text:
Shipping times and costs from Albany, United States of America to Auckland, New Zealand
1 Bedroom flat
Shipping costs by air £12,438 - £13,746
Shipping costs by sea £6,530 - £7,217
3 Bedroom house
Shipping costs by air N/A
Shipping costs by sea £10,046 - £11,103
5 Bedroom house
Shipping costs by air N/A
Shipping costs by sea £15,070 - £16,654
Please note: the prices listed here are meant as an estimate only. The best way to get a comprehensive, tailored quote is to fill out our form and be matched with a supplier.
Shipping Container Costs to New Zealand
Auckland has the best of both worlds. If you want stylish cosmopolitan living, you've got it. If you want natural beauty, you've got it. With the Pacific Ocean on one side and the Tasman Sea on the other, Auckland is blessed with one of the best major city locations in the world. There are two mountain ranges, more than fifty nearby islands and nearly 30,000 km of coastline. The lifestyle in this New Zealand city is world class - which is why Auckland placed third in Mercer's 2017 Global Quality of Life survey. The City of Sails contains nearly 1.5 million people and around 40% of them are expats, so you won't be alone. Auckland's multiculturalism has produced an incredibly diverse city. Before you can start life as an Aucklander, there are a few practical things you should know about.Different shipping options
Assuming you want to bring a few belongings with you on your move, you need to think about how you're going to get them to Auckland. Your choice is between air freight and sea freight, each of which come with their pros and cons.Air freight is the quick option. Your cargo will jet off and arrive in Auckland in a matter of days. It's very helpful if you're moving abroad in a rush, but it's much more expensive than ocean shipping.
Sea freight is slower but it's also much cheaper. Your cargo will go off in a container ship across the sea and it'll take several weeks to reach Auckland. As long as you're not moving last minute, we strongly recommend that you choose sea freight. Depending on how much stuff you want to bring, you will either use a 20ft container or a 40ft container. If you're bringing less than 15 cubic metres of cargo, it's more economical for you to choose a groupage shipment (known as Less Than Container Load, or LCL). This is where several people share the use of a container. Most of our suppliers offer a full door-to-door service, which comes at a higher price than port-to-port but it's much more convenient.
Major shipping routes
If you're moving to Auckland, your container will be sailing to the Port of Auckland. It's New Zealand's largest container port, and it handles around 31% of the country's annual container trade. The port is currently working on a "30-year masterplan", including a big fancy hotel and driverless cranes. It's all very exciting. If you have opted for a door-to-door service, once your container reaches the port it will go by truck to your new home in Auckland.Auckland customs
Clearing customs is nothing to worry about; your shipping company will help you through the process. The more prepared you are, the quicker and less expensive it will be. To get a shipping container through the Port of Auckland, you must complete an Unaccompanied Personal Baggage Declaration form. In this, you'll have to create a clear and detailed inventory of everything inside the container. Every inventory is assessed by the Ministry of Primary Industries (MPI), who will decided whether to physically inspect your container. Any wooden items (either furniture or packaging) will have to be examined, which comes with a biosecurity inspection fee. You can avoid paying customs duty on all used household goods, as long as you're moving to New Zealand permanently and you intend to use these belongings in your new home. Be sure not to bring any prohibited items, such as double-edged swords, straw and honey. Check out the official New Zealand customs website for more information.Shipping Container Options
20Ft Shipping Container
33 Cubic Meters
5.9m x 2.35m x 2.39m (l x w x h)
Price: £10,046 - £11,103
Get a quote for a 20ft container Get Shipping Container Quotes40Ft Shipping Container
67 Cubic Meters
12.03m x 2.35m x 2.39m (l x w x h)
Price: £19,088 - £21,095
Get a quote for a 40ft container Get Shipping Container QuotesCar shipped by sea freight
Max Dimensions: 5.75m x 2.2m x 2.2m (l x w x h)
Base Price: £3,110 - £3,437
Quarantine & Taxes: £1,000 - £2,500
Price: £12,146 - £16,353
Get a quote for a car Get Shipping Container Quotes


text:
Control flow and error handling
JavaScript supports a compact set of statements, specifically control flow statements, that you can use to incorporate a great deal of interactivity in your application. This chapter provides an overview of these statements.
The JavaScript reference contains exhaustive details about the statements in this chapter. The semicolon (;
) character is used to separate statements in JavaScript code.
Any JavaScript expression is also a statement. See Expressions and operators for complete information about expressions.
Block statement
The most basic statement is a block statement that is used to group statements. The block is delimited by a pair of curly brackets:
{ statement_1; statement_2; . . . statement_n; }
Block statements are commonly used with control flow statements (e.g. if
, for
, while
while (x < 10) { x++; }
Here, { x++; }
is the block statement.
Important: JavaScript prior to ECMAScript2015 does not have block scope. Variables introduced within a block are scoped to the containing function or script, and the effects of setting them persist beyond the block itself. In other words, block statements do not define a scope. "Standalone" blocks in JavaScript can produce completely different results from what they would produce in C or Java. For example:
var x = 1; { var x = 2; } console.log(x); // outputs 2
This outputs 2 because the var x
statement within the block is in the same scope as the var x
statement before the block. In C or Java, the equivalent code would have outputted 1.
Starting with ECMAScript2015, the let
variable declaration is block scoped. See the let
reference page for more information.
Conditional statements
A conditional statement is a set of commands that executes if a specified condition is true. JavaScript supports two conditional statements: if...else
and switch
Use the if
statement to execute a statement if a logical condition is true. Use the optional else
clause to execute a statement if the condition is false. An if
statement looks as follows:
if (condition) {
} else {
Here the condition
can be any expression that evaluates to true or false. See Boolean for an explanation of what evaluates to true
and false
. If condition
evaluates to true, statement_1
is executed; otherwise, statement_2
is executed. statement_1
and statement_2
can be any statement, including further nested if
You may also compound the statements using else if
to have multiple conditions tested in sequence, as follows:
if (condition_1) { statement_1; } else if (condition_2) { statement_2; } else if (condition_n) { statement_n; } else { statement_last; }
In the case of multiple conditions only the first logical condition which evaluates to true will be executed. To execute multiple statements, group them within a block statement ({ ... }
) . In general, it's good practice to always use block statements, especially when nesting if
if (condition) { statement_1_runs_if_condition_is_true; statement_2_runs_if_condition_is_true; } else { statement_3_runs_if_condition_is_false; statement_4_runs_if_condition_is_false; }
if (x = y) { /* statements here */ }
If you need to use an assignment in a conditional expression, a common practice is to put additional parentheses around the assignment. For example:
if ((x = y)) { /* statements here */ }
Falsy values
The following values evaluate to false (also known as Falsy values):
- the empty string (
All other values, including all objects, evaluate to true when passed to a conditional statement.
Do not confuse the primitive boolean values true
and false
with the true and false values of the Boolean
object. For example:
var b = new Boolean(false); if (b) // this condition evaluates to true if (b == true) // this condition evaluates to false
In the following example, the function checkData
returns true
if the number of characters in a Text
object is three; otherwise, it displays an alert and returns false
function checkData() { if (document.form1.threeChar.value.length == 3) { return true; } else { alert("Enter exactly three characters. " + document.form1.threeChar.value + " is not valid."); return false; } }
A switch
statement allows a program to evaluate an expression and attempt to match the expression's value to a case label. If a match is found, the program executes the associated statement. A switch
statement looks as follows:
switch (expression) { case label_1: statements_1 [break;] case label_2: statements_2 [break;] ... default: statements_def [break;] }
The program first looks for a case
clause with a label matching the value of expression and then transfers control to that clause, executing the associated statements. If no matching label is found, the program looks for the optional default
clause, and if found, transfers control to that clause, executing the associated statements. If no default
clause is found, the program continues execution at the statement following the end of switch
. By convention, the default
clause is the last clause, but it does not need to be so.
The optional break
statement associated with each case
clause ensures that the program breaks out of switch
once the matched statement is executed and continues execution at the statement following switch. If break
is omitted, the program continues execution at the next statement in the switch
In the following example, if fruittype
evaluates to "Bananas", the program matches the value with case "Bananas" and executes the associated statement. When break
is encountered, the program terminates switch
and executes the statement following switch
. If break
were omitted, the statement for case "Cherries" would also be executed.
switch (fruittype) { case "Oranges": console.log("Oranges are $0.59 a pound."); break; case "Apples": console.log("Apples are $0.32 a pound."); break; case "Bananas": console.log("Bananas are $0.48 a pound."); break; case "Cherries": console.log("Cherries are $3.00 a pound."); break; case "Mangoes": console.log("Mangoes are $0.56 a pound."); break; case "Papayas": console.log("Mangoes and papayas are $2.79 a pound."); break; default: console.log("Sorry, we are out of " + fruittype + "."); } console.log("Is there anything else you'd like?");
Exception handling statements
You can throw exceptions using the throw
statement and handle them using the try...catch
Exception types
Just about any object can be thrown in JavaScript. Nevertheless, not all thrown objects are created equal. While it is fairly common to throw numbers or strings as errors it is frequently more effective to use one of the exception types specifically created for this purpose:
Use the throw
statement to throw an exception. When you throw an exception, you specify the expression containing the value to be thrown:
throw expression;
You may throw any expression, not just expressions of a specific type. The following code throws several exceptions of varying types:
throw "Error2"; // String type throw 42; // Number type throw true; // Boolean type throw {toString: function() { return "I'm an object!"; } };
block. The following example creates an object myUserException
of type UserException
and uses it in a throw statement.// Create an object type UserException function UserException(message) { this.message = message; this.name = "UserException"; } // Make the exception convert to a pretty string when used as a string // (e.g. by the error console) UserException.prototype.toString = function() { return this.name + ': "' + this.message + '"'; } // Create an instance of the object type and throw it throw new UserException("Value too high");
The try...catch
statement marks a block of statements to try, and specifies one or more responses should an exception be thrown. If an exception is thrown, the try...catch
statement catches it.
The try...catch
statement consists of a try
block, which contains one or more statements, and one or more catch
blocks, containing statements that specify what to do if an exception is thrown in the try
block. That is, you want the try
block to succeed, and if it does not succeed, you want control to pass to the catch
block. If any statement within the try
block (or in a function called from within the try
block) throws an exception, control immediately shifts to the catch
block. If no exception is thrown in the try
block, the catch
block is skipped. The finally
block executes after the try
and catch
blocks execute but before the statements following the try...catch
The following example uses a try...catch
statement. The example calls a function that retrieves a month name from an array based on the value passed to the function. If the value does not correspond to a month number (1-12), an exception is thrown with the value "InvalidMonthNo"
and the statements in the catch
block set the monthName
variable to unknown
function getMonthName(mo) { mo = mo - 1; // Adjust month number for array index (1 = Jan, 12 = Dec) var months = ["Jan","Feb","Mar","Apr","May","Jun","Jul", "Aug","Sep","Oct","Nov","Dec"]; if (months[mo]) { return months[mo]; } else { throw "InvalidMonthNo"; //throw keyword is used here } } try { // statements to try monthName = getMonthName(myMonth); // function could throw exception } catch (e) { monthName = "unknown"; logMyErrors(e); // pass exception object to error handler -> your own function }
The catch
You can use a catch
block to handle all exceptions that may be generated in the try
catch (catchID) {
The catch
block specifies an identifier (catchID
in the preceding syntax) that holds the value specified by the throw
statement; you can use this identifier to get information about the exception that was thrown. JavaScript creates this identifier when the catch
block is entered; the identifier lasts only for the duration of the catch
block; after the catch
block finishes executing, the identifier is no longer available.
For example, the following code throws an exception. When the exception occurs, control transfers to the catch
try { throw "myException"; // generates an exception } catch (e) { // statements to handle any exceptions logMyErrors(e); // pass exception object to error handler }
The finally
The finally
block contains statements to execute after the try
and catch
blocks execute but before the statements following the try...catch
statement. The finally
block executes whether or not an exception is thrown. If an exception is thrown, the statements in the finally
block execute even if no catch
block handles the exception.
You can use the finally
block to make your script fail gracefully when an exception occurs; for example, you may need to release a resource that your script has tied up. The following example opens a file and then executes statements that use the file (server-side JavaScript allows you to access files). If an exception is thrown while the file is open, the finally
block closes the file before the script fails.
openMyFile(); try { writeMyFile(theData); //This may throw a error } catch(e) { handleError(e); // If we got a error we handle it } finally { closeMyFile(); // always close the resource }
If the finally
block returns a value, this value becomes the return value of the entire try-catch-finally
production, regardless of any return
statements in the try
and catch
function f() { try { console.log(0); throw "bogus"; } catch(e) { console.log(1); return true; // this return statement is suspended // until finally block has completed console.log(2); // not reachable } finally { console.log(3); return false; // overwrites the previous "return" console.log(4); // not reachable } // "return false" is executed now console.log(5); // not reachable } f(); // console 0, 1, 3; returns false
Overwriting of return values by the finally
block also applies to exceptions thrown or re-thrown inside of the catch
function f() { try { throw "bogus"; } catch(e) { console.log('caught inner "bogus"'); throw e; // this throw statement is suspended until // finally block has completed } finally { return false; // overwrites the previous "throw" } // "return false" is executed now } try { f(); } catch(e) { // this is never reached because the throw inside // the catch is overwritten // by the return in finally console.log('caught outer "bogus"'); } // OUTPUT // caught inner "bogus"
Nesting try...catch statements
You can nest one or more try...catch
statements. If an inner try...catch
statement does not have a catch
block, the enclosing try...catch
statement's catch
block is checked for a match.
Utilizing Error
Depending on the type of error, you may be able to use the 'name' and 'message' properties to get a more refined message. 'name' provides the general class of Error (e.g., 'DOMException' or 'Error'), while 'message' generally provides a more succinct message than one would get by converting the error object to a string.
If you are throwing your own exceptions, in order to take advantage of these properties (such as if your catch block doesn't discriminate between your own exceptions and system ones), you can use the Error constructor. For example:
function doSomethingErrorProne () { if (ourCodeMakesAMistake()) { throw (new Error('The message')); } else { doSomethingToGetAJavascriptError(); } } .... try { doSomethingErrorProne(); } catch (e) { console.log(e.name); // logs 'Error' console.log(e.message); // logs 'The message' or a JavaScript error message) }
Starting with ECMAScript2015, JavaScript gains support for Promise
objects allowing you to control the flow of deferred and asynchronous operations.
A Promise
is in one of these states:
- pending: initial state, not fulfilled or rejected.
- fulfilled: successful operation
- rejected: failed operation.
- settled: the Promise is either fulfilled or rejected, but not pending.
Loading an image with XHR
A simple example using Promise
and XMLHttpRequest
to load an image is available at the MDN GitHub promise-test repository. You can also see it in action. Each step is commented and allows you to follow the Promise and XHR architecture closely. Here is the uncommented version, showing the Promise
flow so that you can get an idea:
function imgLoad(url) { return new Promise(function(resolve, reject) { var request = new XMLHttpRequest(); request.open('GET', url); request.responseType = 'blob'; request.onload = function() { if (request.status === 200) { resolve(request.response); } else { reject(Error('Image didn\'t load successfully; error code:' + request.statusText)); } }; request.onerror = function() { reject(Error('There was a network error.')); }; request.send(); }); }
For more detailed information, see the Promise
reference page.
© 2016 Mozilla Contributors
Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License v2.5 or later.

subset: commoncrawl


text:
A world parliament allows the poor to speak for themselves.
By George Monbiot. Published in the Guardian 24th April 2007
It was first proposed (as far as I can discover) in 1842, by Alfred Tennyson(1). Since then the idea has broken the surface and sunk again at least a dozen times. But this time it could start to swim. The demand for a world parliament is at last acquiring some serious political muscle.
The Campaign for a UN Parliamentary Assembly is being launched this week in five continents(2). It is backed by nearly 400 MPs from 70 countries, a long and eclectic list of artists and intellectuals (among them Gunter Grass, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Alfred Brendel and Arthur C Clarke), several government ministers and party leaders (including our own Ming Campbell), six former foreign secretaries, the President of the PanAfrican Parliament and a former UN Secretary-General. After 160 years of ridicule, Tennyson's crazy idea is beginning to look plausible.
Those of us who want a world parliament are often accused of trying to invent a system of global governance. But there is already a system of global governance. The UN Security Council, the World Bank, the IMF and the World Trade Organisation make decisions which affect us all. They do so without our consent. The best that can be said for any of them is that they operate by means of photocopy democracy. We vote for an MP, and this vote is then deemed to communicate our support for his party. That is then presumed to legitimise the government, which in turn assumes the right to appoint a prime minister. He then delegates ambassadors and bureaucrats to represent us globally, and their decisions are deemed to express our wishes. With every presumed transfer of democratic consent, the imprint of our cross on the ballot paper becomes fainter. Though the international bodies operate in our name, we have no more influence over them than the people of Burma have over the military junta. Global governance is a tyranny speaking the language of democracy.
The purpose of a world parliament is to hold the international bodies to account. It is not a panacea. It will not turn the IMF or the UN Security Council into democratic bodies: as they are controlled by the veto powers of their major shareholder and permanent members, nothing but abolition and reconstruction could do so. But it does have the potential to impose a check on them. It wields no army, no police force, no weapons, no ready-made powers. Instead, it possesses something that none of the other global bodies have: legitimacy. One of the surprising lessons of history is that undemocratic organisations are often obliged to grant powers to democratic ones, to try acquire some retrospective legitimacy. Why else was the European parliament established? Why else have its powers been enhanced, despite the centralising tendencies of the European Council?
Those who claim, like the British eurosceptics, that regional or global decision-making is unnecessary are living in a world of make-believe. No political issue now stops at the national border. All the most important forces – climate change, terrorism, state aggression, trade, flows of money, demographic pressures, the depletion of resources – can be addressed only at the global level. The question is not whether global decisions need to be made. The question is how to ensure that they are made democratically. Is there any valid answer other than direct representation?
Global democracy has a special problem: the scale on which it must operate. The bigger the electorate, the less democratic a parliamentary body will be. True democracy could exist only in the village, where representatives are subject to constant oversight by their electorate. But an imperfect system is better than no system at all. Even the most pig-headed Eurosceptics would have trouble arguing that the European Union would be better off without a parliament.
What the scale of these supranational bodies demands is a more participatory democracy than any we have been offered so far. The recent fiasco surrounding the European constitution is a useful demonstration of how not to do it. First the people of Europe were presented with a meaningless question which makes a mockery of democracy. "Here is a document containing hundreds of proposals. Some of them will be good for you, others will be bad for you. You must agree to all of them or none of them. If you agree (and we will keep asking until you do), we will deem that you have consented to every measure it contains." When this pantomime of managed consent fails, the managers announce – as Tony Blair did last week(3) – that a referendum is, after all, unnecessary: we will have a new constitution whether we want one or not, and it will be written and approved on our behalf. Nothing could be better calculated to destroy our remaining enthusiasm for Europe.
The European Union (like the United Kingdom) needs a new constitution: we need to know what the limits of its new powers are and whether or not it is breaching them. And we should all have the opportunity to vote for or against it. But to ask us to give a single answer to several hundred conflicting questions is to treat us like idiots, the dumb cattle of democracy whose bodies are required to lend this institution legitimacy but whose minds are not. The process would be meaningful only if we could vote on every clause. This means that ballot papers must be complicated and very long. But that is the cost of democracy: it requires some effort on our part. A world parliament will work only if we are required to do more than simply place a cross on a piece of paper every five years.
There are some aspects of the new campaign with which I disagree. The parliamentary assembly it proposes would initially consist of members of national parliaments(4). It would gradually move towards direct representation. I accept that this is the quickest and easiest means of launching a global assembly, but it seems to me that this path would damage its legitimacy. If someone proposed that our national parliament be composed of a delegated committee of local councillors we would be horrified. Why should we wish national parliamentarians – who know little of global politics and who can engage with them only as a hobby – to represent us at the international level? It looks like another form of photocopy democracy.
But I am splitting hairs: if this is the only realistic means of launching a global assembly which will one day be elected directly, it would be stupid to stand in the way. What jumps out as you read the list of signatories is the number of African names: there is a growing recognition in Africa that a world parliament offers the best chance – perhaps the only chance – that the unmediated concerns of the poor will reach the ears of the rich. A global parliament ensures that the voices of the poor world can no longer be ventriloquised by Bob Geldof and Bono and the leaders of the G8: the people will be able to speak for themselves.
For this reason reactionaries all over the world will oppose the new campaign. And the rest of us should support it.
1. In his poem Locksley Hall.
2. http://www.uno-komitee.de/en/
3. George Parker, 20th April 2007. Blair aims to bow out as EU champion. Financial Times.
4. Andreas Bummel, May 2005. Developing International Democracy. Horizonte Verlag GmbH, Stuttgart. http://www.uno-komitee.de/en/documents/unpa-paper.pdf


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text:
Time to show our Winner and Top Picks for #124
First a reminder on our sponsor:
and here is the sketch that we all played with:
So now on to our winner:
Congrads Lorraine!!!! Please contact us thru facebook (or @ firstname.lastname@example.com) so we can tell you how to claim your prize!!
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Thank you all for playing along and we hope to see you playing along again!!
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text:
Sept. 19, 2019
Buyer beware: How Libra differs from Bitcoin
Facebook, the largest social network in the world, stunned the world earlier this year with the announcement of its own cryptocurrency, Libra.
The launch has raised questions about the difference between Libra and existing cryptocurrencies, as well as the implications of private companies competing with sovereign countries in issuing currencies.
Unlike Bitcoin, which has neither an owner nor a controlling body, Libra will be governed by a Swiss foundation comprised of several members that are well-established brands, including Uber, Visa and PayPal.
Read more: Facebook's Libra: it's not the 'crypto' that's the issue, it's the organisation behind it
Libra operates within a much more controlled environment relative to many other cryptos like Bitcoin and Ether. It also doesn't run on a blockchain.
Instead, the bookkeeping of Libra transactions is bestowed upon a set of trusted computing nodes controlled by the members of the Libra foundation. In contrast, Bitcoin is a free-for-all where anybody can join the group of computers that verify transactions.
This difference in governance structure has wide-ranging implications for the economic gains and possible risks society faces from a possible widespread adoption of new currencies like Libra.
How to grow?
A fundamental issue most fintech companies face today is scalability. The Visa network can authorize up to 65,000 transactions per second, while Bitcoin typically processes a few hundred thousand a day.
Technically, it's possible to expand the Bitcoin network to a commercially viable scale, but due to the lack of a governing body, several attempts to increase capacity have ended up in endless debates, fights within the community and different camps going their own ways. It's resulted in the creation of offspring currencies such as BitcoinGold and BitcoinCash.
Libra overcomes these struggles by a well-defined governance structure where necessary technical adaptations can be efficiently decided upon in an organized manner.
But Libra decision-makers may be tempted to put their own best interests ahead of the consumers' benefit. Recent revelations about the lack of privacy protections in place at the companies on Libra's foundation raise concerns about how much trust users can place in Libra when they're deciding whether to open up their financial transactions to the big internet companies on Libra's board.
Intimate knowledge of people's purchases, wealth and shopping behaviour has incredible value for advertising and resale to other companies. It will be up to the consortium members to credibly convince the public that they will refrain from monetizing this huge wealth of data that they sit upon.
Guard against fraud
In our traditional financial system, laws and regulators watch over privacy as well as access to the financial system. Laws not only provide privacy protections, they also guard against fraud and ensure that citizens can participate on a level playing field.
Rules are created in a democratic process. Banks in western countries cannot easily ban citizens from basic financial services, which are important to join the workforce and get established in society.
But currencies issued by private companies do not face the same scrutiny. What if Facebook decides you cannot have Libra because you posted a critical article on the internet? Your legal options would be limited.
Bitcoin's chaotic governance structure has an advantage here. Without a governing body, there is nobody who can lock anybody else out of the system. While this approach ensures equal access, however, it also invites criminals to use Bitcoin for illicit purposes.
Centuries ago, promissory notes emerged in China and were brought to Europe by Marco Polo as an early banking service that allowed merchants to travel without large sums of money due to fear they'd be robbed. Banks offered safekeeping for money, allowing the merchant to store the funds and withdraw them whenever and wherever needed.
Today, banks still spend billions of dollars on security to protect their clients' savings. Many credit-card companies provide protection against fraudulent transactions.
No such protections exist for cryptocurrencies. No recourse is possible should a hacker gain access to your wallet or if your crypto becomes worthless. With cryptocurrencies, users must once again worry about safekeeping.
Deposit insurance
Often under-appreciated, but of great importance, is government-provided deposit insurance that provides a second layer of security, protecting depositors against the default of the bank.
Unlike Bitcoin, where prices fluctuate dramatically within a few days, Libra's value is tied to a basket of international currencies. As users buy Libra with fiat currency, including Canadian dollars, the Libra foundation will take these dollars and invest them in safe securities.
Because Libra is backed with real and stable financial assets, the value of Libra will then also be stable. While this approach sounds great at a first glance, several problems exist that have plagued banking for centuries.
Temptations will arise to invest some of the money in riskier securities for a higher return. What if people, for some reason or another, doubt that the assets are there or think that the assets lost value? Long lines of depositors wanting to withdraw their funds from a bank that they rightfully or wrongfully believe to be troubled have been observed ever since the inception of banks.
Such bank runs are often self-fulfilling, and Libra is not immune to this problem. When users want to cash out, Libra would have to sell their assets at a large scale, causing the price of these very assets to fall and hence end up with insufficient funds to pay all investors.
As users realize what is happening, more will want to cash out, speeding up the vicious circle.
Would any government come to the rescue?
Unlike with banks, it's unclear how possible losses will be covered and how they might be shared among users. Some U.S. money market funds that are in a similar business — investing client's money in safe short-term assets — found themselves in similar trouble in the 2008 financial crisis and were bailed out by the government.
With Libra, it's unclear which government would come to the rescue, if any.
All the money that users will put into Libra will be missed in the traditional banking system, where banks can put deposits to good use by providing loans to productive companies that generate value and employment. The economic consequences therefore could be far-reaching.
The foundation for Libra's model and possible success is the banking sector's shortcomings and inefficiencies.
While Libra might not offer many advantages to users in Western countries, it will open access to financial services for millions of people around the world without bank accounts.
Cross-border payments are in the current system ridiculously expensive and slow. Traditional banking often seems bureaucratic and technologically outdated. All these issues could be fixed by banks, but it will take outside pressure of new fintech startups to get it done.


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Most people realize that their thyroid is important for controlling their metabolism and body weight.
But did you know that depression, heart disease, chronic fatigue, fibromyalgia, PMS (premenstrual syndrome), menopausal symptoms, muscle and joint pains, irritable bowel syndrome, or autoimmune disease could actually indicate a problem with your thyroid?
The classic signs of a sluggish thyroid gland include weight gain, lethargy, poor quality hair and nails, hair loss, dry skin, fatigue, cold hands and feet, and constipation — and these symptoms are relatively well known.
However, some of the conditions you might not associate with your thyroid include:
•High cholesterol
•Irregular menstruation
•Low libido
•Gum disease
•Fluid retention
•Skin conditions such as acne and exzema
•Memory problems
•Poor stamina
And there are, in fact, many more conditions that can be associated with poor thyroid function. Your thyroid plays a part in nearly every physiological process. When it is out of balance, so are you. This is why it is so important to understand how your thyroid gland works and what can cause it to run amok.
The sad fact is, half of all people with hypothyroidism are never diagnosed. And of those who are diagnosed, many are inadequately treated, resulting in partial recovery at best.
Hypothyroidism: The Hidden Epidemic
Hypothyroidism simply means you have a sluggish or underactive thyroid, which is producing less than adequate amounts of thyroid hormone.
"Subclinical" hypothyroidism means you have no obvious symptoms and only slightly abnormal lab tests. I will be discussing these tests much more as we go on since they are a source of great confusion for patients, as well as for many health practitioners.
Thyroid problems have unfortunately become quite common.
The same lifestyle factors contributing to high rates of obesity, cancer and diabetes are wreaking havoc on your thyroid… sugar, processed foods, stress, environmental toxins, and lack of exercise are heavy contributors.
More than 10 percent of the general population in the United States, and 20 percent of women over the age of 60, have subclinical hypothyroidism. But only a small percentage of these people are being treated.
Why is that?
Much of it has to do with misinterpretation and misunderstanding of lab tests, particularly TSH (thyroid stimulating hormone). Most physicians believe that if your TSH value is within the range of "normal," your thyroid is fine. But more and more physicians are discovering that the TSH value is grossly unreliable for diagnosing hypothyroidism.
And the TSH range for "normal" keeps changing!
In an effort to improve diagnosis of thyroid disease, in 2003 the American Association of Clinical Endocrinologists (AACE) revised the "normal" TSH range as 0.3 to 3.04. The previous range was defined as 0.5 and 5.0, which red-flagged only the most glaring hypothyroidism cases.
However, the new range is still not wholly reliable as the sole indicator of a sulky thyroid gland. You simply cannot identify one TSH value that is "normal" for every person, regardless of age, health, or other factors.
Having said that though most physicians who carefully follow this condition recognize that any TSH value greater than 1.5 could be a strong indication that an underactive thyroid is present.
Your TSH value is only part of the story, and your symptoms, physical findings, genetics, lifestyle and health history are also important considerations. Only when physicians learn to treat the patient and not the lab test will they begin to make headway against thyroid disease.
Understanding How Your Thyroid Works is Step One:-
The thyroid gland is in the front of your neck and is part of your endocrine, or hormonal, system. It produces the master metabolism hormones that control every function in your body[3]. Thyroid hormones interact with all your other hormones including insulin, cortisol, and sex hormones like estrogen, progesterone, and testosterone.
The fact that these hormones are all tied together and in constant communication explains why an unhappy thyroid is associated with so many widespread symptoms and diseases.
This small gland produces two major thyroid hormones: T4 and T3. About 90 percent of the hormone produced by the gland is in the form of T4, the inactive form. Your liver converts this T4 into T3, the active form, with the help of an enzyme.
Your thyroid also produces T2, yet another hormone, which currently is the least understood component of thyroid function and the subject of much ongoing study.
Thyroid hormones work in a feedback loop with your brain — particularly your pituitary and hypothalamus — in regulating the release of thyroid hormone. Your pituitary makes TRH (thyroid releasing hormone), and your hypothalamus makes TSH. If everything is working properly, you will make what you need and you'll have the proper amounts of T3 and T4.
Those two hormones — T3 and T4 — are what control the metabolism of every cell in your body. But their delicate balance can be disrupted by nutritional imbalances, toxins, allergens, infections and stress.
If your T3 is inadequate, either by insufficient production or not converting properly from T4, your whole system suffers.
You see, T3 is critically important because it tells the nucleus of your cells to send messages to your DNA to crank up your metabolism by burning fat. That is why T3 lowers cholesterol levels, regrows hair, and helps keep you lean.
How to Know if You are Hypothyroid:-
Identifying hypothyroidism and its cause is tricky business. Many of the symptoms overlap with other disorders, and many are vague. Physicians often miss a thyroid problem since they rely on just a few traditional tests, so other clues to the problem go undetected.
But you can provide the missing clues!
The more vigilant you can be in assessing your own symptoms and risk factors and presenting the complete picture to your physician in an organized way, the easier it will be for your physician to help you.
Sometimes people with hypothyroidism have significant fatigue or sluggishness, especially in the morning. You may have hoarseness for no apparent reason. Often hypothyroid people are slow to warm up, even in a sauna, and don't sweat with mild exercise. Low mood and depression are common.
Sluggish bowels and constipation are major clues, especially if you already get adequate water and fiber.
Are the upper outer third of your eyebrows thin or missing? This is sometimes an indication of low thyroid. Chronic recurrent infections are also seen because thyroid function is important for your immune system.
Another telltale sign of hypothyroidism is a low basal body temperature (BBT), less than 97.6 degrees F averaged over a minimum of 3 days. It is best to obtain a BBT thermometer to assess this.
How about your family history? Do you have close relatives with thyroid issues?
Some of the family history that suggests you could have a higher risk for hypothyroidism includes:
•High or low thyroid function
•Prematurely gray hair
•Autoimmune diseases (rheumatoid arthritis, lupus, sarcoidosis, Sjogren's, etc.)
•Crohn's disease or ulcerative colitis
•Multiple sclerosis (MS)
•Elevated cholesterol levels
It might be useful to take an online thyroid assessment quiz, as a way to get started. Mary Shomon has a good one. Some of the classic symptoms are mentioned above, but there are many more — too many to list here.
If you suspect you might be hypothyroid, you should see a healthcare provider who can evaluate this, including ordering the basic lab tests for thyroid function.
Laboratory Testing:-
Even though lab tests are not the end-all, be-all for diagnosing a thyroid problem, they are a valuable part of the overall diagnostic process. The key is to look at the whole picture.
New studies suggest a very high incidence of borderline hypothyroidism in Westerners. Many cases are subclinical, and even "sublaboratory," not showing up at all in standard laboratory measurements.
Coexistent subclinical hypothyroidism often triggers or worsens other chronic diseases, such as the autoimmune diseases, so the thyroid should be addressed with any chronic disease.
Many physicians will order only one test — a TSH level. This is a grossly inadequate and relatively meaningless test by itself, as well as a waste of your money. It would be like saying you know your water is pure because it tastes fine.
Dr. Mercola recommends the following panel of laboratory tests if you want to get the best picture of what your thyroid is doing:–
•TSH — the high-sensitivity version. This is the BEST test. But beware most all of the "normal" ranges are simply dead wrong. The ideal level for TSH is between 1 and 1.5 mIU/L (milli-international units per liter)
•Free T4 and Free T3. The normal level of free T4 is between 0.9 and 1.8 ng/dl (nanograms per deciliter). T3 should be between 240 and 450 pg/dl (picograms per deciliter).
•Thyroid antibodies, including thyroid peroxidase antibodies and anti-thyroglobulin antibodies. This measure helps determine if your body is attacking your thyroid, overreacting to its own tissues (ie, autoimmune reactions). Physicians nearly always leave this test out.
•For more difficult cases TRH can be measured (thyroid releasing hormone) using the TRH stimulation test. TRH helps identify hypothyroidism that's caused by inadequacy of the pituitary gland.
Other tests that might be indicated for more complex cases are a thyroid scan, fine-needle aspiration, and thyroid ultrasound. But these are specialized tests that your physician will use only in a small number of cases, in special situations.
Even if all your lab tests are "normal," if you have multiple thyroid symptoms, you still could have subclinical hypothyroidism.
Keeping Your Thyroid Healthy in a Toxic World:-
Now that you have some understanding of the importance of your thyroid and how it works, let's take a look at the factors that can readily cause problems with your thyroid gland.
Your lifestyle choices dictate, to a great degree, how well your thyroid will function.
If you follow my plan to eat for your nutritional type[5], and my nutritional plan your metabolism will be more efficient, and your thyroid will have an easier time keeping everything in check. Eating for your type will normalize your blood sugar and lipid levels and enhance your immune system, so that your thyroid will have fewer obstacles to overcome.
Eliminate junk food, processed food, artificial sweeteners, trans fats, and anything with chemical ingredients. Eat whole, unprocessed foods, and choose as many organics as possible.
Gluten and Other Food Sensitivities:-
Gluten and food sensitivities are among the most common causes of thyroid dysfunction because they cause inflammation.
Gluten causes autoimmune responses in many people and can be responsible for Hashimoto's thyroiditis, a common autoimmune thyroid condition. Approximately 30 percent of the people with Hashimoto's thyroiditis have an autoimmune reaction to gluten, and it usually goes unrecognized.
How this works is, gluten can cause your gastrointestinal system to malfunction, so foods you eat aren't completely digested (aka Leaky Gut Syndrome ). These food particles can then be absorbed into your bloodstream where your body misidentifies them as antigens — substances that shouldn't be there — our body then produces antibodies against them.
These antigens are similar to molecules in your thyroid gland. So your body accidentally attacks your thyroid. This is known as an autoimmune reaction or one in which your body actually attacks itself.
Testing can be done for gluten and other food sensitivities, which involves measuring your IgG and IgA antibodies.
Soy :-
Another food that is bad for your thyroid is soy[9]. Soy is NOT the health food the agricultural and food companies would have you believe.
Soy is high in isoflavones (or goitrogens), which are damaging to your thyroid gland. Thousands of studies now link soy foods to malnutrition, digestive stress, immune system weakness, cognitive decline, reproductive disorders, infertility and a host of other problems — in addition to damaging your thyroid.
Properly fermented organic soy products such as natto, miso, and tempeh are fine — it's the unfermented soy products that you should stay away from.
Coconut Oil:-
Coconut oil is one of the best foods you can eat for your thyroid. Coconut oil is a saturated fat comprised of medium chain triglycerides (MCTs), which are known to increase metabolism and promote weight loss.
Coconut oil is very stable (shelf life of 3 to 5 years at room temperature), so your body is much less burdened with oxidative stress than it is from many other vegetable oils. And coconut oil does not interfere with T4 to T3 conversion the way other oils can.
Iodine is a key component of thyroid hormone. In fact, the names of the different forms of thyroid hormone reflect the number of iodine molecules attached — T4 has four attached iodine molecules, and T3 has three — showing what an important part iodine plays in thyroid biochemistry.
If you aren't getting enough iodine in your diet (and most Americans don't), no matter how healthy your thyroid gland is, it won't have the raw materials to make enough thyroid hormone.
Chlorine, fluorine and bromine are also culprits in thyroid function, and since they are halides like iodine, they compete for your iodine receptors.
If you are exposed to a lot of bromine, you will not hold on to the iodine you need. Bromine is present in many places in your everyday world — plastics, pesticides, hot tub treatments, fire retardants, some flours and bakery goods, and even some soft drinks. I have written a special article about bromine and its influence on your thyroid gland and I encourage you to read it.
Also make sure the water you drink is filtered. Fluoride is particularly damaging to your thyroid gland[14]. Not all water filters remove fluoride, so make sure the one you have does.
Stress and Adrenal Function:-
Stress is one of the worst thyroid offenders. Your thyroid function is intimately tied to your adrenal function, which is intimately affected by how you handle stress.
Many of us are under chronic stress, which results in increased adrenalin and cortisol levels, and elevated cortisol has a negative impact on thyroid function. Thyroid hormone levels drop during stress, while you actually need more thyroid hormones during stressful times.
When stress becomes chronic, the flood of stress chemicals (adrenalin and cortisol) produced by your adrenal glands interferes with thyroid hormones and can contribute to obesity, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, unstable blood sugar, and more.
A prolonged stress response can lead to adrenal exhaustion (also known as adrenal fatigue), which is often found alongside thyroid disease.
Environmental toxins place additional stress on your body. Pollutants such as petrochemicals, organochlorines, pesticides and chemical food additives negatively affect thyroid function.
One of the best destressors is exercise, which is why it is so beneficial for your thyroid.
Exercise directly stimulates your thyroid gland to secrete more thyroid hormone. Exercise also increases the sensitivity of all your tissues to thyroid hormone. It is even thought that many of the health benefits of exercise stem directly from improved thyroid function.
Even something as simple as a 30-minute walk is a great form of exercise, and all you need is a good pair of walking shoes. Don't forget to add strength training to your exercise routine, because increasing your muscle mass helps raise your metabolic rate.
Also make sure you are getting enough sleep. Inadequate sleep contributes to stress and prevents your body from regenerating fully.
Finally, one excellent way to reduce stress is with an energy psychology tool such as the Meridian Tapping Technique (MTT). More and more people are practicing MTT and experiencing amazing results.
Treatment Options for a Sluggish Thyroid:-
Here are some suggestions that can be used for general support of your thyroid, as well as treating an underperforming one:
•Eat plenty of sea vegetables such as seaweed, which are rich in minerals and iodine (hijiki, wakame, arame, dulse, nori, and kombu). This is probably the most ideal form of iodine supplementation as it is also loaded with many other beneficial nutrients.
•Eat Brazil nuts, which are rich in selenium.
•Get plenty of sunlight to optimize your vitamin D levels; if you live where sunlight is limited, use vitamin D3 supplementation.
•Eat foods rich in vitamin A, such as dandelion greens, carrots, spinach, kale, Swiss chard, collard greens, and sweet potatoes.
•Make sure you are eating enough omega-3 fatty acids.
•Use pure, organic coconut oil in your cooking — it's great for stir fries and sautéing many different meats and vegetables.
•Filter your drinking water and your bathing water.
•Filter your air, since it is one of the ways you take in environmental pollutants.
•Use an infrared sauna to help your body combat infections and detoxify from petrochemicals, metals, PCBs, pesticides and mercury.
•Taking chlorella is another excellent detoxification aid.
•Take active steps to minimize your stress … relaxation, meditation, hot soaks, EFT, whatever works for you.
•Exercise, exercise, exercise!
Thyroid Hormone Replacement
If you know your thyroid function is poor, despite making the supportive lifestyle changes already discussed, then it might be time to look at thyroid supplementation.
Taking thyroid hormone should be done only after you have ruled out other conditions that could be causing the thyroid dysfunction such as adrenal fatigue, gluten or other food allergies, hormonal imbalance, etc. It is always best to get your thyroid working again by treating the underlying cause, as opposed to taking an external source of thyroid hormone.
But sometimes supplementation is necessary.
Conventional pharmaceutical treatment usually consists of replacing only T4 in the form of Synthroid, Levoxyl, Levothyroid, Unithroid, and levothyroxine, leaving your body to convert this to T3.
However, research has shown that a combination of T4 and T3 is often more effective than T4 alone. The conversion to T3 can be hampered by nutritional deficiencies such as low selenium, inadequate omega-3 fatty acids, low zinc, chemicals from the environment, or by stress.
Oftentimes, taking T4 alone will result in only partial improvement.
Taking T3 alone is usually too stimulating. The drug Cytomel is a very short-acting form of T3 that can cause palpitations, anxiety, irritability and insomnia. I never recommend this drug.
By far, the better approach is combined T4 and T3 therapy.
Natural thyroid products, like ArmourThyroid are a combination of T4, T3 and T2 made from desiccated, or dried, porcine thyroid. Armour Thyroid has gotten a bad rap over the years, perceived by physicians to be unstable and unreliable in terms of dosage. However, many improvements have been made in the product, making it a safe and effective option for treating hypothyroidism today.
In fact, a study done ten years ago clearly demonstrated that patients with hypothyroidsim showed greater improvements in mood and brain function if they received treatment with Armour Thyroid than if they received Synthroid.
The optimal dose for Armour Thyroid ranges from 15 to 180 milligrams, depending on the individual. You will need a prescription.
Once on thyroid replacement, you will not necessarily need to take it for the rest of your life, which is a common misconception. Once all the factors that have led to your thyroid dysfunction have been corrected, you may be able to reduce or discontinue the thyroid hormone replacement.
Once on thyroid hormone replacement, I recommend you monitor your progress by paying attention to how you feel, in addition to regular lab studies.
You can also routinely check your basal body temperature. If you are on the correct dose, your BBT should be about 98.6 degrees F.
If you begin to feel symptoms such as anxiety, palpitations, diarrhea, high blood pressure, or a resting pulse of more than 80 beats per minute, your dose is likely too high as these are symptoms of hyperthyroidism, and you should let your physician know immediately.
Final Thoughts
A thyroid problem is no different than any other chronic illness — you must address the underlying issues if you hope to correct the problem. The path to wellness may involve a variety of twists and turns before you find what works for you.
But hang in there.
If you approach it from a comprehensive, wholistic perspective, you will find in time that all of the little steps you take will ultimately result in your feeling much better than you could have ever imagined.
Related Links:
What is Thyroid-Related Fatigue?
Signs, Symptoms, and Solutions for Poor Thyroid Function
Fatigue, Dry Skin, Gaining Weight? See Why You'd Better Check Your Thyroid!


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In my last Post I dealt with the humanity of Jesus. The flip-side of this coin is the question about his Divinity. Was Jesus God? Often, this controversy is argued only from the pages of the New Testament. But what about Old Testament prophecies? Long before Jesus came into this world, the prophet Isaiah (again!) had
some remarkable things to say about this. Embedded in the same prophecy of the Virgin birth is this remarkable statement.
Then Isaiah said, "Hear now, you house of David! Is it not enough to try the patience of humans? Will you try the patience of my God also? 14 Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign: The virgin will conceive and give birth to a son, and will call him Immanuel. 15 He will be eating curds and honey when he knows enough to reject the wrong and choose the right (Isaiah 7:13-15)
'Immanuel' literally means 'God with us'. In other words, when this son of the virgin would be born, God would be with us. There is hardly a more succinct way to predict the Incarnation – God becoming Man, than with such a title. And just to make sure we did not misunderstand, two chapters later Isaiah explicitly predicts:
For to us a child is born,
to us a son is given,
and the government will be on his shoulders.
And he will be called
Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God,
Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace. (Isaiah 9:6)
Jewish Predictions in the Old Testament of the Divine Son
And so here in these short, but explicitly prophetic sentences, penned by Isaiah hundreds of years before Jesus was born, in Jewish scriptures (i.e. not from the hand of anything Christian), we see that there are three distinct features to this prophecy:
- the virgin birth,
- the sinless/moral life,
- as well as the incarnation of God becoming man in the birth of a son. The son would be Divine.
We have already seen how the predicted 'Christ' of the Old Testament Psalms would also be the 'son of God'. It is the cumulative effect of many different predictions, on different themes, yet all still converging on the person of Jesus of Nazareth that beggars naturalistic explanations.
One of Us by Joan Osborne
One of the most poignant songs dealing with this question of God becoming one of us was written a few years ago by Joan Osborne. What I find so intriguing is the song is not written from a posture of belief, but from one of asking some honest and human questions. At same dinner where I was exposed as a Santa fraud, I had asked a friend, Chelsea, to sing this song. The lyrics, with those haunting questions, are displayed along with the opening prologue from the Gospel of John. This Gospel deals with questions that are basic to all of us, giving answers that hearken to the fulfillment of Isaiah's prophecy of this very unique Coming Son..


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Pulse, one of our favorite newsreaders for iOS and Android, is now available on the web. You can now view your favorite websites in an elegant and colorful mosaic through your browser. The online app also syncs with the mobile versions.
The video above shows Pulse in action in the browser on a Windows tablet, so it's optimized for upcoming touchscreen tablet PCs. Even without using touch, the web version is a pleasure to use. The layout expands to the width of your browser, you can select various sizes for the grid, navigating through the app is quick (it scrolls infinitely), and each article is displayed well for easy reading. Unlike the iPad app, however, all of the content is displayed in one big grid, rather than separated with headings into categories (e.g., Top Tech stories or stories by website).
As with the mobile apps, you can add social streams (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Reddit, and even your Readability reading list), but they're not as obvious to find, so you have to search for the network you want to add. Also, while Google Reader integration is in the mobile apps, I don't see that option yet on the web version. You can, however, add it on your mobile app and have your news feeds show up on Pulse on the web.
Sign in or sign up via the link below.


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Bringing Geek Back: Q&A with Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger
by Dr. Ian Cutress on October 29, 2021 11:30 AM ESTOne of the overriding key themes of Pat Gelsinger's ten-month tenure at Intel has been the eponymous will to 'bring geek back' to the company, implying a return to Intel's competitive past which relied on the expertise of its engineers to develop market-leading products. During this time, Pat has showcased Intel's IDM 2.0 strategy, leveraging internal production, external production, and an update to Intel's foundry offering, making it a cornerstone of Intel's next decade of growth. The first major launch of this decade happened this week, at Intel's Innovation event, with the announcement of 12th Gen Core, as well as updates to Intel's software strategy up and down the company.
After the event, Intel invited several media and an analyst or two onto a group session with CEO Pat, along with CTO Greg Lavender, a recent new CTO hire coming from Pat's old stomping ground at VMWare. In light of the announcements made at Intel Innovation, as well as the financial quarterly results released just the week prior, and the state of the semiconductor supply globally, everyone had Intel at the forefront of their minds, ready to ask for details on Intel's plan. Each person got the chance to ask a single question in the 30-minute session, although with a couple of minutes at the end, I managed to ask a second.
Pat Gelsinger CEO |
Greg Lavender CTO |
The following is a tidied-up transcript.
Dan Hutchinson, VLSI Research: You've been talking a lot about IDM 2.0 – I like the concept. But what is it that makes it different from 'IDM 1.0' that elevates it above buzzword status? [I preface this] In the sense of the belief I've come to that 'IDM fabless'/fab-light concepts are really just distinctions with very little difference.
Pat Gelsinger: For us, when we talk about IDM 2.0, we talk about three legs. One is a recommitment to IDM 1.0, and Intel's design and manufacturing at scale. Second is the broad leveraging of the foundry ecosystem. Third, and most importantly, is becoming a foundry, and swinging the doors of Intel Fabs, our packaging, and our technology portfolio - being wide-open to engage with the industry to design on our platforms with our IP. It also involves opening up the x86 architecture, as well as all of the other IP blocks, graphics, IO, memory, and others. By adding second element, but most importantly the third element of that, to me is what makes IDM 2.0.
The other thing I'd add to that, Dan, is that I use this language inside and outside the company: IDM makes IFS better, and IFS makes IDM better. IFS meaning our Intel Foundry Services. In a quick example of both, for IDM, my foundry customers get to leverage all of the R&D and IP that I'm creating through my internal design. Normally foundries have to go create all of that, but Intel can leverage the 10s of billions of capital, many billions of R&D, and the most advanced components research on the planet. It's essentially for free to my foundry customers. It's an extraordinary asset. That includes making x86 and other design blocks available for foundry customers. At the same time, Foundry is driving us to do a better job in IDM. We're engaging with a third-party IP ecosystem more aggressively, and with the EDA tool vendors more aggressively. For instance, our engagement with Qualcomm - they're driving us to do a more aggressive optimization for power and performance, more than our more performance-centric product lines would be. So they're making IDM better by the engagement with IFS customers. Standardized PDKs, and other things. So, IDM and IFS, if this really gets rolling as I'm envisioning it to be, they're powerfully going to be reinforcing each other.
Timothy Prickett Morgan, The Next Platform: I'm trying to understand the new Aurora system: the original machine was supposed to be north of [an exaflop] and $500 million. Now it's two Exaflops, or in excess of two Exaflops, and you've got a $300 million write-off for federal systems coming in the fourth quarter. Is that a write-off of the original investment, or is Argonne getting the deal of the century on a two [exaflop] machine?
PG: [Since] the original concept of Aurora, we've had some redefinitions of the timelines and the specifications associated with the project efforts. Obviously some of those earlier dates when we first started talking about the Aurora project we've moved out and changed the timelines for a variety of reasons to get there. Some of those changes lead to the write-off that we're announcing right now. The way the contract is structured, part of it is that the moment that we deliver a certain thing, we will incur some of these write-offs simply from the accounting rules associated with it. As we start delivering it, some of those will likely get reversed next year as we start ramping up the yields of the products. So some of it just ends up being how we account for and how the contracts were structured.
On the two versus one Exaflop: largely it's PVC, you know, Ponte Vecchio. The core of the machine is outperforming the original contractual milestones. So when we set it up to have a certain number of processors, and you can go do the math of what two [Exaflop] is, we essentially overbuilt the number of sockets required to comfortably exceed one Exaflop. Now that PVC is coming in well ahead of those performance objectives for some of the workloads that are in the contract, we're now comfortably over two Exaflop. That's pretty exciting at that point - that we will go from one to two pretty fast.
But to me, the other thing that's really exciting in this space is our Zetta Initiative. What we've said is that we're going to be the first to Zettascale by a wide margin. We're laying out as part of the Zetta initiative what we have to do in the processor, in the fabric, in the interconnect and the memory architecture, what we have to do for accelerators, and the software architecture to do it. So Zettascale in 2027 – it's a huge internal initiative that's going to bring many of our technologies together for a 1000x gain in five years. That's pretty phenomenal.
Ian Cutress, AnandTech: Earlier in the year, as part of this IDM 2.0 initiative, one of the big announcements was a collaboration with IBM. IBM is obviously big in the field, with lots of manufacturing and research expertise. We were promised more color on that partnership by the end of the year - is there any chance you can provide that color today?
PG: I don't have a whole lot more to say, but let me just characterize it a little bit. It's one of the things I think you will be hearing more from us before the year is out. But basically, we're partnering with IBM - think of them as another components research partner with us, in advanced semiconductor research, as well as in advanced packaging research. We're partnering with IBM in those areas. Also, IBM is looking for a partner as well on their manufacturing initiatives, and what they require for their products and product lines. We're aligning together on many of the proposals that you've seen, such as the Ramp-C proposal that we were just granted. Phase one of that involves IBM partnering with us in those areas, so it's a fairly broad relationship. You'll be hearing more from us before the year-end I expect.
Mark Hachman, PCWorld: I have a very simple, high-level manufacturing question. Your new statement is about keeping up, or superseding Moore's law, over the next decade. Is this something that you think is going to be unique to Intel, or do you think your competitors will also keep pace?
PG: I described four things today that I think enable us to go 'at Moore's Law' or 'Super Moore's Law'.
I said EUV, and EUV's obviously available to the industry, but we're going to be advantaged at High-NA (Intel has stated it will be first to High-NA EUV with ASML). It's the second generation of EUV. We also talked about RibbonFETs, the fundamental new transistor architecture. As we look at where we are versus others, we think we're comfortably ahead of anybody else with our Gate-All-Around structure that we'll be putting into mass manufacturing in 2024. So we feel comfortably ahead, and I would also say that since the planar transistor design, through strained metal gate, though FinFET – Intel has always led in transistor architecture. So I think that we're advantaged meaningfully in RibbonFET, and with PowerVIA, nobody else has anything like it. So I think we're fundamentally highly differentiated with our backside power delivery architecture. Also the packaging technology - I think with Foveros, the EMIB, with Omni Foveros, these technologies are comfortably ahead of where others are in the industry.
So if we bring that together, now with a multi-tile or multi-chip approach, with a 2.5D/3D packaging approach, we're going to be well above Moore's Law by the end of the decade. I think we're going to be comfortably ahead of anybody else in the industry.
It's not that nobody else [in the industry] is going to be participating, but I expect as we look at those [technologies] coming together, we're just going to be adding advantage over these four domains as we look out over the rest of the decade. That's what we've said, and as we think about our IDM 2.0 strategy, getting back to parity, getting back to leadership, and then we will have sustained leadership. We are laying down the tracks for sustained leadership across the process technology. Moore's Law is alive and well, and as I said in the keynote, until the periodic table is exhausted, we ain't done.
Linley Gwennap, The Linley Group: When you're talking about Moore's law, I'm wondering how you are defining Moore's Law these days - is it transistor density, is it transistors per dollar, is it power/performance, is it a particular cadence? Or is it just that Intel is still making progress at some rate?
PG: I'm defining it as a doubling of transistors [per product]. Obviously we're going from a single tile to multi-tile, but if you look at the transistor density of a nominal package size, we'll be able to double the number of transistors in that in a sustained way. Trust me - before my TD team let me make those statements today, they analyzed this from quite a few dimensions.
Now, if you click inside of it, we do expect that for transistor density per unit silicon area, we are in a pretty good curve right now. [This includes] the move to RibbonFET, EUV solving lithography issues, and PowerVIAs solving some of the power delivery issues. I think the transistor density per unit area by itself doesn't give you a doubling of the number of transistors per two years, but it's going to be in a pretty good curve for the next 10 years - that is our expectation. When you then combine that with 2.5D/3D packaging, that's when you go 'Super Moore's Law' and you can start to break the tiles into smaller, more manufacturable, common components. With technologies like EMIB, we can tie them together with almost effective on-die interconnect characteristics. [It also enables] a better job at doing power management with PowerVIA, so you're not hitting your head on any of the power limits, even though power will be a big issue there. So it really is the combination of lithography breakthroughs, power breakthroughs, new transistor structures, but most importantly, the 2.5D/ 3D packaging technologies.
Charlie Demerjian, SemiAccurate: One of the key elements in your messaging has been a commitment to being more open and more transparent with the industry, with hardware, software, and all the extra details. This is good, as Intel has pretty much stopped talking about the technology these past few years, sliding in the wrong direction in my view - things like transistor densities or die sizes on products that are launching the next day haven't been shared. I've been requesting Intel to be more open, for years, only to not get any real satisfactory explanation. If you are committed to being more transparent, could you look into providing these numbers [and numbers like these] in the future?
Edited for clarity
PG: Thanks Charlie - we're anxious to see you in person as well, sometime soon! So as we're swinging the doors open wide, we are getting much more engaged with the technology, and with technologists [like yourself]. I think we're going to be doing a lot more in this regard.
These particular comments, I'll say I haven't heard them before this. Feel free to send me an email with your top five that you'd like to see from us, and we'll have robust conversations. I won't promise anything today, because I don't know why people have been hesitant in those regards. But we do want to be engaged with technologists, with developers, and with our tech analyst community. Send me some thoughts directly, and I'll happily follow up on them.
Paul Alcorn, Tom's Hardware: Investing in fab capacity is one of the most capital-intensive exercises imaginable. Those are big multi-billion dollar bets, and they have to be placed years in advance. Can you tell us what type of measures Intel is taking to ensure that it doesn't overinvest or have excess capacity in the event of an industry downturn?
PG: Great question. One thing we do is extraordinary amounts of market modeling and industry modeling for PC growth, server growth, network growth, graphics growth, etc. So a lot of that goes into our LRP, our five-year Long-Range Plan. We want to have better [insight] on where the market is going than anyone else - but then against that we're applying what we call Smart Capital.
For instance, right now, I lust for more fab capacity. Intel has under-invested [in fab capacity] for a number of years. Intel always used to have a spare shell (basically a fab building without any manufacturing equipment). This is [going to be] one of the principles of our Smart Capital – we always have to have spare shells. If you take an Intel 20A Fab, it's going to cost around $10 billion - but you can invest about $2b in the first two years [on the shell]. It's actually a fairly capital-efficient time, where you get a lot of time benefit - two years for only $2 billion, and then you can populate it with equipment in years 2-4 when the fab comes online. So part of our initiative is to build shells - get that greenfield capacity in place such that we can build shells and have more flexibility. [It also gives us] choice in the timing of the actual capital build.
Secondly, also with our IDM 2.0 strategy, we said we're going to consistently use external foundries. With that, maybe a quarter of my capacity is from my external foundry partners. But I'm also going to have tiles that run on both internal manufacturing and on external foundries, so that I'm going to have flexibility as I move up or down that curve - to be able to flex things in or flex things out, as appropriate.
Third, we've said we're going to capitalize some of these expanded capabilities based on government investments as well as customer investments. If a customer of our foundry business, wants 10k wafer starts per week in their capacity from us, that's a whole fab. So we're going to have prepays and other contractual relationships with them that offset our capital risk in a fair way. This is exactly what TSMC, Samsung, and Global Foundries are doing now. So we'll leverage that capacity. You've also heard about the CHIPS Act, and the equivalent in Europe. There is government willingness to invest in this area. That's going to help us moderate some of that capital risk.
So those are the three tenets of Smart Capital.
Underneath that, let's say that I [end up with] too much capacity. That's something I can't even fathom for the next couple of years! But let's say that we're actually in a situation that I actually have a little bit too much capacity. What am I going to do? Well, I'm going to go win more market share. We've had declines in market share in some areas, so we would go apply that capital and gain more share back in PC, in servers, and in other places. We see that capacity-constrained market and we go and gain share, and we believe we're in a position as our products get better to do that in a very profitable way. Secondly, we'll go gain more foundry customers. It is an exciting new business, and right now all of the foundry industry is highly constrained on capacity - so we go win more foundry. Or third, I'll go flex more capacity from our use of external foundries to internal manufacturing as well.
The strategy that we're setting up gives me extraordinary capitalizable efficiency, as well as capitalizable flexibility. Ultimately all three of these ones I just told you are highly margin generative for the company, that's whether I'm gaining market share, whether I'm gaining more foundry customers, or moving from external to internal which has a much better margin structure. So overall, this is how we're laying out our smart capital strategy, and as that comes to scale over the next couple of years I think it just positions us in a phenomenal way.
Marco Chiapetta, HotHardware: Based on what your competitors are doing in the client space, it seems that a tighter coupling with software and operating systems is necessary to extract the maximum performance and efficiency from future platforms. [Does that mean] Intel's engagement with Microsoft and other OS providers changing at all, or will the OS providers affect how processors are designed moving forward?
PG: The case in point right now is what we just did with Intel Bridge technology (enabling Android on Windows). Panos Panay from Microsoft was here, and they took a major piece of technology and are making it now part of standard Windows that they're shipping. It's not the first time that Microsoft has done that with Intel, but it's been a long time since we've had that major functionality [partnership], and Microsoft and Intel are redefining our relationship, between Satya and I.
We've termed it as the 'Virtual Vertical' - how do we bring the same benefits of a much more intimate dedicated partnership with each other to revitalize and energize the PC ecosystem. I think Bridge Technology is a great example, as it brings the entire Android application ecosystem into the PC environment. This is a great example and more such things are well underway.
Greg Lavender: We have hundreds of resources in software engineering working very closely with Microsoft, every day, all day, and every night, with the core internals of Windows optimized for our platforms. We co-developed this HGS+ capability that we have talked about, which provides machine learning heuristics to the Windows scheduler with our E-core/P-core capabilities. We are looking, in real-time during the execution of Windows, at applications on Windows, and to assign those threads to the most optimal cores at the right time. Then even our oneAPI compiler - if you use it to compile capabilities that you run on Windows, you get a 10% performance boost over other compiler capabilities. In my team, we do a lot of work to help with the benchmarking to make sure that all the graphics performance meets all the performance requirements. We run all the Cinebench benchmarks as well, to tune things up to get the optimal power performance efficiencies out of the platforms!
My team does all the BIOS, all the firmware. We're very close with all the vendors, the Linux community, and Microsoft, with Android and Chrome OS, to make sure that we have secure firmware as we digitally sign all of our firmware. Microsoft's a big adopter in Azure cloud with SGX, and they have many applications running securely in using the secure enclaves - our Trusted Execution environments in Azure Cloud. So we have a very tight partnership with them, it's not just with Windows on the PC!
As Pat mentioned the Bridge Technology, we call it Houdini, because we did a bunch of magic to basically allow those Android apps [to work]. As I mentioned in my talk, the Windows Subsystem for Linux version 2 (WSL2) lets you run a complete Linux distro. [With Bridge] we run an actual Android distro into that hidden virtual machine on Hyper-V. Then when you load those applications into Windows, they sit on the Windows File System, so you just launched them like you normally would, but they actually execute in that Android OS that's in WSL. We just make it completely transparent, there's no big performance hit, and we do lots of acceleration with the graphics to make a good user experience, including for Android games. This is the kind of very close partnership we have with Microsoft. We've had it for years.
Any More Questions?
Ian Cutress, AnandTech: You've spoken about offering x86 IP in foundry services – could you go into detail here? Will Intel will offer x86 IP in the form of ISA licenses, core licenses, and will that IP explicitly only to be manufactured at Intel, or other foundries? Also, will there be an appreciable lag between what x86 IP you offer customers, and what x86 IP you use internally?
PG: We are going to make x86 cores available, as standard IP blocks, on Intel Foundry Services. So if you use an Intel process, we will have versions of the x86 cores available. I do say cores, because it's going to be based on the cores that we're building – the E-cores and P-cores for standard product lines, we will be making them available. So you could imagine an array of E-cores, or P-cores, as a Xeon-like product that's combined with unique IP from a cloud vendor. That'd be a great example of where we'd have such hybrid designs, it's not their design, it's not our design, but it's bringing those pieces together.
We're working on the roadmap of cores right now. That's to say which ones become available, [whether that's] big cores, little cores, which ones come first, and the timing for those - there's also a fair amount of work to enable the x86 cores with the ecosystem. As you all know very well, the Arm ecosystem has developed interface standards, and other ways to composite the entire design fabric. So right now we're working on exactly that. A fair amount of the IP world is using Arm constructs versus x86 constructs right now - these are interrupt models, things like memory ordering models, and there's a variety of those differences that we're haggling through right now.
We're also working with customers - we have quite a lot of interest from customers for these cores. So we're working with them, picking some of the first customers, and we have a range of interest from embedded use-cases up to HPC use-cases, with data center and cloud customers somewhat in the middle of those. So it's a whole range of different applications, but we're working through the details of that now. We clearly realize the criticality of making this work inside of our design partners and our customers, in the common EDA environments, and enabling the rest of their IP that they're bringing to the discussion.
Then the lag side - there's got to be minimal lag. My IP teams internally, they act like a Synopsis IP team, because they're delivering for instance, an E-core or P-core to the Xeon design team, or to the Meteor Lake design team, [or others]. So as those cores become available, we're going to be making those available to our internal teams and our external teams somewhat coincidently going forward so there's not a lag. We're making the IP available, and as customers start getting firmed up, as their design ideas firm up, the cores will be more mature, to answer your question. But we do not expect that there's any meaningful, if any, lag.
Many thanks to Pat and Greg for their time.
Thanks also to Gavin Bonshor for transcription.
49 Comments
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Gothmoth - Friday, October 29, 2021 - link
bringing grandpa back.... -
sirmo - Friday, October 29, 2021 - link
"Bringing Geek back". Ok Boomer. -
kkromm - Friday, October 29, 2021 - link
OK, dumbass -
smokefrog - Saturday, October 30, 2021 - link
You clowns don't have nothing worth to say -
YB1064 - Saturday, October 30, 2021 - link
I hoped someone would have asked about integrating FPGA fabric on processors. It would be nice to have a reasonably priced consumer product that did this. -
Threska - Friday, October 29, 2021 - link
Not terribly new. I've dealt with equipment that had an x86 as part of it's core with a bunch of other functionality surrounding it. -
sharath.naik - Saturday, October 30, 2021 - link
Agree.. there is no fundamental architectural change done so can pretty much say their performance numbers are BS or just cranking power draw. If Intel needs to show that they have changed they need to move to on chip high bandwidth ram cache which can double as sole ram in mobile processors without the need for socketed ram. With similar capacities that Apple has.
Not just in some exotic server platform but in all their products. -
mode_13h - Sunday, October 31, 2021 - link
You really think people want to upgrade their whole CPU to get more memory? And what if some of the memory goes bad - discard the entire CPU and buy a new one?
As for server products, probably the most RAM you can pack into a CPU package is < 100 GB. Server platforms already support multiple TB of RAM. So, the in-package stuff can't replace external memory, at least for the substantial majority of customers.
Besides being more restrictive, in-package memory is also more expensive and won't help much with most tasks other than iGPU performance. That means it'll be a relatively specialized product, either for high-end laptops or maybe extreme gaming rigs and workstations looking to squeeze every last drop of performance from the CPU. -
FunBunny2 - Sunday, October 31, 2021 - link
"As for server products, probably the most RAM you can pack into a CPU package is < 100 GB."
not every application is a clone of Google or Amazon or ... for many industrial/commercial applications, 100GB will do just fine. especially if the application is built with a real relational database, as opposed to the common protocol of treating a 'database' as just a more tractable filesystem bunch of files. 5NF will take up, more or less, an order of magnitude less storage than the file-dump approach that is all too common. not only do you get a smaller storage footprint, but you get relational integrity for free; less edit code on clients. yum. -
mode_13h - Sunday, October 31, 2021 - link
> for many industrial/commercial applications, 100GB will do just fine.
Some, yes. And we know that Intel has already announced a variant of Sapphire Rapids with HMB2, with many details yet to come.
However, the post I replied to advocated for Intel to include in-package memory for "Not just in some exotic server platform but in all their products."
In general, the more cores you have, the more RAM you need. I've found that even a simple task like compiling software can use in excess of 1 GB per SMT thread.


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YouTube Marketing: What to Consider Before Getting Started Why your business should or shouldn't be on YouTube, and what you can hope to accomplish with your YouTube videos.
Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.
This is the first in a six-part series on how your business can get started on YouTube. In this installment, we examine how to create a strategy for marketing on YouTube.
YouTube has become a hot site for businesses looking to promote their products and services. But not every business gets acceptable results from their YouTube marketing videos.
Success on YouTube depends on what you want to accomplish with your online videos. So, before you press the record button your video camera, answer some key questions about your YouTube video strategy.
1. Should your business even be on YouTube?
Not every type of business is a good fit for YouTube. Put simply, if you can't show your product or service in action, don't put it on YouTube.
For example, if you sell or manufacture power tools, it can be easy to show how a power drill works in a short video. But if you offer college-tutoring services, you don't have much to demonstrate on camera, so YouTube might not make sense.
Even if you can demonstrate what you do in videos, you still need to set a clear goal for what you hope to accomplish. Your goal will help you determine what type of video to produce.
Related: 10 Questions to Ask When Creating Your Company's YouTube Channel
2. Do you want to attract new customers or support existing ones?
For many companies, YouTube is an ideal medium for attracting new customers. You pull them in by showing them your product and how it works, and then direct them to your website for more information or to close the sale. Since you can't link directly from a video, you'll need to superimpose your URL onscreen and include the URL in the video's text description.
You also can use YouTube to provide additional information and support to existing customers. For example, if you sell children's outdoor playsets, you might produce a video showing how to assemble them. A how-to video can be much more effective than printed instructions, and can cut down the volume of post-sale customer support calls.
3. Do you want to inform or educate with your video?
The most successful YouTube videos tend to accomplish one of three things: inform, educate or entertain. While entertaining videos are the most likely to go viral, they're also the most difficult to pull off. That's why most businesses focus on either informing or educating with their videos.
Related: 3 Tips for Maximizing YouTube's New Layout for Brand Channels
An informative video can provide details about a specific product, your company or industry, or simply topics of interest to potential customers. For example, if you're an attorney, you might produce a series of videos that discuss important legal issues. If you run a bed and breakfast, you might offer video tours of your facilities.
An educational video shows customers how to do something, typically in step-by-step fashion. For example, if you sell computer-networking equipment, you might produce a video that shows customers how to set up a home network -- using your equipment, of course. If you sell musical instruments, it's a no-brainer to offer a series of music instruction videos.
Some businesses naturally gravitate to either an informative or educational approach, while others can go either way. For example, if you run a restaurant, you could produce informative videos that show your top dishes in attractive settings, or you could produce educational videos that show customers how to cook their own versions of some of your favorite recipes.
Whether you take the informative or educational video approach depends a lot on your company's image and your own personal style. But whichever approach you take, remember that YouTube is a soft sell medium, meaning viewers tend to reject direct commercial messages. Offer potential customers something useful, however, and you'll help to build your brand over the long term.
Related: 7 Ways to Create More Engaging Videos That Rank Higher in YouTube


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Yesterday, instead of the day being filled with candy and flowers, I was surrounded with lots of vintage/home decor stuff as I set up an outdoor photo shoot. I have about a week of work left, and this coming week will be all about moving/sorting/and selling. I'm planning an outdoor estate sale for next weekend. (Easy to do when the temps are nearing 90 already!)
I didn't realize this until just this week but you can advertise estate/yard sales on Craigslist and Facebook as well as Garage Sale Gal. We would need some photos though to advertise along with a description of what we were selling. (anything and everything!) So I came up with this idea to create a little country-road-side market photo shoot with some of the things that would be included in the actual yard sale next week. I spent my evenings sketching out the set-up idea as well as scribbling down notes as to what I wanted to include in my photos.
I love staging photos. I really like creating photos where there is almost too much stuff in the photo and your eye has to wander to really take everything in. Photos that are 'visually interesting.' Two hours later I had the scene set and the lighting was just right for an afternoon photo shoot!
Not only will there be an enormous amount of scrapbooking stuff at this yard sale I'm also working on creating a virtual scrapbook yard sale.... like a studio-spring cleaning sale. I just need to work out the details of where to put everything (etsy vs. blog) and get all of the photos ready!
and looked who came out to help me yesterday. My little buddy Chase, he found a fruit picker in the yard last week and now every time he tags along he'll pick all of his own fruit. I have 2 baskets of evidence right now on my kitchen counter. :)
Hope everyone had a wonderful Valentines Day and a very Happy Saturday to you all!
xo ~ tara