The Renminbi: The Political Economy of a Currency - By Arthur Kroeber | Foreign Policy - Vimperator The Chinese currency, or renminbi (RMB), has been a contentious issue for the past several years. Most recently, members of the U.S. Congress have suggested tying China currency legislation to the upcoming votes on the free trade agreements with South Korea, Colombia, and Panama. While not going that far, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and Sen. The root of the conflict for the United States -- and other countries -- is complaints that China keeps the value of the RMB artificially low, boosting its exports and trade surplus at the expense of trading partners. Although the U.S. The international conversation over the RMB remains perennially vexed because China and its trade partners have fundamentally divergent ideas on the function of exchange rates. Chinese officials take a very different view. China's Currency Policies In short, China's exchange-rate policy is mainly driven by the aim of enhancing the country's export competitiveness. The Internationalization of the RMB
How many people pay the estate tax? Because of a series of increases in the estate tax exemption, few estates pay the tax. The Economic Growth and Tax Relief Reconciliation Act of 2001 (EGTRRA) raised the estate tax exemption from $675,000 in 2001 to $1 million in 2002 and to $3.5 million in a series of steps through 2009, sharply reducing the number of estates that paid estate taxes. EGTRRA repealed the estate tax for 2010 but after that, the estate tax was scheduled to revert to pre-EGTRRA rules. The Tax Relief, Unemployment Insurance Reauthorization, and Job Creation Act of 2010 reinstated the estate tax and generation-skipping transfer tax and extended them through 2012, with a $5 million estate tax exemption (indexed for inflation after 2011) and a top rate of 35 percent. The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act doubled the exemption to $11.18 million in 2018 (indexed for inflation after 2018), but the estate tax cut is scheduled to expire after 2025 (along with most other provisions of the new law).
Vimperator What’s Gained from Calculating Bayesian Probabilities? The previous post claimed it’s reasonable to expect frequencies in binary experiments to be near .5 simply because that’s what most possible outcomes lead to. Reasonable or not, there’s no guarantee it’ll happen however. If 1% of the possibilities yield outcomes far from .5 that’s still an enormous number of exceptions in absolute terms, so there’s plenty of room to be wrong. So if we could be wrong, then why do the calculation in the first place? April 12, 2014 The “Propensity Theory of Probabilities” as a Simple Application of the Bayesian Definition of Probabilities Many view the propensity theory of probabilities as something incompatible with Bayesian probabilities. To see this I’ll apply those Bayesian principles to predicting the outcome of trials of a binary experiment. April 9, 2014 Jaynes’s Bayesian view of Frequencies April 6, 2014 Bayesian Probabilities Defined (part 1) April 3, 2014 (more…) April 2, 2014 March 25, 2014
Ten Facts You Should Know About the Federal Estate Tax | Center on Budget and Policy Priorities The federal estate tax is a tax on property (cash, real estate, stock, or other assets) transferred from deceased persons to their heirs. Only the wealthiest estates pay the tax because it is levied only on the portion of an estate’s value that exceeds a specified exemption level — $5.49 million per person (effectively $10.98 million per married couple) in 2017.[2]The estate tax limits the large tax breaks that extremely wealthy households get on their wealth as it grows, which can otherwise go untaxed. The estate tax thus limits, to a modest degree, the large tax breaks that extremely wealthy households get on their wealth as it grows, which can otherwise go untaxed. The estate tax has been an important source of federal revenue for a century, yet a number of misconceptions continue to surround it. (While this paper focuses on the federal estate tax, taxes on inherited wealth are also a traditional and common revenue source for states.[3])
Beamer and Latex With Keynote Theme | Shawn Lankton Online - Vimperator LaTeX is a typsetting system that allows you to make great-looking documents, and is well-used to make academic papers. I even use it for homeworks and other documents. There are also packages that allow it to make fantastic posters and slide presentations as well. I spent the last few days getting caught up on this, and want to share what I’ve figured out: A sexy Beamer theme that looks like KeynoteHow to format the footerHow to make slide numbersHow to remove the navigation symbolsHow to make movies show up in presentationsThe best references I’ll talk about each of these briefly and give links to download a demo presentation and the .tex and .sty files that made it. I’ve known about the possibility of LaTeX slides for a while, but never took the time to figure it out. My experiences have been with Beamer (but other options exist.) I really wanted my presentation to look like those classy Keynote presentations you’re always seeing Steve Jobs giving. Keynote Beamer Theme Voila!
The Housing Value of Every County in the U.S. | Max Galka After the last post, which looked at housing values across New York City, I thought it would be interesting to take a more granular look at housing values across the U.S. To create the map below, I took the total residential property value for every county in the U.S. (the contiguous 48 states), and substituted those values for each county's land area. Aside from the Northeast, property value in the U.S. is concentrated in a relatively small number of areas. In the animation below, notice what a small portion of the U.S. land area is actually covered by the red counties. Here is the previous post on New York City property values, which explains how the values were calculated. This type of map, in which each area is substituted by some other mapping variable, is called a cartogram. For this map, most of the work was done using Carto3F(documentation).
Data integration - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - Firefox Beta Data integration involves combining data residing in different sources and providing users with a unified view of these data.[1] This process becomes significant in a variety of situations, which include both commercial (when two similar companies need to merge their databases) and scientific (combining research results from different bioinformatics repositories, for example) domains. Data integration appears with increasing frequency as the volume and the need to share existing data explodes.[2] It has become the focus of extensive theoretical work, and numerous open problems remain unsolved. In management circles, people frequently refer to data integration as "Enterprise Information Integration" (EII). History[edit] Figure 1: Simple schematic for a data warehouse. Figure 2: Simple schematic for a data-integration solution. Issues with combining heterogeneous data sources under a single query interface have existed for some time. Example[edit] Theory of data integration[edit] where and .
Scott Walker Strips Wisconsin Workers Of 'Living Wage' In New State Budget Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker (R) signed the new state budget into law on Sunday with a last-minute change that strips the words "living wage" from state laws and replaces it with "minimum wage." The change means minimum-wage Wisconsin workers will earn nearly $6,000 per year less than what the Massachusetts Institute of Technology calculates is a living wage in the state. And they will have no recourse, according to the Center for American Progress. MIT says a living wage would be $10.13 an hour. The new law eliminates the ability of low-wage workers to appeal for a living wage. For more from The Huffington Post, download our app for iOS or Android. The old law allowed residents to challenge the living wage amount with the Department of Workforce Development. Walker, who announced his 2016 presidential campaign on Monday, also decided workers don't need weekends off.