Importance Of Infrastructure Quotes

What counts as social infrastructure? I define it capaciously. Public institutions such as libraries, schools, playgrounds, parks, athletic fields, and swimming pools are vital parts of the social infrastructure. So too are sidewalks, courtyards, community gardens, and other green spaces that invite people into the public realm. Community organizations, including churches and civic associations, act as social infrastructures when they have an established physical space where people can assemble, as do regularly scheduled markets for food, furniture, clothing, art, and other consumer goods. Commercial establishments can also be important parts of the social infrastructure, particularly when they operate as what the sociologist Ray Oldenburg called "third spaces," places (like cafes, diners, barbershops, and bookstores) where people are welcome to congregate and linger regardless of what they've purchased.

Liberal pundits fail to fully grasp the importance of movement infrastructure because their opinion-manufacturing profession ascribes supreme importance to the communication of ideas in abstraction.

Today, as cities and suburbs reinvent themselves, and as cynics claim that government has nothing good to contribute to that process, it's important that institutions like libraries get the recognition they deserve. After all, the root of the word "library," liber; means both "book" and "free." Libraries stand for and exemplify something that needs defending: the public institutions that -- even in an age of atomization and inequality -- serve as bedrocks of civil society. Libraries are the kinds of places where ordinary people with different backgrounds, passions, and interests can take part in a living democratic culture. They are the kinds of places where the public, private, and philanthropic sectors can work together to reach for something higher than the bottom line.

The age-old trick of transfer pricing Taking advantage of the fact that they operate in countries with different tax rates, TNCs [transnational corporations] have their subsidiaries over-charge or under-charge each other – sometimes grossly – so that profits are highest in those subsidiaries operating in countries with the lowest corporate tax rates. In this way, their global post-tax profit is maximized. A 2005 report by Christian Aid, the development charity, documents cases of under-priced exports like TV antennas from China at $0.40 apiece, rocket launchers from Bolivia at $40 and US bulldozers at $528 and over-priced imports such as German hacksaw blades at $5,485 each, Japanese tweezers at $4,896 and French wrenches at $1,089. The Starbucks and Google cases were different from those examples only in that they mainly involved ‘intangible assets’, such as brand licensing fees, patent royalties, interest charges on loans and in-house consultancy (e.g., coffee quality testing, store design), but the principle involved was the same. When TNCs evade taxes through transfer pricing, they use but do not pay for the collective productive inputs financed by tax revenue, such as infrastructure, education and R&D. This means that the host economy is effectively subsidizing TNCs.

Consider almost any public issue. Today’s Democratic Party and its legislators, with a few notable individual exceptions, is well to the right of counterparts from the New Deal and Great Society eras. In the time of Lyndon Johnson, the average Democrat in Congress was for single-payer national health insurance. In 1971, Congress overwhelmingly passed the Comprehensive Child Development Act, for universal, public, tax-supported, high-quality day care and prekindergarten. Nixon vetoed the bill in 1972, but even Nixon was for a guaranteed annual income, and his version of health reform, “play or pay,” in which employers would have to provide good health insurance or pay a tax to purchase it, was well to the left of either Bill or Hillary Clinton’s version, or Barack Obama’s. The Medicare and Medicaid laws of 1965 were not byzantine mash-ups of public and private like Obamacare. They were public. Infrastructure investments were also public. There was no bipartisan drive for either privatization or deregulation. The late 1960s and early 1970s (with Nixon in the White House!) were the heyday of landmark health, safety, environmental, and financial regulation. To name just three out of several dozen, Nixon signed the 1970 Clean Air Act, the 1970 Occupational Safety and Health Act, and the 1973 Consumer Product Safety Act. Why did Democrats move toward the center and Republicans to the far right? Several things occurred. Money became more important in politics. The Democratic Leadership Council, formed by business-friendly and Southern Democrats after Walter Mondale’s epic 1984 defeat, believed that in order to be more competitive electorally, Democrats had to be more centrist on both economic and social issues.

Social infrastructure is not "social capital" -- a concept commonly used to measure people's relationships and interpersonal networks -- but the physical conditions that determine whether social capital develops. When social infrastructure is robust, it fosters contact, mutual support, and collaboration among friends and neighbors; when degraded, it inhibits social activity, leaving families and individuals to fend for themselves. Social infrastructure is crucially important, because local, face-to-face interactions -- at the school, the playground, and the corner diner -- are the building blocks of all public life. People forge bonds in places that have healthy social infrastructures -- not because they set out to build community, but because when people engage in sustained, recurrent interaction, particularly while doing things they enjoy, relationships inevitably grow.

RENEWABLE ENERGY REVOLUTION: SOLAR + WIND + BATTERIES In addition to AI, we are on the cusp of another important technological revolution—renewable energy. Together, solar photovoltaic, wind power, and lithium-ion battery storage technologies will create the capability of replacing most if not all of our energy infrastructure with renewable clean energy. By 2041, much of the developed world and some developing countries will be primarily powered by solar and wind. The cost of solar energy dropped 82 percent from 2010 to 2020, while the cost of wind energy dropped 46 percent. Solar and onshore wind are now the cheapest sources of electricity. In addition, lithium-ion battery storage cost has dropped 87 percent from 2010 to 2020. It will drop further thanks to the massive production of batteries for electrical vehicles. This rapid drop in the price of battery storage will make it possible to store the solar/wind energy from sunny and windy days for future use. Think tank RethinkX estimates that with a $2 trillion investment through 2030, the cost of energy in the United States will drop to 3 cents per kilowatt-hour, less than one-quarter of today’s cost. By 2041, it should be even lower, as the prices of these three components continue to descend. What happens on days when a given area’s battery energy storage is full—will any generated energy left unused be wasted? RethinkX predicts that these circumstances will create a new class of energy called “super power” at essentially zero cost, usually during the sunniest or most windy days. With intelligent scheduling, this “super power” can be used for non-time-sensitive applications such as charging batteries of idle cars, water desalination and treatment, waste recycling, metal refining, carbon removal, blockchain consensus algorithms, AI drug discovery, and manufacturing activities whose costs are energy-driven. Such a system would not only dramatically decrease energy cost, but also power new applications and inventions that were previously too expensive to pursue. As the cost of energy plummets, the cost of water, materials, manufacturing, computation, and anything that has a major energy component will drop, too. The solar + wind + batteries approach to new energy will also be 100-percent clean energy. Switching to this form of energy can eliminate more than 50 percent of all greenhouse gas emissions, which is by far the largest culprit of climate change.

The analogy that has helped me most is this: in Hurricane Katrina, hundreds of boat-owners rescued people—single moms, toddlers, grandfathers—stranded in attics, on roofs, in flooded housing projects, hospitals, and school buildings. None of them said, I can’t rescue everyone, therefore it’s futile; therefore my efforts are flawed and worthless, though that’s often what people say about more abstract issues in which, nevertheless, lives, places, cultures, species, rights are at stake. They went out there in fishing boats and rowboats and pirogues and all kinds of small craft, some driving from as far as Texas and eluding the authorities to get in, others refugees themselves working within the city. There was bumper-to-bumper boat-trailer traffic—the celebrated Cajun Navy—going toward the city the day after the levees broke. None of those people said, I can’t rescue them all. All of them said, I can rescue someone, and that’s work so meaningful and important I will risk my life and defy the authorities to do it. And they did. Of course, working for systemic change also matters—the kind of change that might prevent calamities by addressing the climate or the infrastructure or the environmental and economic injustice that put some people in harm’s way in New Orleans in the first place.

If you are an evangelical reading this book, then I would ask you to look around and see what your witness has wrought. The nation is polarized. The candidates you back want to take us back to a mythical time—apparently the 1950s—that honestly did not exist. The bile and hatred of some of the leaders you emulate make it impossible for people to believe whatever witness you have left. While you are clinging to God and guns, mothers are clinging to pictures of children who have been shot dead in classrooms, in streets, in malls, in cars. More people go hungry today than ever before. Inequality is mounting. Calls for law and order mean more Black and Brown bodies dead at the hands of the police. The nation’s infrastructure is failing. Disdain for science has left America behind during a pandemic, while the rest of the world moves forward. The president you followed slavishly declared “American carnage” in his inaugural speech. Look around. You helped make this carnage we now experience. All of these things have occurred because evangelicals, through religious lobbying and interference, supported the political structures that curtailed, limited, or struck down truly important issues. The polarization we are experiencing in government has stymied progress. That polarization has taken on a resemblance to ideological and theological battles. Your nationalistic evangelicalism is hurting others. Your racism is actively engaged in killing bodies and souls. My analysis and prognostications may be dire, but it is never too late to make amends.

Geopolitics is ultimately the study of the balance between options and lim­itations. A country's geography determines in large part what vulnerabilities it faces and what tools it holds. "Countries with flat tracks of land -- think Poland or Russia -- find building infrastructure easier and so become rich faster, but also find them­selves on the receiving end of invasions. This necessitates substantial stand­ing armies, but the very act of attempting to gain a bit of security automat­ically triggers angst and paranoia in the neighbors. "Countries with navigable rivers -- France and Argentina being premier examples -- start the game with some 'infrastructure' already baked in. Such ease of internal transport not only makes these countries socially uni­fied, wealthy, and cosmopolitan, but also more than a touch self-important. They show a distressing habit of becoming overimpressed with themselves -- and so tend to overreach. "Island nations enjoy security -- think the United Kingdom and Japan -- in part because of the physical separation from rivals, but also because they have no choice but to develop navies that help them keep others away from their shores. Armed with such tools, they find themselves actively meddling in the affairs of countries not just within arm's reach, but half a world away. "In contrast, mountain countries -- Kyrgyzstan and Bolivia, to pick a pair -- are so capital-poor they find even securing the basics difficult, mak­ing them largely subject to the whims of their less-mountainous neighbors. "It's the balance of these restrictions and empowerments that determine both possibilities and constraints, which from my point of view makes it straightforward to predict what most countries will do: · The Philippines' archipelagic nature gives it the physical stand-off of is­lands without the navy, so in the face of a threat from a superior country it will prostrate itself before any naval power that might come to its aid. · Chile's population center is in a single valley surrounded by mountains. Breaching those mountains is so difficult that the Chileans often find it easier to turn their back on the South American continent and interact economically with nations much further afield. · The Netherlands benefits from a huge portion of European trade because it controls the mouth of the Rhine, so it will seek to unite the Continent economically to maximize its economic gain while bringing in an exter­nal security guarantor to minimize threats to its independence. · Uzbekistan sits in the middle of a flat, arid pancake and so will try to expand like syrup until it reaches a barrier it cannot pass. The lack of local competition combined with regional water shortages adds a sharp, brutal aspect to its foreign policy. · New Zealand is a temperate zone country with a huge maritime frontage beyond the edge of the world, making it both wealthy and secure -- how could the Kiwis not be in a good mood every day? "But then there is the United States. It has the fiat lands of Australia with the climate and land quality of France, the riverine characteristics of Germany with the strategic exposure of New Zealand, and the island fea­tures of Japan but with oceanic moats -- and all on a scale that is quite lit­erally continental. Such landscapes not only make it rich and secure beyond peer, but also enable its navy to be so powerful that America dominates the global oceans.

The Republic of Foo, our high-investment, intangible economy of the future, has significantly overhauled its land-use rules, particularly in major cities, making it easier to build housing and workplaces; at the same time, it invests significantly in the kind of infrastructure needed to make cities livable and convivial, in particular, effective transport and civic and cultural amenities, from museums to nightlife. In some cases, this involves rejecting big development plans that destroy existing places. It has faced political costs in making this change, especially from vested interests opposed to new development or gentrification, but the increased economic benefits of vibrant urban centers have provided enough incentive to tip the balance of power in favor of development. The cities of the Kingdom of Bar have chosen one of two unfortunate paths: in some cases, they have privileged continuity over dynamism in its towns—creating places like Oxford in the UK, which are beautiful and full of convivial public spaces, but where it is very hard to build anything, meaning few people can take advantage of the economic potential the place creates. Other cities resemble Houston, Texas, in the 1990s—a low-regulation paradise where an absence of planning laws keeps home and office prices low, but where the lack of walkable centers and convivial places makes it harder for intangibles to multiply. (To Houston’s credit, it has changed for the better in the last twenty years.) The worst of Bar’s cities fail in both regards, underinvesting in urban amenities and making it hard to build. In all three cases, the economic disadvantage of not having vibrant cities that can grow have become larger and larger as the importance of intangibles has increased.

What is scarce? Surely time is scarce? This is true in the sense that we get only one life, but yet again there are ways in which competition and how we use our time can make us feel an artificial sense of time scarcity. Each time we are able to build on the work of others with confidence, each time we use the elements of life pulled from our commonwealth of agricultural knowledge, we bundle time, and so get the benefit of having multiple lifetimes. Each time nature uses genetic code that has been developed over millions of years, millions of years of development are collapsed into something that works in our lifetimes. Each time we add to that collection, we are putting our lifetimes' work into a useful form for the benefit of future generations. At the same time, yes, we each have only our own single lives in which to pursue happiness. The goal is to spend as much of that time in a framework of sharing abundance rather than having it squeezed into a life of scarcity and competition. In contrast, we need not look far to find lots of frustrating examples in which our time is treated as abundant when we would rather have it be valued as scarce. It happens each time we must stand in line at the DMV, fill out redundant forms at the hospital, reproduce others' efforts by spending time searching for knowledge or data that already exists somewhere, create a report that no one reads. In those cases, we are creating and living in artificial and unnecessary time scarcity. Time is indeed one of the most curious elements of life, especially since our lifetimes and those of plants and animals all move at different rates. We know, for example, that the urgency to address climate change is really on our human scale, not geologic scale. The Earth has been through greater upheavals and mass extinctions and will likely go through them again, but for the narrowest of narrow bands of human history on Earth, we require very specific conditions for us to continue to thrive as a species. To keep our planet within a habitable and abundant balance, we have, as Howard Buffet noted, only 'forty seasons' to learn and adjust. That is why building on one another's work is so important. One farmer can have the benefit of forty seasons and pass some of that experience down, but if 1,000 farmers do the same, there is the collective benefit of 1,000 years in a single year. If a million people participate, then a million years of collective experience are available. If we are then able to compound knowledge across generations and deepen our understanding of human and natural history, we add even greater richness. It is in this way of bundling our experiences for continual improvement, with compound interest, that time shifts from a scarce resource to being far less of a constraint, if not truly abundant. However, for time to be compounded, knowledge must be shared, and real resources, energy, and infrastructure must exist and function to support and grow our commonwealth of knowledge.

due to the precision of the optical electron oscillation frequency within strontium or aluminium. 30. Train of identical nearly single-cycle optical pulses. The spectrum of the pulse train looks like the teeth of a comb, hence it is called a frequency comb. ‘Optical clockwork’ of this kind allows the comparison of disparate frequencies with such remarkable precision that it provides a means to test the tenets of relativity, and thus to understand better the role of light in defining space and time. Frequency, and thus time, is the physical quantity that can be measured with the highest precision of any quantity, by far. Optical telecommunications Frequency combs are also important in telecommunications links based on light. In Chapter 3, I described how optical waves could be guided along a fibre or in a glass ‘chip’. This phenomenon underpins the long-distance telecommunications infrastructure that connects people across different continents and powers the Internet. The reason it is so effective is that light-based communications have much more capacity for carrying information than do electrical wires, or even microwave cellular networks. This makes possible massive data transmission, such as that needed to deliver video on demand over the Internet. Many telecommunications companies offer ‘fibre optic broadband’ deals. A key feature of these packages is the high speed—up to 100 megabytes per second (MBps)—at which data may be received and transmitted. A byte is a number of bits, each of which is a 1 or a 0. Information is sent over fibres as a sequence of ‘bits’, which are decoded by your computer or mobile phone into intelligible video, audio, or text messages. In optical communications, the bits are represented by the intensity of the light beam—typically low intensity is a 0 and higher intensity a 1. The more of these that arrive per second, the faster the communication rate. The MBps speed of the package specifies how rapidly we can transmit and receive information over that company’s link.

We therefore conclude that cost overrun has not decreased over time. Cost overrun today is in the same order of magnitude as it was ten, thirty or seventy years ago. If techniques and skills for estimating costs and avoiding cost overrun in transport infrastructure projects have improved over time, this does not show in the data. No learning seems to take place in this important and highly costly sector of public and private decision making.

Yet, other than apprehending some of the perpetrators, the US took no other important action. It treated terrorism as a law enforcement problem rather than an ideological threat that needed to be eradicated. Terrorist organizations and infrastructures did not otherwise suffer, and state sponsors of terror were not made to pay the price.

As a legal and economic instrument, the zone presides over a cocktail of enticements and legal exemptions that are sometimes mixed together with domestic civil laws, sometimes manipulated by business to create international law, and sometimes adopted by the nation in its entirety. Incentives vary in every location but might include: holidays from income or sales taxes, dedicated utilities like electricity or broadband, deregulation of labor laws, prohibition of labor unions and strikes, deregulation of environmental laws, streamlined customs and access to cheap imported or domestic labor, cheap land and foreign ownership of property, exemption from import/export duties, foreign language services, or relaxed licensing requirements.

To fully understand Auschwitz and what it means, it is important to know the context against which the camps were constructed. While the physical infrastructure of Auschwitz only started to be constructed in 1940, the political climate that allowed it to happen began when the Nazis instituted state-sponsored racism against Jewish people following their ascent into power in 1933 by passing legislation designed to isolate them from society and drive them to leave Germany.

The increases in productivity brought about by Ford’s innovation were startling and revolutionized not just the automobile industry but virtually every industry serving a mass market. Introduction of “Fordist” mass production techniques became something of a fad outside America: German industry went through a period of “rationalization” in the mid-1920s as manufacturers sought to import the most “advanced” American organizational techniques.12 It was the Soviet Union’s misfortune that Lenin and Stalin came of age in this period, because these Bolshevik leaders associated industrial modernity with large-scale mass production tout court. Their view that bigger necessarily meant better ultimately left the Soviet Union, at the end of the communist period, with a horrendously overconcentrated and inefficient industrial infrastructure—a Fordism on steroids in a period when the Fordist model had ceased to be relevant. The new form of mass production associated with Henry Ford also had its own ideologist: Frederick W. Taylor, whose book The Principles of Scientific Management came to be regarded as the bible for the new industrial age.13 Taylor, an industrial engineer, was one of the first proponents of time-and-motion studies that sought to maximize labor efficiency on the factory floor. He tried to codify the “laws” of mass production by recommending a very high degree of specialization that deliberately avoided the need for individual assembly line workers to demonstrate initiative, judgment, or even skill. Maintenance of the assembly line and its fine-tuning was given to a separate maintenance department, and the controlling intelligence behind the design of the line itself was the province of white-collar engineering and planning departments. Worker efficiency was based on a strict carrot-and-stick approach: productive workers were paid a higher piece rate than less productive ones. In typical American fashion, Taylor hid

China and oil, remember? Okay, here goes. This caught me by surprise—China is the second largest importer of oil in the world, after only you-know-who. Its economy grows at nearly 10 percent and its appetite for oil is all but insatiable, growing at 8 percent a year. You see, they decided to go with cars instead of sticking with mass transit.” “Big mistake,” Jeff said. “Cars are a dead end.” “Maybe, but you need an enormous infrastructure to support a thriving car industry and it is a quick way to provide jobs while giving the industrial base a huge boost. Plus, factories that produce cars can easily be converted to military needs.” She gave him a cockeyed smile. “Remember that crack about cars when you go shopping for one next month. I’ve seen you trolling the Web sites. Anyway, within twenty years they’ll have more cars than the U.S. and that same year they’ll be importing just as much oil as we do. So here’s the deal. They don’t have it. Want to guess where they get it from?” “The Middle East?” “No surprise, huh? And who is their biggest supplier?” “Iran. Right?” “You guessed, but yes, that’s right. They signed a deal saying if Iran would give them lots of oil, China would block any American effort to get the United Nations Security Council to do anything significant about its nuclear program. They’ve been doing a lot of deals with each other ever since.” He slipped his computer into his bag. “That explains a lot.” “Oh yeah, these two countries are very cozy indeed. Anyway, China gets most of its oil from Iran. And they don’t just need oil—they need cheap oil because they sell the least expensive gasoline in the world. I think that’s to keep everybody happy driving all those new cars.

the size and functions of the state matter profoundly to the performance of capitalist economies. In orthodox economic commentary it is frequently asserted that the role of the public sector should be minimised in order to free private enterprise from the ‘dead hand’ of regulation and the perverse impact of ‘crowding out’. In fact, successful economies have almost ​all had states actively committed to their development.54 This is not just about the role of the state in providing or co-investing in infrastructure (as is sometimes conceded even by those otherwise sceptical of public investment), though this is indeed important. Its role in innovation is also key, as we have seen. At the same time, the development of a skilled and adaptive labour force requires deep investment in education, training, health, childcare and social care. These functions cannot simply be outsourced or privatised—as Crouch shows, when this is done the goal of greater competition almost always degenerates into private oligopoly, where public purpose is lost, and corporate political influence increases. We need to acknowledge, rather, the interdependence of private enterprise and the public sector; of market and non-market activities.

I believe that there is a Maslovian hierarchy of fires that applies to most rapidly growing start-ups, where the top of the list is the most important fire to fight first: Distribution Product Revenue model Operations Competition What’s next? What this means is that for most consumer Internet start-ups, the most important fire is distribution; if your distribution goes up in flames, your company is doomed. If you are able to contain that fire, however, it will make fighting the other fires a whole lot easier. Acquiring users gives you feedback on how to improve your product. Acquiring millions of users or thousands of customers makes it a lot easier to generate revenue. Generating revenue makes it easier to pay for the infrastructure and personnel to scale up your operations, either out of cash flow or by raising investment. And if you have a successful and growing business, then it makes sense to worry about the competition.

In the Mission District of San Francisco, observant passersby can discover the heroic history behind a fire hydrant that sits on an otherwise ordinary sidewalk. In the wake of the 1906 earthquake that shook San Francisco, a great blaze swept through the city. Many of the water mains failed and other lines ran dry, but one hydrant continued to function. This bit of infrastructure is credited with saving the Mission District from total destruction. Today, the hydrant has been painted gold and its importance has been further memorialized with an adjacent plaque. The small marker tells a huge city-defining tale of tragedy and triumph and highlights a moment in time that reshaped a metropolis.

Given the historical importance and exponential power ascribed to Convergence technologies, a comprehensive vision is required that describes how these technologies will be best aligned with our core human values and what the implications will be if they are not. Piecemeal descriptions and industry-centric narratives do not provide the holistic vantage point from which we must consider how best to make the critically important decisions regarding matters of privacy, security, interoperability, and trust in an age where powerful computing will literally surround us. If we fail to make the right societal decisions now, as we are laying the digital infrastructure for the 21st century, a dystopic “Black Mirror” version of our future could become our everyday reality. A technological “lock-in” could occur, where dysfunctional and/or proprietary technologies become permanently embedded into the infrastructure of our global systems leaving us powerless to alter the course of their direction or ferocity of their speed. A Web 3.0 that continues its march toward centralized power and siloed platforms would not only have crippling effects on innovation, it would have chilling effects on our freedom of speech, freedom of thought, and basic human rights. This should be enough to compel us to take thoughtful but aggressive action to prevent such a lock-in from occurring at all costs. Thankfully, there is also a “white mirror” version of Web 3.0, a positive future not well described in our sci-fi stories. It’s the one where we intentionally and consciously harness the power of the Convergence and align it with our collective goals, values, and greatest ambitions as a species. In the “white mirror” version, we have the opportunity to use these technologies to assist us in working together more effectively to improve our ecologies, economies, and governance models, and leave the world better than the one we entered.

digital technology is becoming systematically important, much in the same way as finance. As the digital economy is an increasingly pervasive infrastructure for the contemporary economy, its collapse would be economically devastating.

We started with a small number of two-pizza teams so that we could learn what worked and refine the model before widespread adoption. One significant lesson became clear fairly early: each team started out with its own share of dependencies that would hold them back until eliminated, and eliminating the dependencies was hard work with little to no immediate payback. The most successful teams invested much of their early time in removing dependencies and building “instrumentation”—our term for infrastructure used to measure every important action—before they began to innovate, meaning, add new features. For example, the Picking team owned software that directed workers in the fulfillment centers where to find items on the shelves. They spent much of their first nine months systematically identifying and removing dependencies from upstream areas, like receiving inventory from vendors, and downstream areas, like packing and shipping. They also built systems to track every important event that happened in their area at a detailed, real-time level. Their business results didn’t improve much while they did so, but once they had removed dependencies, built their fitness function, and instrumented their systems, they became a strong example of how fast a two-pizza team could innovate and deliver results. They became advocates of this new way of working. Other teams, however, put off doing the unglamorous work of removing their dependencies and instrumenting their systems. Instead, they focused too soon on the flashier work of developing new features, which enabled them to make some satisfying early progress. Their dependencies remained, however, and the continuing drag soon became apparent as the teams lost momentum.

South Korea showed the importance of having in place the infrastructure that was required to respond to a pandemic. This was true especially when it came to the equipment needed to deploy an enormous amount of testing. However, having enough test kits and test supplies was just one half of the equation. We also needed an installed base of labs and equipment that could run the tests and the ability to deploy testing sites that could quickly screen a massive population.

the containment of the coronavirus pandemic will necessitate a global surveillance network capable of identifying new outbreaks as soon as they arise, laboratories in multiple locations around the world that can rapidly analyse new viral strains and develop effective treatments, large IT infrastructures so that communities can prepare and react effectively, appropriate and coordinated policy mechanisms to efficiently implement the decisions once they are made, and so on. The important point is this: each separate activity by itself is necessary to address the pandemic but is insufficient if not considered in conjunction with the others. It follows that this complex adaptive system is greater than the sum of its parts. Its effectiveness depends on how well it works as a whole, and it is only as strong as its weakest link.

The most successful teams invested much of their early time in removing dependencies and building "instrumentation" - our term for infrastructure used to measure every important action, before they began to innovate, meaning, add new features.

The current chapter discusses the ecology of form in community planning, highlighting the importance of designing around the “green infrastructure” of wetlands, watercourses, and wildlife habitat in creating

Far from setting the stage for more prosperity, the more these markets were opened, they predicted, the more unfavorable Africa's position was likely to become and the more damage would be done to African economies. For these critics, it was utopian footling to suggest that African farmers could soon match the rich world in financial resources, technology, or infrastructure, whether on the national level (roads, ports, bridges, ect.) or in the context of individual farms. Given these realities, a far likelier outcome was the further immiseration and marginalization of Africa's rural smallholders, while the most important enduring effect of trade liberalization was the creation of new markers for the agricultural producers of the Global North.

One of Amy Edmondson’s most important findings about psychological safety at work is that it happens at the team level. Two teams working at the same company with all the same infrastructure can have radically different levels of FOSU and, consequently, different levels of microinnovations, problem solving, and customer advocacy depending on their manager.

Another economist, Amartya Sen, called this “development as freedom.” It is hard to imagine something more important to be free of than violence. As it happens, fighting also makes us poor. Nothing destroys progress like conflict—crushing economies, destroying infrastructure, or killing, maiming, and setting back an entire generation.[1] War undermines economic growth in indirect ways as well.

Balancing the diversity of exchanges and trading pairs is important for the robustness of any asset, including cryptoassets. Learning from bitcoin’s reliance on too few currencies and exchanges early in its young life, we can now follow the trading pair diversity of other cryptoassets, especially with regard to fiat currency pairs. Fiat currency pairs are particularly important for cryptoassets because they require significant integration with preexisting financial infrastructures.

Everyone in the aid community says that the Chinese are doing a lot of highly visible things, parachuting hardware [by this he meant major, very visible projects like bridges and stadiums], but not really involving themselves in the hard work of institutional development and of capacity building.” In passing, he acknowledged that 90 percent of the requests made to his Millennium Challenge Corporation were also for construction projects. “I personally think that infrastructure is incredibly important, but I’m also not willing to say that [it] is the answer to all the big questions here. Infrastructure reflects the priorities of the governments. This does not necessarily mean that a bias for hardware equates with the best development choices. In many cases, it may reflect nothing more than the fact that because construction projects are visible and tend to be big, that they leave something behind that is tangible, that leaders can point to and take credit for. It becomes their argument for staying in power.

The experiences of SARS and Ebola—the two major “dress rehearsals” of the new century—serve as sobering reminders that our public health and biomedicine defenses are porous. Prominent features of modernity—population growth, climate change, rapid means of transportation, the proliferation of megacities with inadequate urban infrastructures, warfare, persistent poverty, and widening social inequalities—maintain the risk. Unfortunately, not one of these factors seems likely to abate in the near future. A final important theme of Epidemics and Society is that epidemic diseases are not random events that afflict societies capriciously and without warning. On the contrary, every society produces its own specific vulnerabilities.

AWS and the Seven-Year Lead When creating Amazon Web Services (cloud computing), Amazon was essentially creating their own internal Internet Operating System (IOS) and then leveraging their technology infrastructure into a profit center. He said, “IT departments are recognizing that when they adopt AWS, they get more done. They spend less time on low value-add activities like managing datacenters, networking, operating system patches, capacity planning, database scaling, and so on and so on. Just as important, they get access to powerful APIs [Application Programing Interfaces] and tools that dramatically simplify building scalable, secure, robust, high-performance systems. And those APIs and tools are continuously and seamlessly upgraded behind the scenes, without customer effort.” —Bezos (2014 Letter) In other words, Amazon took the proprietary infrastructure they built for themselves and turned it into a service that any developer could use for their own purposes.

Ask yourself: What assets or capabilities do you need to be successful in this comfort-and-safety-as-a-service proposition? For example, you would need the capability to assemble and distribute the necessary HVAC equipment, security cameras, and other physical infrastructure. This, fortunately, may be a capability you already possess as an equipment manufacturer. But chances are that such a player would lack at least a few other critical capabilities. For instance, you would need the ability to install and maintain that equipment, which may go beyond the scope of your current operation. Perhaps most importantly, you would need an online platform to connect all the devices, sensors, and other equipment—allowing for the creation of digital twins for real-time remote digital monitoring. This online platform would also allow customers to make adjustments, access camera footage, and manage their subscription, all in one place.

The story that results is often a disheartening one. Though the various parts of rural America differ in important ways, as a whole, they are weighed down by their struggles: resource economies where powerful interests extracted wealth and left the people who toiled to remove it with little or nothing to show for their decades of labor; manufacturing jobs that fled overseas; inadequate healthcare and physical infrastructure; limited opportunities that push talented young people to leave; and much more. And all this exists within a landscape of political emptiness in which a lack of real competition leaves Democrats believing there’s no point in trying to win rural votes and Republicans knowing they can win those votes without even trying—and give the people who supply them nothing in return. We

The First Industrial Revolution (1700s–1800s) Beginning in the UK in the 1700s, freeing people to be inventive and productive and providing them with capital led many societies to shift to new machine-based manufacturing processes, creating the first sustained and widespread period of productivity improvement in thousands of years. These improvements began with agricultural inventions that increased productivity, which led to a population boom and a secular shift toward urbanization as the labor intensity of farming declined. As people flocked to cities, industry benefited from the steadily increasing supply of labor, creating a virtuous cycle and leading to shifts in wealth and power both within and between nations. The new urban populations needed new types of goods and services, which required the government to get bigger and spend money on things like housing, sanitation, and education, as well as on the infrastructure for the new industrial capitalist system, such as courts, regulators, and central banks. Power moved into the hands of central government bureaucrats and the capitalists who controlled the means of production. Geopolitically, these developments most helped the UK, which pioneered many of the most important innovations. The UK caught up to the Netherlands in output per capita around 1800, before overtaking them in the mid-19th century, when the British Empire approached its peak share of world output (around 20 percent).

Galileo Galilei made an important contribution to the structure understanding and movement of the Earth, where humans did not realize that his courage at that time had an impact which helped lay strategic infrastructure points in order to maintain stability at the end of time.

There was also a large crew of people who tried to nickname the previously mentioned Bipartisan Infrastructure Framework "BIF". If you would like your audience to start making fun of a big, serious, and important piece of legislation, start calling it BIF.

One significant lesson became clear fairly early: each team started out with its own share of dependencies that would hold them back until eliminated, and eliminating the dependencies was hard work with little to no immediate payback. The most successful teams invested much of their early time in removing dependencies and building “instrumentation”—our term for infrastructure used to measure every important action—before they began to innovate, meaning, add new features.

Having a doula present during an abortion is no longer “icing on the cake”—our clinics consider us an important part of their infrastructure.

Amazon realized the importance of recruiting developers early  —  moving its entire organization to services-based interfaces. At the time, this was revolutionary; while everyone was talking about “Service Oriented Architectures,” almost no one had built one. And certainly no one had built one at Amazon’s scale. While this had benefits for Amazon internally, its practical import was that, if Amazon permitted it, anyone from outside Amazon could interact with its infrastructure as if they were part of the company. Need to provision a server, spin up a database, or accept payments? Outside developers could now do this on Amazon’s infrastructure as easily as employees. Suddenly, external developers could not only extend Amazon’s own business using their services  —  they could build their own businesses on hardware they rented from the one-time bookstore, now a newly minted technology vendor.

CFR’s Renewing America initiative—from which this book arose—has focused on those areas of economic policy that are the most important for reinforcing America’s competitive strengths. Education, corporate tax policy, and infrastructure, for example, are issues that historically have been considered largely matters of domestic policy. Yet in a highly competitive global economy, an educated workforce, a competitive tax structure, and an efficient transportation network are all crucial to attracting investment and delivering goods and services that can succeed in global markets. The line between domestic economic policy and foreign economic policy is in many cases now almost invisible. Building a more competitive economy for the future requires that our political leaders—not just in Congress and the White House but also in state and local governments—understand how their policy choices can affect the choices of companies that can now invest almost anywhere in the world.

An almost equally important payoff of open source is its utility as a way to propagate open standards and build markets around them. The dramatic growth of the Internet owes much to the fact that nobody owns TCP/IP; nobody has a proprietary lock on the core Internet protocols. The network effects behind TCP/IP’s and Linux’s success are fairly clear and reduce ultimately to issues of trust and symmetry — potential parties to a shared infrastructure can rationally trust it more if they can see how it works all the way down, and will prefer an infrastructure in which all parties have symmetrical rights to one in which a single party is in a privileged position to extract rents or exert control. It is not, however, actually necessary to assume network effects in order for symmetry issues to be important to software consumers. No software consumer will rationally choose to lock itself

System Message Logging (Syslog) It is amazing just how helpful Cisco devices try to be to their administrators. When major (and even not-so-major) events take place, these Cisco devices attempt to notify administrators with detailed system messages. As you learn in this section, these messages vary from the very mundane to those that are incredibly important. Thankfully, administrators have a large variety of options for storing these messages and being alerted to those that could have the largest impact on the network infrastructure.

Pour donner consistance à cette révolution du temps, il suffit de commencer à énumérer les domaines de production de biens et de services dont l'existence actuelle ne se soutient que de la logique de la société marchande, de la double nécessité d'accroître sans cesse la production-pour-le-profit et de reproduire l'organisation sociopolitique qui la rend possible. Osons donc trancher à la racine et mesurer l'ampleur des secteurs qui, dans une société non marchande, soucieuse de surcroît d'écarter toute séparation entre gouvernants et gouvernés, deviendraient parfaitement superflus. On peut éliminer sans hésiter tout le personnel militaire et policier, poursuivre avec les banques, le système financier et les assurances (ces dernières seules pèsent aujourd'hui 15 % du PIB mondial), sans se priver du plaisir d'ajouter la publicité et le marketing( qui absorbent 500 milliards de dépenses annuelles, soit près d'un tiers des budgets militaires mondiaux). Finalement, le principe d'un autogouvernement à tous les échelons, tel qu'on l'a suggéré dans le chapitre précédent, condamnerait l'ensemble des bureaucraties nationales et internationales à une complète inutilité. Dens pans considérables de l'appareil industriel seront abandonnés, à commencer par la production d'armes et d'équipements militaires. Les impératifs écologiques et l'affirmation de l'agriculture paysanne rendront caduque une grande partie de l'industrie chimique (notamment l'écrasant secteur agrochimique) comme des biotechnologies fortement contestées (OGM notamment). Le secteur agroalimentaire, exemple type d'une marchandisation perverse des formes de production, s'évanouira, au profit d'une valorisation de l'autoproduction et des circuits locaux de production/consommation. […] on voit que chaque abandon de production de biens et de services aura des effets démultiplicateurs importants, puisque les besoins en édifices (bureaux, installations industrielles), en matériaux et en énergie, en infrastructures et en transports, s'en trouveront diminués d'autant. Le secteur de la construction sera par conséquent ramené à une échelle bien plus raisonnable qu'aujourd'hui, ce qu'accentuerait encore la régénération des pratiques d'autoconstruction (ou du moins une participation directe des utilisateurs eux-mêmes, aux côtés d'artisans plus expérimentés). Chaque suppression dans la production de biens et de services éliminera à son tour toutes les productions nécessaires à son installation, à son fonctionnement, sans oublier la gestion des déchets engendrés par chacune de ces activités. Pour donner un exemple parmi tant d'autres, la suppression de la publicité (jointe à celle des bureaucraties et à d'autres changements technico-culturels) entraînera une diminution considérable de la consommation de papier, c'est-à-dire aussi de toute la chaîne industrielle qui lui est associée, dans laquelle il faut inclure exploitation forestière, produits chimiques, matériaux nécessaires aux installations industrielles, transport, etc. Sans nier la pertinence de maintenir des échanges à longue distance, le fait de privilégier, dans toute la mesure du possible, les activités locales et de supprimer les absurdes détours de production qui caractérisent l'économie capitaliste (lesquels mènent, par exemple, l'ail chinois jusqu'en Europe et de l'eau - oui, de l'eau ! - des Alpes jusqu'au Mexique) réduira à peu de chose la chaîne commerciale actuelle et restreindra encore les besoins en transport. Joint à l'abandon d'une logique de production et d'organisation centrée sur l'automobile et le fétichisme égolâtre qui la soutient, tout cela entraînera une forte contraction de la consommation énergétique, qui pourra être satisfaite grâce aux énergies renouvelables, produites, dans la mesure du possible, localement. En conséquence, tout ce qui fonde le poids écrasant du secteur énergétique dans l'économie mondiale actuelle s'évanouira pour l'essentiel. (p. 91-92)

In 1924, Native Americans were granted U.S. citizenship, and the federal government considered it a national duty to “civilize” them,13 including Alaska Natives. Education was seen as an important force in this mission, and teachers were sent to native settlements to encourage changes in culture, religion, and language. School was taught in English, churches were constructed, and monogamous marriages and patriarchal households were encouraged or enforced, breaking up communal households .14 Historically nomadic Alaska Natives began settling around the schools and churches, often by order of the U.S. government, which in turn provided small-scale infrastructure and health clinics.15 What is now the village of Kivalina, for example, had originally been used only as a hunting ground during certain times of the year, but its intermittent inhabitants were ordered to settle permanently on the island and enroll their children in school or face imprisonment.

2011, I led the Department of Energy’s Quadrennial Technology Review to develop strategies for government support of emerging clean energy technologies. In one town hall meeting, I faced advocates for four different vehicle technologies—internal combustion engines powered by biofuels, compressed natural gas, hydrogen-powered fuel cells, and battery-powered plug-ins. Each of them believed that their technology was the optimal vision for the future, and that all the government had to do was support the development of the appropriate fueling infrastructure. When I reminded them that the country could probably deploy no more than two new fueling technologies at scale, a squabble ensued. There are several reasons I believe that electricity will fuel the passenger vehicles of the future, but one of them is that the existing electrical grid is a good start on the fueling infrastructure. If a widespread transition to plug-in electric cars does come about, systems thinking will be even more important as the electrical and transportation systems would have to work together to accommodate charging millions of vehicles.

The implications for civil government are equally obvious—expanding social services, city administration, and rule of law into periurban areas is clearly important, as are investments in infrastructure to guarantee supplies of fuel, electricity, food and water. Less obvious but equally important are investments in governance and infrastructure in rural areas, as well as efforts to mitigate the effects of rural environmental degradation, which can cause unchecked and rapid urban migration. Given the prevalence and increasing capability of criminal networks, police will need a creative combination of community policing, constabulary work, criminal investigation, and special branch (police intelligence) work. And local city managers, district-level officials, social workers, emergency services, and ministry representatives may need to operate in higher-threat governance environments in which they face opposition. The

Mobile Virtual Network Operators (MVNOs) have been around in the telecom world since the dawn of the 21st century. However, since their inception, their role has kept on changing. From broadly voice-based service providers to 3G purveyors, MVNOs have evolved in their services with time. Nowadays, in this world of intense competition, the success of MVNO completely depends on their ability to think out of the box. It is their ingenuity in creating customer-driven plans that decides their fate in today’s heavily saturated telecom market. The present-day MVNO subscribers are finicky, moody and disloyal. It is an MVNO’s task to inspire confidence in them, attract them towards their services and ensure that they stay loyal. The Challenge Faced by Different MVNOs Evoking customer trust and then ensuring that it is maintained is probably the toughest challenge faced by an MVNO in telecom. Especially in the competitive world of today that demands a differentiation in service along with an attractive pricing model. Based on their infrastructural capabilities, MVNOs can be divided into: 1. Skinny MVNOs: Equipped with their own voice mail, content applications, SMSC, prepaid and VAS. 2. Thin MVNOs: Apart from the infrastructure above, they also have AUC, EIR, HLR, and IN. 3. Thick MVNOs: Along with infrastructure of a thin MVNO, thick MVNOs also have a VLR and MSC. Regardless of the kind of MVNO that you are running, there are some major challenges that you need to overcome. While a skinny MVNO does not have to worry too much about the infrastructure, he cannot scale his operations as well as a thin or thick MVNO. On the other hand, a thick MVNO may be able to scale his operations well, but he might get too involved in managing the infrastructure with very little time for branding and marketing. The Importance of MVNE/MVNA Partnership for Overcoming Challenges As MVNOs are considerably smaller than a full-fledged MNO (Mobile Network Operator), they need support from MVNEs (Mobile Virtual Network Enablers) to get their job done. A capable MVNE with a comprehensive MVNO software solution like Telgoo5 can provide the following benefits to an MVNO: 1. Better billing – Billing is probably the toughest task for an MVNO to undertake all by itself. Any mistake or inefficiency in billing tasks can have a major bearing on MVNO subscribers. But when you partner with an MVNE like Vcare, you get access to a cutting-edge MVNO billing software solution. With a convergent billing solution by your side, you can create itemized bills with details of all types of services used by your subscribers. 2. Profitable deals with MNOs – Partnership with a competent MVNE/MVNA can help you get better-priced deals with an MNO. This will allow you to deliver the services at a lower rate to your MVNO subscribers while still making a profit. 3. Avoid red tape – Running a successful MVNO operation requires you to get into contracts with different carriers and vendors. By partnering with a competent MVNE like Vcare (who already has fully-licensed platforms and contracts with vendors), you are able to bypass the process of signing new deals, thereby saving considerable time and effort.

Let me take you back in time a little,” says Anumita Roychowdhury, an elegant woman in a beige and pale blue wrap. She’s the director of the Center for Science and Environment, a group that’s played a leading role in the years of battles over air quality. In the 1990s, she tells me, Delhi’s air was so bad “you couldn’t go out in the city without your eyes watering.” India had no regulations on vehicles or fuel, so despite advances elsewhere in the world, engines here hadn’t improved for 40 years, and fuel quality was abysmal. It was the activist Supreme Court that changed that. Its judges started issuing orders, and from 1998 to about 2003, a series of important new rules came into force. Polluting industries were pushed out of the city, auto-rickshaws and buses were converted to CNG, and emission limits for vehicles were introduced, then tightened. “These were pretty big steps,” Roychowdhury says, and they brought results. “If you plot the graph of particulate matter in Delhi, you will see after 2002 the levels actually coming down.” The public noticed. “I still remember the 2004 Assembly elections in Delhi, where the political parties were actually fighting with each other to take credit for the cleaner air. It had become an electoral issue.” So how did things go so wrong? The burst of activity petered out, and rapid growth in car ownership erased the improvements that had been won. “If you look at the pollution levels again from 2008 and ’09 onwards, you now see a steady increase,” Roychowdhury says. “We could not keep the momentum going.” Indeed, particulate levels jumped 75 percent in just a few years.14 Even the action that was taken, she believes, “was too little. We had to do a lot more, more aggressively.” Part of the reason government stopped pushing, Roychowdhury believes, is that the moves needed next would have had to address Delhiites’ growing fondness for cars, so would surely have prompted public anger. “There is a hidden subsidy for all of us who use cars today,” she says. “We barely pay anything in terms of parking charges, we barely pay anything in terms of road taxes. It is so easy to buy a car because of easy loans. So there is absolutely no disincentive.” About 80 percent of transportation spending is focused on drivers, even though they’re only about 15 percent of Delhiites. “The entire infrastructure of the city is getting redesigned to facilitate car movement, but not people’s movement.

Bezos’s “it” factor was picking the perfect product to sell at the start. He avoided inventory risk (he could return books), expanded the product list beyond what could be sold in stores, and offered a price advantage that could not be matched by the large store-based competitors due to their fixed costs. Then he reinforced his product advantage with an infrastructure edge and expanded his list of products beyond books. Important to note: He sold his infrastructure services to others, including his key competitors, such as Target. To protect itself, another competitor, Walmart, has recently asked some of its suppliers to avoid using web infrastructure services offered by Amazon.com

Our attention is normally drawn to that which we can see (the effect), which obscures the importance of what remains hidden (the cause). We focus on results (the having) and forget the process (the doing) necessary to achieve those results. We are even less aware of the infrastructure (the being) that underlies processes and provides the necessary capabilities for their functioning. Achieving specific results requires behaving in a way that produces such results, and behaving in such a way requires being the type of person or organization capable of such behavior. Thus, the highest leverage comes from becoming the person or organization capable of behaving in the way that produces the desired results.

It wasn’t the jocks or the prom kings and queens who created the social and business infrastructure of the twenty-first century. It was the geeks and the nerds who spent their Friday nights playing with their computers and Saturday nights playing a little D&D with their friends. In this way, D&D filled an important social gap for those less inclined to mingle.

Senior citizens naturally lament the passage of a former way of life whenever a county undergoes massive infrastructure changes; all acts of change are disconcerting. It is easy to confuse feelings of nostalgia for an incorrect belief that our youth was the Golden Age of Civilization and now decadence and debauchery mars the county that we cherish. A democratic nation is always a roughhouse of bawdy conduct. Each thronging generation of Americans fought tooth and claw over politics and social engineering and America brims with its congeries of impatient groups. Every generation includes speculators wanting to obtain quick results and instant wealth. Every age group loudly squabbles over issues of local, national, or international import. Each passing generation of American citizens skeptically questions the art and music of the new generation and dubiously interprets change as severing America from its root structure when in truth America’s fundamental tenet is its mutability, the ability to transform its governmental mechanisms, quickly adapt to transformations in science, medicine, industry, and technology.

Airport sponsors around the globe are looking for ways to develop and enhance their current infrastructure networks. It is important for all investors to consider different aspects of the industry before making a decision regarding on-airport infrastructure.

Removing red tapism and favoritism in higher education and research administration and management is of utmost importance. We need to empower universities, both government funded and private, to promote research and enable them to improve research infrastructure.

cities and suburbs to the opportunities we have to casually interact with strangers, friends, and neighbors. It is especially important for children, the elderly, and other people whose limited mobility or lack of autonomy binds them to the places where they live. But social infrastructure affects everyone. And while social infrastructure alone isn’t sufficient to unite polarized societies, protect vulnerable communities, or connect alienated individuals, we can’t address these challenges without it. In this book, I’ll explain how and why.

Many laws passed by Congress have grandiose names and are hailed by their sponsors as far more important than they really are. In one case, however, legislators promised little of consequence for a law that reshaped the country. The Hart-Celler Act of 1965, also known as the Immigration and Nationality Act, abolished the national-origins immigration quotas set up in 1924 to preserve the European character of the American population. As we saw in the previous chapter, the promoters of the act insisted it would have little effect on the ethnic mix of the country, which was then nearly 90 percent white. By 2008, however, whites had already fallen to 65 percent of the population, and the Census Bureau was predicting they would become a minority in 2042—just 77 years after enactment. This would be a more dramatic long-term effect than perhaps that of any other legislation passed in the 20th century. Post-Hart-Celler immigration has also enormously increased the population of the United States, which is the only industrial nation that is growing like a developing country. In 2010, the population was expanding by about 7,500 people every day—nearly three million a year—and immigrants and their children accounted for 75 percent of the 27.3 million increase from 2000 to 2010. Growth at this rate requires enormous amounts of new infrastructure, including about 8,000 new schools every ten years. In 2008, the Census Bureau projected that the population would expand from 302 million to 439 million by 2050, assuming immigration continues at current rates. If immigration stopped after 2009, there would be much more moderate growth, with the population reaching 345 million rather than 439 million.

Ramakrishna Paramhans Ward, PO mangal nagar, Katni, [M.P.] 2nd Floor, Above KBZ Pay Centre, between 65 & 66 street, Manawhari Road Mandalay, Myanmar Phone +95 9972107002 Market research plays a pivotal role in shaping business strategies and facilitating growth in dynamic markets like Myanmar. As businesses navigate through the complexities of the Myanmar market landscape, the expertise and insights provided by market research agencies become invaluable. One such prominent player in the field is AMT Market Research Agency, known for its comprehensive approach and tailored solutions. This article delves into the significance of market research for businesses in Myanmar, explores the services offered by AMT, showcases success stories, analyzes emerging trends in the industry, and presents client testimonials, providing a holistic view of the market research agency in Myanmar # 1. Introduction to Market Research in Myanmar ## Understanding the Market Landscape Market research in Myanmar is like exploring a hidden gem - full of potential but requiring a keen eye to uncover the treasures within. As one of the fastest-growing economies in Southeast Asia, Myanmar presents a unique blend of traditional values and modern aspirations that make it a fascinating market to study. ## Challenges and Opportunities in Myanmar Navigating the market in Myanmar can be akin to a thrilling adventure, with challenges and opportunities around every corner. From infrastructural limitations to cultural nuances, businesses face hurdles that require insightful market research to overcome. However, with the right approach, the untapped potential of Myanmar's market can lead to significant growth and success. # 2. Overview of AMT Market Research Agency ## Background and History of AMT AMT Market Research Agency is not your average player in the market research scene. With a rich history rooted in a passion for uncovering insights and a commitment to excellence, AMT has established itself as a trusted partner for businesses looking to navigate Myanmar's complex market landscape. ## Key Differentiators of AMT What sets AMT apart from the rest of the pack? It's not just their cutting-edge methodologies or their team of expert researchers, but their genuine enthusiasm for understanding the intricacies of the Myanmar market. AMT doesn't just deliver data - they offer valuable insights that drive strategic decision-making. # 3. Importance of Market Research for Businesses in Myanmar ## Driving Informed Decision-Making In a market as dynamic as Myanmar, making informed decisions is crucial for business success. Market research provides the necessary data and insights that empower businesses to make strategic choices with confidence. With AMT by your side, you can trust that your decisions are backed by solid research and analysis. ## Mitigating Risks in a Dynamic Market The only constant in the Myanmar market is change. With shifting consumer behaviors, regulatory landscapes, and competitive pressures, businesses face a myriad of risks. Market research acts as a compass, guiding businesses through the uncertainties and helping them navigate the market with clarity and foresight. # 4. Services Offered by AMT Market Research Agency ## Quantitative Research Solutions Numbers don't lie, and neither does quantitative research. AMT offers a range of quantitative research solutions that provide businesses with statistically sound data to make informed decisions. From surveys to data analysis, AMT ensures that your business is equipped with the numbers it needs to succeed. ## Qualitative Research Approaches Sometimes, it's not just about the numbers - it's about understanding the why behind the what. Qualitative research approaches offered by AMT delve deep into consumer insights, behaviors, and motivations, providing businesses with a rich understanding of the market landscape.