A former Amazon employee claims that there is a weekly plan to destroy about 130,000 units of all kinds of goods, half of which are new and the other half are returned by customers. During peak weeks, the number of destroyed goods reaches 200,000. The company's approach to disposal is not selective - hair dryers, vacuum cleaners, laptops and tablets end up in the scrap, the next day - 20,000 packaged medical masks.

The news channel was able to access the statistics. The number of goods intended for distribution for charitable purposes and for disposal was found out. It turned out that in one week 124,000 goods were destroyed and only 28,000 were sent to those in need.

The reason is simple and well known. Amazon not only sells its own products, but is also a platform for many sellers who have the opportunity to store their products in the company's warehouses. The longer a product is stored, the more expensive it is to store it. Finally, at one point it becomes cheaper to give it up for destruction than to store it.

https://www.itv.com/news/2021-06-21/amazon-destroying-millions-of-items-of-unsold-stock-in-one-of-its-uk-warehouses-every-year-itv-news-investigation-finds

Nice capitalist practice.

Japan must put at least a trillion yen ($9 billion) toward chip development this fiscal year and trillions more after that, if it is to have any hope of reviving its national industry, according to the government’s lead adviser on its new semiconductor strategy.

Anything less won’t be enough, given the high cost of chip factories and how far Japan lags behind South Korea and Taiwan in advanced manufacturing, according to Tetsuro Higashi, chairman emeritus at gearmaker Tokyo Electron Ltd. and head of an expert panel advising the government.

“It will not be at all easy to stage a comeback,” the 71-year-old industry veteran said in an interview this week. “If we miss this opportunity now, there may not be another one.”

Biggest fun is that it is Japanese management that destroyed it all, they just exchanged it to their nice yearly bonuses.

This was also the case once in Beijing. I was resting, squatting in Chinese, and did not immediately notice the disheveled Chinese mincing in my direction. A poorly chosen resting place with a smell of common areas, traces of the recent trade in vegetables and a runoff of rotten water made me rise, I automatically answered his greeting. And suddenly a confused monologue followed:

China is a terrible place! All around lies, deception. Everyone is used. And thieves run everything, all warm places are distributed to their relatives. Mao was the main liar, he killed millions of people. I remember the corpses lying around the corner over there. When in the Cultural Revolution people driven to despair died of hunger on the streets, they were afraid to approach them, they avoided them like the plague. And Dan is a liar. Everything that is said in the West about the Chinese economic miracle is a mirage, our rulers are mediocre, unable to rule a city, let alone a country. Tibet, Xinjiang - I hope they will rise up soon. Are you recently from Taiwan? Tell the Taiwanese not to agree to unite with China, in any case. There is lies and violence everywhere.

...Stability under the leadership of the party, which is the primary goal of the leaders, is not cheap for the Chinese people. According to some reports, up to 20 million convicts of the Chinese Gulag are injected for free to ensure the Chinese Miracle. (A few years ago, a Chinese firm received a contract to build a railway in one of the African countries; the profitability of the contract it proposed was easily explainable: after finishing the work, it took its prisoner workers back to China.) Tried and tested political dissidents receive repeated fifteen-year sentences, criminals are shot in public in stadiums - in 1995, a thousand death sentences were carried out. Women who become pregnant a second time are fined, forced to have an abortion, or even sterilized. The order to shoot chest-level students in Tiananmen Square in 1989 was issued by the current authorities. “Kill the chicken to intimidate the monkeys,” explained the perpetrators of the persecution of the past decades in China. This rule stuck, and it seems that the authorities are not going to abandon it even now.

So many things I heard in China; here are some memorable phrases from this discord. Taxi driver in Harbin: "The party does not have much time to govern, they have already become across the throat for the people ." Shanghai student: “Students will not go out on the street again. But nobody else believes in either the party or the government. ” A young musician from Chongqing: "Whatever one may say, but without democracy, China will rot." An employee of the city administration of Chengdu (despite the constant tugging at his wife's sleeve): “The South is already unstable, and the poisoned gift of Hong Kongers who do not want to fall under the power of Beijing will only aggravate the centrifugal forces of this economically advanced region. And returning Taiwan will be much more difficult. ” Well-fed party members in Kaifeng: "The reforms are correct, but too fast, the foundation has not grown stronger, but they are building on, building on everything." “It’s hard to find a wife now,” the poor peasant complained.

(c) Ermolai Solzhenitsyn, new generation of same old scum

There is strong evidence for brain-related pathologies in COVID-19, some of which could be a consequence of viral neurotropism. The vast majority of brain imaging studies so far have focused on qualitative, gross pathology of moderate to severe cases, often carried out on hospitalised patients. It remains unknown however whether the impact of COVID-19 can be detected in milder cases, in a quantitative and automated manner, and whether this can reveal a possible mechanism for the spread of the disease. UK Biobank scanned over 40,000 participants before the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, making it possible to invite back in 2021 hundreds of previously-imaged participants for a second imaging visit. Here, we studied the effects of the disease in the brain using multimodal data from 782 participants from the UK Biobank COVID-19 re-imaging study, with 394 participants having tested positive for SARS-CoV-2 infection between their two scans. We used structural and functional brain scans from before and after infection, to compare longitudinal brain changes between these 394 COVID-19 patients and 388 controls who were matched for age, sex, ethnicity and interval between scans. We identified significant effects of COVID-19 in the brain with a loss of grey matter in the left parahippocampal gyrus, the left lateral orbitofrontal cortex and the left insula. When looking over the entire cortical surface, these results extended to the anterior cingulate cortex, supramarginal gyrus and temporal pole. We further compared COVID-19 patients who had been hospitalised (n=15) with those who had not (n=379), and while results were not significant, we found comparatively similar findings to the COVID-19 vs control group comparison, with, in addition, a greater loss of grey matter in the cingulate cortex, central nucleus of the amygdala and hippocampal cornu ammonis (all |Z|>3). Our findings thus consistently relate to loss of grey matter in limbic cortical areas directly linked to the primary olfactory and gustatory system. Unlike in post hoc disease studies, the availability of pre-infection imaging data helps avoid the danger of pre-existing risk factors or clinical conditions being mis-interpreted as disease effects. Since a possible entry point of the virus to the central nervous system might be via the olfactory mucosa and the olfactory bulb, these brain imaging results might be the in vivo hallmark of the spread of the disease (or the virus itself) via olfactory and gustatory pathways.

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.06.11.21258690v1.full

• For PayPal digital payments with its PayPal Checkout, Pay with Venmo, PayPal Credit, Pay in 4, PayPal Pay with Rewards, and Checkout with crypto, the new rate for online transactions will be 3.49 percent plus $0.491 per transaction.
• For in person payments with PayPal and Venmo QR code transactions over $10, the rate will be 1.90 percent plus 10 cents, and for transactions $10 and less, the rate will be 2.40 percent plus 5 cents. For certain in-person debit and credit transactions the rate will be 2.29 percent plus 9 cents.
• The rate for online credit and debit card transactions will be 2.59 percent plus $0.491 per transaction without its chargeback protection, and with chargeback protection the rate will be 2.99 percent plus 49 cents.
• The fee for charity transactions will be 1.99 percent plus 49 cents.
• For US merchants who have custom, non-standard pricing, rates will remain unchanged

Rumors are that in 2022 we can see 5% .

For the second quarter of fiscal year 2021, which ended for Adobe on June 4, the company generated revenue of $ 3.84 billion, which corresponds to an increase of 23% over the same period last year. Adjusted earnings of $ 3.03 per share. The company's results were better than analysts' expectations, who had forecast $ 3.73 billion in quarterly profit on earnings per share of $ 2.82.

Sales in the Digital Media segment, which includes creative divisions and cloud-based document editing services, jumped 25% to $ 2.79 billion. Sales in the Digital Experience segment, which includes marketing software, grew 21% to $ 938 million Amid the announcement of financial results, the company's shares rose by almost 2.5% and traded at $ 551.36 per share.

In the third quarter of this year, Adobe expects to receive revenue of $ 3.88 billion, which is slightly higher than analysts' forecasts, which on average expect $ 3.83 billion in revenue. The company also expects to receive adjusted earnings of $ 3 per share, while analysts forecast earnings of $ 2.90 per share.

At the same time biggest questions discussed inside US office is... diversity and prevention of white supremacism. One of developers told me in May that at least on two meetings such questions took more than 60% of total time, 20% of remaining time had been spend on discussing fuckups of new "diversified" developers.

And still any people who try to make any optimization or fix old bugs get very dark future ahead of them - all their marks suddenly become lower and their income and bonuses also plummet.