In the mailbox beneath my apartment, I found a letter from Central Pacific Bank, a Hawaiian bank I’ve had my account with for almost 15 years, stating that it had changed its policy for customers with Non-Resident Alien (NRA) status. According to the new policy, effective April 1 this year, the bank will deduct $20 from the monthly service charge on NRA customers’ accounts if they don’t keep at least $10,000 in total in their accounts.
(more…)Category: Economics
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Going Driverless
I used to watch Knight Rider on TV when I was a junior high school student. Knight Rider is an American TV series where a hero, Michael Knight, together with a talking self-driven car, KITT, beats the evil and sometimes has romantic experiences with a heroine of each episode. I thought that such a car was just a pipe dream at that time, but the dream will probably come true in a decade or two.
The development of autonomous cars, or driverless cars, is widespread. Google started testing of the developing autonomous cars on public roads as Nevada state law allowed to do it and issued license plates to them in 2011. Following Google, Audi obtained the road testing license as well from the state government of Nevada in 2013. In the same year, the United Kingdom also permitted road testing of automated cars. In China, Baidu is also planning similar testing.
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