President Joe Biden payments going out to families as part of the expanded child tax credit

President Joe Biden on Thursday called payments going out to families as part of the expanded child tax credit “historic,” saying they have the potential of lifting many families out of poverty. Biden made his remarks at the White House late Thursday morning as payments reached some of the nearly 40 million families who qualified for the tax credits, affecting an estimated 65 million children. “This is another step toward ending poverty in America,” Biden said. “This is our belief that the people who really need the tax cut are not the people at the top, but the people in the middle; the folks who are struggling.” Biden compared the expanded child tax credit, approved under his American Rescue Plan passed earlier this year by Congress, to Social Security, which was passed in 1935. “This has a chance to reduce child poverty in the same way Social Security reduced poverty for the elderly,” Biden said. Vice President Kamala Harris, who spoke before Biden, said that providing the tax credits in monthly payments allows the program to have a more sustained impact on families. “If the struggle to make ends meet is monthly, then the solution must be also,” Harris said. “The payments may be monthly, but the impact will be generational. This is the largest middle-class tax cut in a generation. Qualifying families will receive a monthly payment of $300 per child under the age of 6 and $250 for children aged 6-17. The average payment is expected to be around $420. Biden’s rescue plan expanded the maximum credit for children younger than 6 to $3,600 and to $3,000 for children 6 years old and older. Parents earning an adjusted gross income under $75,000 and couples earning less than $150,000 will be eligible for the full credit. The amount of the payments phase out for parents who earn more, and individuals and couples who make more than $95,000 and $170,000 are not eligible. Qualifying households can elect to opt out of the monthly payments and receive the full credit all at once when they file their 2021 taxes. Most families who have filed their taxes or used the IRS’ non-filer tool in 2020 to receive their stimulus payments will not have to take action to receive their payments. Those who don’t earn enough income to file taxes, but have eligible children can register to receive the payments through the IRS non-filer tool. About 80% of eligible families will receive the monthly child tax credit by direct deposit if the IRS has their direct deposit information, and the agency will send paper checks and debit cards to some families. Officials say future payments will go out on the 15th of every month through the end of 2021, unless the date falls on a weekend or holiday. The IRS says the remaining payments are scheduled to go out on Aug. 13, Sept. 15, Oct. 15, Nov. 15 and Dec. 15.

Energy technology

Energy technology is an interdisciplinary engineering science having to do with the efficient, safe, environmentally friendly, and economical extraction, conversion, transportation, storage, and use of energy, targeted towards yielding high efficiency whilst skirting side effects on humans, nature, and the environment. For people, energy is an overwhelming need, and as a scarce resource, it has been an underlying cause of political conflicts and wars. The gathering and use of energy resources can be harmful to local ecosystems and may have global outcomes. Energy is also the capacity to do work. We can get energy from food. Energy can be of different forms such as kinetic, potential, mechanical, heat, light etc. Energy is required for individuals and the whole society for lighting, heating, cooking, running, industries, operating transportation and so forth. Basically there are two types of energy depending on the source s they are; 1.Renewable Energy Sources 2.Non-Renewable Energy Sources

Printing Technology and Business process

Print on demand (POD) is a printing technology and business process in which book copies (or other documents) are not printed until the company receives an order, allowing prints of single or small quantities. While other industries established the build to order business model, "print on demand" could only develop after the beginning of digital printing because it was not economical to print single copies using traditional printing technology such as letterpress and offset printing. Many traditional small presses have replaced their traditional printing equipment with POD equipment or contract their printing to POD service providers. Many academic publishers, including university presses, use POD services to maintain large backlists (lists of older publications); some use POD for all of their publications. Larger publishers may use POD in special circumstances, such as reprinting older, out-of-print titles, or for test marketing. Predecessors Before the introduction of digital printing technology, production of small numbers of publications had many limitations. Large print jobs were not a problem, but small numbers of printed pages were typically during the early 20th century produced using stencils and reproducing on a mimeograph or similar machine. These produced printed pages of inferior quality to a book, cheaply and reasonably fast. By about 1950, electrostatic copiers were available to make paper master plates for offset duplicating machines. From about 1960, copying onto plain paper became possible for photocopy machines to make multiple good-quality copies of a monochrome original. In 1966, Frederik Pohl discussed in Galaxy Science Fiction "a proposal for high-speed facsimile machines which would produce a book to your order, anywhere in the world". As the magazine's editor, he said that "it, or something like it, is surely the shape of the publishing business some time in the future". As technology advanced, it became possible to store text in digital form – paper tape, punched cards readable by digital computer, magnetic mass storage, etc. – and to print on a teletypewriter, line printer or other computer printer, but the software and hardware to produce original good-quality printed colour text and graphics and to print small jobs fast and cheaply was unavailable. Book publishing Print on demand with digital technology is a way to print items for a fixed cost per copy, regardless of the size of the order. While the unit price of each physical copy is greater than with offset printing, the average cost is lower for very small print jobs, because setup costs are much greater for offset printing. POD has other business benefits besides lesser costs (for small jobs): Technical set-up is usually quicker than for offset printing. Large inventories of a book or print material do not need to be kept in stock, reducing storage, handling costs, and inventory accounting costs. There is little or no waste from unsold products. Many publishers use POD for other printing needs other than books such as galley proof, catalogs and review copies. These advantages reduce the risks associated with publishing books and prints and can result in increased choice for consumers. However, the reduced risks for the publisher can also mean that quality control is less rigorous than usual. Other publishing King and McGaw art prints are made on-demand at their warehouse in Newhaven, England. Digital technology is ideally suited to publish small print jobs of posters (often as a single copy) when they are needed. The introduction of ultraviolet-curable inks and media for large-format inkjet printers has allowed artists, photographers and owners of image collections to take advantage of print on demand. For example, UK art retailer King and McGaw fulfills many of its art print orders by printing on-demand rather than pre-printing and storing them until they are sold, requiring less space and reducing overheads to the business.[6] This was brought about after a fire destroyed £3 million worth of stock and damage to their warehouse. Other notable art retailers utilising POD include arthaus, Society6, TeePublic, and Redbubble. Service providers The introduction of POD technologies and business models has created a range of new book creation and publishing opportunities. There are three main categories of offerings. Self-publishing authors POD creates a new category of publishing (or printing) company that offers services, usually for a fee, directly to authors who wish to self-publish. These services generally include printing and shipping each individual book ordered, handling royalties, and getting listings in online bookstores. The initial investment required for POD services is less than for offset printing. Other services may also be available, including formatting, proofreading, and editing, but such companies typically do not spend money for marketing, unlike conventional publishers. Such companies are suitable for authors prepared to design and promote their work themselves, with minimal assistance and at minimal cost. POD publishing gives authors editorial independence, speed to market, ability to revise content, and greater financial return per copy than royalties paid by conventional publishers. Self publishing also helps authors share their message with the world without waiting in line for a traditional publisher's approval. POD enablement While amateur/professional writers are targeted as early adopters by companies like Infinity Publishing and Trafford Publishing, there is an effort presently to make POD more mass-market. A class of companies like Lulu, Picaboo, Blurb, Peecho and QOOP have chosen to be "author-agnostic", attempting to serve a broad mass-market of ordinary citizens who may want to express, record and print keepsake copies of memories and personal writing (diaries, travelogues, wedding journals, baby books, family reunion reports etc.). Instead of tailoring themselves to the classic book format (at least 100 pages, mostly text, complex rules for copyright and royalties), these companies strive to make POD more mass-market by creating programs by which a range of different text and picture items can be produced as finished books. The management of copyrights and royalties is often less important for this market, as the books themselves have a small clientele (close family and friends, for instance). The major photo storage services (e.g. Eastman Kodak's Ofoto and Shutterfly and Hewlett-Packard's Snapfish) have included the ability to produce picture books and calendars. However, they emphasize digital photography. The companies Blurb and Lulu apply this method to a greater volume of creative work (primarily text, as typed in personal weblogs) and include the capability to embed photographs and other media. QooP and Peecho assume the role of an infrastructure service provider, allowing any partner website to use its pre-designed payment and printing functions. The program Peecho provides an embeddable print button. Publisher use Print-on-demand services that offer printing and distributing services to publishing companies (instead of directly to self-publishing authors) are also growing in popularity within the industry. Many major publishers print on demand as a way to save money. It can become costly to print a book regularly that is going to sit on a bookshelf for more than a year before being purchased. Print on demand allows texts to be revised and published rather more quickly. POD is environmentally friendly because there are only printing and shipping costs for actual sales. POD allows self-publishers to get their books out for little start-up costs. Maintaining availability Among traditional publishers, POD services can be used to make sure that books remain available when one print job has sold out, but another has not yet become available. This maintains the availability of older works, the estimated future sales of which may not be great enough to justify a further conventional print job. This can be useful for publishers with large backlists, such that sales for individual works may be few, but cumulative sales may be significant. Managing uncertainty Print on demand can be used to reduce risk when dealing with "surge" publications that are expected to have large sales but a brief sales life (such as biographies of minor celebrities, or event tie-ins): these publications represent good profitability but also great risk owing to the danger of inadvertently printing many more copies than are necessary, and the associated costs of maintaining excess inventory or pulping. POD allows a publisher to use cheaper conventional printing to produce enough copies to satisfy a pessimistic forecast of the publication sales, and then rely on POD to make up the difference. POD offers advantages over conventional print production and distribution. POD service is not always easy to implement. Print providers and customers have to be willing to evaluate their business process with the flexibility and self-determination to change what is necessary. Niche publications Print on demand is also used to print and reprint "niche" books that may have a high retail price but limited sales opportunities, such as specialist academic works. An academic publisher may be expected to keep these specialist works in print even though the target market is almost saturated, making further conventional print jobs uneconomic. The local history of a small community is well adapted to print on demand, as these books are invaluable to libraries, museums and archives in that small community but are limited in their marketability outside their home region. Public libraries which normally avoid print-on-demand tomes due to their lesser quality will readily make exceptions if content is appropriate for a local topic which cannot be addressed by more conventional means. Many of the smallest small presses, often known as micro-presses because they have inconsequential profits, have become reliant on POD technology and ebooks. This is either because they serve such a small market that print jobs would be unprofitable or because they are too small to absorb much financial risk. Variable formats Print on demand also allows books to be printed in a variety of formats. This process, known as accessible publishing, allows books to be printed in a variety of larger type sizes and special formats for those with vision impairment or reading disabilities, as well as personalised typefaces and formats that suit an individual reader's needs.[8] This has been championed by a variety of new companies. Economics Profits from print-on-demand publishing are on a per-sale basis, and royalties vary depending on the method by which the item is sold. Greatest profits are usually generated from sales direct from a print-on-demand service's website or by the author buying copies from the service at a discount, as the publisher, and then selling them personally. Lesser royalties come from traditional bookshops and online retailers, both of which buy at high discount, although some POD companies allow the publisher or author to set their own discount level. Unless the publisher or author has fixed their discount rate, the greater the volume sold, the less the royalty becomes, as the retailer is able to buy at greater discount. Because the per-unit cost is typically greater with POD than with a print job of thousands of copies, it is common for POD books to be more expensive than similar books made by conventional print jobs, especially if a book is produced exclusively with POD instead of using POD as a supplemental technology between print jobs. Book stores order books through a wholesaler or distributor, usually at high discount of as much as 70%. Wholesalers obtain their books in two ways: either as a special order such that the book is ordered direct from a publisher when a book store requests a copy, or as stocked, which they keep in their own warehouse as part of their inventory. Stocked books are usually also available through "sale or return", meaning that the book store can return unsold stock for full credit as much as one year after the initial sale. POD books are rarely if ever available on such terms because for the publishing provider it is considered too much of a risk. However, wholesalers monitor what works they are selling, and if authors promote their work successfully and achieve a reasonable number of orders from book stores or online retailers (who use the same wholesalers as the stores), then there is a reasonable chance of their work becoming available on such terms. Although returnability lessens the risk for book stores, only a certain proportion of such stock can be returned. Non-returnability can make bookstores less enthusiastic about POD books. Many print-on-demand publications are debut works;[citation needed] many bookstores are reluctant to risk an author's first, untested work without the endorsement of a commercial publisher. Another issue is that these books are not available right away and take time to create (Friedlander). When a customer wants to purchase one of these books, they are less likely to follow through with the sale because they do not get the book that day. They are more likely to go home and order through another company like Amazon. See also[edit] Accessible publishing Alternative media Article processing charge Author mill Custom media Dōjin Dynamic publishing Independent music List of self-publishing companies Offset printing Online shopping Outskirts press Predatory open access publishing Print on demand Samizdat Self Publish, Be Happy Category:Self-published books Self publishing

Sustainable energy

The use of energy is considered sustainable if it meets the needs of the present without compromising the needs of future generations. Definitions of sustainable energy typically include environmental aspects such as greenhouse gas emissions, and social and economic aspects such as energy poverty. Meeting the world's need for energy in a sustainable way is one of the greatest challenges facing humanity in the 21st century. The global energy system, which is 85% based on fossil fuels, is responsible for over 70% of the greenhouse gas emissions that cause climate change. The burning of fossil fuels and biomass is a major contributor to air pollution, which causes an estimated 7 million deaths each year. More than 750 million people lack access to electricity and over 2.6 billion rely on polluting fuels such as wood or charcoal to cook. Renewable energy sources such as wind, hydroelectric power, solar, and geothermal energy are generally far more sustainable than fossil fuel sources. However, some renewable energy projects, such as the clearing of forests for the production of biofuels, can cause severe environmental damage. The role of non-renewable energy sources has been controversial. For example, nuclear power is a low-carbon source and has a safety record comparable to wind and solar,[1] but its sustainability has been debated due to concerns about nuclear proliferation, radioactive waste and accidents. Switching from coal to natural gas has environmental benefits, but may lead to a delay in switching to more sustainable options. Carbon capture and storage technology can be built into power plants to remove their carbon dioxide emissions, but is expensive and has seldom been implemented. Reducing greenhouse gas emissions to levels consistent with the Paris Agreement will require system-wide transformation of the way energy is produced, distributed, stored, and consumed. To accommodate larger shares of variable renewable energy, electrical grids require flexibility through infrastructure such as energy storage. A sustainable energy system is likely to see a shift towards far more use of electricity in sectors such as transport and heating, energy conservation, the use of hydrogen produced by renewables and from fossil fuels with Carbon capture and storage. Some technologies that are critical for eliminating energy-related greenhouse gas emissions are still in development. Wind and solar energy sources generated 8.5% of worldwide electricity in 2019, a share that has grown rapidly. Costs of these energy sources, and of batteries, have fallen rapidly and are projected to continue falling due to innovation and economies of scale. Pathways exist to provide universal access to electricity and to clean cooking technologies in ways that are compatible with climate goals, while bringing major health and economic benefits to developing countries. Well-designed government policies that promote energy system transformation can lower greenhouse gas emissions and improve air quality simultaneously, and in many cases can also increase energy security. Policy approaches can include carbon-pricing and energy-specific policies such as renewable portfolio standards and phase-outs of fossil fuel subsidies.

Climate change

 

Climate change includes both global warming driven by human-induced emissions of greenhouse gases and the resulting large-scale shifts in weather patterns. Though there have been previous periods of climatic change, since the mid-20th century humans have had an unprecedented impact on Earth's climate system and caused change on a global scale.[2] The largest driver of warming is the emission of gases that create a greenhouse effect, of which more than 90% are carbon dioxide (CO 2) and methane.[3] Fossil fuel burning (coal, oil, and natural gas) for energy consumption is the main source of these emissions, with additional contributions from agriculture, deforestation, and manufacturing.[4] The human cause of climate change is not disputed by any scientific body of national or international standing.[5] Temperature rise is accelerated or tempered by climate feedbacks, such as loss of sunlight-reflecting snow and ice cover, increased water vapour (a greenhouse gas itself), and changes to land and ocean carbon sinks. Temperature rise on land is about twice the global average increase, leading to desert expansion and more common heat waves and wildfires.[6] Temperature rise is also amplified in the Arctic, where it has contributed to melting permafrost, glacial retreat and sea ice loss.[7] Warmer temperatures are increasing rates of evaporation, causing more intense storms and weather extremes.[8] Impacts on ecosystems include the relocation or extinction of many species as their environment changes, most immediately in coral reefs, mountains, and the Arctic.[9] Climate change threatens people with food insecurity, water scarcity, flooding, infectious diseases, extreme heat, economic losses, and displacement. These human impacts have led the World Health Organization to call climate change the greatest threat to global health in the 21st century.[10] Even if efforts to minimise future warming are successful, some effects will continue for centuries, including rising sea levels, rising ocean temperatures, and ocean acidification.[11] Energy flows between space, the atmosphere, and Earth's surface. Current greenhouse gas levels are causing a radiative imbalance of about 0.9 W/m2.[12] Many of these impacts are already felt at the current level of warming, which is about 1.2 °C (2.2 °F).[13] [14] The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has issued a series of reports that project significant increases in these impacts as warming continues to 1.5 °C (2.7 °F) and beyond.[15] Additional warming also increases the risk of triggering critical thresholds called tipping points.[16] Responding to these impacts involves both mitigation and adaptation.[17] Mitigation – limiting climate change – consists of reducing greenhouse gas emissions and removing them from the atmosphere.[17] Methods to achieve this include the development and deployment of low-carbon energy sources such as wind and solar, a phase-out of coal, enhanced energy efficiency, and forest preservation. Adaptation consists of adjusting to actual or expected climate,[17] such as through improved coastline protection, better disaster management, assisted colonisation, and the development of more resistant crops. Adaptation alone cannot avert the risk of "severe, widespread and irreversible" impacts.[18] Under the 2015 Paris Agreement, nations collectively agreed to keep warming "well under 2.0 °C (3.6 °F)" through mitigation efforts. However, with pledges made under the Agreement, global warming would still reach about 2.8 °C (5.0 °F) by the end of the century.[19] Limiting warming to 1.5 °C (2.7 °F) would require halving emissions by 2030 and achieving near-zero emissions by 2050.[20]