This Week I Learned - Week #29 2019

This Week I Learned -

A cloud broker is a software application that facilitates the distribution of work between different cloud service providers. This type of cloud broker may also be called a cloud agent.

Azure Cloud Shell can you let you work with over two dozen pre-installed tools

* Azure Sentinel is a cloud-native SIEM and SOAR solution

* PowerBuilder is tool owned by SAP (following its acquisition from Sybase in 2010) that simplifies the building of data driven, business applications. On July 5, 2016, SAP and Appeon entered into an agreement whereby Appeon would be responsible for developing, selling, and supporting PowerBuilder.

* The unemployment rate in the US is at an 18-year low. More open jobs exist than unemployed workers, the first time that’s happened since the Labor Dept. began keeping such records in 2000.

* The Aadhaar design did not envisage using it for building online social, financial and asset registries, electronic health records etc. Consequently, the instrument lacks the robustness and privacy safeguards necessary to support such applications. The design also did not examine safe protocols for facilitating analytics for targeting of welfare, education and healthcare, econometric analysis, epidemiological studies, tax compliance etc., as the recent Economic Survey has suggested. This resulted in overreach with a narrow design, and ad hoc and extra-legal Aadhaar seeding in registries like the state resident data hubs (SRDHs), which ultimately had to be discontinued - IE

* India Gate in Delhi is a war monument which commemorates those 70,000 Indian soldiers who lost their lives fighting for the British army during WWI.

* 50 years back, fourteen major lenders with deposits of at least Rs 50 crore each that accounted for 85 per cent of bank deposits  were nationalised under the then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi-led government. Its objective then was to break the vice-like grip of leaders of commerce and industry on commercial banking, which was seen to erode the capital base of banks. In second wave of nationalisation, the number of public sector banks (PSBs) rose to 28 in April 1980 with the inclusion of State Bank of India and its associate banks. Banks, once nationalized, became risk-averse and hidebound, rarely lending to new firms. Bank officials did not have to care about finding and evaluating profitable firms. Instead they lent to those companies selected, for whatever reason, by their political bosses. Such cronyism led to periodic bad loan crises that required bailouts by the banks’ owners, the taxpayers. The market share of PSBs in overall bank credit and overall bank deposits was at 63.2 per cent and 66.9 per cent respectively at the end of FY18. A banking sector that should be stimulating growth and investment remains inefficient and wasteful, and the cause is the same: the political priorities of a populist prime minister.

* Anil Ambani-led RCom which owes over Rs 50000 crore to a consortium of 31 banks led by the country's largest lender State Bank of India, has now been officially declared bankrupt.

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