Tag: economics
White House Pauses Federal Grants, Loans
The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) directed federal agencies, in a Jan. 27 memorandum, to suspend the distribution of grants, loans, and other financial assistance while the programs are under review.
A memo, from OMB Acting Director Matthew Vaeth, directs federal agencies to conduct a comprehensive analysis of all financial assistance programs to determine whether they are aligned with the executive orders signed by President Donald Trump after his inauguration on Jan. 20.
“In the interim, to the extent permissible under applicable law, Federal agencies must temporarily pause all activities related to obligation or disbursement of all Federal financial assistance, and other relevant agency activities that may be implicated by the executive orders, including, but not limited to, financial assistance for foreign aid, nongovernmental organizations, DEI, woke gender ideology, and the green new deal,” it stated.
Vaeth stated in his memo that the pause will allow the government more time to review agency programs and determine the best uses of funding for those programs consistent with the law and Trump’s priorities.
‘America mass-deported 3 times in the past hundred years’ and results were good — Peter St Onge
Fake ‘religious’ immigration scams
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This fails the morality and ethics test. Jews do it too with HIAS, which Mayorkas once headed, which thereby fails the ethics test even worse. I am sure there are many other ‘religious’ groups working some angle of the immigration scam and profiting handsomely. I do not know of any Buddhists groups involved in immigration scams and I hope there are none. The Abrahamics all seem to have a very passionate and active sense of what moral behavior is. And this seems to lead to many ethically very low interpretations. In Buddhism, morality is understood more as ‘coolness’ (shila) which allows or encourages thinking more deeply before acting. If a person is healthy and can work but poor, Buddhism is OK with temporary help to get them going but not permanent handouts. Scamming taxpayers to make money on able-bodied immigrants is actually immoral in Buddhism because you are doing neither the taxpayer nor the immigrant any good at all. You are duping the taxpayer and stealing while encouraging dependency and law-breaking in the immigrant. Moreover, you yourself, the ‘religious’ person posturing as a moral person, are also harming yourself with egregiously selfish behavior for mere money or conquest, if that’s how you see it. If that is how you see yourself, as a conqueror, you are not. You are just a parasite, a lowly piece of shit. ABN
Trump: ‘Frankly, FEMA is not good’
AI: Meta genai org in panic mode
It started with deepseek v3, which rendered the Llama 4 already behind in benchmarks. Adding insult to injury was the “unknown Chinese company with 5..5 million training budget”
Engineers are moving frantically to dissect deepsek and copy anything and everything we can from it. I’m not even exaggerating
Management is worried about justifying the massive cost of gen ai org. How would they face the leadership when every single “leader” of gen ai org is making more than what it cost to trained deepseek v3 entirely, and we have dozens of such “leaders”
Deepseek r1 made things even scarier. I can’t reveal confidential info but it’ll be soon public anyways
It should have been an engineering focused small org but since a bunch of people wanted to join the impact grab and artificially inflate hiring in the org, everyone loses
China’s new open-source AI model DeepSeek can outperform OpenAI for a fraction of the cost
In another open-source win, DeepSeek aims to redefine ‘open AI’ with R1, its latest model. Open-source artificial intelligence (AI) has reached another milestone — and the cost differences it represents could shake up the industry.
On Monday, Chinese AI lab DeepSeek announced the release of R1, the full version of its newest open-source reasoning model, which the company launched in preview in November. The company noted that R1 beats or is on par with OpenAI’s o1 in several math, coding, and reasoning benchmarks.
Also: $450 and 19 hours is all it takes to rival OpenAI’s o1-preview
Similar to o1, R1’s reasoning takes more time to answer than other models, but its queries are meant to be more sophisticated and accurate. Alongside the 671-billion-parameter model, DeepSeek also released six smaller “distilled” versions with as few as 1.5 billion parameters, which can be run on a local device.
What the global elite reveal to Davos sex workers: High-class escort spills the beans on what happens behind closed doors — and how wealthy ‘know the world is doomed, so may as well go out with a bang’
A high-class escort has spilled the beans on what happens behind closed doors in Davos during the World Economic Forum, including what the wealthy think really will happen to the world in the near future.
Salome Balthus, 40, is a high-end escort and author from Berlin who has travelled to Davos, Switzerland, to meet up with clients during the annual gathering of the global elite.
Salome revealed to MailOnline what she has learned about the global elite – and for many it is that they are doom-mongering about the fate of the world… so they’ve decided to enjoy it while it lasts.
Convinced that a climate change apocalypse is upon us they shamelessly spend their vast wealth on expensive escorts in Switzerland… which they fly to in their environmentally-unfriendly private jets.
‘The elephant in the room is climate change. Everyone knows it can’t be prevented any more,’ she said, adding that the ‘super rich’ could generally be split into two groups on the topic.
So, they are drinking their own Kool-Aid or lying to a prostitute. ABN
In this world, there’s givers and there’s takers. ABN
STARGATE, a new American company to invest $500 billion in AI infrastructure
RFK on who owns everything
Tariff benefits explained by Treasury Secretary Nominee Scott Bessent
Immigrant contributions to Europe compared
Trump announces External Revenue Service
Aligning with the concept of using tariffs to fund government operations, President Trump has announced his intention to create the External Revenue Service. It appears to be a collection and enforcement mechanism to gather income from tariffs, duties and other sources that will pay for access to the U.S. consumer market.
One of the issues the External Revenue Service will likely address is the de minimis loophole.
The de minimis loophole comes from back in the 1930s. The idea back then was, say you went on a vacation to Paris, you shouldn’t have to file customs paperwork or pay taxes if you decided to ship some little Eiffel Tower statues to your friends back home.
Congress in 2015 then raised the de minimis threshold from $200 to $800. However, the e-commerce world exploded, and Chinese companies began using the de minimis loophole to ship cheap goods (ex. Temu and Shein) into the USA direct to consumers without paying any customs duty.
It was reported last year that the U.S. was on track to receive a billion packages through the de minimis loophole that aren’t taxed and don’t have customs slips saying what they are. Making matters worse, illegal items are slipping through the cracks, including, knockoffs, unsafe items and even chemicals used to make fentanyl. The worst abuser that exploits this de minimis loophole is, by far, China.
American Buddhist Net 
