Tech Storror

            Venezuela was once the richest country in Latin America. It has the largest known oil reserves in the world and its democratic government was once praised worldwide. But today Venezuela's democratic institutions and its economy are in shambles. The country has the highest inflation rate in the world, making food and medicine inaccessible to most Venezuelans. Over the last four years, its GDP has fallen 35%, which is a sharper drop than the one seen during the Great Depression in the US and the country's murder rate. Surpassed that of the most dangerous cities in the world. These conditions have sparked months of protests against the President, Nicolas Maduro, and it's easy to see. Why ?  The country has become measurably worse since his election in 2013. A poll showed that about 80% of Venezuelans want Maduro removed from office. But instead the opposite has happened. Maduro has consolidated his power, bringing the country closer to authori...

   Warren Buffett, one of the richest people in the world thanks to the company. He runs Berkshire Hathaway. Basically it's a holding company that just owns a bunch of other companies. GEICO Dairy Queen, a huge railroad, as well as a lot of stock and other companies like Apple and Coca-Cola. So when those companies do well and their stock goes up, Berkshire Hathaway stock goes up.  When Buffett took over the company in 1965, a single share was worth $19.00. Today it's worth nearly half a million dollars.  Buffett owns nearly 240,000 of these shares. This is where his wealth is, but as he's been known for pointing out, Warren Buffett still pays a lower tax rate than his secretary. That's because they pay different types of taxes. His secretary pays income taxes on her salary, but Buffett mainly pays capital gains taxes on his sold stock, and that's taxed at nearly half the rate.  The wealthy are definitely under taxed. In the US the disparity between the richest ...

  Hey. There is a vending machine for every 23 people in Japan. That's the highest vending machine per capita on the planet. After the business card fiasco, I started to become keenly aware of all the vending machines that I saw here in Japan. I noticed they are everywhere indeed. What we're looking at here is a Japanese institution. Behind me sits an entire shop dedicated to chopsticks. Yes, I'm about to go inside. The first thing you have to know in order to understand the vending machines is that Japan is an aging country. The average age here is 46 years old, which is almost double the world average and the fertility rate is 1.4, which means the population is actually shrinking. This is actually a looming crisis for Japan generally, but one of the effects of it is that the labor market is very expensive. There's a scarcity of low skilled labor. So instead of paying a sales clerk to sit and collect your money when you buy a piece of gum, they just put it in a machine...

  BlackBerry once reigned as the king of smartphones, selling more than 50 million units at its peak.  The company started out creating pagers and handsets, but the first iteration of its smartphone, complete with an iconic keyboard, took shape in the early 2000s. Soon, BlackBerry phones were everywhere at one time, BlackBerry controlled 43% of the smartphone market in the US and 20% globally. But now the company doesn't make smartphones anymore. And in January 2022 it stopped supporting its phones entirely, essentially making blackberries obsolete.  So what happened? In 1984, two Canadian engineering students, Mike Lazaridis and Douglas Fregin formed research in motion. In 1989, the Canadian Telecom company Rogers contracted research in motion to work on its Mobotix network, a system specifically designed for messaging, giving the company a leg up as an early leader in mobile messaging. Fast forward to 1996, when the company created its first two way pager, its supported...

  I'm gonna start this article with a quote. Henry Ford once said it is well enough that the people of the nation do not understand our banking and monetary system. For if they did, I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning. I quote this because it encapsulates the fact that the contents of this article may be unsettling compared to the articles that I normally make.  I still feel compelled to make this article because I've been exploring the financial world for the last four years and it's definitely given me a more complete view of the world I want to share some of what I've come across with you guys. I'm also going to do a article about cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin in the future and to understand why Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies may continue to rise. It's critical that you understand the contents of this article. I hope that you find this topic interesting and that inspires you to do your own research afterwards.  Now, with that sai...

  The original purpose of insulin was to save the lives of millions of people who had diabetes, but giant corporations realized that when it comes to life and death, people are willing to spend thousands of dollars. This was a huge business opportunity. So corporations shifted their focus from public well-being to making money. Today, one vile costs around 2:00 to $6 to produce. However, the average price for one vial of insulin is about $300.00. These corporations have a very straightforward policy if you want to live buy insulin at the price decided by them.  If you cannot afford it, you do have Toronto for just the dollar. Little did they know, their greatest invention would turn into one of the most profitable businesses in the world. One of the few outsiders, an insulin medication. However, every little progression contributing to the advancements has been patented by these companies. To prevent other manufacturers from developing insulin. Thanks to Evergreening, these th...

So you are the head of one of the world's largest countries. Your country has sophisticated payment infrastructure. World's most pervasive surveillance system and possibly the most advanced AI tech. But there are three major threats to your power. To eliminate any potential threats to your dominance, you need to make a move and it should be fast. Here's how China solved this problem?  These two(Tencent and Alibaba)  private companies account for 90% of digital payments in China. This means that these companies are in a position to access the data of more than a billion people. Needless to list the unmatched benefits they get from exploiting this data, the government realized that so much power in the hands of private players could challenge its authority. But this wasn't the only threat. Known for surveillance and tracking, every move of its citizens, it would have been ironic if China did not ban cryptocurrencies. China has very strict laws against the purchase of fore...

  While the pandemic has been crippling for the working class, the collective net worth of the billionaires in America alone has grown by $1.1 trillion over the past ten months. Though there were several billionaires whose wealth doubled this year, Elon Musk left them all behind with an increase of 642% by looking at the stock market, one may believe that Tesla is a dominant player in the auto industry. Tesla retains a market capitalization greater than the next three automakers combined, but the ground reality might be a little different. Despite Tesla's recent profitability, the company produces far fewer vehicles than its competitors. Japan based Toyota with a market cap of $211 billion, sold 9.5 million vehicles in 2020, followed by Volkswagen with a market cap of 148 billion, sold 9.3 million vehicles by looking at the market cap of Tesla, one may believe that Tesla might have surpassed all of them, but in reality only 500,000 vehicles were sold. But why is Tesla performing...

  The estimated amount of money laundered annually is around 800 billion to 2 trillion. That's 5% of the entire planet's GDP. With this kind of money, you can buy the entire NFL league 40 times, pay for 8.3 million students to complete their schooling, or buy an iPhone for every American. But before we talk about how money laundering works, you need to know about what money laundering is. Money laundering is the legal process of making large amounts of money generated by criminal activity appear to have come from a legitimate source. In short, it's a process that Criminals used in an attempt to hide the illegal source of their income money laundering is essential to the operation of any criminal activity that has long term and lucrative.  Most criminal transactions are handled in cash because only cash payments are assured to be untraceable at the point of sale, however, a major business problem of large, organized criminal enterprises such as drug smuggling operations is t...

  Around 3 decades ago, US producers began manufacturing in China for one reason costs, but that is changing due to pandemic and trade war. China is losing factories at an astonishing pace. However, there's more to the story, so let's find out.  Currently, China is the world's biggest exporter and accounts for 30% of total manufacturing that happens globally. That's $4 trillion worth of products manufactured every year and equal to the US, Japan and Germany combined. However, things have started to change. China has ongoing conflicts with India, Australia, Japan, Taiwan, and according to Pew Center a subtle but major shift in Americans has been seen. At first they looked at China's rivals, but now they look at them as enemies. Therefore, from a reputation perspective, it won't be good for us. Companies to facilitate anti China sentiments and then use China's resources for its manufacturing operations.  Australian Strategic Policy Institute reported that 27 f...

For the past couple of years, Huawei has been in controversy due to concerns about its closeness to the Chinese government and fears that Huawei's equipment could be used to spy on other countries and companies due to these concerns. Governments across the world are banning Huawei as a result of which its phone sales have declined by 41.1%. It was also reported that Huawei saw a decline in revenue in every region except China. But how did Huawei end up here? Why is it being accused of spying on behalf of China, Could Huawei Survived the ban? Let's find out in today's article. Huawei was founded by Ren Jiang Fei in 1987, before founding Huawei. He was a member of the Liberations Army Engineering units, which built many advanced factories for China. He served People's Liberation Army until 1983 when his unit was disbanded. After this, he pivoted to the civilian economy and got a job in Shenzhen Electric, which was state owned. After working for four years for the company,...

  Concerning the environment, there are countless examples. Were irrational behavior motivated by the goal of making profits has led to the degradation of the ecosystem. Agriculture happens to be one of the victims of such a rational behavior by corporations. In 2020, the median US income from farm activities was - 1198 dollars. the US farmers share of the retail price, which means how much a farmer makes when farm produce is sold, has declined from 50% in the 1950s to less than 15% today.  The debt has touched $425 billion loan default rates and bankruptcy filings are up, and so are calls to the suicide prevention lines. Farmer suicide rates today are four to five times the national average. So what happened? How did the situation get so dreadful? Let us find out in today's article.  The growth of American industry and population has always depended on the availability of foods produced by commercial farmers and transportation networks to get them to consumers. Our story...

  For nearly two decades, Skype has been the go to app people used to get in touch via video, but soon after the lockdown was announced, Skype was instantly replaced by Zoom. So what happened? How was zoom able to replace an app twice as old? Let's find out in today's article .  Skype was founded in 2003 by Nicholas Zennstrom and Janice Freese after the original 0.90 beta, Skype released several subsequent versions in 2005, beta 2.0 was released, which introduced video calling with a simplified interface. With the release of it, Skype zoom to new levels of popularity. The same year eBay acquired Skype in a landmark transaction for 2.5 billion. Fast forward to 2011, Microsoft acquired Skype for 8.5 billion while Microsoft.  Such as Skype. Eric Yuan was developing zoom. Skype had become so big that in 2011 the Onion joked that Skype would be added to the dictionary. Three years later, the verb was added to the Oxford English Dictionary, highlighting how popular the service ...

Currently India is in one of the worst economic slowdowns, but despite this, a company called Jio is thriving in a matter of four years. Its user base has grown from zero to more than 385 million users, making it the world's fastest-growing telecom network.  In fact, JIO's rise is actually inadvertently responsible for the whole PewDiePie versus T series SUBWAR.  Seeing the potential of the company Facebook and Google have collectively invested more than $10 billion for approximately 18% minority stake in the company. So let's find out what makes this company so special. The company was built by Asia's richest man Mukesh Ambani before this Indian billionaire even entered the market, he invested $20 billion in Jio to set up an optical fibre network across India. At that time there were more than 1 billion mobile users in India, out of which only 34% were connected to the Internet in less than 12% had a reliable connection. Now imagine if you were living in India and some...

  At the beginning of 2019, Chinese company Huawei was on its path to become the biggest tech giant in the world. However, from the beginning of the century, Huawei has been accused of shady practices. In 2001 it was placed on a watch list by India's intelligence for allegedly supplying the Taliban with military telecommunications equipment. Then, in 2003, Cisco accused Huawei of stealing its source code. Then in 2007, the US government blocked a deal between three COM and Huawei due to national security concerns and then again.  In 2010, Motorola sued Huawei for corporate espionage. So considering their history, it can be said that the company cannot be trusted. But it was the year 2018 when things really started to heat up. First Verizon Wireless dropped Huawei as a phone supplier in January. Then AT&T refused to sell Huawei Mate 10s and T-Mobile promised no Huawei Tech was going to be used in its 5G network. After all of this heads of the six U.S. intelligence agencies ...