Snap! Crackle! Pop!
The Guardian: European and Canadian central banks expected to cut interest rates this week
New lower rates of 3.75% and 4.75% respectively are likely to be introduced this week after drops in inflation.
WashPo: Claudia Sheinbaum elected Mexico’s first female president
The historic vote Sunday underscored the nation’s progress on gender equity but the Morena victory highlighted concerns about the weakening of its democratic institutions.
NYT: MicroStrategy and Its Founder to Pay $40 Million in Tax Fraud Lawsuit
Michael Saylor did not pay any income taxes to Washington despite living there from 2005 through 2020, the attorney general for the District of Columbia said.
The attorney general for the District of Columbia reached a $40 million settlement with Michael Saylor and the software company he founded, MicroStrategy, in what the attorney general’s office said was the largest income tax fraud recovery in Washington history, The New York Times has learned.
The settlement, which is expected to be announced on Monday, stems from lawsuits filed in 2021 and 2022 accusing Mr. Saylor of evading more than $25 million in income taxes in Washington. Mr. Saylor enlisted MicroStrategy’s help to file fraudulent forms from 2005 through 2020 claiming that he lived in either Virginia or Florida, states with significantly lower income tax rates, and he did not pay any income taxes to the district during that period, the attorney general’s office said.
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“Michael Saylor and his company, MicroStrategy, defrauded the district and all of its residents for years,” Brian L. Schwalb, the attorney general, said in a statement. “Indeed, Saylor openly bragged about his tax-evasion scheme, encouraging his friends to follow his example and contending that anyone who paid taxes to the district was stupid.”
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This is not the first time that Mr. Saylor or MicroStrategy has been accused of committing fraud: In 2000, Mr. Saylor and two other MicroStratgy executives settled accounting fraud charges with the Securities and Exchange Commission for about $11 million.
NYT: Abnormally Dry Canada Taps U.S. Energy, Reversing Usual Flow
In February, the United States did something that it had not done in many years — the country sent more electricity to Canada than it received from its northern neighbor. Then, in March, U.S. electricity exports to Canada climbed even more, reaching their highest level since at least 2010.
The increasing flow of power north is part of a worrying trend for North America: Demand for energy is growing robustly everywhere, but the supply of power — in Canada’s case from giant hydroelectric dams — and the ability to get the energy to where it’s needed are increasingly under strain.
Meanwhile in Ontario, Doug Ford tore down windmills!
Reuters: UK’s Labour Party set for 194-seat majority in general election - YouGov poll
Britain’s main opposition Labour Party is set to win next month’s general election in a landslide victory with a 194-seat majority, YouGov said on Monday.
The multilevel regression and post-stratification (MRP) poll predicted that Labour would win 422 seats, with the governing Conservatives expected to win 140 seats.
A previous YouGov’s MRP poll published in early April showed Labour winning 403 seats nationwide if a general election was held then. A party would need to win more than 320 seats to secure a majority in parliament.
This is going to be a huge change! Of course, there will be lots of mistakes with so many rookie MPs and MPs who have never been in power.
TechRadar: I watched Nvidia’s Computex 2024 keynote and it made my blood run cold
There was something that Huang said during the keynote that shocked me into a mild panic. Nvidia’s Blackwell cluster, which will come with eight GPUs, pulls down 15kW of power. That’s 15,000 watts of power. Divided by eight, that’s 1,875 watts per GPU.
Our house averages less than 0.5 kW!
MacRumors: Apple Readies WWDC Stream on YouTube Ahead of Keynote Next Week
WWDC 2024 will kick off with Apple’s keynote on June 10 at 10 a.m. Pacific Time, and the page where the presentation will be live streamed is now available on YouTube. On the page, you can set a reminder to be notified before the keynote begins.
NYT: Elon Musk’s Starlink Connects and Divides Brazil’s Marubo People
Elon Musk’s Starlink has connected an isolated tribe to the outside world — and divided it from within.
NYT: The 25 Photos That Defined the Modern Age
In 1966, Ruscha photographed both sides of the Strip by securing a motorized camera to the bed of a pickup truck. The result was “Every Building on the Sunset Strip,” a nearly 25-foot accordion-fold, self-published artist’s book.
NYT: EVs Are Suddenly Becoming Affordable
More efficient manufacturing, falling battery costs and intense competition are lowering sticker prices for battery-powered models to within striking distance of gasoline cars.
The most accurate way to compare cars is by their total lifetime cost (TLC), in which case electric cars are now actually cheaper than carbon cars!
CNN: Claudia Sheinbaum profile: Who is the veteran politician set to be Mexico’s first female president?
The 61-year-old is set to replace the outgoing President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, her longtime ally whose social welfare programs lifted many Mexicans out of poverty, making their leftist Morena party favorite in the polls.
“Our duty is and will always be to look after every single Mexican without distinction,” Sheinbaum said in a speech early Monday morning. “Even though many Mexicans do not fully agree with our project, we will have to walk in peace and harmony to continue building a fair and more prosperous Mexico.”
Baffler: The Insulin Empire
But if a patient is so lucky as to be diagnosed with diabetes in time to prevent or ameliorate DKA, they are immediately faced with another disconcerting problem: accessing the treatment, which happens to be one of the most lucrative pharmaceutical products in human history. Just past the centennial of insulin’s discovery, the lack of insulin access and affordability continues to run rampant globally. Of the 537 million people living with diabetes worldwide, around 70 million require insulin. At the same time, more than three in four adults with diabetes reside in low- and middle-income countries where a combination of poverty and predatory pharmaceutical regimes make acquiring sufficient insulin difficult or impossible. Even in higher-income countries, pharmaceutical consortiums control who gets access to insulin, and for how much.
Take the United States: about 38.4 million Americans–including children–have diabetes, and among them, 8.4 million rely on insulin. A 2019 Yale study found that one in four insulin-dependent diabetics have resorted to rationing their insulin supplies: using less insulin than prescribed, stopping insulin therapy, delaying the start of insulin therapy, not filling prescriptions, and engaging in other underuse behaviors related to cost. Many who need insulin not only require adequate dosages but different types of insulins, alongside a suite of devices to monitor and stabilize blood sugar levels as health complications can emerge if they drift too far in either direction. Forgoing adequate insulin dosing can have devastating consequences for type 1 and many type 2 diabetics, and the practice is a substantial driver of the hundreds of thousands of deaths attributable to diabetes complications in the United States each year. With global diabetes rates expected to double by 2050, insulin accessibility and affordability will continue to be a matter of life and death for people with the disease.
The potential for insulin’s market exploitation was almost presciently understood by Banting and his team at the University of Toronto, so in 1923, when Banting and Best were awarded the U.S. patents for insulin and the method for making it, they swiftly sold them to the university for $1 each. “Insulin does not belong to me, it belongs to the world,” Banting explained, believing that profiting off such an essential treatment was not only immoral but detrimental to ensuring universal affordability and access.
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Some of the commonly used forms of insulin have long been exponentially more expensive in the United States than in the rest of the OECD; for years, caravans have taken Americans across the border to Canada, where they can buy insulin for a tenth of its U.S. price. Stateside, insulin prices have consistently seen hikes that are eye-watering for patients and mouth-watering for executives and investors. A vial of Eli Lilly’s rapid-acting Humalog (insulin lispro) cost $21 in 1996 but increased to $332 by 2018.
Last Updated: 03.Jun.2024 22:29 EDT
