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Strategies & Market Trends : 2026 TeoTwawKi ... 2032 Darkest Interregnum -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: marcher who wrote (197370)	4/1/2023 1:53:35 AM
From: TobagoJack	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 217575

Re <<sick joke>> I can recommend revolutionary change, and post-revolution, like in China China China, the tippy top of the universities cost ~$5K per annum, well within do-ability of average-ish middle class. Entrance based strictly on test score, end of story full stop. Of course the acceptance rats are within 1-2% against USA top schools 3-6%. What is a few points? NBD (no big deal) bloomberg.com Parents Are Paying Consultants $750,000 to Get Kids Into Ivy League Schools Acceptance rates at the nation’s top universities are plunging, and parents are doing whatever it takes to get their kids in. Paulina Cachero 31 March 2023 at 22:30 GMT+8 Harkness Tower stands on the Yale University campus in New Haven, Connecticut. Photographer: Craig Warga/Bloomberg The mantra for making it into America’s top schools rings from New York City to Kentucky: Whatever it takes. College consultants charging as much as $750,000 to build standout applications starting in seventh grade? Worth it, says Hope Choi, whose son applied to 22 schools and has already won a spot at Yale. Ivy League prices approaching $90,000? “What’s a couple thousand more dollars in debt?” asks 18-year-old Addison Witucki, who set her hopes on going to Harvard or Brown — and then medical school. Addison Witucki (left), poses with her younger sisters. Source: Sarah Witucki Despite public outcry about America’s student loan crisis and soaring college costs, the appeal of an elite education has only gotten stronger. Acceptance rates have plunged below 5%, meaning securing a spot at the top institutions feels akin to winning the lottery. It’s leaving parents and students wanting a prestigious-if-expensive degree now more than ever, and hunting for the best ways to boost their chances. Read more: Ivy League Prices Are Pushing $90,000 a Year Does Prestige Pay? Miniscule acceptance rates at some of the top colleges illustrate the necessity of finding an edge. Out of the more than 59,000 students who applied to the University of Pennsylvania, 2,400 were accepted. Yale University’s acceptance rate this year was 4.35%, with the application pool being the largest in the college’s history after growing by nearly 50% since 2020. The sense of exclusivity only makes students and parents want it more — the Varsity Blues scandal demonstrated the extreme lengths some wealthy families will go to get their kids into the best schools. Eric Sherman, a counselor at college counseling firm IvyWise, compares the veneration of name-brand colleges to a Hermes bag. “You hit a certain point where quality is legitimately increased, and then everything above that is just brand,” said Sherman, who’s also director of college counseling at Kehillah Jewish High School in Palo Alto, California. “I think that there is a really powerful element here where parents, if they’re at a cocktail party they might want to say, ‘Oh, I drive a Maserati and my daughter goes to Penn.’” There’s also the return on investment to consider for those willing to cover an elite college’s exorbitant costs. According to Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce, four-year private schools offer the highest ROI based on the average debt taken on and median salaries 10 and 40 years after enrollment. “Tuition and cost of attendance is not just going up at Ivy League and competitive schools, it’s going up everywhere,” said Christopher Rim, the CEO of college consulting firm Command Education. “If a Rolls-Royce and a Toyota are the exact same price, which one would you want?” For the Choi family, the answer is a Rolls-Royce — Choi’s son has already been accepted into Yale, Columbia and the University of Chicago, and is still waiting to hear from his dream school, Stanford. Like many families living in New York City’s Upper East Side, the Chois have paid hundreds of thousands already to put him through private school since kindergarten. “We are fortunate that price is no object,” said Hope Choi. “Prestige carries a lot of weight and we want him to attend the best college for his future.” To supplement his schooling, they’ve been working with Command Education since he was in ninth grade, considering it a worthwhile investment in his future. The consulting firm charges as much as $750,000 to work with students starting in seventh grade and as much as $500,000 starting in ninth grade. Altogether, Rim estimates many of his clients spend “over $1 million” to prepare their kids for college. “No client is paying us these fees to get into a random school,” Rim said. Throwing Darts To be sure, the decision by many schools to no longer require standardized tests has caused application numbers to balloon. This has artificially deflated universities’ acceptance rates by bottom-loading the application pool, experts say. “These schools every year get better and better at getting students to apply,” said Brian Taylor, managing partner at Ivy Coach, a private college counseling firm. “As an extreme example, more C students applying to Harvard does not make the Harvard applicant pool more competitive.” New York University received a record-breaking 120,000 applications for the class of 2027, 13% more than last year. Next fall’s freshman year class will be around 5,700 students, bringing their admissions rate down to 8% — a steep drop from 35% a decade ago. The trend is hard on the many students who don’t get accepted. Addison Witucki found out Thursday that she didn’t get into Harvard or Brown, and is planning to go to the University of Kentucky in her home state instead. Her mother, Sarah, said Addison was disappointed but also relieved that she’d have to take on significantly less debt — the school costs $33,150 total for in-state students versus nearly $85,000 for Brown. “Even that’s still so much money,” Sarah Witucki said. “The fact that a state school costs this much is mind blowing.” For those who do get in, aid is often an essential part of the equation. Because elite schools with billion-dollar endowments and robust financial resources are able to help students lower the final cost of attendance, it’s sometimes more affordable to attend a private school than a public one, college consultants say. The gap between graduates with federal student loans is relatively small: In 2021, bachelor’s degree recipients from four-year state colleges had an average federal debt level of $21,400, compared to $22,600 for private universities, according to the College Board. When Preeti Singh’s daughter was applying to college this year, she recalls telling her, “If you’re going out of state then it has to be something really, really good, because I’m not sending you to the neighboring state just for you wanting to be away from home.” For the Ohio family, who have a second child who will also be applying to college in a couple of years, price was top of mind. Her daughter applied to both state colleges and more selective schools, Singh said. When she was accepted to Stanford in December, they decided it was worth paying around $65,000 a year for her computer science degree over about $15,000 at Ohio State University. Singh said that after looking at the aid her daughter received, the cost is “manageable” for an elite education.

To: marcher who wrote (197370)	4/1/2023 2:01:41 AM
From: TobagoJack	1 Recommendation Recommended By marcher Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 217575

Re <<sick joke>> Musk Knows It’s China’s Clean-Tech World for Now. So Does Biden.Tesla and Ford are looking for ways to match the IRA's promise with today's realities. They risk daring Congress to impose tighter restrictions on Chinese involvement. Liam Denning 31 March 2023 at 23:19 GMT+8 China’s CATL is the largest battery maker in the world. Photographer: Bloomberg/BloombergThe Inflation Reduction Act’s essential problem is that it aims to foster a US clean tech boom without using clean tech from the world’s number one supplier of clean tech. The Venn diagram of “clean tech suppliers” and “China” is, like time, a flat circle. News that Tesla Inc. may follow Ford Motor Co. in partnering with a large Chinese company to build a domestic electric vehicle battery plant is the latest reminder of this dilemma and the contortions by politicians and companies alike to get around it. Contemporary Amperex Technology Co., or CATL, is the largest battery maker in the world. In addition, it dominates the supply of lithium-iron-phosphate, or LFP, batteries. These lack the range of more traditional nickel-based chemistries but are safer and, crucially, cheaper. Tesla’s expansion in China and its cheapest Model 3 variant in the US owe much to using CATL’s LFP cells in its batteries. Similarly, Ford wants to use those batteries to boost production of its burgeoning EV line, so it’s building a factory in conjunction with CATL in Michigan. In keeping with the US government’s objectives, Tesla and Ford want to build more EVs, make these more affordable and build as many of them as possible, and get their components, at home. That, after all, is how you qualify for as much as possible of the various EV subsidies offered under the IRA, including up to $7,500 of federal tax credits for drivers. Getting as much of that credit is critical, not just to narrow the EV price premium compared to traditional vehicles but also in terms of competing within an increasingly crowded field of EV models. That was one rationale for Tesla cutting prices at the start of the year in order for some models to meet the IRA’s criteria. The CATL partnerships pose a thorny political problem, though. These factories would build batteries in the US using, as much as possible, components and minerals supplied from within the US or friendly countries. Yet they would do so using the intellectual property of a Chinese national champion, which would, by definition, expand its market and profit partly on the back of US taxpayers. Senator Joe Manchin, whose crucial vote for the IRA depended in part on strict domestic-content rules, is angry about anything that might let those subsidies leak to foreign companies anywhere. That includes efforts by President Joe Biden to carve out a role for allies without needing to amend the IRA. Friday morning’s clarification from the Treasury Department about content rules for the federal EV tax credit highlighted the role of suppliers in countries with free trade agreements — and pointedly said “free trade agreement” isn’t defined in statute. It added that “newly negotiated critical minerals agreements” might yet help foreign suppliers qualify. This is a clear signal that the recent deal struck with Japan may soon be extended to the European Union, allowing them to participate in IRA benefits. With typical understatement, Manchin described the new proposed rules as “horrific.” And that’s allies, folks. Little wonder he also flatly opposes any Chinese involvement. Can he oppose it though? The IRA’s provisions are rooted in physical flows: What gets mined, refined and put together where. By building and operating any CATL-linked plant themselves, Ford’s approach, and presumably Tesla’s if it were to happen, fits with this reading of the legislation. The difference is that, in an ironic turn, these would be US companies licensing technology from a Chinese company to utilize here in the US. One has to imagine at least some of the ire in Washington stems from the uncomfortable reversal of traditional industrial roles there. Nonetheless, on its face, this looks like a straightforward case of companies doing what companies do: Surveying the hurdles in front of some subsidies and digging a tunnel instead. That said, Ford and Tesla should dig carefully. China-bashing is just about the last bipartisan sport left (which is why Biden tapped into it to get the IRA passed in the first place). Governor Glenn Youngkin of Virginia nixed a plan to site Ford’s factory in his state, despite the thousands of jobs it would have brought. Performative as that may have been, daring Congress and the White House to impose even tighter restrictions on Chinese involvement is risky. If Friday’s report from Reuters that Elon Musk may soon visit China to meet with Premier Li Qiang turns out to be accurate, it suggests the Tesla chief retains his knack for pouring napalm on troubled waters. Above all, though, the gamesmanship around these plants is less bug than feature of the IRA. The legislation itself resulted from a tortuous process requiring its green principles to be repackaged as a plan for reviving America and checking China. While the intent of seizing leadership in one of the defining industrial sectors of the 21st century is laudable, the unspoken other half of that intent must be recognition that America is a long way from realizing it today. That means, at least in the near term, dealing with things as they are, where China has spent years and billions upon billions building dominance in clean tech. Just as the price cap on Russian oil exports — designed to hit Moscow’s revenue but not disrupt supply — implicitly accepts existing conditions for now, so the IRA must operate in a world that is only beginning to move away from decades of forging complex, regime-agnostic supply chains. As it is, parsing each gram of lithium, graphite and all the rest of it for provenance will be an immensely difficult task, fostering an industry of consultants and verifiers on its own. In decrying critical mineral agreements with like-minded allies, Manchin would be effectively strangling domestic EV production at birth, which really would violate some of the spirit of the IRA. As for railing against using Chinese technology to kickstart a domestic industry in the US, why not take advantage of it until the US is in a position to compete on its own terms. After all, that’s what China did.

To: marcher who wrote (197370)	4/1/2023 2:09:07 AM
From: TobagoJack	1 Recommendation Recommended By marcher Respond to of 217575

Below appended is <<sick>>, ala imperatives lead to solutions China Takes Its Climate Fight to the Rooftops One in five solar panels installed worldwide last year were mounted on a Chinese roof, putting households at the forefront of efforts to decarbonize a top emitter. 28 March 2023 at 07:01 GMT+8 Longi solar panels on the rooftop of a village house in China’s Shaanxi province. Source: Bloomberg On the rooftop of his home beside green onion and wheat fields in China’s Shaanxi province, Li Lifeng has installed dozens of solar panels that glisten in the winter sun. For the past five years, he’s been among more than 2.4 million Chinese homeowners each doing their own small part to clean up the world’s biggest source of planet-warming carbon emissions. Most of that rooftop solar has been added in the past two years, as China offered support for local governments to boost installations, and raised power rates to businesses, making generating their own electricity more attractive. The resulting renewables boom saw China build more small-scale solar last year than the total new clean power capacity in any other country. Roughly one of every five panels installed worldwide in 2022 was fixed atop a Chinese home or business. One of every five panels installed in the world in 2022 was fixed atop a Chinese home or business. Source: Bloomberg For Li, the decision was financial. The 52-year-old owns a noodle shop and two rowhouses about an hour outside of Xi’an in central China. With one son about to get married and another preparing for college, he and his wife wanted to secure another income source before they retired. Since connecting its first panel to the grid in early 2018, Li’s family has made more than 62,000 yuan ($8,963) selling clean electricity. “You can’t get this much return putting money in the bank,” Li said. China already has the world’s biggest wind and solar fleets but its electricity grid remains heavily reliant on coal, the dirtiest fossil fuel. A spike in energy prices after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and prolonged droughts that hit hydroelectric generation prompted China to ramp up coal-fired generation last year, even as it raced to expand renewables capacity. If the world’s second-largest economy is to meet President Xi Jinping’s goal of reaching net-zero by 2060, however, it’ll have to do more to phase out fossil fuels and reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The government is already constructing vast wind and solar farms in the country’s sparsely-populated inland deserts, but the infrastructure needed to connect them to the megacities of central and eastern China is costly and not fully built. Li Lifeng Source: Bloomberg Space to erect utility-scale renewables is running out in more densely populated regions, especially coastal provinces like Shandong and Hebei. The government is also under pressure to balance the energy transition with a separate initiative to preserve natural habitats after decades of rampant industrialization. So it’s weaponizing the country’s rooftops in the climate fight instead. China added more than 51 gigawatts of small-scale solar power last year. About 40% of its total solar capacity now comes from rooftops and backyards, including some projects that helped bring power to remote villages and isolated monasteries for the first time. The national government initially supported all solar projects with generous subsidies guaranteeing high enough payouts to make investments profitable. As solar panel prices fell, it allowed the subsidy program to lapse at the end of 2021, and local payouts have since either shrunk or disappeared. In their place, Beijing launched a pilot program in 2021 that helps local governments pool smaller projects together for big orders, drawing more developers and helping to reduce costs. Cities were encouraged to cover almost a third of commercial buildings and a fifth of farmhouses in panels by the end of 2023, setting off an unprecedented boom in small-scale solar installations. Longi Green Energy Technology Co., the world’s biggest solar power equipment manufacturer, expects the country to add 60 gigawatts in small-scale solar this year and keep expanding by about 20% annually for the foreseeable future, according to Niu Yanyan, who heads its domestic distributed photovoltaic business. China’s buildings and rooftops have the potential to host more than 1 terawatt of solar power capacity, almost the same size as the entire existing global industry, according to the manufacturer. Demand has grown so much that Longi last year introduced its first panels designed specifically for the rooftop solar market, which are more efficient and aesthetically pleasing. It’s not just households. Rooftop solar installations on factories and commercial buildings have grown dramatically in recent years after energy shortages led to a series of prolonged blackouts that hit production. An employee inspects photovoltaic cells on the production line at the Longi Green Energy Technology Co. plant in Xi'an. Photographer: Qilai Shen/Bloomberg Chinese businesses are also facing increased pressure to cut greenhouse gas emissions, both from their own government and foreign clients seeking to decarbonize their supply chains amid growing investor scrutiny. After widespread power shortages in late 2021, the government allowed utilities to charge industrial and commercial users higher power rates, which has helped propel the transition among businesses. At the Yuanzheng Incubator in an industrial park in Xi’an, more than 300 rooftop panels generate half the electricity the complex consumes. Home to more than 20 companies that manufacture products including electronics and prosthetic limbs, it now saves about 42,000 yuan on electricity bills each month. The panels were installed by Jinze Power Group, a solar equipment retailer and project constructor whose distributed solar business doubled in both 2021 and 2022. “In 2015, we would be pretty happy if we sold a few dozen panels for distributed solar,” said Liu Jihong, the head of project development. “Now, signing deals for thousands of panels is like an ordinary day.” The outlook isn’t entirely sunny, however. The breakneck pace of installations has made it difficult for grids in some regions to handle all the new electricity generated when the sun is shining. Solar panels at an office building in Xi’an. Rooftop solar installations on factories and commercial buildings have grown dramatically in recent years after energy shortages led to a series of prolonged blackouts that hit output and raised electricity prices. Source: Bloomberg Shandong, home to the most rooftop solar in China, asked householders to suspend generation during the Lunar New Year holiday in January to protect the grid as power demand dropped. It’s one of a handful of provinces piloting spot power trading programs to better manage supply and demand and the local government recently published rules that allow negative prices to discourage generation when there’s excess electricity. Increasingly liberated, localized power markets could well lead to more volatile power prices — and more unstable incomes for people like Li. Some coastal regions are now requiring or encouraging new rooftop installations to be connected to battery storage, an expensive prospect. And while some local authorities operate their own incentives schemes, the expiry of national subsidies means new rooftop solar projects are less profitable than they were, even though equipment costs have fallen. “In the next couple of years, there’s still room for massive growth, but it’ll have to be done in a more sustainable way,” said Cosimo Ries, an analyst with consultancy Trivium China Ltd. Li is a return customer when it comes to rooftop solar. Having already made back the 60,000 yuan outlay to install his first system, he took a nearly-100,000 yuan loan in December to build a second — with brand new Longi panels vaulted high above his rooftop. Longi solar panels are set-up on the rooftop of a village house. Source: Bloomberg If Li’s worried about taking on that much debt as he prepares for retirement, he’s not showing it. “We are farmers, so we don’t get much in monthly pension payments,” Li said. “Revenue from the solar panels will help ease the pressure on the kids to provide for us when we get old.” — Luz Ding and Dan Murtaugh contributed to this report.