分类目录归档：英语

2020-4-16 English Reading.

阅读打卡 Reading Record。

第一篇阅读：大概就是美国的小公司过得非常困难，天天申请某个特殊计划的贷款，贷款的太多了，现在国会还没批下来

The Small Business Administration said Monday that it reached the $349 billion lending limit for the program. Thousands of small business owners whose loans have not yet been processed must now wait for Congress to approve a Trump administration request for another $250 billion for the program.

source:https://time.com/5822511/paycheck-protection-program-hold/

 

第二篇阅读：

数码圈的新闻Apple 发布了新手机 新版 iPhone se

Apple’s New iPhone SE Offers Most of the Features at a Fraction of the Price

Most of the Features at a Fraction of the price 很低的价格  大多数的Feature

原文：https://time.com/5821625/apple-se-low-cost-smartphone/

2020-4-14 English Reading

Reading record. source:https://time.com/5819878/smithfield-pork-plant-closes-coronavirus/

The world’s biggest pork producer is shuttering a major U.S. plant indefinitely after a coronavirus outbreak among employees, with the company warning that closures across the country are taking American meat supplies “perilously close to the edge” of shortfalls.

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2020-4-9 English Reading.

Reading Record

source:https://time.com/5817083/jack-dorsey-pledges-1-billion-coronavirus-relief/

Jack Dorsey is devoting $1 billion of his stake in Square Inc., the payments firm he co-founded, to help fund the coronavirus relief effort.

“After we disarm this pandemic, the focus will shift to girl’s health and education, and UBI,” Dorsey said Tuesday in a tweet, referring to universal basic income. The pledge represents about 28% of his wealth, he said.

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2020-4-6 English Reading.

Price Gouging

Though Trump didn’t detail his concerns with 3M, White House trade adviser Peter Navarro said at a Thursday news conference that the administration has had concerns about whether the company’s production around the world is being delivered to the U.S.

Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban said he has been in touch with the White House about supposed price gouging by resellers of 3M masks and accused the company of not doing enough to ensure they end up in the hands of medical professionals.

3M has previously said it hasn’t changed the prices it charges and can’t control the prices dealers or retailers charge for their products.

The president is facing mounting pressure from governors and congressional Democrats to use the Korean War-era defense law that gives him sweeping powers to force companies to produce personal protective equipment and ventilators that are in short supply. More than 236,000 people in the U.S. have contracted the virus and more than 5,600 have died, according to Johns Hopkins University.

Health-care officials and governors have said that in some localities, people may die because there won’t be enough ventilators for the growing number of patients who need them.

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo on Thursday said the state would run out of ventilators in six days at the current rate. “If a person comes in and needs a ventilator and you don’t have a ventilator, the person dies,” Cuomo told reporters.

Ventilator Shortage

Trump said at the White House later on Thursday that “thousands” of ventilators are in production. But he faulted states for failing to stockpile them, deflecting criticism of his administration.

“We’re not an ordering clerk, we’re a backup,” Trump said. “The states have to stock up. It’s like one of those things, they waited.”

He has expressed reluctance to use the defense law, comparing it to nationalizing industries. He has said he prefers to use threats to invoke the act as leverage to force companies to comply with demands to manufacture equipment.

The president, however, ordered General Motors Co. last Friday to make ventilators by directing the U.S. health secretary, under the defense law, to require the automaker to do so.

—With assistance from Ellen Proper.

source:

https://time.com/5815155/3m-face-masks-trump/

2020-4-5 English Reading.

President Donald Trump attacked 3M over concerns with supplies of protective face masks as his administration issued an order under the Defense Production Act to speed production of ventilators and respirators for coronavirus patients.

3M responded hours later with a statement, saying early Friday that it has increased production of respirator masks significantly and was already working with the administration to prioritize orders from the Federal Emergency Management Agency. The latest actions offer a framework to “expand even further the work we are doing in response to the global pandemic crisis,” 3M said.

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2020-4-2 English Reading.

In August 2019, the Arizona Municipal Water Users Association built a 16-foot pyramid of jugs in its main entrance in Phoenix. The goal was to show residents of this desert region how much water they each use a day—120 gallons—and to encourage conservation.

“We must continue to do our part every day,” executive director Warren Tenney wrote in a blog post. “Some of us are still high-end water users who could look for more ways to use water a bit more wisely.”

A few weeks earlier in nearby Mesa, Google proposed a plan for a giant data center among the cacti and tumbleweeds. The town is a founding member of the Arizona Municipal Water Users Association, but water conservation took a back seat in the deal it struck with the largest U.S. internet company. Google is guaranteed 1 million gallons a day to cool the data center, and up to 4 million gallons a day if it hits project milestones. If that was a pyramid of water jugs, it would tower thousands of feet into Arizona’s cloudless sky.

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2020-4-1 English Reading

The passage of the pandemic stimulus bill to the tune of at least $2.2 trillion dollars was heralded as a major step towards staunching the massive economic toll of the near-complete shutdown of the United States. But of the many moves made by the federal government, the effects of that stimulus bill may ultimately pale in comparison with the radical measures enacted by the Federal Reserve. We are in uncharted and deep waters, but none may prove as revolutionary as what the Fed is about to do.

Graced by Congress and by the Treasury Department, the Federal Reserve is committed to using its balance sheet to inject more than $4 trillion into the economy. That is not a typo. And it is, in fact, likely to be substantially more than that by the time the pandemic crisis has subsided. This will not end up directly in the pockets of individuals, but it will flood the financial system with unprecedented amounts of money and provide a cushion and a floor for almost any tradeable asset.

And by any tradeable asset, that means money market funds, corporate bonds, municipal bonds, bank lines of credit, student loans, mortgage-backed securities, and according to Jerome Powell, the chairman of the Federal Reserve, perhaps even stocks. Asked about the possible outer limits of what the Fed might buy, Powell said, with unusual candor, that in a time of pandemic, “We’re trying to create a bridge from our very strong economy to another place of economic strength, and that’s what our lending really does. It’s very broad. It’s across small, medium and large businesses.” And it extends as well to state and local governments strapped for cash as tax revenues evaporate. It extends, in fact, to just about everything and anything imaginable.

It is impossible to overstate how radical a departure from past precedent these moves are. During the Great Recession of 2008-2009, the Fed cut interest to zero (as it has now) and then began to experiment with what it called “quantitative easing” on a multi-trillion dollar scale; it began to buy up bonds and act as a lender of last resort to large financial institutions that were facing potential insolvency, and to European banks as well as the European Union faced its own crisis into 2011. But as innovative as that was, it took many months for the Fed to act then, after the financial crisis had already metastasized into an economic collapse, and its buying was limited to specific and rather arcane corners of the financial markets.

2020-3-30 English Reading.

最近发现一行一行标注阅读太慢了，半天才能读一点，为了加大阅读量，下来只记录阅读的内容，一些重点的句子和生词还是标注一下。
President Donald Trump issued an order Firday that seeks to force General Motors to produce ventilators for coronavirus patients under the Defense Production Act.
had been productive取得成果
Trump said negotiations with General Motors had been productive, “but our fight against the virus is too urgent to allow the give-and-take of the contracting process to continue to run its normal course.”
Trump said “GM was wasting time” and said his actions will help ensure the quick production of ventilators that will save American lives. Previously Trump has been reluctant to use the act to force businesses to contribute to the coronavirus fight, and it wasn’t clear what triggered his order against GM.
 

The Detroit automaker is farthest along in the effort to make more of the critical breathing machines. It’s working with Ventec Life Systems, a small Seattle-area ventilator maker to increase the company’s production and repurpose a GM auto electronics plant in Kokomo, Indiana, to make the machines. The company said Friday it could build 10,000 ventilators per month starting in April with potential to make even more.

After Trump invoked the act, GM said in a statement that it has been working around the clock for more than a week with Ventec and parts suppliers to build more ventilators. The company said its commitment to build Ventec’s ventilators “has never wavered.”

Trump said that while the White House activated the act against GM, it may not be needed. “Maybe we won’t even need the full activation. We’ll find out,” Trump said Friday in the Oval office.

The move appears aimed at price and volume negotiations with the government. But it’s Ventec, not GM, that is talking with the government, said Chris Brooks, Ventec’s chief strategy officer.
Ventec ventilators, which are portable and can handle intensive care patients, cost about $18,000 each, Brooks said. That’s much cheaper than the more sophisticated ventilators used by hospitals that can cost up to $50,000, he said.
portable and can handle intensive care patients便携性的、可以处理重症病人
The Federal Emergency Management Agency has made multiple requests since Sunday for estimates of how many ventilators it can build at what price, and has not settled on any numbers, according to Brooks. That could slow Ventec’s efforts to ramp up production because it doesn’t know how many breathing machines it must build, he said.
 

Trump’s action came just after a series of tweets attacking GM, alleging that the company promised to build thousands more breathing machines than it can deliver for coronavirus patients and that it wants too much money for them.

“As usual with ‘this’ General Motors, things just never seem to work out,” Trump wrote on Twitter, adding that the company promised 40,000 ventilators quickly but now says it will build only 6,000 in late April. Trump also tweeted that Ford should start making ventilators fast.

The move escalated a feud involving the president, GM, several governors and medical experts over the severity of the crisis and just how many ventilators will be needed to handle it.

Experts say the U.S. is hundreds of thousands of breathing machines short of what it likely will need to treat a rapidly rising number of COVID-19 patients. New York, Michigan, Louisiana and the state of Washington have been singled out as virus hot spots in the U.S.

The series of tweets came just hours after Trump, during a Fox News interview Thursday night, said he had “a feeling” that the number of ventilators being requested to handle the virus was too high. GM said it is offering resources to Ventec “at cost.”

In the interview, Trump questioned whether the number of ventilators requested by hospitals was exaggerated: “I have a feeling that a lot of the numbers that are being said in some areas are just bigger than they’re going to be,” Trump said.

“I don’t believe you need 40,000 or 30,000 ventilators,” he continued. “You know, you’re going to major hospitals sometimes, they’ll have two ventilators. And now, all of a sudden, they’re saying, ‘can we order 30,000 ventilators?’”

His remarks contradicted medical experts and apparently were aimed at New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who has been pleading for 30,000 more ventilators to handle an expected surge in critical virus patients during the next three weeks.

“When the president says the state of New York doesn’t need 30,000 ventilators, with all due respect to him, he’s not looking at the facts of this astronomical growth of this crisis,” said New York City’s mayor Bill de Blasio on ABC’s Good Morning America.

 

2020-3-29 English Reading.

 

Nikki Haley Resigns From Boeing Board Over Opposition to Proposed $60 Billion Bailout

(COLUMBIA, S.C.) — Former U.N. ambassador Nikki Haley has resigned from the board of Boeing Co., cutting ties with a company she long supported as South Carolina governor because of her opposition to a bailout of the airplane manufacturer that is in the works amid the growing coronavirus outbreak.

“I strongly believe that when one is part of a team, and one cannot in good faith support the direction of the team, then the proper thing to do is to resign,” Haley wrote to Boeing CEO Dave Calhoun and board chairman Larry Kellner, in a letter dated March 16 and provided Thursday to The Associated Press. “As such, I hereby resign my position from the Boeing Board.”

hereby 特此

Earlier this week, Boeing said it was seeking $60 billion in federal aid for itself and its supply chain, both of which are struggling amid the COVID-19 outbreak, which has halted major travel and shuttered many businesses. The Trump administration has said it would back Boeing, which is also a top U.S. defense contractor.

back Boeing支持波音
defense contractor. 国防承包商
 

Haley, 48, joined the Boeing board last year after her departure from President Donald Trump’s administration. Popular in her home state, Haley moved back to South Carolina — where Boeing has a major production facility — founded a nonprofit organization, and wrote and promoted a memoir.

nonprofit organization非营利组织
memoir回忆录
 

As governor of South Carolina prior to joining the Trump administration, Haley fought attempts by unions to represent workers at the North Charleston plant where the company assembles its Boeing 787 jetliners. At the time, she said unions weren’t needed because companies in her state take care of their workers.

In 2017, workers at the plant voted about 3-to-1 against representation by the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers, a resounding setback for unions that have long hoped to make inroads in the South.

Boeing is among the companies whose stocks are tumbling amid the COVID-19 outbreak. Earlier this month, the Chicago-based company said it had imposed a hiring freeze in response to the virus outbreak, which is undercutting air travel and threatening to kill airlines’ appetite for new planes.