Author Archives: Editors

Receiving your salary in cryptocurrency is now a thing -By Reuben Jackson

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  • Cryptocurrencies are constantly becoming more mainstream.
  • With the changing landscape of work and workers, financial systems also need to evolve.
  • Cryptocrrencies have a lot to offer workers in this new age, but they still have some hurdles to face before they become the norm.Since 2018, cryptocurrencies are no longer operating just on the fringes of the financial system.Digital currencies have made significant inroads at traditional financial institutions so much that many banks already offer Bitcoin investment options. Several prominent retailers, including Starbucks, Whole Foods, and Nordstrom, are already accepting Bitcoin at checkout. More importantly for the future of the currency, global regulatory oversight has matured since Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies burst on the scene a few years ago.

    With cryptocurrencies becoming more mainstream all the time, it only makes sense for them to be affecting other elements of the financial system, which is exactly what we are starting to see in the significant sector of employee wages.

    While it’s true that right now those receiving their salaries in crypto are an oddity, this won’t be so in the long run.

    The way we view work is changing

    There is a shift happening in the very way work and compensation are viewed in the world today. Rather than working traditional 9-5 jobs, many employees, particularly younger ones, are joining the gig economy, choosing to be their own bosses and work for short-term, temporary contracts for everything from freelance work to driving an Uber.

    In the U.S. alone, 57 million people participate in the gig economy, where transfers and transaction costs are the norm. This is a landscape in need of secure, fast, and cheap solutions that will improve participants’ lives significantly.

    Currently there are many pain points and regularly occurring annoyances in the market.

    For example, 58% of freelancers have experienced not getting paid for their work, an issue that can be easily solved with the usage of smart contracts—a blockchain-based technology that enforces contracts without the need of a third party.

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    posted by f.sheikh

The Perils of Empire-America’s Future-By Tick Atkinson

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Empires are hard to build and even harder to keep intact. No sooner does an empire congeal than centrifugal forces — overreach, complacency, strategic miscalculation and enemies, foreign and domestic — threaten to tug it apart.

As we celebrate our 243rd Independence Day, and the resultant American empire that would come to dominate the modern world, it’s worth considering the 18th-century British Empire against which we rebelled in a bleak and bloody eight-year war. We have become more like that Anglo imperium than perhaps we suspect, and we face some of the same head winds that caused so much grief for King George III and his nation.

Several dynastic coalition wars against European adversaries had ended indecisively before Britain’s wildly successful triumph in 1763 over France and Spain in the Seven Years’ War, called the French and Indian War in America. Britain massed firepower in her blue-water fleet and organized enough maritime mobility to transport assault troops vast distances, capturing strongholds from Quebec and Havana to Manila in what London also called the Great War for the Empire. “Our bells are worn threadbare with ringing for victory,” one happy Briton reported.

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Spoils under the Treaty of Paris were among the greatest ever won by force of arms, including Canada, a half-billion fertile acres west of the Appalachians, various sugar islands in the West Indies, Florida and parts of India. Britain emerged from the war with the most powerful navy in history and the world’s largest mercantile fleet, some 8,000 vessels. She cowed her rivals and so dominated Europe’s trade with Asia, Africa and North America that by 1773, the writer George Macartney could celebrate “this vast empire on which the sun never sets.”

Britain was ascendant, with its own mighty revolutions — agrarian and industrial — underway. A majority of all European growth in the first half of the 18th century had occurred in England, a proportion that would increase with the arrival of the steam engine, patented in 1769, and the spinning jenny a year later. Canals were cut, roads built, highwaymen hanged, coal mined, iron forged. Sheep would double in weight during the century; calf weights tripled. “I felt a completion of happiness,” the Scottish diarist James Boswell wrote. “I just sat and hugged myself in my own mind.”

A map of the British Empire in North America in 1762, by John Gibson. The shaded areas are territories formerly claimed by France or Spain. (Library of Congress)

Hubris, the disease of victory, also set in. Britain viewed the new empire as an affirmation of her virtues — tenacity and martial prowess among them — as well as the fountainhead of national wealth and power. Colonies existed to provide raw materials for the mother country and to buy her finished products, not to find their own way in the world or to extend prosperity to the masses.

But Britain had emerged from the Great War for the Empire deeply in debt. Interest payments devoured half of the government’s yearly tax revenue. Britons were among Europe’s most heavily taxed citizens, paying excise fees on items from soap and salt to male servants and racehorses that might exceed 25 percent of an item’s value.

It seemed only fair that colonists should help shoulder the burden: a typical American, by Treasury Board calculations, paid no more than sixpence a year in Crown taxes, one-fiftieth of the average Englishman’s payment, even as Americans benefited from eradication of the French and Spanish threats and the Royal Navy’s protection of North American trade.

Top Ten Universities In Asia-By Mike Colagrassi

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Some of the world’s most prestigious universities aren’t in America.

  • China’s Tsinghua and Peking University are on par with Harvard and MIT.
  • These 10 universities consistently shuffle around for top tier status in Asian college rankings.
  • Universities in Japan, Singapore, South Korea, and China have churned out dozens of Nobel Laureates and other renowned figures.Asia possesses some of the most cutting-edge and finest universities in the world. While we’re all accustomed to the powerhouse and traditional American and U.K.-based universities, in the past 100 years Asia has seen a surge of growth.

    Leading the way in terms of advanced future research, while also partnering with established university systems around the world — Asia has become a destination for some of the world’s best and brightest.

    Tsinghua University is one of the most prestigious institutions in China. Leading a rigorous multidisciplinary system for the past three decades, it has gone through many iterations and changes since its creation in 1911.

    Known as one of the most elite schools in China, and referred to some as the “MIT of China,” the school prides itself on its strength in engineering and the sciences. Admitted students must have excellent scores on their national exams. Tsinghua consistently ranks in the top 30 of The World University Rankings.

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Explaining A Novel To Pakistani Intelligence-By Muhammad Hanif

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(Must read article by Muhammad Hanif. It is hard to decide whether to laugh or shake your head ! f. Sheikh)

Fear is a line in your head,” my dear friend Sabeen Mahmud used to say. “You have to decide which side you want to be on.” Mahmud paid the maximum price for her fearlessness. In 2015, she organized a public discussion in Karachi about the disappearances of political activists—she was an activist herself—knowing it was a subject the Pakistani media was afraid to touch. After leaving the event, she was shot dead. 

The assassin was sentenced to death after a summary trial, but the shot that killed Mahmud still reverberates: her murder marked the beginning of an unprecedented assault on freedom of speech in Pakistan. The Pakistani media is now enduring its darkest phase yet. Major General Asif Ghafoor, the head of the Pakistan Army’s public relations department, has been circulating the online profiles of journalists he judges to be involved in antistate activities. In a press conference last December, he issued a heartfelt plea: if journalists filed positive stories for just six months, Pakistan would become a great nation. Mostly, Pakistani journalists obliged. Writers who were once bold and boisterous, taking on military dictators and civilian rulers and extremist organizations, have now become patriotic—or have found themselves out of work. Without jobs, some of the country’s top columnists and prime-time TV journalists are learning to start their own YouTube channels. Others receive threats from anonymous entities claiming to represent the state intelligence services.

Against this backdrop, I was relieved when an inspector from an intelligence agency called me, introduced himself, and said that he wanted to debrief me about my recent visit to Bangladesh. (Relieved because the caller had a name, a number, and a purpose.) The occasion for the call was my participation in a literary festival in Dhaka for the launch of my new novel, Red Birds. Usually Pakistan’s intelligence agencies and their civilian cousins in radical organizations are more obsessed with managing the news cycle than monitoring the activities of fiction writers, but the inspector had received an inquiry from his higher-ups and wanted to meet me. After consulting some journalist colleagues, I agreed to meet him in a public place.

The inspector arrived with one of his senior colleagues. The encounter was part journalistic interview, part interrogation. How did I know the Dhaka festival director? Was she married? Could I find out? Was my own marriage arranged? Did I own my house? How many children and how old? To my surprise, they also wanted to talk about the book. They asked for a copy; I politely suggested that they buy it and put it on their expense account. Okay, they said, but can you please tell us what happens? Like many novelists, I find it difficult to sum up the plot of my story in a few sentences. I started haltingly, and they seemed to like the premise: an American pilot lands in a desert and is rescued by a refugee child. The refugee must be Afghan? they asked, and I nodded enthusiastically. For the next half hour my interrogators and I were writing this novel together. I realized that I was telling an entirely different story for their consumption: omitting certain things, embellishing other parts. I was determined not to reveal that at the heart of the novel is a boy who has gone missing, a case of enforced disappearance. (Six years ago I had reported on missing activists in Pakistan and was warned by friends not to go there. And then there was Sabeen Mahmud.) I made the story sound patriotic; I made it about the positive image of Pakistan. I don’t know if they believed any of it, but I was sure that they would never bother to read it. I was relieved, for once, not to receive any interest in my journalism. A lot of what I write would fail the patriotism test. 

 

I learned this trick of weaving fiction around fact a decade ago. My first novel, A Case of Exploding Mangoes, grew out of my frustrated attempts to investigate the plane crash that killed General Mohammad Zia ul-Haq, Pakistan’s military dictator, and half a dozen top generals, along with the US ambassador to Pakistan. Thirty-one people died in total. There had been two official inquiries into the crash, and it was said that sabotage was involved, but no culprits were ever found. When I tried, years after the event, to talk to some of the players who were around at the time of the crash and to research the very little that had been written about it, I soon realized that I was not going to find out the truth. There were cover-ups to cover the cover-ups. It became obvious that nobody (including the Americans, who had lost a rising star in the State Department) was interested in finding out whodunit. They all seemed to be saying, Good riddance—now let’s get on with our lives. Failing to find any facts, I decided to solve the assassination through fiction; in the absence of an identified killer in real life, I came up with a character who raises his hand and says: I did it. As with many novels that start on a whim, this little conceit took on a life of its own. My novel borrowed the many bizarre conspiracy theories about the plane crash, embellished them, and added counterparts of my own invention. It included some political jokes and some real-life characters who were still in power. I threw in a mango-eating crow and a poison-tipped sword for good measure. I had assumed that if you said on the cover that the book was a work of fiction, people would read it as a work of fiction. But many readers in Pakistan have come to me and asked how I uncovered it all. It’s almost frightening to think that people read a work of fiction full of fantastical happenings as a piece of history. A retired spy chief once cornered me at a party and said, “Son, you have written a brilliant book, but who were your sources.

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