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Federal budget spending bookended by extended-care, child-care investments – TheChronicleHerald.ca

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The Trudeau Liberal government delivered a federal budget Monday aimed at finishing the fight against COVID-19 and investing in a broken economy while providing much-anticipated good news for Nova Scotians young and old.

Introducing the first federal budget in more than two years, Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland said the pandemic has preyed on Canadian seniors “mercilessly,” ending thousands of lives and forcing all seniors into fearful isolation.

“We have failed so many of those living in long-term care facilities,” Freeland said. “To them, and to their families, let me say this: I am so sorry. We owe you so much better than this.”

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The “so much better” is expected to come from a budget announcement of a $3-billion investment over five years, starting in 2022-23, to ensure that provinces and territories provide a standard of care in their long-term care facilities.

Freeland said the pandemic has shed a light on systemic issues affecting long-term care facilities across the country, a light that was focused on Nova Scotia last week when Premier Iain Rankin was bombarded with opposition questions about pandemic failures at the Northwood long-term care facility in Halifax that resulted in 53 virus deaths.

Michelle Lowe, the executive director of Nursing Homes of Nova Scotia Association, an umbrella group that represents 85 per cent of the province’s 97 nursing homes, said her association has had recent discussion about the push for national standards.

Lowe said the Nova Scotia system is not perfect but “we have a very good system when it comes to standards and outcomes that are required.”

Lowe said the concern is that when the federal government focuses on developing national standards, “it then starts to take the focus off the really critical things that require investment.”

“The immediate issue is (staff) recruitment,” Lowe said. “Standards are important but I would say the standards that many of our facilities here in Nova Scotia abide by are exceptional.”

The Northwood extended care home in Halifax. The federal budget included funding that would create national standards in extended-care homes across Canada.- Tim Krochak

Lowe said Nova Scotia could set standards that would meet and likely exceed national benchmarks and said a variety of government bodies, like Accreditation Canada, audit long-term-care facilities to make sure practices meet national and international standards. 

Lowe said federal government funds would be better invested in paying the sometimes unattainable fees for those governing bodies to audit facilities. 

“The number one issue that’s facing long-term care in this country is recruitment,” Lowe said. “For so long, the emphasis has been on recruiting acute-care staff, recruiting doctors, recruiting nurses, to come into the primary care setting and what’s fallen off the radar and what’s fallen off efforts by government is this whole area of recruiting for continuing care, not only in Nova Scotia, but across the country.”

Lowe said funding for new or renovated facilities is important “but if we don’t have the staff to support that, none of it will matter.”

“If we don’t have some significant investment in recruitment, particularly from what we are seeing here in Nova Scotia … I’m crossing my fingers and hoping this doesn’t happen, you are going to see facilities closing beds for summer vacations because they just don’t have enough staff to provide the care.”

Lowe said providing private rooms for every senior in long-term care is not realistic, based on projections that suggest 199,000 new beds would be needed over the next 15 years to support the baby boomers as they go through the system. 

The federal budget also provides $90 million over three years to look at ways to support an age well at home initiative to support seniors to stay at home, in their home communities as long as possible.. The funding would provide practical support to help low-income and otherwise vulnerable seniors, including matching seniors with volunteers who can help with meal preparations, home maintenance, daily errands, yard work, and transportation. 

“That’s fantastic,” Lowe said of caring for more seniors at home.

The federal government has also promised to increase old age security for Canadians 75 and older.

It means providing support where COVID has struck hardest – to women, to young people, to low-wage workers, and to small and medium-sized businesses, especially in hospitality and tourism. 

At the other end of the spectrum from seniors measures is a federal commitment to invest $30 billion over the next five years in a Canada-wide child-care and early learning program. By the end of next year, the federal government aims to reduce average fees for regulated early learning and child care by 50 per cent that would bring fees for 4egulated child care down to $10 per day on average within the next five years. 

Combined with previous investments announced since 2015, a minimum of $9.2 billion per year will be invested annually in child care, including Indigenous early learning and child care, starting in 2025-26.

“Long overdue,” said Alec Stratford, chairman of the steering committee for the Nova Scotia branch of the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, 

“It’s been 50 years since the Commission on the Status of Women recommended a national child-care program,” Stratford said. “It is finally nice to see words come to fruition with a meaningful investment.”

Stratford said the program will work the same as health care, with the federal government providing funding with federal standards and the provinces figuring out the best way to deliver it.

Stratford said child care is particularly important at this current moment as “we look at the statistics on women in the labour force and the impact that the pandemic has had.”

Stratford said child care is one of the most effective economic policies that we can put into play with every dollar spent returning two dollars to the economy, a policy that creates equity among genders in the workplace.

“As women are able to feel safe in having their kids cared for, they re-enter the labour market, go back to school and find the education and tools that we all need.”

The federal budget comes with a 354.2-billion deficit for the fiscal year just completed and a projected $154.7-billion deficit for the 2021-22 fiscal cycle.

The federal budget plan is to create one million new jobs by year’s end, extended funding through the fall to bridge Canadians and Canadian businesses through the pandemic crisis toward recovery and support 500,000 new training and work opportunities, almost half of which will be opportunities for youth.

“These are the programs that are needed,” Stratford said. “That, with pharmacare, increased health-care spending, all of those programs and services work to lower the cost of living for Canadians, so that they can live a more quality life, which is a markedly different approach that we’ve seen in past governments where austerity is the policy decision-maker.”

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Amazon Adds $2.75 Billion To Anthropic Investment, Sora Goes To Hollywood – Forbes

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Amazon invests $2.75 billion in Anthropic. This brings Amazon’s investment to $4 billion, as it follows its previous investment of $1.25 billion, which gave the company the option to invest the additional funds. This comes as Anthropic’s new Claude-3 chatbot outperforms ChatGPT- 4 in recent tests. Amazon has unique insight into Anthropic’s performance as it is one of the suite of AI models offered by AWS, which include most of Claude’s competitors.

Sora Goes To Hollywood. Everyone is reacting to a Bloomberg report that OpenAI will soon be meeting with studios and other Hollywood stakeholders to demonstrate the capabilities of the text-to-video generator and explore partnerships. OpenAI says unnamed “A list” directors are already using it.

Based in Toronto, shy kids are a multimedia production company who utilized Sora for the above short film about a man “who is literally filled with hot air.” His head, as you can see, is a yellow balloon. “We now have the ability to expand on stories we once thought impossible,” shares the trio made up of Walter Woodman, Sidney Leeder and Patrick Cederberg. Walter, who directed Air Head, said as great as Sora is at generating things that appear real, what excites us is its ability to make things that are totally surreal.

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Neuralink Shows Paralyzed Patient Playing Chess on a PC. Elon Musk’s brain-computer interface company shared a video of its first human patient, Noland Arbaugh, playing chess and Civilization VI using their brain implant. Arbaugh, who is paralyzed below the shoulders, described the experience as “just stare somewhere on the screen” to move the cursor. While some experts see this as a promising step, others emphasize that it’s still early days and the technology has limitations. Arbaugh acknowledged that there’s still work to be done, but the implant has already changed his life.

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Illuvium Labs Raises an additional $12 million for NFT Gaming Universe. Following an extensive three-and-a-half-year development journey and $60 million in funding, Illuvium Labs is on the cusp of unveiling its interoperable gaming universe. It will feature three interconnected titles designed to utilize the same NFTs seamlessly across all games, promising a first-of-its-kind experience. The influx of $12 million in Series A funding from esteemed firms like King River Capital, Arrington and Animoca will be allocated to developing new gaming titles within the Illuvium ecosystem.

Databricks’ DBRX claims the crown as best open-source LLM. It’s a list that includes Meta’s Llama 2 and Mistral’s Mixtral. Leading companies like OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic sell, or rent, their proprietary private models to enterprises and subscribers. DBRX was produced for just $10 million, orders of magnitude less than its competitors. On Monday, Wired reported that the company showed data proving its AI model’s reading comprehension, answers to general knowledge questions, and coding is superior to other open-source models that can be downloaded from Hugging Face and modified by users.

Shiba-Inu Metaverse leader steps down amid dispute over IP. Marcie Jastrow, the well-regarded Hollywood executive who led Technicolor’s XR efforts, has left the company. This led the company’s legions, known as the Shib Army, to speculate about malfeasance, which is easy to do, because Jastrow is the only person involved who is not anonymous, including Ship’s charismatic leader Shytoshi Kusama.

This live football experience was built by Immersiv.io to showcase how AR can transform the live sports broadcast and fan experience using the Apple Vision Pro. Immersiv.io worked with the Bundesliga (the German Football League) on the production. In a post on X, the company said. “This is a 3D reproduction of the live game integrating TRACAB Gen 6 live skeletal data of all players and the ball, complemented with real-time insights, offering the ultimate live tactical perspective of the game.”

SXSW 2024: XR That Makes You Go Wow. The XR competition was won by an AI experience, The Golden Key. This is the second year in a row that an XR experience did not take the immersive festival’s grand prize.

The second annual AI Film Festival is coming to Los Angeles on May 1, and New York May 9. Seats are limited, request to attend at http://aiff.com

This column, once called “This Week in XR,” is also a podcast hosted by author Charlie Fink, and Ted Schilowitz, former studio executive and co-founder of Red Camera, and Rony Abovitz, founder of Magic Leap. This week our guest is Liz Hyman, CEO of the XR Association. We can be found on Spotify, iTunes, and YouTube.

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Where Will Virtual Reality Take Us? (Jaron Lanier/New Yorker)

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FP Answers: What is a 'behavioural edge' in investing and how does it affect returns? – Financial Post

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Temperament is the unsung hero of investing success

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By Julie Cazzin with Felix Narhi

Q: What is a “behavioural edge” in investing? How does it potentially enhance returns? How can an investor develop it? — Giovanni

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FP Answers: Giovanni, the term behavioural edge is just another way of saying “temperament,” which refers to the habitual way a person behaves in each situation. For example, one person may be easygoing and relaxed while another is more likely to be impatient and assertive.

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Temperament is the unsung hero of investing success. Gaining insight about our innate emotional temperament and learning how to work with it gives investors an edge.

The common misconception is that you need a high level of intelligence to be a successful investor. No doubt, that can be helpful, but based on many years in the industry, I’ve seen it is not always the most important differentiator.

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Once someone has at least an average level of intelligence, it is temperament that often provides the investing edge in leading to better returns over the long term. “Investing is not a business where the guy with the 160 IQ beats the guy with the 130 IQ,” famed investor Warren Buffett has pointed out.

Having the right temperament can potentially enhance investment returns in several ways. An investor who is very reactive to external events is likely to fare poorly over the long term because, quite simply, the world is full of uncertainty and always will be. Markets are highly reactive, abetted by algorithmic trading and automatic rebalancing by exchange-traded funds. Individual investors should not be.

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Research shows that investors who trade frequently or try to time the market underperform. On the other hand, those investors who can remain calm and patient throughout market cycles do better because markets historically trend upwards. Hands down, being calm, cool and collected is the right temperament for an investor to have.

The concept of “homo economicus” — or economic man — describes a hypothetical person who consistently makes rational decisions. In real life, our decisions are coloured by our formative experiences, moods, external circumstances, what we ate for lunch and a host of other factors. These influences drive our behaviours, but they often operate below conscious awareness (even artificial-intelligence apps “hallucinate”).

Given that behaviour is some combination of cognitive and emotional inputs, an investor can create an edge by developing a disciplined investment process that overrides temperament, especially during highly volatile periods.

The term “active patience” means being clear about your investment principles and what you are looking for, and practicing active patience until the right opportunity arises.

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In contrast, regular patience is making an investment decision and sticking with it no matter what, even if it was the wrong decision. The latter approach is unlikely to bring financial success, which is the major goal of investing.

Active patience is what Buffett would call the “fat pitch,” which occurs when the market (occasionally) presents a very attractive opportunity. It is easy to spot a great opportunity and take full advantage of it when an investor has clear principles on what they are looking for.

Can we change our temperament? Recent studies show that personality traits and moods are subject to change, sometimes within the hour, so temperament may not be as fixed as we’ve been led to believe.

Becoming a better investor starts with self-knowledge — and lots of practice. The behavioural traits associated with good investment outcomes are patience, discipline, emotional control and risk awareness. It so happens, these qualities lead to good life outcomes, too. A calm temperament is the bedrock of making sound investment decisions.

Every investor must determine for themselves how to achieve greater equanimity and there is no shortage of books, videos and TikTok tutorials on that evergreen topic. I would also add the importance of staying humble.

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In investing, as in life, the learning never stops. Staying open to new information and having the courage to challenge our own and others’ beliefs and habitual behaviours are the keys to future success.

Felix Narhi is chief investment officer and portfolio manager at PenderFund Capital Management Ltd.

Bookmark our website and support our journalism: Don’t miss the business news you need to know — add financialpost.com to your bookmarks and sign up for our newsletters here.

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Lenders Rally After India’s Central Bank Eases Investment Curbs – BNN Bloomberg

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(Bloomberg) — Indian banks and shadow lenders rose Thursday after the country’s central bank eased capital requirements for a unique type of investment, a move that may free up more funds for loans.

The gains came after the Reserve Bank of India issued Wednesday modified rules on lenders’ required provisions for exposure to alternative investment funds, or AIFs, that invest in the lenders’ borrowers. Under the new policy, a lender needs to set aside capital only for the amount the AIF invested in the debtor company, and not the entire investment of the lender in the AIF.

Shares of Piramal Enterprises Ltd., which reported among the biggest provisions for such investments, closed 1% higher after rising as much as 6% during the day. A gauge of financial services firms climbed 1%, the most since March 1.

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Lenders led the rally in the broader market, with the NSE Nifty 50 Index registering its best day since beginning of the month.

The RBI’s softening stance came after industry players raised concerns over clarity and uniformity after it announced in December restrictions on lenders’ exposure to AIFs that hold stakes in their borrowers. The latest move will likely help firms including Piramal, HDFC Bank Ltd. and IIFL Finance Ltd. reverse some of their relevant provisions made previously, according to analysts at Citigroup Inc. and Jefferies Financial Group Inc.

Read more: India’s Crackdown on Financial Risks Puts Industry on Watch

“Select private banks and NBFCs like Piramal had provided for their entire AIF exposure during 3Q and could see some write-backs in 4Q if they decide to reverse the excess provision,” Jefferies analyst Bhaskar Basu wrote in a note.

Regulators introduced a flurry of new rules last year to prevent a buildup of financial stress at a time when India’s economy remained resilient in the face of rising interest rates, slowing global growth and unabated geopolitical tensions.

©2024 Bloomberg L.P.

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