HYPOCRISY is one of the aggravating sins of the progressive elite. There is nothing more sickening than the failure of prominent figures to abide by the standards they seek to impose on others. Such double standards can be found in socialists who rage against private education but send their children to fee-paying schools, or in eco warriors who wail about carbon footprints while globe-trotting in luxury jets.

CRUISE holidays offer a number of luxurious leisure activities as part of the package. However, for an extra cost passengers can enjoy more exclusive experiences, but only if they stick to this rule.

CRUISE holidays may begin for guests the moment they step onboard, however, the planning and preparation needed to create the ultimate experience begins long before. Journey Planner Denitza Dimitrov, one of the forces behind river cruise company Emerald Waterways, explains how her job helps to make cruise dreams a reality.

Jihadists linked to al-Qaida and the Islamic State organization have been overrunning gold mines, forcing the miners to sell them the gold exclusively, which is then smuggled and sold across the border in places like Benin, Ghana or Togo.

THE CORONAVIRUS pandemic is forcing the political elite to finally acknowledge what the general public have known for some time; as a nation we have allowed ourselves to become far too dependent on importing essential goods and cheap labour from across the globe. The financial crisis of 2008 exposed as a myth the claim that globalisation would lead to ever greater prosperity for all. The current crisis has made it crystal clear that globalisation, as well as being bad news for our economy, puts lives at risk.

IT IS TIME that political interference with the police and the CPS ceased. One might have thought that after the ludicrous Operation Midland , the lesson had been learned.

THIS is a story of two businesses and of two very different approaches to our current exigencies.The first concerns my local laundry CleanCall, which devised a means to keep going and contributing to the economy.

A Nashville mom who gave birth to an 'alarmingly small' child celebrates her first Mother's Day with a healthy daughter and waves of gratitude.

News of Little Richard's death sent shockwaves across social media Saturday as tributes started pouring in from celebrities and musicians.

Little Richard Penniman, a founding father of rock music, died at 87. Before Elvis, the flamboyant singer wowed 1950s teens with his frantic sound.

I CAN'T help feeling that this is all a long-delayed return to normal. I know the lockdown feels abnormal, and I suppose it is, in that we've never seen anything like it before. But beyond that, I have a powerful sense that normal relations have merely been resumed; the age-old see-saw relationship between man and planet re-established.

This year, I am currently making over $12,000 less a year then I was supposed to when I was hired in 2004, a letter to the editor says.

If I was just passing through on my way somewhere else, what I see along the roadside would not encourage me to stay, a letter to the editor says.

Once he pads his resume, former South Bend, Indiana, mayor Pete Buttigieg can run again for a higher office, a letter to the editor says.

I am grateful for thoughtful insights amid today's cacophony of intolerant and mean-spirited shouting, a letter to the editor says.

Providence has dominated the series with Butler,12-4

As IndyCar's iRacing Challenge ventures onto an oval track, expect the rhythm of the competition and, perhaps, those winning, to change.

Donnelly and Braun campaigns focus on personal attacks

The minority party may change but the rhetoric stays the same

A long-stalled push to eliminate gerrymandering suddenly enjoys some momentum.

Bipartisanship doesn't score you many points in politics these days. But it should, and Sen. Joe Donnelly is a perfect example of why.

Brownsburg, Broad Ripple Haverford fighting for spots in Great Lakes Regional.

Plainfield Correctional Facility inmates grow produce in a garden to give to needy.

Belatedly, I've got round to looking at the Treasury's recent decision to change how it calculates the necessary contributions that have to be made to cover the future costs of unfunded public service pensions.

My interest was sparked by a letter sent to the chancellor by 23 pension experts, organised by the consultant John Ralfe. They argue that the Treasury has made a mistake in its choice of a new so-called discount rate.

If you think this is tedious abstruse stuff that has no relevance to you, think again. The aggregate public-sector net liability for pensions is so huge - perhaps £1 trillion - that it matters to all of us as taxpayers, especially those likely to be paying tax in 10 and 20 years time, that the government has a reliable and accurate valuation of pension promises.

Pensions represent, to coin the phrase, a massive off-balance-sheet debt. And as we've all learned to our cost from the financial crisis of 2007-8, it is a bad idea to carry on blithely pretending off-balance-sheet liabilities don't exist.

So what is this blessed discount rate? Well in the private sector it can be seen as the number used to translate into today's money a commitment to pay £650 a week pension (for example) for 30 years or so to a retired employee (till he or she dies), so that we can see whether there's enough money in the pension fund to pay that employee (and all the other employees) during his or her long retirement.

The point of the discount rate is to assess whether there's enough money in the pension fund - or whether it needs to be topped up.

Which is all very well, except that for most of the public sector, there are no funds or pots of money to pay for future pensions. Most of the pension promises are unfunded, payable out of employees' current contributions and out of general taxation.

That said, since public sector workers are increasingly expected to make a contribution to the costs of their own pensions, it would presumably be sensible for that contribution to be set at a level that is rationally related to the value of promised pensions.

So what is the best way of measuring the cost today of new pension promises?

Well the government has decided to "discount" those promises by the rate at which the economy is expected to grow.

Now there is some logic to that: the growth rate of the economy should determine the growth rate of tax revenues; and the growth rate of tax revenues will have a direct bearing on whether future pension promises will bankrupt us all or not.

But here's the thing. Any private sector chief executive might well be sent to prison if he or she decided to use the equivalent discount rate for a company, which would be the expected growth rate of that company's revenues or profits.

The reason is that although it might be possible to remove subjectivity (or in a worst case, manipulation) from any long-term forecast of the growth of GDP or of a company's turnover, it is not possible to remove considerable uncertainty.

To illustrate, the Treasury has chosen a GDP growth rate of 3% per annum as the discount rate for public sector pensions, which is considerably above the rate at which the UK economy has grown for years or indeed may grow for many years.

If we were growing at 3%, we would in practice be less worried about the off-balance-sheet liabilities of public-sector pensions, because the on-balance-sheet debt of the government would not be growing at an unsustainably fast rate.

To put it another way, in choosing its view of the long term growth rate of GDP as the discount rate, the Treasury is arguably understating the burden of future pensions to a considerable extent.

So what discount rate do companies use?

Well they are obliged to discount the liabilities at the yield or interest rate on AA rated corporate bonds.

Which may not be ideal, but has some advantages: there is a market price for AA corporate bonds, so the yield or discount rate is difficult to manipulate by unscrupulous employers; and it tells the company how much money would need to be in the pension pot, on the basis that all the money were invested in relatively safe investments (AA corporate bonds).

Now Ralfe and his chums believe that the discount rate for public sector promises should be the yield on long-term index linked gilts (gilts are bonds or debts of the British government) - partly because this too has a difficult-to-manipulate market price and because an index-linked government bond is a very similar liability to a public sector pension promise (both are protected against inflation, both are in effect debts of the government).

They point out that gilt interest and principal payments are paid out of future tax revenues, just as future pensions are. So if the value today of future pensions should be discounted at the GDP rate, that's how index linked gilts should be value on the government's balance sheet - which would be bonkers.

Anyway, if you've read this far (and many congratulations to you if you have), you may take the view that it would not be rational to impose a tougher discount rate on the government than on private-sector companies - which is what Ralfe et al seem to want, in that the yield on index linked gilts will always be lower than the yield on AA corporate bonds (because HMG, even with all its debts, is deemed to be more creditworthy than any British business).

But for a government and for a chancellor who have made it a badge of honour to bring transparency and prudence to public-sector finances, prospective GDP growth does look a slightly rum discount rate for valuing those enormous pension liabilities.

The first day of the 2020-2021 school year is just a few months away. Will kids be back in classrooms or continue logging on?

Enquanto o fundador do Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, apoia medidas de isolamento, Elon Musk, da Tesla, está cada vez mais cético.

A fixture in IU's starting lineup for most of the past two years, Smith averaged 10.4 points and 5.2 rebounds per game in 2019-20.

IU baseball, softball working out expanded rosters

Today's decision was unusual in that it could have gone three ways - it could have conceivably been a half point cut or no cut at all. The reason there's such a wide span of options is that the economy...

Vice President Mike Pence toured a GM facility making hospital ventilators for about an hour Thursday.

DES MOINES-Iowa Firearms Coalition President Barry Snell shared their mission of protecting Second Amendment Rights for Iowans at the Bull Moose Club luncheon in Des Moines on Tuesday.  He explained how the IFC was formed and gave an update on their legislative achievements since their formation in 2010. “IFC got […]

2020-03-23 -

Nijerya, ülkenin kuzeyinde hafta sonu başlayan ve 100 kişinin ölümüne neden olan isyan hareketini bastırmaya çalışıyor. Ordu, radikal İslamcıların üslendiği Maiduguri kentini topçu ateşine tuttu.

Prophet Brown's wide-ranging skill set could bring possibilities for Notre Dame.

Fighting Irish went 32-6 and also went to the Elite Eight the next season.

A fixture in IU's starting lineup for most of the past two years, Smith averaged 10.4 points and 5.2 rebounds per game in 2019-20.

IU baseball, softball working out expanded rosters

Cummins is partnering with Minnesota-based 3M to make filters for use in respirators used during the COVID-19 outbreak.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: GPS is facing a major interference threat from a 5G network approved by the Federal Communications Commission, U.S. military officials told Congress in a hearing on Wednesday. In testimony to the Senate Committee on Armed Services, Department of Defense Chief Information Officer Dana Deasy disputed the FCC's claims that conditions imposed on the Ligado network will protect GPS from interference. When the FCC approved Ligado's plan last month, the agency required a 23MHz guard band to provide a buffer between the Ligado cellular network and GPS. Deasy argued that this guard band won't prevent interference with GPS signals. Results from tests by federal agencies show that "conditions in this FCC order will not prevent impacts to millions of GPS receivers across the United States, with massive complaints expected to come," Deasy said. The FCC unanimously approved Ligado's application, but the decision is facing congressional scrutiny. "I do not think it is a good idea to place at risk the GPS signals that enable our national and economic security for the benefit of one company and its investors," Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.) said at the hearing, according to CNBC. "This is about much more than risking our military readiness and capabilities. Interfering with GPS will hurt the entire American economy." A spokesperson for FCC Chairman Ajit Pai called the military's concerns "baseless fear-mongering" in a statement quoted by Multichannel News. "The FCC made a unanimous, bipartisan decision based on sound engineering principles," the spokesperson said. The FCC said "the metric used by the Department of Defense to measure harmful interference does not, in fact, measure harmful interference," and that "testing on which they are relying took place at dramatically higher power levels than the FCC approved." "Ligado said Wednesday in a statement that it has gone to great lengths to prevent interference and will provide 'a 24/7 monitoring capability, a hotline, a stop buzzer or kill switch' and will 'repair or replace at Ligado's cost any government device shown to be susceptible to harmful interference,'" CNBC reported. The FCC also said it imposed a power limit of 9.8dBW on Ligado's downlink operations -- "a greater than 99 percent reduction from what Ligado proposed in its 2015 application," Pai said.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: The Pacers will listen to the government and follow its lead before bringing players back

A historic day in Washington as Barack Obama makes his inauguration speech. Take Away English has the details.

Source: The Pacers will listen to the government and follow its lead before bringing players back

Those who want to add this Chatback feature to their own blog (or website!), need to register to Google Talk and then they need to create a Google Talk chatback badge. Copy the script and paste it to the page of your choice. You're done. Enjoy.

A barbecue pavilion and a rooftop wine and whiskey bar are in the works out back.

"A little bit of all of us died when Kim died. If we could treat others like Kim treated us, the world would be a better place."

England's physical disability cricketers have taken on an energy-sapping challenge - they are running a collective marathon each day for 10 days.

It comes after reports that garden centres in England and Wales are set to reopen.

Desperate for coronavirus help, California spending billions on no-bid coronavirus contracts, little accountability

The NFL has instituted a league-wide policy in which fans who buy tickets directly from teams can receive refunds for games that are canceled.