Afghanistan will delay paying salaries to hundreds of thousands of civil servants next month because it does not have enough money, a finance ministry official said on Saturday.
The acknowledgment that it is now impossible to pay October salaries on time is one of the challenges facing new leader Asraf Ghani, who is to be sworn in as president Monday after months of turmoil following a disputed election.
Aside from the deadly fight with the Taliban insurgency, Afghanistan’s fiscal crisis is the most immediate problem facing new leader Asraf Ghani, who is to be sworn in as president on Monday, and coalition partner Abdullah Abdullah.
Afghanistan’s treasury now holds less than the 6.5 billion Afghanis (71.41 million pound) needed to begin processing monthly salaries, said Alhaj Mohammad Aqa, director-general of treasury in the ministry.
He would not say exactly how much money the government had in its coffers, only that it was not enough to meet the payroll.
“Right now, we don’t have that much,” Aqa said.
Afghanistan has asked for $537 million in emergency funds from the United States but so far has not received approval, Aqa said. Even if that additional funding is approved within a week it’s now too late to process the October payroll on time and government salaries will come at least one or two weeks late, he added.
Long a difficult place for foreign companies, India has launched a major effort to attract manufacturers and investors
Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s ‘Make in India’ campaign was unveiled just ahead of a visit to the United States where he is due to meet the bosses of leading companies.
Addressing a gathering of top corporate executives from both India and abroad, he played up India’s unique assets: “The whole world is ready to come here, but they don’t know where to go in Asia. Then they think that we should go to the place in Asia where there is democracy, a demographic dividend, and big demand. If there is any country in the world where all these three things are present, it is India.”
Critics point out Modi will have to do more about India’s bureaucracy and infrastructure problems as well as a lack of skills development and the fact that it is 134th in the World Bank’s “ease of doing business” ranking. By contrast China is 96th.
Modi said there was a need to restore faith in Indian manufacturing and its capacity to create millions of jobs with skills enhancement.
The sectors being targeted for potential investment include automobiles, IT, pharmaceuticals, textiles, ports, aviation, railways, renewable energy, mining and bio-technology.
A Moscow court has seized the shares of an oil company mostly owned by Russian conglomerate Sistema.
Its boss, billionaire oligarch Vladimir Yevtushenkov, is under house arrest accused of money laundering during the acquisition of the oil firm – Bashneft – from local authorities in the Urals region seven years ago.
Yevtushenkov has always had good relations with President Vladimir Putin, but the share seizure deepened investors’ fears the Kremlin is stepping up its campaign to reclaim former state assets, like Bashneft, which is Russia’s sixth largest oil producer.
The case has drawn comparisons with Yukos, the oil giant taken over by the state when its chief executive Mikhail Khodorkovsky was jailed for fraud and tax evasion after falling out with Putin.
The Russian prosecutor general’s office, said it had uncovered “significant violations” of the law and was acting to end the “illegal possession” of Bashneft and restore it to federal ownership.
It said the Moscow arbitration court had granted its request to seize the shares as an interim measure and the court said it would hold a hearing on the lawsuit on October 9.
Shares in Moscow, including Sistema and Bashneft, fell on the news while the rouble slumped to new lows.
Even Russia’s Economy Minister Alexei Ulyukayev has said Yevtushenkov’s arrest is damaging the country’s business and investment climate.
Sergei Petrov, an opposition deputy, told Reuters this week: “They (officials) are telling themselves, to ease their conscience, that they are doing a high-minded thing by returning it to state ownership. The channel is already known, the method has been tested … as it was last time with Yukos.”
Sistema has denied the accusations against Yevtushenkov, though it and Bashneft declined comment on the share seizure.
Every human used to have to hunt or
gather to survive. But humans are smart-ly lazy so we made tools to make our
work easier. From sticks, to plows to tractors we’ve gone from everyone needing
to make food to, modern agriculture with almost no one needing to make food —
and yet we still have abundance.
Of course, it’s
not just farming, it’s everything. We’ve spent the last several thousand years
building tools to reduce physical labor of all kinds. Mechanical muscles —
stronger, more reliable, and more tireless than human muscles could ever be and
that's a good thing. Replacing human labor with mechanical muscles frees people
to specialize and that leaves everyone better off even though still doing
physical labor. This is how economies grow and standards of living rise.
Some people have specialized to be
programmers and engineers whose job is to build mechanical minds. Just as
mechanical muscles made human labor less in demand so are mechanical minds
making human brain labor less in demand.
This is an
economic revolution. You may think we've been here before, but we haven't. This
time is different…
PHYSICAL LABOR:
The old
kind of automation, the one you are probably thinking about, are the giant
mechanical arms in big car manufacturers, that really only take a very small
percentage of works, but not anymore…
Meet
Baxter, a robot programmed not to do a certain task, but rather to learn how to
do a whole bunch of low skilled task. This is what we may call a “general
purpose” robot, which costs cents on electricity, rather than minimum wage.
Baxter may only be the beginning, but sooner rather than later robots could
take over a lot of low skill works, for example a janitor.
AUTOMOBILES:
Self-driving
cars aren’t the future, they are here. They already exist and have driven
hundreds of thousands of miles in streets. So the question isn’t “will they
take over human transportation work?”, But rather “when?” Self-driving cars don’t
need to be perfect, just better than humans, which they already are since they
don’t text and drive, get drunk, sleepy, etc.
CREATIVITY:
Our
brain is complicated to simulate, maybe impossible, but that hasn’t stopped us
from trying. Robots have been programmed to create pattern, unique patterns
every time, in the form of music, paintings, etc. Maybe you are a unique
creative snowflake, but automation is coming for you as well, robots like Emily
Howell who writes music all day, for free.
PROFESSIONS:
Surely
professionals are safe, they are experienced and have studied hard to get to
where they are, well, no. When you think of a lawyer you think of trials and
intelligence, but its really getting the evidence organize for the convenience of
your client. This normally includes going through a lot of paper work, but specialized
robots can go through hundreds of documents in seconds.
Doctors
you ask? Well meet IBM’s Watson whose day job is to be the best doctor there
is.
You may have seen him, not beat, but destroy humans in
Jeopardy, but that was only an experiment. He is already giving diagnosis and
treatments for lung cancer patients. And again, robots don’t need to be
perfect, they just need to be better than humans.
CONCLUSION:
This post is not made to say that
automation is bad, rather to say that it’s inevitable. We don’t need to be
scared, just prepare ourselves when, for most jobs, Humans Need Not Apply.
Pennies. Everybody loves pennies right? They are just great, except in the fact that they’re incredibly useless in every way possible. Let me elaborate…
To understand why pennies are so incredibly useless we have to know where it began. The Penny’s story begins in 1792 with the inauguration of the first United States’ Mint. As time went on prices of copper started to rise changing the penny from its 100% copper composition to only a 5% (composing the outer ring) and the other 95% is made of zinc. Around the 1960s and the 1970s the existence of the penny was no trouble because the penny had actual buying power, more than the current day dime as a matter of fact, so that gives us at least 2 more coins to slaughter…
Getting back to the penny though, as of 2006 the price that the raw materials to make pennies raised over the 1 cent mark, so in consequence the US Mint is working on a loss of around 1.6 to 2 cents for each penny. Because of pennies being worth more melted than in actual penny form, so people started to melt them.
In a perfect world the US would have let its citizen remove the coins for circulation and tax the activity, but the world is not so perfect. The US government made melt coins of all type illegal and continues to produce 4 million pennies each year, which generates 4 million dollars is losses.
But still, if pennies were actually made out of something truly representative of their value (plastic perhaps) it doesn’t change the problem they fundamentally have, they fail as money. The main point of money is to make everyday transactions easier, which if you’ve ever tried to pay exact change with pennies, you know it’s not even worth the time.
Other countries have already abolished pennies for having no buying power, this include: New Zealand, Australia, Finland, The Netherlands, and Canada. They just rounded cash transactions to the nearest 5 cents. As a matter of fact, the US has gone through a similar process already, in 1857 they discontinued the half cent coin for being worth too little. And in the overseas US military bases pennies have already been abolished.
But, there’s one more problem, Lincoln. Everybody adores good old Abe, but let’s face it, he wouldn’t like to be on the most insignificant worthless unit of the US national coin, and he is on the five dollar bill. So it’s really not disrespectful or unpatriotic in any way.
