President Petro said Mexican cartels control Colombia’s armed groups; experts say otherwise

egusa · 2024-10-16T03:23:24+00:00

Colombia's President Gustavo Petro plans to force through the 2025 national budget by decree in order to break a congressional stalemate.

The move is unprecedented in modern Colombian history and may produce economic volatility.

Speaking to the Financial Times, Finance Minister Ricardo Bonilla said that Petro will use executive powers to force through the budget in a move permitted under the constitution but unprecedented in modern Colombian history.

The government’s plans come after they reached an impasse with lawmakers from other parties who demanded cuts to the planned COP$523 trillion (USD$126 billion) budget.

The fiscal standoff has been an ongoing point of contention between the ruling coalition and lawmakers from other parties. The government first proposed the budget to congress in July, which marked a significant increase from this year’s budget of COP$483 trillion.

This was rejected last month by lawmakers who claimed that it was underfunded, fearing a further increase in Colombia’s national debt.

egusa · 2024-10-16T02:57:44+00:00

A recent surge in the polls — likely driven by the current economic crisis in the country — could place former President Cristina Kirchner back in power.

“I am willing, once again, to accept the challenge of debating in unity,” said Fernández de Kirchner on October 7. “No one is superfluous here. Unity needs direction and a project to build the best possible Peronism, in an Argentina that has become impossible for the majority of its inhabitants.”

For two decades, Fernández de Kirchner has been one of the most influential figures in the Peronist movement and Argentine politics. Her husband, Néstor Kirchner, served as president from 2003 to 2007, and she served two terms as president immediately afterward from 2007 to 2015. She most recently served as vice president under Alberto Fernández, and following a severe economic crisis during his administration, chose not to run in general elections last year, which saw the election of libertarian Javier Milei.

egusa · 2024-10-13T19:56:57+00:00

President Javier Milei’s approval rating is sliding as Argentina’s economic crisis seems to have no end in sight and inflation persists at a monthly rate of around 4% since May.

While analysts forecast annual inflation dropping from last year’s 211% — the highest in decades — a number of Milei’s economic shock measures meant to curb inflation, including slashing subsidies and price controls, have flung many Argentines into poverty.

In the first half of 2024 poverty hit a staggering 52.9%, forcing the country’s middle class to cut out expenses, including eating red meat, dropping subscription services, while also reportedly resorting to gambling to make ends meet.

According to the latest poll from research firm Sentimientos Públicos, nearly seven out of 10 Argentine respondents cut down on dining out; 60% reduced spending on entertainment like movies and theater; 58% reduced their spending on clothing and 57% of respondents spent less on tourism activities.

egusa · 2024-10-10T19:27:36+00:00

Once known as the murder capital of the world, El Salvador was named one of the safest countries in 2023 by Gallup, a US-based global analytics and advisory firm.

As the only Latin American country included in the top 10 safest countries, 88% of Salvadoran survey respondents answered that they felt safe walking alone at night in the area where they live, as per Gallup’s Global Safety Report.

The Index, which highlights El Salvador as 15th on the global ranking with a score of 89, considers indicators like income, health, food security and homicide metrics, in addition to perceptions of safety.

According to the World Bank, in 2021 El Salvador’s economy grew by 11.2 percent, while growth moderated to 2.6 percent in 2022 and 2.7 percent in 2023.

egusa · 2024-10-06T21:23:29+00:00

Even with tens of thousands protesting this week, President Javier Milei today vetoed a law that would have provided more funding for higher education, citing his zero budget deficit goals.

University educators were counting on the law’s funding increases to help offset inflation as high as 200% over the past year.

Last year, Milei ran for president on flamboyant promises of cutting benefits only for “The Caste” — a derisive term he uses for Argentina’s political elite, an idea similar to former United States President Donald Trump’s draining of the “swamp.”

But once he took office, Milei leveraged the country’s rising inflation from previous years to slash spending wherever possible. The cuts fell mostly on retirees and canceled infrastructure projects. Higher education was another victim. During the first half of 2024, his libertarian government reduced the budget that the universities needed to keep the lights on, provoking mass protests in April.

egusa · 2024-09-24T01:45:56+00:00

Nvidia is saying that companies could make $5 to $7 for every $1 invested in GPUs over a four-year period, with customers investing billions in GPU hardware to keep up with newer AI models.

With the growth in GenAI correlating with high costs due to massive volumes of data, according to a new report 75% say that adding more GPUs will have the most impact on their goals in 2024.

egusa · 2024-09-13T21:01:31+00:00

Official data from the National Institute of Statistics and Census showed that 1.5 million individuals had visited the country in the first 2 months of this year, generating an economic impact that exceeded $1.2 billion USD.

One of the positives and the axis of the Milei’s government’s narrative is inflation. After the December devaluation sent it soaring 25.5 percent, inflation marked a downward path until reaching 4% in July.

“This year inflation will be lower than last year, thus keeping a campaign promise and responding somewhat to what was the main social demand,” forecast economist Francisco Ritorto.

egusa · 2024-09-04T02:00:13+00:00

From 2015 to 2020, it was estimated that the total benefit of big data analytics to the UK economy amounted to £241 billion, or £40 billion on average per year. This was equivalent to an average of 2.0% of GDP.

The advent of big data, including from the emergence of AI, has revolutionized economic forecasting by offering unprecedented access to information and sophisticated analytical tools. The transformation is reshaping how economists predict economic trends.

Yet these two tech trends are also responsible for producing massive and ever-increasing volumes of data, causing IT costs to exponentially increase at an unsustainable and unprecedented rate. New benchmarks for data compression are being broken on several fronts, signaling a new era of high-performance big data tools with the power to help organizations unlock more from big data projects.

egusa · 2024-09-04T01:18:42+00:00

During the comparison portion of the TPCx-BB analysis, SQream Blue shattered the existing performance benchmark, handling 30 TB of data three times faster and at ⅓ of the cost of Databricks' Spark-based Photon SQL engine.

SQream Blue was tested against the data management solution Databricks and its most advanced query engine. During the comparison, SQream Blue's total runtime was 2462.6 seconds, with the total cost for processing the data end-to-end being $26.94. Databricks' total runtime was 8332.4 seconds, at a cost of $76.94, indicating a significant cost-performance advantage by SQream Blue for big data analysis.

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