An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNBC: Even as Americans cut back in the face of rising prices and recessionary fears, fewer want to give up their streaming subscriptions, especially when it comes to TV, movies and music services, such as Amazon Prime, Netflix and Spotify. Roughly two-thirds of consumers said they will have to decrease their spending due to inflation; however, only about a quarter plan to cancel such subscriptions in the months ahead, according to a recent report by the National Research Group. Most people said they were more likely to cut back on dining out, groceries and clothing.

Consumers are least likely to cancel Amazon Prime, TV and movie streaming services and home security systems, the report found, even over food and gasoline. Just over half, or 51%, also said subscriptions now make up a "significant" portion of their monthly spending. On average, U.S. consumers estimate they spend $135 a month and 17.8% of their monthly budget on subscriptions, the National Research Group found. The report polled more than 2,500 adults in August.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Partha Ranganathan came to realize about seven years ago that Moore's law was dead. No longer could the Google engineering VP expect chip performance to double roughly every 18 months without major cost increases, and that was a problem considering he helped Google construct its infrastructure spending budget each year. Faced with the prospect of getting a chip twice as fast every four years, Ranganathan knew they needed to mix things up. Ranganathan and other Google engineers looked at the overall picture and realized transcoding (for YouTube) was consuming a large fraction of compute cycles in its data centers. The off-the-shelf chips Google was using to run YouTube weren't all that good at specialized tasks like transcoding. YouTube's infrastructure uses transcoding to compress video down to the smallest possible size for your device, while presenting it at the best possible quality.

What they needed was an application-specific integrated circuit, or ASIC -- a chip designed to do a very specific task as effectively and efficiently as possible. Bitcoin miners, for example, use ASIC hardware and are designed for that sole purpose. "The thing that we really want to be able to do is take all of the videos that get uploaded to YouTube and transcode them into every format possible and get the best possible experience," said Scott Silver, VP of engineering at YouTube. It didn't take long to sell upper management on the idea of ASICs. After a 10-minute meeting with YouTube chief Susan Wojcicki, the company's first video chip project was approved. Google started deploying its Argos Video Coding Units (VCUs) in 2018, but didn't publicly announce the project until 2021. At the time, Google said the Argos VCUs delivered a performance boost of anywhere between 20 to 33 times compared to traditional server hardware running well-tuned transcoding software. Google has since flipped the switch on thousands of second-gen Argos chips in servers around the world, and at least two follow-ups are already in the pipeline.

Crop of expensive fantasy adaptations from Amazon and HBO Max served up at subsidised prices. Financial Times: Since 2016, the veteran US television executive John Landgraf has been predicting the arrival of "peak TV" -- the moment when the number of new scripted shows reaches an all-time high. The streaming boom has proved him wrong every time but he gamely made the prediction again this month, telling guests at the Television Critics Association press tour that 2022 would mark "the peak of the peak TV era." Landgraf, chair of Disney's FX network, conceded that he could be wrong this time too. But there is little doubt that this autumn will present audiences with a flood of some of the most expensive television ever produced. On September 2, Amazon Prime will release its adaptation of The Lord of the Rings, with an estimated budget of $465mn for the first season -- almost enough to make Top Gun: Maverick three times over.

HBO Max's House of the Dragon -- the prequel to Game of Thrones -- is reported to have cost $200mn for the season's 10 episodes. At Disney Plus, Star Wars: Andor will lead a large slate of new programmes that include a Pinocchio remake, She Hulk, and a spin-off of the Cars franchise. These shows are being served up to consumers at subsidised prices by streaming platforms making record losses. The only profitable exception is Netflix, but the industry pioneer's market value has plunged almost $200bn over the past year because of slowing subscriber growth. Its share price is languishing at a four-year low. The forthcoming crop of new programming was given the green light during a headier time, when Wall Street cheered as streaming services committed lavish sums to compete. But faith in the streaming business model -- and investor tolerance for profligate spending -- has waned as Netflix's once-blistering subscription growth has gone into reverse.

[...] On top of that, there are growing concerns that inflation will bite into discretionary spending, including on streaming services. "Everyone [in Hollywood] is throwing big dollars after big things," said Niels Juul, who was an executive producer of Martin Scorsese's Netflix film The Irishman. "But [subscribers] are inundated now to the point where they are looking at their monthly bills and saying, 'Something's got to go -- I've got $140 worth of subscriptions here!'" Even so, Tom Harrington at Enders Analysis said consumers were still getting a better deal than the streaming companies themselves. "People get through $100mn of TV in a day and say: 'what's next?' From a consumer point of view that is great. But for a video operator, it's clearly unsustainable."

A report from the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago analyzed data from a moving company, concluding that 59.4% of the moves in California were out of the state — the second-highest percentage for any state in America (behind only Illinois). And that percentage is growing, reports the Los Angeles Times, since between 2018 and 2019, California had a lower outbound move rate of just 56%. Citing changes in work-life balance, opportunities for remote work and more people deciding to quit their jobs, the report found that droves of Californians are leaving for states like Texas, Virginia, Washington and Florida. California lost more than 352,000 residents between April 2020 and January 2022, according to California Department of Finance statistics [about 15,476 per month].

San Francisco and Los Angeles rank first and second in the country, respectively, for outbound moves as the cost of living and housing prices continue to balloon and homeowners flee to less expensive cities, according to a report from Redfin released this month. [Los Angeles residents] in particular, are flocking to places like Phoenix, Las Vegas, San Diego, San Antonio and Dallas. The number of Los Angeles residents leaving the city jumped from around 33,000 in the second quarter of 2021 to nearly 41,000 in the same span of 2022, according to the report.

California has grappled with extremely high housing prices compared with other states, according to USC economics professor Matthew Kahn. Combined with the pandemic and the rise in remote work, privileged households relocated when they had the opportunity. "People want to live here, but an unintended consequence of the state's environmentalism is we're not building enough housing in desirable downtown areas," Kahn said. "That prices out middle-class people to the suburbs [and creates] long commutes. We don't have road pricing to help the traffic congestion, and these headaches add up. So when you create the possibility of work from home, many of these people ... they say 'enough' and they move to a cheaper metropolitan area." Kahn also pointed out that urban crime, a growing unhoused population, public school quality and overall quality of life are driving out residents.

"In New York City, but also in San Francisco, there are all these fights about which kids get into which elite public schools," he said. "The rich are always able to hide in their bubble, but if the middle class looks at this quality of life declining, that's a push factor to leave."

Redfin chief economist Daryl Fairweather cited a June report that tracked the change in spending power of a homebuyer on a $2,500 monthly budget. While 11.2% of homes in Los Angeles were affordable on that budget, using a 3% interest rate, that amount swelled to about 72% in Houston and about 50% in Phoenix. "It's really an affordability problem," Fairweather said. "California for the longest time has prioritized single-family zoning, which makes it so people stay in their homes longer because their property taxes don't reflect the true value. California is the epicenter of where the housing shortage is so people have no choice but to move elsewhere."
The Times also notes figures from the Public Policy Institute of California showing that the state's population did increase between 2010 and 2020 — but by just 5.8%, "below the national growth rate of 6.8%, and resulting in the loss of a congressional seat in 2021 for the first time in the state's history."

At least part of this seems tied to a sudden curtailing of immigration into California. UCLA economics professor Lee Ohanian points out that immigration had offset California's population outflow over the past two decades, but "Delays in processing migration requests to the U.S. were compounded during the pandemic, resulting in the lowest levels of immigration in decades, according to U.S. Census Bureau data. Estimates showed a net increase of 244,000 new immigrants between 2020 and 2021 — roughly half the 477,000 new immigrant residents recorded between 2019 and 2020 and a drastic reduction from more than 1 million reported from 2015 to 2016." The state is also seeing a dwindling middle class, said Ohanian, who cited a report from the National Association of Realtors, outlining that the national median home sales price has reached $416,000, a record high. Meanwhile, California's median home price has topped $800,000. "(California is) at a risk for becoming a state for very, very wealthy people and very, very low earners who receive state and local and federal aid that allows them to be able to live here," Ohanian said. "We should worry about those in the middle who are earning that $78,000 household median income and is, at the end of the day, really struggling, especially if they have interest in buying a home."

"A growing number of cities and towns all over the U.S. are handing out cash grants and other perks aimed at drawing skilled employees of faraway companies to live there and work remotely," reports the Wall Street Journal: A handful of such programs have existed for years, but they have started gaining traction during the pandemic — and have really taken off in just the past year or so. Back in October there were at least 24 such programs in the U.S. Today there are 71, according to the Indianapolis-based company MakeMyMove, which is contracted by cities and towns to set up such programs.

Because these programs specifically target remote workers who have high wages, a disproportionate share of those who are taking advantage of them work in tech — and especially for big tech companies. Companies whose employees have participated in one remote worker incentive program in Tulsa, Oklahoma, include Adobe, Airbnb, Amazon, Apple, Dell, Facebook parent Meta Platforms, Google, IBM, Microsoft, Lyft, Netflix, Oracle and Siemens, according to a spokeswoman for the organization.

Local governments are offering people willing to move up to $12,000 in cash, along with subsidized gym memberships, free babysitting and office space....

A skeptic might ask why local economic development programs are spending funds to subsidize the lives of people who work for some of the most valuable companies in the world. On the other hand, because these remote workers aren't coming to town seeking local jobs, an argument can be made that they constitute a novel kind of stimulus program for parts of the country that have been left out of the tech boom — courtesy of big tech companies... Every remote worker these places successfully attract and retain is like gaining a fraction of a new factory or corporate office, with much less expenditure and risk, argues Mark Muro, who studies cities and labor at the Brookings Institution.
The reporter interviewed an Amazon engineer who moved to Greensburg, Indiana (population: 12,193), and Meta worker David Gora, who moved to Tulsa, Oklahoma and praises its relocation program's sense of mission, possibility, and community. "Even with the pay cuts that Meta has imposed on workers who relocate to areas with a lower cost of living, Mr. Gora is saving a lot more money and has a much higher quality of life than before, he adds."

Tulsa's program is unique in that it's funded by a philanthropic organization rather than a local economic-development budget, the article points out. But it adds that "a study conducted by the Economic Innovation Group and commissioned by Tulsa Remote concluded that for every two people the program brings to the city, one new job is created." By contrast, when an office moves to a town, every new high-wage tech job creates an estimated five more jobs in sectors including healthcare, education and service, according to research by economist Enrico Moretti. That's because those deals involve not only people but the money that goes into building and maintaining facilities, paying commercial property taxes and more.

Still, for towns that don't have the budget to attract a whole office or factory, the modest impact of bringing in a handful of remote tech workers can be balanced by the much smaller investment required to attract them.

Bill Gates, concerned about the "significant suffering" caused by global setbacks including the COVID-19 pandemic, announced Wednesday that he will donate $20 billion to his foundation so it can increase its annual spending. The Associated Press reports: The donation, combined with longtime board member Berkshire Hathaway CEO Warren Buffett's $3.1 billion gift last month, brings The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation's endowment to approximately $70 billion, making it one of the largest, if not the largest in the world, depending on daily stock valuations. In an essay on the foundation's website, Bill Gates said he hopes "others in positions of great wealth and privilege will step up in this moment too."

The Gates Foundation plans to raise its annual budget by 50% over pre-pandemic levels to about $9 billion by 2026. The foundation hopes the increased spending will improve education, reduce poverty and reinstate the global progress toward ending preventable disease and achieving gender equality that has been halted in recent years. "Despite huge global setbacks in the past few years, I see incredible heroism and sacrifice all over the world and I believe progress is possible," Bill Gates, the foundation's co-chair, said in a statement. "But the great crises of our time require all of us to do more... I hope by giving more, we can mitigate some of the suffering people are facing right now and help fulfill the foundation's vision to give every person the chance to live a healthy and productive life."

In his essay, Bill Gates wrote that polarization in the United States makes battling global crises tougher. "The political divide limits our political capacity for dialogue, compromise, and cooperation and thwarts the bold leadership required both domestically and internationally to tackle these threats," he wrote. "Polarization is forcing us to look backwards and fight again for basic human rights, social justice, and democratic norms." While achieving gender equality has long been one of the foundation's primary investment areas, in his essay, Bill Gates singled out the Supreme Court's overturning of Roe v. Wade as "a huge setback for gender equality, for women's health, and for overall human progress." "The potential for even further regression is scary," he added. "It will put lives at risk for women, people of color, and anyone living on the margins." You can read the full essay via Gates Notes.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Popular Science: Ahead of the upcoming midterm elections, Connecticut is hiring a "security analyst" tasked with monitoring and addressing online misinformation. The New York Times first reported this new position, saying the job description will include spending time on "fringe sites like 4chan, far-right social networks like Gettr and Rumble and mainstream social media sites." The goal is to identify election-related rumors and attempt to mitigate the damage they might cause by flagging them to platforms that have misinformation policies and promoting educational content that can counter those false narratives.

Connecticut Governor Ned Lamont's midterm budget (PDF), approved in early May, set aside more than $6 million to make improvements to the state's election system. That includes $4 million to upgrade the infrastructure used for voter registration and election management and $2 million for a "public information campaign" that will provide information on how to vote. The full-time security analyst role is recommended to receive $150,000. "Over the last few election cycles, malicious foreign actors have demonstrated the motivation and capability to significantly disrupt election activities, thus undermining public confidence in the fairness and accuracy of election results," the budget stated, as an explanation for the funding.

While the role is a first for Connecticut, the NYT noted that it's part of a growing nationwide trend. Colorado, for example, has a Rapid Response Election Security Cyber Unit tasked with monitoring online misinformation, as well as identifying "cyber-attacks, foreign interference, and disinformation campaigns." Originally created in anticipation of the 2020 presidential election, which proved to be fruitful ground for misinformation, the NYT says the unit is being "redeployed" this year. Other states, including Arizona, California, Idaho, and Oregon, are similarly funding election information initiatives in an attempt to counter misinformation, provide educational information, or do both.

Almost $10 billion over the next decade will be pumped into helping Australia compete in cyber warfare with adversaries such as Russia and China in a major funding boost that will nearly double the size of the nation's leading cyber security agency. From a report: In its centrepiece defence budget announcement, the government will make the largest single investment in the 75-year history of the Australian Signals Directorate, the country's powerful and highly secretive electronic intelligence agency. The government said the funding increase -- dramatically named Project REDSPICE (Resilience, Effects, Defence, Space, Intelligence, Cyber, and Enablers) -- will significantly expand the ASD's offensive cyber capabilities, as well as the agency's ability to prevent hacking and other digital attacks.

The government intends to put national security at the centre of the upcoming election campaign, contrasting its latest announcements with reductions to defence spending during the Rudd-Gillard era. In his budget night speech Treasurer Josh Frydenberg described the $9.9 billion in spending over 10 years as the country's "biggest ever investment in Australia's cyber preparedness." It comes on top of the government's previously announced expansion in Australian Defence Force personnel and the purchase of new Chinook helicopters, Abrams tanks and combat engineering vehicles.

If Congress' sweeping new spending bill is signed, it would finally provide full funding to some major NASA projects that have been underfunded over the last few years. From a report: Notably, NASA's program to develop a new human lunar lander would be fully funded as the president's budget requested, as will a program to develop new commercial space stations in low Earth orbit. Overall, NASA would receive $24.041 billion for 2022 in this new bill, which will fund the US government for fiscal year 2022. NASA's portion is roughly $800 million less than the $24.8 billion that President Joe Biden's budget request called for in May of 2021. However, NASA would still see a slight bump from its total funding for fiscal year 2021, which sat at $23.27 billion.

Though Congress's plan would not fully meet the president's budget request, there are a few projects that House and Senate lawmakers are finally agreeing to fund in their entirety. The bill would give NASA's human landing system the full $1.195 billion that the request asked for. Currently, NASA is developing a new human lunar lander as part of its Artemis program, an initiative to send the first woman and first person of color to the Moon. Previously, Congress showed its reluctance to give NASA the money it requested for the lander. For 2021, appropriators only provided $850 million of the requested $3.4 billion for the lander.

In the early 2000s, the U.S. Army released America's Army, a video game meant as a recruitment tool. "The free-to-play tactical shooter was wildly successful, reaching 20 million players," reports Fast Company. "But come May 5, the servers will be shut down -- and America's Army will surrender to the forces of time." From the report: To date, no industry has embraced games as warmly as the military, though. America's Army, for example, started with an initial budget of $7 million of your tax dollars at play -- and quickly grew from there. Recognizing that players know a quality title when they see one (and ignore and ridicule poor-quality efforts), it assembled a team of proven developers and bought a license for the Unreal Engine, which was (and remains) one of the premier game engines on the market. America's Army was only supposed to be a seven-year project, but its success encouraged the Defense Department to stay with the game, with the Pentagon spending more than $3 million a year to evolve and promote it -- a drop in the bucket compared to the overall $8 billion recruiting budget.

How well did it work? A 2008 study from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology found that "30% of all Americans ages 16 to 24 had a more positive impression of the Army because of the game and, even more amazingly, the game had more impact on recruits than all other forms of Army advertising combined." The end of America's Army is hardly the end of the military's use of games as recruiting tools. The Army has its own Twitch channel (with more than 23,000 followers) and has an e-sports team that competes at tournaments -- with recruiters in tow.

The Justice Department is still months away from deciding whether to sue Apple or file a new suit against Google over antitrust concerns, POLITICO reported Thursday, citing two people familiar with the discussions -- a question facing new financial complications after the collapse of President Joe Biden's social spending bill. From a report: DOJ antitrust prosecutors had earlier aimed to wrap up their probes of the two tech giants by Dec. 31, culminating years of scrutiny by the department into Apple's App Store and Google's command of the online ad market. But now the decision on going to court is likely to come in March or later because of continued discussions about where to file and who will make the call, the two people told POLITICO. They spoke anonymously to discuss internal DOJ deliberations. Another major concern for the department is the likely expense of a court battle with the two companies, each of which has a market value exceeding $1 trillion. That issue became more fraught this week when Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) torpedoed Democrats' Build Back Better package, which would have given DOJ a $500 million boost for antitrust enforcement.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ProPublica: Across the country, some law enforcement agencies have deployed controversial surveillance technology to track cellphone location and use. Critics say it threatens constitutional rights, and members of Congress have moved to restrain its use. Nonetheless, in 2019 the Boston Police Department bought the device known as a cell site simulator -- and tapped a hidden pot of money that kept the purchase out of the public eye. A WBUR investigation with ProPublica found elected officials and the public were largely kept in the dark when Boston police spent $627,000 on this equipment by dipping into money seized in connection with alleged crimes.

Also known as a "stingray," the cell site simulator purchased by Boston police acts like a commercial cellphone tower, tricking nearby phones into connecting to it. Once the phones connect to the cell site simulator's decoy signal, the equipment secretly obtains location and other potentially identifying information. It can pinpoint someone's location down to a particular room of a hotel or house. While this briefcase-sized device can help locate a suspect or a missing person, it can also scoop up information from other phones in the vicinity, including yours. The Boston police bought its simulator device using money that is typically taken during drug investigations through what's called civil asset forfeiture.

An August investigation by WBUR and ProPublica found that even if no criminal charges are brought, law enforcement almost always keeps the money and has few limitations on how it's spent. Some departments benefit from both state and federal civil asset forfeiture. The police chiefs in Massachusetts have discretion over the money, and the public has virtually no way of knowing how the funds are used. The Boston City Council reviews the BPD annual budget, scrutinizing proposed spending. But the surveillance equipment wasn't part of the budget. Because it was purchased with civil forfeiture funds, BPD was able to circumvent the council. According to an invoice obtained by WBUR, the only city review of the purchase -- which was made with federal forfeiture funds -- came from the Procurement Department, confirming that the funds were available. In fact, it was only after sifting through hundreds of documents received through public records requests that WBUR discovered BPD had bought the device from North Carolina-based Tactical Support Equipment Inc., which specializes in surveillance technology.

Amazon has been successful in nearly every industry it has entered, from books and grocery shopping to cloud computing and movie streaming. So it has been puzzling to many that success in the lucrative video game business has eluded the tech giant. On Tuesday, Amazon gave producing its own video games another try. From a report: After more than a year of delays, it released New World, an online multiplayer game in which players join factions, fight monsters, fight one another and colonize a fictional island in the Atlantic Ocean. The $40 computer game, which received generally positive reviews as players tested early versions over the past few months, arrives at a crucial time for the tech giant's disappointing gaming efforts.

After spending by some estimates hundreds of millions of dollars, neither of the other two big-budget games that Amazon announced it was producing in 2016 alongside New World exists today. Some of its top gaming hires have departed over the years without putting out any notable titles. Last year, the company also removed another game from storefronts after a poor reception. New World "has to be our breakthrough game -- there's no doubt about it," said Christoph Hartmann, the vice president of Amazon Games. "Just for morale of people, at some point you want to see some success." Amazon's biggest accomplishment in the gaming industry so far has been the acquisition of Twitch, the livestreaming video site, which the company bought in 2014 for about $1 billion. Amazon has also forged ahead with a new gaming subscription service, Luna, and recently announced a new development studio in Montreal.

During the lockdowns I edited dozens of Slashdot posts from the front-passenger seat of my car (using a cellphone for a mobile hotspot).

But according to CNBC, I wasn't the only person working from a vehicle... When Erica Horn received a work email in May 2020 saying her company would be fully remote for the next year, she knew right away it was time to live out her long-held dream of living out of a van... Horn is not alone. Many workers with jobs that let them work remotely during the pandemic left behind their sedentary housing situations and moved full-time into vans. These remote workers drive from location to location in their homes, working from internet hotspots in their vans and spending their free time in nature and exploring new places. As vaccines roll out and states start to open up, some workers are returning to their offices.

But many workers who've adopted the van life don't want to give it up...

Like overseas backpacking, van life appeals to those with a love for travel or the outdoors who have the privilege to work remotely and the budget to spend thousands of dollars buying and setting up their vans. They can shift the money from rent and car payments toward a lifestyle of endless travel... For some, working out of a van is less about travel and more of an alternative to leasing an office. Kenzo Fong, CEO of tech start-up Rock, began working out of his van in May 2020 after his children began doing their schoolwork at home during the pandemic. Fong still lives in his San Francisco home, but during the days, he gets into his van and picks a new location in the city...

Some van lifers only need a laptop. Others have more elaborate set ups complete with multiple monitors. But most carry at least two hot spots from different network providers so they can catch signal from at least one of the services as they hit new locations... Despite the challenges of life on the road, those who spoke with CNBC said they plan to continue their nomadic lifestyle until their companies stop allowing remote work or until they get burnt out. Horn said she originally planned to live on the road for at least a year, but that's now changed.

"At six months, I still feel like I'm just learning this, just getting the hang of it and just getting started," she said. "I could actually see myself doing it for closer to two years, and who knows, maybe longer."

The U.S. Air Force wants to invest $38 million next year in projects under the heading "Rocket Cargo." Ars Technica reports that Air Force is already spending $9.7 million on the projects, "but seeks to increase that total for the coming year as it moves into the test phase of the program. The funds will have to be approved by Congress as part of its budget deliberation process this summer and fall."

The Air Force's 462-page budget-justifying document says their branch of the military "seeks to leverage the current multi-billion dollar commercial investment to develop the largest rockets ever, and with full reusability to develop and test the capability to leverage a commercial rocket to deliver Air Force cargo anywhere on the Earth in less than one hour, with a 100-ton capacity."

Although this does not refer to Starship by name, this is the only vehicle under development in the world with this kind of capability. The Air Force does not intend to invest directly into the vehicle's development, the document says. However, it proposes to fund science and technology needed to interface with the Starship vehicle so that the Air Force might leverage its capabilities. Clearly, some Air Force officials are intrigued by the possibility of launching 100 tons of cargo from the United States and having the ability to land it anywhere in the world about an hour later.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Now a second wave of Covid-19 has struck India, and the middle class dreams of tens of millions of people face even greater peril. Already, about 32 million people in India were driven into poverty by the pandemic last year, according to the Pew Research Center, accounting for a majority of the 54 million who slipped out of the middle class worldwide. The pandemic is undoing decades of progress for a country that in fits and starts has brought hundreds of millions of people out of poverty. Already, deep structural problems and the sometimes impetuous nature of many of Mr. Modi's policies had been hindering growth. A shrinking middle class would deal lasting damage. "It's very bad news in every possible way," said Jayati Ghosh, a development economist and professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. "It has set back our growth trajectory hugely and created much greater inequality."

The second wave presents difficult choices for India and Mr. Modi. India on Friday reported more than 216,000 new infections, another record. Lockdowns are back in some states. With work scarce, migrant workers are packing into trains and buses home as they did last year. The country's vaccination campaign has been slow, though the government has picked up the pace. Yet Mr. Modi appears unwilling to repeat last year's draconian lockdown, which left more than 100 million Indians jobless and which many economists blame for worsening the pandemic's problems. His government has also been reluctant to increase spending substantially like the United States and some other places, instead releasing a budget that would raise spending on infrastructure and in other areas but that also emphasizes cutting debt.

China is freeing up tens of billions of dollars for its tech industry to borrow. It is cataloging the sectors where the United States or others could cut off access to crucial technologies. And when its leaders released their most important economic plans last week, they laid out their ambitions to become an innovation superpower beholden to none. From a report: Anticipating efforts by the Biden administration to continue to challenge China's technological rise, the country's leaders are accelerating plans to go it alone, seeking to address vulnerabilities in the country's economy that could thwart its ambitions in a wide range of industries, from smartphones to jet engines.

China has made audacious and ambitious plans before -- in 2015 -- but is falling short of its goals. With more countries becoming wary of China's behavior and its growing economic might, Beijing's drive for technological independence has taken on a new urgency. The country's new five-year plan, made public on Friday, called tech development a matter of national security, not just economic development, a break from the previous plan. The plan pledged to increase spending on research and development by 7 percent annually, including the public and private sectors. That figure was higher than budget increases for China's military, which is slated to grow 6.8 percent next year, raising the prospect of an era of looming Cold War-like competition with the United States.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: South Korea returned to first place in the latest Bloomberg Innovation Index, while the U.S. dropped out of a top 10 that features a cluster of European countries. Korea regained the crown from Germany, which dropped to fourth place. The Asian nation has now topped the index for seven of the nine years that it's been published. Singapore and Switzerland each moved up one spot to rank second and third. The Bloomberg index analyzes dozens of criteria using seven equally weighted metrics, including research and development spending, manufacturing capability and concentration of high-tech public companies.

Korea's return to the top spot is mainly due to an increase in patent activity, where it ranks top, alongside a strong performance in R&D and manufacturing. Second-placed Singapore, which has been allocating budget funds to help workers and companies transition to a digital economy, also scores high for manufacturing -- and its globally competitive universities put it top of the tertiary education gauge. Switzerland, a leader in financial and biological technology, ranks near the top in both of the index's research categories. Germany's loss of the crown follows a warning two years ago by Juergen Michels, chief economist of Bayerische Landesbank, who said the country lacked skilled workers and a proper strategy for next-generation technology. As the two biggest economies, the U.S. and China account for much of the world's innovation. But both saw their rankings decline this year.

The U.S., which topped the first Bloomberg Innovation Index in 2013, dropped two places to 11th. The country scores badly in higher education, even though U.S. universities are world-famous. That underperformance was likely made worse by obstacles to foreign students, who are usually prominent in science and technology classes -- first due to the Trump administration's visa policies, and later to the pandemic. China, which fell one place to 16th in the 2021 index, is locked in a battle with the U.S. over key aspects of innovation policy. Other gainers in this year's index include India, which climbed back into the top 50 for the first time since 2016, and Uruguay, which qualified for the first time. Algeria and Argentina were among the countries that fell furthest.

NASA is preparing to oversee the largest push of business activity aboard the ISS. "Later this month, up to 10 bottles of a new Estee Lauder (EL) skincare serum will launch to the space station," reports CNN. "NASA astronauts are expected to film the items in the microgravity environment of the ISS and the company will be able to use that footage in ad campaigns or other promotional material." The details of those plans were first reported by New Scientist magazine. From the report: The Estee Lauder partnership will continue NASA's years-long push to encourage private-sector spending on space projects as the space agency looks to stretch its budget beyond the ISS and focus on taking astronauts back into deep space. Those efforts include allowing the space station to be used for marketing and entertainment purposes. The Estee Lauder products, a new formula of the company's "Advanced Night Repair" skin serum, are expected to launch aboard a Northrop Grumman Cygnus spacecraft, tucked alongside 8,000 pounds of other cargo, experiments and supplies. NASA astronauts will be tasked with capturing "imagery and video" of the product. The astronauts themselves, however, won't be appearing in any cosmetics ads: The space agency's ethics policies strictly bar astronauts from appearing in marketing campaigns.

"A rebellion against the high cost of a bachelor's degree, already brewing around the nation before the coronavirus, has gathered fresh momentum as campuses have strained to operate in the pandemic," reports the New York Times.

"Who wants to pay $25,000 a year for glorified Skype?" one incoming freshman tells them: Incensed at paying face-to-face prices for education that is increasingly online, students and their parents are demanding tuition rebates, increased financial aid, reduced fees and leaves of absences to compensate for what they feel will be a diminished college experience. At Rutgers University, more than 30,000 people have signed a petition started in July calling for an elimination of fees and a 20 percent tuition cut. More than 40,000 have signed a plea for the University of North Carolina system to refund housing charges to students in the event of another Covid-19-related campus shutdown...

Universities have been divided in their response, with some offering discounts but most resisting, arguing that remote learning and other virus measures are making their operations more, not less, costly at a time when higher education is already struggling.... Moody's Investors Service, which in March downgraded the higher education sector to negative from stable, wrote that even before the pandemic, roughly 30 percent of universities "were already running operating deficits." Since then, emptied dorms, canceled sports, shuttered bookstores and paused study-abroad programs have dried up key revenue streams just as student needs have exploded for everything from financial aid and food stamps to home office equipment and loaner laptops. Public health requirements for masks, barriers, cleaning and other health protections also have added new costs, as have investments in training and technology to improve remote instruction and online courses....

Chapman's president, Daniele Struppa, said the university spent $20 million on technology and public health retrofits for the fall semester, and he estimates that the switch to an online fall will cost the school $110 million in revenue. He has cut spending "brutally" from the $400 million annual budget, he said, freezing hires, slashing expenses, canceling construction of a new gym, ending the retirement match to employees and giving up 20 percent of his own $720,000 base salary. Only students who can demonstrate financial need will get help, he is telling families. "Tuition really reflects our cost of operation, and that cost has not only not diminished but has greatly increased." A survey by the American Council on Education estimated that reopening this fall would add 10 percent to a college's regular operating expenses, costing the country's 5,000 some colleges and universities a total of $70 billion....

Some families have sued. Roy Willey, a class-action attorney in South Carolina, said his firm alone has filed at least 30 lawsuits — including against the University of California system, Columbia University and the University of Colorado — charging universities with breach of contract for switching in-person instruction to online classes, and is closely monitoring the fall semester....

A handful of universities have announced substantial price cuts... But most colleges have kept prices flat, and a few have even increased them. They can't afford to do otherwise without mass faculty layoffs, said Robert Kelchen, a Seton Hall University associate professor of higher education...