In the second quarter of 2021, the volume of global debt reached $ 296 trillion, follows from the results of a report published last week by the Institute of International Finance (IIF). Over the quarter, this figure increased by $ 4.8 trillion, and over the past 18 months, i.e., since the beginning of the pandemic, by $ 36 trillion.

The largest contributors to the rise in global debt in the second quarter were developing countries, which borrowed $ 3.5 trillion and brought their total financial liabilities to nearly $ 92 trillion. China borrowed faster than other developed countries, whose total debt, with the exception of China, reached a new record of $ 36 trillion.

The debt of developed countries, especially in the Eurozone, began to rise again in the second quarter after a slight decline in the first.

US debt in the last reporting period rose by $ 490 billion, which was a record low quarterly value since the start of the pandemic. At the same time, household debts grew at a record pace.

The total debt of global households rose by $ 1.5 trillion in the second quarter to $ 55 trillion. In the first half of the year, IIF recorded an increase in household debt burden in almost a third of the countries studied.

Up to 10 big Chinese Property Developers can crash within next two weeks, including largest of them - Evergrande.

According to the WSJ, Douyin’s “youth mode,” which follows the imposition of new limits on younger Chinese users’ access to online videogames, will restrict under-14s to using the app between 6 a.m. and 10 p.m. The app will be inaccessible to all users in that age group outside of those hours.

While Douyin had introduced some of the features beginning in 2018 on an optional basis, the latest rollout will apply to all users registered with their real names and as being under 14 years old, Douyin said Saturday. It said that the mandatory measures were designed to protect younger users from harmful content, which however prompts a question: if the online content served by the platform is "harmful", which would it exist in the first place. In that vein, the up-to 40 minutes a day of Douyin for younger users will henceforth serve up "edifying content such as science experiments, museum exhibitions and history lessons, the company said."

Tiktok is real black hole of shitty stuff, it is designed such.

This paper summarizes recent evidence on what achievement tests measure; how achievement tests relate to other measures of “cognitive ability” like IQ and grades; the important skills that achievement tests miss or mismeasure, and how much these skills matter in life.

Achievement tests miss, or perhaps more accurately, do not adequately capture, soft skills—personality traits, goals, motivations, and preferences that are valued in the labor market, in school, and in many other domains. The larger message of this paper is that soft skills predict success in life, that they causally produce that success, and that programs that enhance soft skills have an important place in an effective portfolio of public policies.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3612993/