Pins matching posted:2023-05-04

Among the allowances, state policy banks were given an additional 300 billion yuan ($44 billion) focused mainly on financing infrastructure projects. Tight rules were announced alongside the measures that require the projects to be profit-making and targeted.

Local governments were given the green light to use more than 500 billion yuan ($73 billion) of existing special bond quotas and were promised reduced financing costs through interest-rate changes.

Amid an energy crisis sparked by severe droughts and heat waves, the cabinet said central-government-run electricity firms will be allowed to sell 200 billion yuan ($29 billion) in special debt to ensure adequate energy supply.

Hivemapper relied on ride-hail, delivery and truck drivers with dash cams to collect 1 million unique kms of fresh map data.

Hivemapper, the startup that puts dashcams on ride-hail and delivery vehicles to map the world, is getting a little closer to its goal of toppling the B2B mapping empire that Google has built.

With only 2% of the world’s roads mapped, Hivemapper is still very much the underdog in this fight. But Gabe Nelson, Hivemapper’s head of operations, reckons the startup is reaching an inflection point that will lead to exponential scale.

Hivemapper said Thursday it collected more than 1 million kilometers (about 620,000 miles) of unique street-level imagery. Compared to Google’s 60 million kilometers, that’s small potatoes. However, Hivemapper collected this data over the last three months. It took Google from 2007 to 2019 to collect 16.1 million kilometers of unique road data.

Now the startup aims to map 10 million unique road kilometers by early next year.

Hivemapper relies on individual contributors around the world to collect its street-view data, rather than spending millions of dollars putting dedicated mapping vehicles on the road. Its dashcams are equipped with a high-quality imager and precise GPS, and they go for $549. Mapping with dashcams, the company says, means its data is continuously being refreshed, whereas much of Google’s Street View imagery, particularly outside of urban centers, is over a decade old.

The increase is the 10th straight interest-rate hike since last March in what has been the most aggressive rate-hiking regime since the 1980s.

Westinghouse announced the launch of a small version of its flagship AP1000 nuclear reactor on Thursday.

The new reactor, called the AP300, aims to be available in 2027, and will generate about a third of the power as the flagship AP1000 reactor, enough to power about 300,000 homes.

It’s expected to cost about $1 billion to set up each plant, a small fraction of the expense of the full AP1000.