#regional economy

[farmerstrend]

Transforming Makueni’s Agricultural Landscape as the County Set To Welcome School of Agriculture Campus

Makueni County is poised to gain significantly in agricultural education with the proposed establishment of a Kenya School of Agriculture campus at Kwa-Kathoka. This is following a public participation meeting held on Monday by stakeholders drawn from Agricultural, Administrative, Business and Education sectors to discuss the project, which will be managed by the Ministry of Agriculture and…

[sayruq]

[CONT] call, prompting aircraft carrier USS Dwight D. Eisenhower to come to its aid, dispatching helicopters to deal with approaching Yemeni Navy vessels

If the US and the UK go through with this plan, the Yemenis will bomb oilfields across the Gulf. This is will increase global oil prices significantly and ultimately tanking the global economy. If you thought life is hard now, you're not ready for how bad things will get in 2024.

All Joe Biden has to do to stop the Red Sea blockade is lift the siege on Gaza.

[astrologysaysno]

I immediately thought of him when I saw this.

[jcmarchi]

The regions racing to become the “Silicon Valley” of an aging world

New Post has been published on https://thedigitalinsider.com/the-regions-racing-to-become-the-silicon-valley-of-an-aging-world/

The regions racing to become the “Silicon Valley” of an aging world

In 2018, when Inc. Magazine named Boston one of the country’s top places to start a business, it highlighted one significant reason: Boston is an innovation hub for products and services catering toward the aging population. The “longevity economy” represents a massive chunk of economic opportunity: As of 2020, the over-50 market contributed $45 trillion to global GDP, or 34 percent of the total, according to AARP and Economist Impact.

What makes Boston such a good place to do business in aging? One important factor, according to the Inc. story, was MIT — specifically, MIT’s AgeLab, a research organization devoted to creating a high quality of life for the world’s growing aging population.

Inspired by that claim, AgeLab Director Joseph Coughlin, AgeLab science writer and researcher Luke Yoquinto, and The Boston Globe organized a yearlong series of articles to explore what makes Boston such a fertile ground for businesses in the longevity economy — and what might make its soil even richer. The series, titled “The Longevity Hub,” had a big goal in mind: describing what would be necessary to transform Boston into the “Silicon Valley of aging.”

The articles from the Globe series stand as a primer on key issues related to the wants, needs, and economic capabilities of older people, not just in Boston but for any community with an aging population. Importantly, creating a business and research environment conducive to innovation on behalf of older users and customers would create the opportunity to serve national and global aging markets far larger than just Boston or New England.

But that project with the Globe raised a new question for the MIT AgeLab: What communities, Boston aside, were ahead of the curve in their support of aging innovation? More likely than Boston standing as the world’s lone longevity hub, there were doubtless many international communities that could be identified using similar terms. But where were they? And what makes them successful?

Now The MIT Press has published “Longevity Hubs: Regional Innovation for Global Aging,” an edited volume that collects the original articles from The Boston Globe series, as well as a set of new essays. In addition to AgeLab researchers Coughlin, Yoquinto, and Lisa D’Ambrosio, this work includes essays by members of the MIT community including Li-Huei Tsai, director of the Picower Institute for Learning and Memory; the author team of Rafi Segal (associate professor of architecture and urbanism) and Marisa Moràn Jahn (senior researcher at MIT Future Urban Collectives); as well as Elise Selinger, MIT’s director of residential renewal and renovation.

In addition to these Boston Globe articles, the book also includes a new collection of essays from an international set of contributors. These new essays highlight sites around the world that have developed a reputation for innovation in the longevity economy. 

The innovative activity described throughout the book may exemplify a phenomenon called clustering: when businesses within a given sector emerge or congregate close to one another geographically. On its face, industrial or innovation clustering is something that ought not to happen, since, when businesses get physically close to one another, rent and congestion costs increase — incentivizing their dispersal. For clustering to occur, then, additional mechanisms must be at play, outweighing these natural costs. One possible explanation, many researchers have theorized, is that clusters tend to occur where useful, tacit knowledge flows among organizations.

In the case of longevity hubs, the editors hypothesize that two sorts of tacit knowledge are being shared. First is the simple awareness that the older market is worth serving. Second is insight into how best to meet its needs — a trickier proposition than many would-be elder-market conquerors realize. An earlier book by Coughlin, “The Longevity Economy” (PublicAffairs, 2017), discusses a long history of failed attempts by companies to design products and services for older adults. Speaking to the longevity economy is not easy, but these international longevity hubs represent successful, ongoing efforts to address the needs of older consumers.   

The book’s opening chapters on the Greater Boston longevity hub encompass a swathe of sectors including biotech, health care, housing, transportation, and financial services. “Although life insurance is perhaps the clearest example of a financial services industry whose interests align with consumer longevity, it is far from the only one,” writes Brooks Tingle, president and CEO of John Hancock, in his entry. “Financial companies — especially those in Boston’s increasingly longevity-aware business community — should dare to think big and join the effort to build a better old age.”

The book’s other contributions range far beyond Boston. They highlight, for example, Louisville, Kentucky, which is “the country’s largest hot spot for businesses specializing in aging care,” writes contributor and Humana CEO Bruce Broussard, in a chapter describing the city’s mix of massive health-care companies and smaller, nimbler startups. In Newcastle, in the U.K., a thriving biomedical industry laid the groundwork for a burst of innovation around the idea of aging as an economic opportunity, with initial funding from the public sector and academic research giving way to business development in the city. In Brazil’s São Paulo, meanwhile, in the absence of public funding from the national government, a grassroots network of academics, companies, and other institutions called Envelhecimento 2.0 is the main driver of aging innovation in the country.

“We are seeing a Cambrian explosion of efforts to provide a high quality of life for the world’s booming aging population,” says Coughlin. “And that explosion includes not just startups and companies, but also different regional economic approaches to taking the longevity dividend of living longer, and transforming it into an opportunity for everyone to live longer, better.”

By 2034, for the first time in history, older adults will outnumber children in the United States. That demographic shift represents an enormous societal challenge, and a grand economic opportunity. Greater Boston stands as a premier global longevity hub, but, as Coughlin and Yoquinto’s volume illustrates, there are potential competitors — and collaborators — popping up left and right. If and when innovation clusters befitting the title of “the Silicon Valley of longevity” do arise, it remains to be seen where they will appear first.

[spaceandbones]

shaking and sweating and jacking off in this excel document

[aahsoka]

they got us switched to a direct flight home by way of us giving up our seats to san fran (we did not want to go anyways) and maybe ended up with an upgrade I think because the plane was wayyyy more spacious than I’m used to and had in flight movies lmfao. I watched like 80% of Twister . how come no one told me cary elwes was in it

[defencecapital]

Indian Navy as a net security guarantor in the South Asian region

By N. C. Bipindra With the changing sea line of communication and the economy’s eastward shift, maritime security has become one of the most substantial economic and human security pillars. Since the 2004 tsunami, the Indian Navy has consistently proven itself as the first responder to any crisis in the Indian Ocean region, showcasing its readiness and reliability in such…

[zee-man-chatter]

I posted a video yesterday that explains why smaller banks in the US are under strain and threat. This article continues with that line, and goes deeper into how this will affect the US economy going down the road. Things don’t look good.

[worldspotlightnews]

This community in southern Mexico has defied the gender binary for generations | CNN

Editor’s Note: CNN Original Series “Eva Longoria: Searching for Mexico” airs on CNN Sundays at 9 p.m. ET/PT. Sign up to CNN Travel’s four-part Unlocking Mexico newsletter for more on the country and its cuisine. CNN  —  In the town of Juchitán de Zaragoza, located on the Isthmus of Tehuantepec in Mexico’s southern state of Oaxaca, one variation of a local legend goes something like this. San…

[vonlipvig]

ok i'm actually really enjoying suzerain so far. i was a bit wary about the management aspect of it, but it's not a timed game which is usually what makes me anxious, it's completely text-based and you get all the time you need to make your decisions. basically read and decide, and i can do those just fine.

sure, maybe the decisions i'm making are the worst decisions you could probably make and i'm dooming this country little by little, but hey! i'm having fun so that's all that matters, yippee!

[economicsresearch]

page 559 - flag of popular Economian region.

These are lame as hell. Also, I think they HAVE been gassing me from time to time, knocking me out. To reset the blog or whatever, I do not know. I think the other guy took the gas this time though. As in the gas started and I held my breath and pinched my nose and my eyes stung and watered, then from across the room I heard wild hyper-ventilating. But it was slow. The most intense deep breaths you've ever heard, trying to draw all the air in this dungeon across to him. It's like he was trying to pull the gas away from me. Am I down here with a hero? A breath hero?

[aralintheobsessive]

And why does America grow so much fucking corn? Well, several reasons, but dominant among them: Subsidised revenue insurance programs! "In 1949, government payments made up 1.4% of total net farm income — a measure of profit — while in 2000 government payments made up 45.8% of such profits. In 2019, farms received $22.6 billion in government payments, representing 20.4% of $111.1 billion in profits."

Bad year? Bad market? Get paid anyway. Grow corn! Why go to all the risk and expense of diversifying your operation to try and grow crops there's an actual market demand for when you could instead go all-in on corn and soybeans? Now so many farmers have gone down this route that if the government reduces those subsidies, it would devastate entire regions. In today's agricultural industry of broadacre cropping, most farming is done by massive, expensive, highly specialized machinery. You can't just pivot, because you're in debt on giant machines that really only work on corn. So the government isn't going to cut the subsidies. So more farmers are going to go all-in on the safe bet that is corn. It's a horrible self-perpetuating cycle.

(Source for quote and image: https://usafacts.org/articles/federal-farm-subsidies-what-data-says/)

I will write this thought about Veganism and Classism in the USA in another post so as to not derail the other thread:

There are comments in the notes that say meat is only cheaper than plant based foods because of subsidies artificially lowering the price of meat in the United States. This is...part of the story but not all of it.

For my animal agriculture lab we went to a butcher shop and watched the butcher cut up a pig into various cuts of meat. I have had to study quite a bit about the meat industry in that class. This has been the first time I fully realized how strongly the meat on a single animal is divided up by socioeconomic class.

Like yes, meat cumulatively takes more natural resources to create and thus should be more expensive, but once that animal is cut apart, it is divided up between rich and poor based on how good to eat the parts are. I was really shocked at watching this process and seeing just how clean and crisp an indicator of class this is.

Specifically, the types of meat I'm most familiar with are traditionally "waste" parts left over once the desirable parts are gone. For example, beef brisket is the dangly, floppy bit on the front of a cow's neck. Pork spareribs are the part of the ribcage that's barely got anything on it.

And that stuff is a tier above the "meat" that is most of what poor people eat: sausage, hot dogs, bologna, other heavily processed meat products that are essentially made up of all the scraps from the carcass that can't go into the "cuts" of meat. Where my mom comes from in North Carolina, you can buy "livermush" which is a processed meat product made up of a mixture of liver and a bunch of random body parts ground up and congealed together. There's also "head cheese" (made of parts of the pig's head) and pickled pigs' feet and chitlin's (that's made of intestines iirc) and cracklin's (basically crispy fried pig skin) and probably a bunch of stuff i'm forgetting. A lot of traditional Southern cooking uses basically scraps of animal ingredients to stretch across multiple meals, like putting pork fat in beans or saving bacon grease for gravy or the like.

So another dysfunctional thing about our food system, is that instead of people of each socioeconomic class eating a certain number of animals, every individual animal is basically divided up along class lines, with the poorest people eating the scraps no one else will eat (oftentimes heavily processed in a way that makes it incredibly unhealthy).

Even the 70% lean ground beef is made by injecting extra leftover fat back into the ground-up meat because the extra fat is undesirable on the "better" cuts. (Gross!)

I've made, or eaten, many a recipe where the only thing that makes it non-vegan is the chicken broth. Chicken broth, just leftover chicken bones and cartilage rendered and boiled down in water? How much is that "driving demand" for meat, when it's basically a byproduct?

That class really made me twist my brain around about the idea of abstaining from animal products as a way to deprive the industry of profits. Nobody eats "X number of cows, pigs, chickens in a lifetime" because depending on the socioeconomic class, they're eating different parts of the animal, splitting it with someone richer or poorer than they are. If a bunch of people who only ate processed meats anyway abstained, that wouldn't equal "saving" X number of animals, it would just mean the scraps and byproducts from a bunch of people's steaks or pork chops would have something different happen to them.

The other major relevant conclusion I got from that class, was that animal agriculture is so dominant because of monoculture. People think it's animal agriculture vs. plant agriculture (or plants used for human consumption vs. using them to feed livestock), but from capitalism's point of view, feeding animals corn is just another way to use corn to generate profits.

People think we could feed the world by using the grain fed to animals to feed humans, but...the grain fed to animals, is not actually a viable diet for the human population, because it's literally just corn and soybean. Like animal agriculture is used to give some semblance of variety to the consumer's diet in a system that is almost totally dominated by like 3 monocrops.

Do y'all have any idea how much of the American diet is just corn?!?! Corn starch, corn syrup, corn this, corn that, processed into the appearance of variety. And chickens and pigs are just another way to process corn. That's basically why we have them, because they can eat our corn. It's a total disaster.

And it's even worse because almost all the USA's plant foods that aren't the giant industrial monocrops maintained by pesticides and machines, are harvested and cared for by undocumented migrant workers that get abused and mistreated and can't say anything because their boss will tattle on them to ICE.

[carlocarrasco]

DOTr’s “road safety park” to rise in Muntinlupa City

Yesterday in Muntinlupa City, the “road safety park” project of the Department of Transportation (DOTr) was formally started with a groundbreaking ceremony at the Muntinlupa Sports Center, according to a news article by the Philippine News Agency (PNA). To put things in perspective, posted below is an excerpt from the PNA news article. Some parts in boldface… The Department of Transportation…

[farmerstrend]

Kyang’ondu Stockyard Commissioned: A Boost for Livestock Traders and Farmers in Makueni

Kako Waia Ward, Makueni County – In a significant development for livestock traders and farmers in Kako Waia Ward and surrounding areas, the Kyang’ondu Stockyard was officially commissioned, marking a new chapter in the region’s agricultural and economic growth. The state-of-the-art facility is poised to revolutionize livestock trade, enhance revenue generation, and create job opportunities for…

[insightfultake]

India's Digital Payments Revolution: Redefining Financial Landscapes

The story of India’s digital payments revolution is nothing short of extraordinary. In a nation of 1.4 billion people, where cash once reigned supreme, technology has rewritten the rules of commerce. Seamlessly blending innovation, government policies, and mass adoption, India has emerged as a global leader in cashless transactions. This article dives deep into the remarkable growth, the impact on entrepreneurs, the role of regional banks, and India’s vision for leading the global digital payment landscape. Expand to read more

[thetrashyflower]

Maybe it's a little paranoid to think this but I know there's a lot of first gen/immigrant students at my university and it has a really stupid history of being complicit with shitty government policy. I'm scared for a lot of people today.