Similar to Microsoft’s previous quarter , the software program giant is not taking much of a hit from the coronavirus epidemic. Amid robust revenues of $38 billion (up 13 percent from last 12 months), the company’s This autumn earnings report reveal that its Xbox content material and services enterprise has elevated by sixty five p.c from a 12 months in the past. Floor sales, meanwhile, jumped up by 28 %, reaching $1.7 billion. These figures aren’t too shocking, given the rising demand for PCs to handle work and faculty at dwelling, as well as games to keep us all sane as we’re trapped inside.
Most of that development has come from for-income, which now make up 59 % of the three,720 Medicare-certified hospices in the U.S., federal data exhibits. In some states, like Florida, hospices should acquire a certificate of want†in order to start operations, a excessive hurdle that means the state with one of many largest aged populations is served by comparatively few, but very giant, hospices. In Georgia, the bar to entry is pretty low, which has led to a proliferation: There are tons of of hospices in Atlanta alone.
Since 1996, the proportion of poor households receiving cash help from the federal government has fallen from 68 p.c to 23 p.c. No state offers cash advantages that add up to the poverty line. Eligibility criteria have been surgically tightened, usually with requirements which are counterproductive to really escaping poverty. Take Temporary Help for Needy Households, which ostensibly helps poor families with children. Its predecessor (with a different acronym) had the aim of helping dad and mom of children below 7, often via easy money funds. Nowadays, those advantages are explicitly geared toward getting moms away from their kids and into the workforce as quickly as potential. Just a few states require ladies to enroll in training or start making use of for jobs the day after they give birth.
There is now a rift in the trade. Many nonprofit hospices blame the for-income for sullying hospice’s good fame. The for-income respond that families of sufferers overwhelmingly say they have been pleased with the care they obtained, and that the for-revenue revolution has swept throughout all health services, not simply hospice.
It is the same in Burma. In the two years after its military dictatorship uncorked in 2011, $40 billion in overseas funding poured in. Most of it got here from Chinese language, Malaysian, Singaporean and Thai companies; as of 2013, the United States was solely the ninth largest investor. The outcomes are about what you’d count on. Earlier this 12 months, greater than 2,000 Burmese workers marched in protest outside a manufacturing facility producing for E-Land, the South Korean-owned conglomerate that’s now the largest women’s-attire retailer in China. The employees were demanding a elevate from $1 per day. The manufacturing unit was in a particular economic zone; the employees were arrested on the pretext that they didn’t have a allow for the demonstration.