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Running a small business demands many skills, including ambition and resilience. However, nothing beats financial preparednessespecially as the Trump administration’s tariffs loom.A new survey from TD Bank suggests that small business owners may not be as prepared for revenue shortfalls as they’d like to believe. Wakefield Research conducted the Financial Preparedness Survey among U.S. small business owners who have 100 employees or fewer and revenues of $100,000+ annually. Overwhelmingly, respondents reported that their business is equipped for whatever challenges the next 12 to 18 months may bring, with 94% saying they were ready. But most also admitted their business could not withstand temporary revenue shortfalls. In the survey, 72% of respondents said insufficient revenue for two quarters or less would cause them concern about their business’s future. And, more concerningly, 43% said longer dips, for three to four quarters, would be catastrophic. In other words, their business would not survive the impact of more than two quarters where revenue fell short. With the impact of federal layoffs and tariffs already setting in, 99% of respondents said they are assessing overall preparedness more frequently. “Now, more than ever, it is critical for business owners to be financially prepared,” Andy Bregenzer, cohead of U.S. Commercial Banking at TD Bank, said in the report. “Business owners who invest the time to create a financial plan will be better positioned to face challenges and seize new opportunities.”Still, respondents were divided on how to gauge their readiness. More than half say a positive cash flow is a telltale signal for how well equipped they are, while 37% said enough capital to cover emergencies is the most important way to stay afloat. Small business owners are not the only ones who are worried about stability in the wake of tariffs. In a recent survey of 5,000 frontline workers, 52% said they fear they will be laid off, while 74% said they expect Trump’s tariffs to impact their earning potential. Unsurprisingly, 77% of these workers said it’s small business owners, rather than Wall Street, who will be hurt by tariffs.
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E-Commerce
Is a side hustle really the only thing separating you from the life you desire? Listening to some influencers on social media could certainly have you thinking so. Side hustles encompass a range of self-directed entrepreneurial activities undertaken while also working a job. For young people with limited access to capital, theyre the most accessible opportunity to engage in entrepreneurship. Yet, we still know very little about who takes them on and why, and what kind of impact they have on working life in economies like Australia. Our new report, Side Hustles: How Young People Are Redefining Work, presents the first wave of findings from an ongoing three-year, mixed-methods study that seeks to answer these questions. In our first year of data collection, we surveyed 1,497 side hustlers ages 18 to 34 and interviewed a further 68. Our findings raise questions about the merits of entrepreneurship as a solution to youth unemployment or a pathway to financial freedom. What makes a side hustle? To be included in our project, a young person had to be employed, but also carrying out some form of entrepreneurship. We defined entrepreneurship as self-directed economic activity, where the side hustler has some measure of control over when they work, who they work for, and what they charge. The most popular side hustle among participants was selling goods (42.9%). Others included: services such as gardening, dog-walking or moving furniture (29.2%) creating media content (16.5%) creative work such as graphic design or photography (11.3%). Side hustling could include some gig work through online platforms, but only when these platforms allow workers to negotiate prices with clients and make choices about their work. As such, we excluded ride-share and food delivery drivers from the project. Projects for the privileged While some people may assume that young people start a side hustle out of financial stress, we found side hustlers are actually a relatively privileged cohort. They are a well-educated group. Almost two-thirds of our sample had university degrees and many of the remainder were studying. They also generally report their financial well-being as comfortable. Why is this? Side hustles often dont make much money, cost money to set up, and carry riskall of the hallmarks of entrepreneurship. Median hourly earnings from their side hustles are less than what they would make working in retail or hospitality, and on average they are about 50% what they make in their main job. As one e-commerce side-hustler put it: “If I really put my time and energy into the consideration, I would say were not making much money at all. Its just something I enjoy doing in my free time.” Their side-hustle earnings are also uncertain: 65% say they are unsure what their earnings will look like in three months. In other words, you need to be financially secure already to even contemplate a side hustle. Passion over pay Side hustles dont make enough to help someone who is really financially struggling, and they are unlikely to be a pathway out of the employment rat race. Despite this, our participants are overwhelmingly satisfied with their side hustles and say they have good work-life balance. So what motivates them? The top motivation reported in our study is passion and enjoyment. Side hustlers say they want work that relates to their interests and enjoy the autonomy and flexibility that a side hustle allows. Even though side hustles are often less profitable than a second job, the second-highest motivation was still money. Thats likely because they offer a way of making some supplementary income in a way that is flexible and autonomous. Theyre often a source of play money. One 33-year-old man with an e-commerce side hustle told us: “If I was to pick up a second job, like Uber driving at night time, I wont be happy. Ill be tired. Ill be stressed out trying to do that. Whereas, I think because Ive got the passion for it here, Im happy to do it because, like I said, Im doing it at my own pace.” Pressure to be productive Our research suggests that rather than being a pathway out of unemployment, side hustles actually represent a broader social and economic trend: More and more of young peoples lives are being encompassed by work. Interviewees frequently talked about feeling like they needed to make their time outside of work productive in some way. For some, it was as though they could not justify leisure time unless it was financially profitable. One participant told us: “You obviously want to enjoy life and have a bit of a chill time, but some days you just go, like, ‘What am I doing? Just sitting at home and just relaxing watching Netflix or whatever. I should probably be out there making more money. Blurring work life boundaries? Most participants were also not very concerned about growing their side hustles into businesses. Instead, they aspired for balanced working lives with a side hustle offering passion, flexibility, and autonomous work, and paid employment supporting them financially and offering the option of a traditional career. They also did not necessarily see the time spent on their side hustles as work, being much more personally invested and self-directed in their side hustles than in their paid jobs. But this means that much of their leisure time looks very much like work, and more and more of their lives are dedicated to being productive. David Farrugia is an ARC Future Fellow at the School of Education at Deakin University. Brendan Churchill is an ARC senior research fellow and senior lecturer in sociology at The University of Melbourne. Kim Allen is a professor of sociology of youth and culture at the University of Leeds. Stephanie Patouras is a research officer and PhD candidate at Deakin University. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Category:
E-Commerce
A U.S. lawmaker plans to introduce legislation in coming weeks to verify the location of artificial-intelligence chips like those made by Nvidia after they are sold. The effort to keep tabs on the chips, which drew bipartisan support from U.S. lawmakers, aims to address reports of widespread smuggling of Nvidia’s chips into China in violation of U.S. export control laws. Nvidia’s chips are a critical ingredient for creating AI systems such as chatbots, image generators and more specialized ones that can help craft biological weapons. Both President Donald Trump and his predecessor, Joe Biden, have implemented progressively tighter export controls of Nvidia’s chips to China. But Reuters and other news organizations have documented how some of those chips have continued to flow into China, and Nvidia has publicly claimed it cannot track its products after they are sold. U.S. Representative Bill Foster, a Democrat from Illinois who once worked as a particle physicist, said the technology to track chips after they are sold is readily available, with much of it already built in to Nvidia’s chips. Independent technical experts interviewed by Reuters agreed. Foster, who successfully designed multiple computer chips during his scientific career, plans to introduce in coming weeks a bill that would direct U.S. regulators to come up with rules in two key areas: Tracking chips to ensure they are where they are authorized to be under export control licenses, and preventing those chips from booting up if they are not properly licensed under export controls. Foster told Reuters that there are already credible reports – some of which have not been publicly disclosed – of chip smuggling occurring on a large scale. “This is not an imaginary future problem,” Foster told Reuters. “It is a problem now, and at some point we’re going to discover that the Chinese Communist Party, or their military, is busy designing weapons using large arrays of chips, or even just working on (artificial general intelligence), which is as immediate as nuclear technology.” Nvidia declined to comment for this story. Chip smuggling has taken on new urgency after the emergency of China’s DeepSeek, whose AI systems posed a strong challenge to U.S. systems and were built with Nvidia chips that were prohibited for sale to China, according analyst firm SemiAnalysis. Prosecutors in Singapore have charged three Chinese nationals with fraud in a case that involved servers that may have contained Nvidia chips. Though it has not been put into broad use, the technology to verify the location of chips already exists. Alphabet’s Google already tracks the location of its in-house AI chips and others in its vast network of data centers for security purposes, according to two sources with direct knowledge of its operations. Google did not respond to a request for comment. Foster’s legislation would give the U.S. Department of Commerce six months to come up with regulations to require the technology. Bipartisan support Foster’s bill has support from fellow Democrats such as Representative Raja Krishnamoorthi, the ranking member on the House Select Committee on China. “On-chip location verification is one creative solution we should explore to stop this smuggling,” Krishnamoorthi said in a statement. Republicans are also supportive, with Representative John Moolenaar, who chairs the committee, telling Reuters that “the Select Committee has strong bipartisan support for requiring companies like Nvidia to build location-tracking into their high-powered AI chips and the technology to do it already exists. The technology for verifying the location of chips would rely on the chips communicating with a secured computer server that would use the length of time it takes for the signal to reach the server to verify where chips are, a concept that relies on knowing that computer signals move at the speed of light. Tim Fist, a former engineer and director of emerging technology policy at Washington think tank Institute for Progress, said such tracking would provide a general, country-level location for chips. But that is far more information than the Bureau of Industry and Security, the arm of the U.S. Commerce Department responsible for enforcement of export controls, currently has. “BIS has no idea which chips they should be targeting as a potential high priority to investigate once they’ve gone overseas,” Fist said. With location verification, “they now at least have bucketed the set of chips that are out there in the world into ones that are very likely to not have been smuggled and ones that warrant further investigation.” Foster’s second legislative goal of preventing AI chips from booting up if they are not properly licensed under U.S. export controls would be more technologically complex to implement than location verification, but he said the time has come to begin discussions for both efforts. “We’ve gotten enough input that I think now we can have more detailed discussions with the actual chip and module providers to say, ‘How would you actually implement this?'” Foster told Reuters. Stephen Nellis and Max A. Cherney, Reuters
Category:
E-Commerce
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