while waiting for the next data packet to arrive. To speed things up, IBM has developed what it claims is the next generation of optical technology. Using optics to shift data around isn't new. It's been employed to move information from place to place by means of fiber optic cables for decades. However, this has mainly been for long distances. Once the data arrives and enters the computer itself, it's back to copper wires. To overcome this, IBM is turning to a new process for creating Co-Packaged Optics (CPO) in the form of a Polymer Optical Waveguide (PWG) that routes optical signals between the photonic integrated circuits (PICs) and external connections like single-mode fibers (SMFs). The company says that tests of the PWG show that if it was used in data centers they would require five times less power than conventional versions and allow cable connections to stretch from one meter to hundreds, allowing for more flexible architecture while carrying terabits of data per second. IBM's claim is that the power reduction for training one AI model would be enough to run 5,000 US homes for a year and using light would reduce the time for training an AI Large Language Model from three months to three weeks thanks to having 80 times the bandwidth of conventional systems. "As generative AI demands more energy and processing power, the data center must evolve – and co-packaged optics can make these data centers future-proof," said Dario Gil, SVP and Director of Research at IBM. "With this breakthrough, tomorrow’s chips will communicate much like how fiber optics cables carry data in and out of data centers, ushering in a new era of faster, more sustainable communications that can handle the AI workloads of the future." Source:Distinguishing between humans and machines online has become more important than ever. Over the past years, the digital world has seen a proliferation of AI-fueled deepfake impersonations, bots and Sybil attacks, in which a single entity creates many false identities to gain influence. An increasing number of companies are trying to come up with solutions relying on blockchain technology. One of the more well-known projects is , previously known as Worldcoin, which scans irises to confirm their users are human. But the space is seeing more and more competitors relying on biometrics to prove people are real – including . “There are definitely a bunch of companies that are trying to solve the whole Proof of Personhood problem,” the company’s founder Terence Kwok told Biometric Update in an interview earlier this month. “We’re lucky to be one of the few that have started launching, building a user base and joined the market.” The company in October, allowing users and developers to get their first taste of the platform and receive some free cryptocurrency. The project has so far signed up over a million people – moving quickly to catch up with World Network which currently has 15 million users, including 7 million verified through its Orb iris-scanning technology. For now, the company is allowing mobile app pre-enrollment with a phone camera that captures palm prints. The full enrolment will involve scanning both palm prints and palm veins using specialized devices to avoid faking or spoofing. The Hong Kong-based firm is working with several manufacturers on palm-scanning hardware but the industrial design and the electrical engineering is done in-house, adds Kwok. The founder has the media that its first batch of devices should start rolling out between December and February. In 2025, the company plans to launch a personal enrolment device that can be plugged into a smartphone. “Everything is in-house built, from the app all the way to the algorithms on the back for biometrics, as well as the encryption,” says Kwok. The launch of the mainnet is expected over the next couple of months while Humanity Protocol is also planning to release its own app. Meanwhile, Humanity Protocol is also developing different use cases through partnerships with other companies, both the crypto space and the traditional world, according to Kwok. “In the blockchain world, Proof of Personhood is super important,” he says. Proof of Personhood (PoP), sometimes called Proof of Humanity (PoH), ensures that users are real human beings through identity verification that doesn’t rely on a central authority. Verifying that someone is a real person prevents abusing online systems. But Humanity Protocol has plans that go beyond and it’s looking to bring its product to the offline space. “We’re building a full credential ecosystem,” says Kwok. “So it’s not just proof of person, it’s also potentially allowing people to prove their age, prove their nationality, prove where they went to school, where they work.” The company has some serious names behind it. The platform was co-created by the co-founder of blockchain company , Sandeep Nailwal, and Yat Siu, the founder of Hong Kong’s unicorn Animoca Brands. The company, which offers digital property rights to video gamers through blockchain and non-fungible tokens (NFTs), has also been and Kwok is hoping to become a part of their infrastructure. Kwok himself founded the first unicorn from Hong Kong, a tourism startup called Tink Labs which eventually went bankrupt. The startup was funded by backers such as Softbank and Sinovation Ventures, a VC fund headed by the former chief of Google China, Kaifu Lee. The Humanity Protocol project, which in February this year, announced a valuation of in May. But Humanity Protocol still has some catching up to do with the likes of World Network. Kwok says he doesn’t necessarily view other Proof-of-Personhood projects as competitors: Multiple systems can exist for different use cases, he notes. Companies like his owe a lot to World Network for paving the way and educating regulators worldwide about privacy-preserving self-sovereign identity. “I think in a lot of markets, this is welcomed,” says Kwok. “And then some of the other places, we’ll have to engage and figure out how to expand.” | | | | | | | | |