The process is challenging and complex. First a synthetic gas is made from pure oxygen and methane, the main component of natural gas, which is cleansed of sulfur, metals and other impurities, under intense pressure and heat. Then the synthetic gas is put in giant reactors that make a synthetic crude through the Fischer-Tropsch process. The process essentially forces heated synthetic gas to react with a catalyst, typically cobalt, to convert into a liquid hydrocarbon. Finally that liquid is refined into one fuel or another. The process is far more complex than that at a typical refinery, so the plant is much more expensive to build and operate. Alfred Luaces, a refining specialist at the consultancy IHS, said a conventional oil refinery could be built for $50,000 per barrel of capacity, less than half of what Sasol says it is willing to spend on the proposed Louisiana plant.
Tech Pushes to Keep Its Spoils in Immigration Bill - NYTimes.com - 0 views
Sasol Betting Big on Gas-to-Liquid Plant in U.S. - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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Sasol is building a gas-to-liquids plant in Uzbekistan with the Malaysian oil company Petronas. It is working with Chevron to build another plant in Nigeria.
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How Apple and Other Corporations Move Profit to Avoid Taxes - NYTimes.com - 1 views
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There is something ridiculous about a tax system that encourages an American company to invest abroad rather than in the United States. But that is what we have.
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“The fundamental problem we have in trying to tax corporations is that corporations are global,” says Eric Toder, co-director of the Tax Policy Center in Washington. “It is very, very hard for national entities to tax entities that are global, particularly when it is hard to know where their income originates.”
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Some international companies hate that idea, of course. They warn that we would risk making American multinational corporations uncompetitive with other multinationals, and perhaps encourage some of them to change nationality.
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How Apple and Other Corporations Move Profit to Avoid Taxes - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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It got so bad that late last year Starbucks promised to pay an extra £10 million — about $16 million — in 2013 and 2014 above what it would normally have had to pay in British income taxes. What it would normally have paid is zero, because Starbucks claims its British subsidiary loses money. Of course, that subsidiary pays a lot for coffee sold to it by a profitable Starbucks subsidiary in Switzerland, and pays a large royalty for the right to use the company’s intellectual property to another subsidiary in the Netherlands. Starbucks said it understood that its customers were angry that it paid no taxes in Britain.
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“It is easy to transfer the intellectual property to tax havens at a low price,” said Martin A. Sullivan, the chief economist of Tax Analysts, the publisher of Tax Notes. “When a foreign subsidiary pays a low price for this property, and collects royalties, it will have big profits.”
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it is especially hard for countries to monitor prices on intellectual property, like patents and copyrights.
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Luring Back the Chinese Who Study Abroad - Room for Debate - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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First, the rate of return has remained approximately 30 percent for decades.
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in 2009, more than 240,000 Chinese students went abroad to study at all levels — high school, undergraduate and graduate degrees, a tenfold increase over 2004.
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Second, the return rate among Chinese who received Ph.D.’s in the United States is shockingly low. Approximately 92 percent of all Chinese who received a science or technology Ph.D. in the U.S. in 2002 were still in the U.S. in 2007. This rate was well above India’s, which is in second place with 81 percent.
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In Japan, the Fax Machine Is Anything but a Relic - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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Handwritten messages have long been a necessity in Japan, where the written language is so complex, with two sets of symbols and 2,000 characters borrowed from Chinese, that keyboards remained impractical until the advent of word processors in the 1980s.
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But its very success has made the fax a hard habit to kick.
Has the U.S. Economy Been Permanently Damaged? : The New Yorker - 0 views
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Although the study uses some sophisticated statistical methods, its basic point is straightforward: in the long term, economic output (G.D.P.) is constrained by the quantity and the quality of economic inputs (labor, capital, and technology). If the growth rate and quality of these inputs decline, the potential growth rate of G.D.P. will fall, too—it’s just a matter of arithmetic.
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With hiring rates down, many workers have given up searching for jobs and have dropped out of the labor force.
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With budgets tight, corporations and government departments have cut back on investments in new plants and machinery, computer hardware and software, and research and development.
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Should You Eat Chicken? - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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U.S.D.A. does not stand alone. The Food and Drug Administration (F.D.A.), knowing that manufacturers grow animals under conditions virtually guaranteed to breed disease, allows them to attempt to ward off disease by feeding them antibiotics from birth until death. (This despite the stated intention of the agency to change that, and a court order requiring it to.)
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About a quarter of all chicken parts are contaminated,
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The F.D.A. must disallow the use of prophylactic antibiotics in animal production.
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The tragedy of Argentina: A century of decline | The Economist - 0 views
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The tragedy of Argentina A century of decline
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In the 43 years leading up to 1914, GDP had grown at an annual rate of 6%, the fastest recorded in the world.
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The country ranked among the ten richest in the world, after the likes of Australia, Britain and the United States, but ahead of France, Germany and Italy.
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Solar energy: Stacking the deck | The Economist - 0 views
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Stacking the deck
A Lot Changes in Tech Over Four Years and 1,000 Blog Posts - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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A Lot Changes in Tech Over Four Years and 1,000 Blog Posts
The Quality of Jobs: The New Normal and the Old Normal - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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Despite 42 consecutive months of gains in private-sector employment, the unemployment rate is still at 7.3 percent; in December 2007 it was only 4.6 percent. The current unemployment rate is higher now than in 2007 across all age, education, occupation, gender and ethnic groups.
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That’s despite the fact that about four million workers have left the labor force, driving the labor force participation rate to a historic low
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Although the share of the long-term unemployed has fallen from its peak of 45 percent in 2011 to 38 percent today, it is still far above its 2001-7 average. And about eight million people are working part-time for “economic reasons,”
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