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This WSJ report shows how retirement looks in America from the financial and lifestyle aspects. The median net worth for people 65-74 years is about $266,000 compared to an average net worth of 5 times that of $1.2 million for this group. This means wealth is highly skewed in America today with a small percentage of high wealth group pushing the average up this much- a result of neglect of American manufacturing that sharply reduced income and savings security of working families, and the impact of laissez faire policies of the administrations since the 1970's with financial crises hurting workers and families. The impact of wars was also borne heavily by workers and families with the neglect of infrastructure and public services in a misallocation of the nation's wealth.  Other points of note are the way time is spent today in retirement with less educational activity or volunteer work than one would imagine, and not enough time for exercize. Only a miniscule amount of time goes to volunteer work (.17 hours) or reading (.57 hours) compared to watching television (4.50 hours) for retirees. Exercize that keeps people healthy one would expect it to go up in retirement only shows .29 hours. Arts and entertainment or cultural activities only 0.05 hours, people are lonelier spending less time with each other with 0.57 hours for socializing and communicating. All showing how Americans in retirement can do better and live better lives by increasing the amount of time they spend in these healthy activities and less on television. Television which is also a sedentary activity takes up 3 times all the other activities essential for healthy living just mentioned combined. Little or no time is spent in meditation, mindfulness or mental wellness, as this grouped under prayer shows only .07 hours or just a few minutes a day.  Small changes that are made in the right direction would do much good for the quality of living for all Americans. Combined with an effort for the renewal of infrastructure and public services this would be an effort in the right direction, contributing to the well being of America.   ...

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On over 50,000 square feet of space this MIT Museum on scientific endeavours in different fields of inquiry brings together scientific projects and artifacts from MIT's past. It poses many fascinating questions to the visitor says WSJ. It is moved to a new 3 storey space within MIT's campus. Here we come across the realization that accidental situations can lead to new discoveries, that it is all about asking questions as education is about exploration. Four major galleries include Essential MIT, Gene Cultures, AI: Mind the Gap and MIT Collects.

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Two out of three people across France oppose the pension reforms as formulated by president Macron. The reform increases the number of years workers have to make contributions for the pension and increases the age to 64. It comes at a time of social change in France with workers and families under stress from a cost of living crisis, and loss of manufacturing in communities across France, a widening economic gap between cities and rural areas.  About 1.2 to 1.4 million people are expected to come out in the protests across France.

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The US will sell 5 Virginia class nuclear submarines to Australia. Manufacturing will start in the US and be shifted to Australia with nuclear submarine visits to Perth in western Australia by 2027. The US will at some point augment its own nuclear submarine fleet where about 1.5 submarines are added each year. The new US fiscal 2024 defense budget will be $835 billion, higher than in 2023. Australia and Britain will acquire new technologies and the knowledge to maintain these submarines. This will help the US maintain its lead in undersea technologies over China. 

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Germany is building the new pipeline that connects the Wilhelmshaven LNG Terminal to its natural gas storage tank in record time in the midst of an energy crisis in Europe. The new 26 kilometer pipeline for  the LNG Terminal is being built in a few months when it would have otherwise taken 8 years. See Rani Bhandari, Managing Director of Open Grid Europe talk about the project in this video from DW.com to get a sense of how Germany is moving quickly to address natural gas needs for the winter. Click on Original article to see it.

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Unions represent 10.1% of wage and salary workers in the US in 2022, down from 10.3% in 2021. Unions added 273,000 workers in 2022, increasing by 1.9% to 14.3 million. Only a small fraction of workers in the private sector are unionized, 6% of 120 million workers or 7.2 million workers. In the public sector 7.1 million or 33% of 21 million workers are represented by unions. Unions won the ability to represent workers in 1041 of 1363 elections held in 2022. In Jan 2023 workers at Microsoft voted to form a union.

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This BBC report looks back at the Solomon Islands which were part of the Guadalcanal campaign in World War II and the importance of the Pacific. In 1943 a Japanese destroyer sank an American ship under John Kennedy in these Pacific ocean waters. About  80 years later his daughter Caroline Kennedy, ambassador to Australia in the Biden administration, takes a trip to this Pacific region and islands of Samoa and Tonga, with Wendy Sherman. China is seen as planning a base in the Solomon Islands which is on the southern sea route near Australia.

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This report in the NYT shows a grim reality that about 70% of 15400 nursing homes offering a place for the elderly in America are for profit and some owned by private investors who seek to turn a profit on the operations. With competition from home care support and assisted living facilities the investors were having a hard time turning a profit on the operations resulting in deterioration in quality of operations and care. 

 Japan, Scandinavian countries, and Germany, other countries have a better system for quality of life as people get older.

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Greg Ip looks at the Chinese economy its strengths and and many weaknesses including debt and declining foreign investment in 2023, as president Xi visits the US this coming week. With a slowing economy, high youth unemployment and excessive debt, China remains a resilient economy because it has strengths in manufacturing. It would take the US the next decade to build up its manufacturing capabilities after neglecting this important field with mistaken policies for three decades under presidents Reagan, Bush, Clinton, Obama and Trump. President Biden is taking steps for this new manufacturing revival to take place.

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Suriname a small country of 600,000 people near Brazil, joins other countries with debt problems such as Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Zambia, and others which have piled up debt borrowing with unsustainable debt payments. About 545 million borrowed from China and total $2.4 billion in debt accumulated. It is now negotiating with the IMF for $690 three year loan. The US says China has to agree to join in reducing the debt burden so that the cost of assistance does not fall only on the US as the IMF's largest shareholder. 

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Ford car inventory April 2025 is 568,000 vehicles, 8% higher than in 2024. Only Dodge has more vehicles in inventory.  Ford From America For America car discounts give the price discount given to employees to customers in April 2025. This will displace some of the German and South Korean cars that face a 25% import duty on Liberation Day April 2, 2025. German and South Korean cars are made in their home country or a third country about 60% for South Korean makers Hyundai/Kia and over 70% for German carmakers VW Audi, BMW, Benz.

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US president Biden joins a UAW picket line in Detroit. Biden says he supports the UAW in its wage negotiations for 40% increase in wages. Workers wages are depressed because of concessions made a decade ago to ensure the survival of the US auto companies. UAW leader Shain Fawn was elected directly by the rank and file members for the first time. He has gone back to the UAW's roots for strike action, as it seeks to reverse concessions on tiered wages and address the cost of living crisis. 

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A Pew Research Center poll before April elections shows 70% of Indians dissatisfied with conditions in the country. 63% of those polled say they prefer the opposition BJP party to lead the next government, compared to 19% for the ruling Congress party. More significant was the favorable view of Narendra Modi by 78% of those polled, with only 16% holding an unfavorable view of Modi, the chief minister of the state of Gujarat which has seen fast growth rates. The Congress party has been hurt by a series of corruption scandals, weak leadership and poor management of the economy as growth slowed in 2012-2013.

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This important WSJ report shows how the CDC labs failed to come with the test after contamination of a component and failure of the third part of the three part test components. In the absence of a working test from CDC where delays cost three weeks of February the private labs all over the country and state labs could have developed their own test, yet HHS and FDA required approval for these labs to develop their own test and use it. From Feb. 8 when state and city public health labs detected problems with the CDC test to Feb 29 when solutions were developed including simply excluding the third part of the three component test, and letting labs around the country do their own test, were 3 crucial weeks that let the virus spread out of control. The CDC, HHHS, and the FDA and their managers and heads of departments bear responsibility for these errors. Week after week the delays continued, instead the two component test which detects if the genetic material in the sample is coronavirus material, could simply have been approved at the outset instead of the approval for this given weeks later. The third component of the test checks if the virus mutated, according to this report. There is no explanation why the labs all over the U.S. were not allowed to go ahead on February 9 itself or within a few days after that to develop their own tests once it was clear the CDC test did not work on that day. CDC officials failed to recognize that there was a possibility that they may not be able to fix the faulty third component of the test and the risks if they gave false reassurances. There is also no explanation of why a German designed test was not used once the CDC test failed on Feb. 9, which would be a proper way for action considering that this pandemic had already shutdown parts of China by this time. Alarming also is the mention in this report that on Feb. 22 a FDA official in charge of lab diagnostics  flies to Atlanta where the CDC Respiratory Diagnostic lab which developed the test is located. His boss FDA medical device center director is cited from later information as describing the lab as "filthy" meaning the lab had the potential to contaminate, and going so far as saying that if it had been any other lab it would have been shut down. Considering that investment in public health has deteriorated over the last two decades and that there has been a massive misallocation of capital in the country away from public infrastructure this is appalling. The thought of critical labs for emergency health needs as not being up to high quality standards in the U.S. as a result of two decades of misspending, that this shows, is very disturbing.  This WSJ report is based on interviews with people who know about the testing crisis, and undisclosed emails, correspondence on the issues involved. Community transmission began in January 2020 in the U.S. These delays were costly in February and could have been prevented either by going with the German design on Feb 10 or asking labs across the U.S. to develop their own test, and letting other labs immediately use the modified 2 component test of CDC that worked instead of doing this action weeks later. Mardi Gras on Feb 25 and other places where large crowds gathered in sports stadiums could have been stopped had testing gone forward and shown the true extent of the community transmission in these critical weeks.  First China delayed a U.S. team of experts coming into the country for weeks, and then the CDC, FDA, HHS, failed to get testing started, creating  a false sense of complacency. Two crucial errors outside and inside the country that caused so much damage to America and the world.   ...

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David Autor at MIT authored some of the first detailed studies about the severe disruption in U.S. communities from the trade with China following China's entry into the World Trade Organization in 2001. The sheer size of the impact now appears to have been underestimated by economists and other experts. It was believed says Hilsenrath and Davis, that the U.S. having absorbed the impact of trade with Japan in the seventies and eighties, and with Mexico following NAFTA, could do the same with China. That turns out to be false. Much of 2016 election season has been spent seeing the rise of anti-trade movements led by Trump and Sanders, and reveals a deep discontent with job shifting overseas, and disruption of communities across America by trade patterns. What happened? In 2015 China's exports to the U.S. reached 2.7% of U.S. GDP. Hilsenrath and Davis say it was about 1% less with Japan and Mexico when their exports surged. The rapidity of the impact is another problem. It took 12 years following Japan's emergence as a major supplier, to reach the same level of impact that China had only 4 years after China's entry into the WTO in 2001. A similiar situation of 12 years happened with Mexico after NAFTA. Another problem is that Japan's exports impacted mostly steel and autos, China's exports impacted a whole range of industries. The speed with which China's planners sought to change and modernize their manufacturing  base is unprecedented in history, and has an impact not only on the U.S. as a recipient of low cost exports, but also on China as it struggles with bad debts and job losses today, that are a legacy of that too rapid move. This was part of the drive to urbanize China rapidly by shifting agricultural workers to factories in the cities, at a pace unprecedented in history. Another factor not mentioned is the global financial crisis of 2008-2009 that hurt U.S. manufacturing in the auto and other industries, and the wide impact this had in loss of jobs and decline in wages. By 2010 the tide of public opinion had shifted. The WSJ/NBC poll of September 2010, cited in detail in WSJ 10/2/2010 under "Americans Sour on Foreign Trade" shows over 80% consistently for all levels of income, over $75,000 and under $75,000, Republicans and Democrats, working class Americans or well educated Americans, saying that Americans were struggling and there was less hiring, because of how trade had impacted their communities. Lyrarc covered this in considerable detail since 2006. All political parties, business leaders, ignored the implications of this huge change, the media covered it but assumed it would take care of itself as trade with Japan had done previously, and it was left to Trump and Sanders as outsiders to call it like they saw it 5 years later.  Economic inequality has widened in China to the point of it becoming unrecognizable as a former socialist economy. Now both countries are faced with the job of picking up, chastened by the experience, and hoping to limit the political fallout to achieve economic recovery. The very open trading system that had generated prosperity since World War II was being put at risk by a lack of awareness that trade brings with it changes, winners and losers, and manufacturing jobs moving overseas on a scale and speed unprecedented in history, was something that no one could cope with. ...

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How the state of Maharashtra was formed from Bombay state that included Gujarat, by making language as a basis of state formation offers clues for India's economic and political solutions to the problem of modernizing the country in the way Japan and China have done. The same is true for Gujarat.  Gujarat added the princely states of Saurashtra. The original Bombay state did not include Saurashtra or the Vidarbha and Marathwada regions of today's Maharashtra state. Vidarbha and Marathwada were added to create Maharashtra, Saurashtra was added to create Gujarat. Voting patterns have given the party that is pushing hardest for modernization of infrastructure with speed and scale favorability in most regions of Maharashtra except Marathwada regions and most regions of Gujarat except Saurashtra. The Bombay city region that forms a large part of the voting population in Maharashtra came first under the influence of British, then Gujarati business, then trade unions, followed by a Mumbai for Marathis movement, and now an integration of the Marathi movement into one that reaches for leadership for modernization on a national scale.   Bombay city is itself being dug up in a way Tokyo in the 20's and 60's must have been, or Shanghai in the 90's, 1912 sites have been dug up for a next generation Metro system of trains, a bullet train to Ahmedabad and New Delhi and for bridges across the Arabian sea, new expressways. Projects that were stalled for decades because of political stalling inaction are now being pushed ahead to be finished in 2-3 years or half the time. In Japan in the 20's the incentive was Japan's resurgence, in the 60's its recovery from world war. In China in the 90's the rush to modernize after the Japanese invasion and failed attempts in the 60's. In India today it is the rush to modernize after the British Empire's extraction of wealth from the country since 1850, and the failed attempts twice in the 60's and 90's.   ...

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This NYT report covers the period around 2019 and since when Tesla established its first factory in China.  It is the remarkable story of how the intuition and rapid decisionmaking  of Huang Li, a top Shanghai official and now premier since 2022, helped China create its own EV industry from scratch. He did this by giving Tesla a start with a new factory in Shanghai with $1.5 billion in incentivized loans and building it in 1 year 2019-2020.  A top Shanghai official Huang Li hoped to attract Tesla to China in 2019 after contacts were opened through California officials. Tesla had its only factory at Fremont, California, and had worked with the state government on a program of emissions credits as a form of financing that it could use. California officials  advocated for a similar policy in China in 2019. With Mr. Li's backing the Tesla factory in Shanghai was built in 1 year, California style emissions credit were put in place in China. What Mr. Huang Li's intuition told him was that China was at a turning point it had to take strong steps for a emissions free auto industry to tackle climate change. A company like Tesla offered an opportunity to do this. The factory was built faster than Chinese time in 1 year and loans of $1.5 billion helped finance this. Li correctly sensed that local supplier chain had to be built giving China a way to build its own EV industry. CATL was a lead supplier to Tesla. By providing assistance to CATL and other suppliers and using China's rapid development model Li was able to build an entire EV vehicle industry from scratch. BYD became through work in the pandemic years the largest EV maker in the world, and CATL the largest battery maker. Tesla provided the impetus which Li took on with the idea of building its own versions to soon overtake Tesla in 4 years between 2020 and 2024. BYD went even further and developed its own in house battery technology to cut costs and bring prices down. ...

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Vance says he is skeptical and inherently mistrustful about the constructive influence of Silicon Valley on America, on the broader economy in all parts of America, and on education expanding opportunity for all. Vance says of his stint in Silicon Valley starting in 2013 when he moved to the Bay Area after graduating in law from Yale to 2022 when he ran for the US Senate from Ohio, that it taught him something about the influence of venture capital on America. He is skeptical about its constructive influence when seen from the American heartland, from the Kansas prairies of Eisenhower to his own rust belt state of Ohio and the hinterland of Appalachia across the eastern US from New York through Tennessee to Mississippi. Vance says: "I've certainly personally been very close to the technology sector. Because of that experience, I inherently mistrust it or worry about its influence in the broader economy." WSJ's Angel Au Yeung calls it short lived but it stretched for 10 years and Vance returned to Ohio for Narya Ventures, worked with AOL founder Steve Chase on Revolution to look at what could be done in places such as Chattanooga, Tennessee, in the south and midwest with these venture concepts. This is enough experience just to understand its effects on all parts of America. Realizing in the end that it failed to support education or expanding opportunity for all. Even Apple's much touted iPad succeeds as a potentially useful tech device but fails when one sees what little interest or effort Apple put into developing its educational potential to expand opportunity for all. The reasons are that that was never the intended goal to subordinate public interest to profit, when education is inherently public interest. And because tech tools alone cannot do the work of educating minds. Only human beings and knowledge, ideas in books can do this, as they have done in all of America's and Europe's past. ...

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Krugman says there is cause for concern from May's U.S. jobs report of only 38,000 jobs added- low even with Verizon strike jobs added back in- compared to the 200,000 a month average since Jan 2013. One cannot read too much into one months report, yet the political uncertainty in a election year adds to the problem. The low interest rates near zero offering little possibility for rate cuts, make it difficult to come up with a policy response. Under a Clinton administration the infrastructure spending option would face Republican resistance.  It is not clear how a Trump administration would respond. Krugman says the jobs figure reflects a stronger dollar- a result partly of the Fed's plan to raise rates- that is hurting U.S. exports.

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Indian foreign minister Jaishankar tells a conference in Begaluru that what happens outside India affects each and every Indian. Inflation with prices of fertilizer, foodgrains and oil are affected by the war in Ukraine, coronavirus started in Wuhan, China, the incursions since 2020 in the Himalayas were started at our borders by China and began with its invasion of Tibet, what is happening on the border in Kashmir with crossborder terrorism happens with China's support of Pakistan.  Gaining access to pools of US and European capital and technology will involve action taken by foreign investors from outside India's borders in lands far away. This will affect the infrastructure and the speed and scale of India's industrialization and modernization, and will affect every Indian. It will also help India compete with other industrialized countries including China, and emerge as a leader of the Free World along with US and European Union. The world is where everything takes place and India's place is in the Free World. ...

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The UK NHS is urgently tracking down parents of 35,000 children in London who are not fully vaccinated against polio, says this report in The Times. Health officials have detected the first outbreak since 1984. They are trying to trace it back to a "single household or street." London has lower rates of polio vaccination than the rest of England, dropping to levels that are seen as risky for the health of children. Vaccination rates are low in north and east London says this report in The Times. In London as a whole the vaccination rate for one year olds in 2021 is at 87%,  5 percentage points lower than that of the UK as a whole of 92%.  

Lack of investment in public health and services has weakened the public health system even as hundreds of billions of dollars were misallocated by capital markets gone astray. The pandemic exacerbated a bad situation in public health lowering vaccination rates even further.

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Safety checks at Norfolk Southern are the subject of this report in the WSJ. The derailment of a freight train leading to spill of toxic chemicals in Ohio on Feb 3, 2023, led to concern about the safety practices at American railroads in the efforts to cut costs. The National Transportation Safety Board has opened a probe into the safety culture and practices of Norfolk Southern. One practice called PSR or precison scheduled railroading has been used by railroads in America to cut costs. This means fewer employees, longer freight trains as long as 3 miles, and fewer locomotives. The result is that employees count went down from 159,000 in 2011 to 115,000 in 2021 a drop of 28% even when freight dropped by 11%. This increased profits resulting in higher dividends and stock buybacks, with a heavier workload and less time off  even for sick days until a threatened strike. President Biden intervened to set a new pay and work deal and an element of fairness for workers. ...

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The BBC shows pictures of King Charles visit to Germany. King Charles's speech to the German parliament, the Bundestag, was the first for a British monarch. He received a standing ovation. He made the speech mostly in German, and spoke about the close cultural connections between the two nations- the first Shakespeare association was was formed not in England but in Weimar and Handel will be played at his coronation. He touched on the war in Ukraine and said- "Since I last spoke in this building the scourge of war is back in Europe." It has left freedom and human dignity "trampled in the most brutal way." He praised "the vital leadership" shown by UK and Germany.

About the future he said- "In the long and remarkable story of our countries there are many chapters yet to be written. Let us fill these with the relentless pursuit of a better tomorrow." 

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Janet Protasiewicz, a Democrat, wins 55% to 45% for Republican Daniel Kelly in the Wisconsin Supreme Court election. This gives Democrats a one vote majority in the Supreme Court. It will mean a challenge of a 1849 abortion law and the redrawing of the electoral maps that gives Republicans  a majority in the state assembly. The governor is Democrat Tony Evers and the legislature in Wisconsin has a Republican majority.  States in the midwest such as Michigan and Wisconsin played a part in Mr. Trump's gain of the presidency. Since then Ohio has moved into the Republican side, and the close contests are in places like Arizona, Pennsylvania and Georgia. Colorado moved to the Democratic side. Just 40,000 votes in Arizona, Georgia and Wisconsin separated Biden from Trump in the election of 2020 even though Biden had 7 million more votes than Biden because of the Electoral College system which goes by state's won. In 2016 Trump and Biden were separated by just 80,000 votes.   ...

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A question about perceptions of the  of Indian Muslim communities is asked at the Peterson Institute in Washington D.C. Nirmala Sitharaman, India's Finance Minister, responds by comparing the situation where India's Muslim communities have grown from about 10% of the population in 1947 to 15% today compared to Pakistan where Muslim communities were not protected and dwindled from 15% of the population to about 3% today. She did not mention the inclusivity in policy where sab ka vikas sab ke sath is national policy, development for all with the participation of all. And that Muslims benefit equally with other communities in the rapid growth of the economy and GDP in India. This positive story for Muslims and for all communities also stems from the ideals of Vedanta, respect for all religions in Vivekananda's idea including Buddhism, Christianity and Islamic faiths. It also comes from India being rooted in Gandhi's and Vivekananda's ideas since independence. ...