“Financial planning never hurts,” with this phrase Juan José Salas Méndez, Academic Director of Personal Finance at Banco Invex, began his conference within the framework of the National Financial Education Week 2020.

Salas Méndez explained that sometimes, many people throughout their lives do not undertake the task of researching more on the subject, which represents a high cost to learn to manage their money on time.

“This represents problems in the sense that you do not have time to achieve all your goals; What happens when you don’t have proper planning? By not keeping records, not being organized, you may be missing various events that would be more favorable to have lived at the age you are now and not postpone them, “he said.

For the manager of Banco Invex, the cost of not learning to handle money has an important impact on the quality of life, so it is important that clear financial goals are established from an early age.

“The quality of life implies making very clear, very specific decisions with situations of greater slack,” he added.

To err is a natural characteristic of the human being, and although it is often difficult to recognize it, it is an important step to begin to have a better management of your money, for this reason Juan José Salas added that, if you do not recognize or accumulate those errors that harm your finances they will have an irreparable impact in the long term.

“When people who do not recognize the problems, that is, do not identify them, and let them happen, it can become serious emergencies in the heritage of people,” he said.

He added that many occasions pretexts are interposed to recognize those errors that make the management of their money not the most optimal.

“Financial crises, debt, the quality of life that a person leads, is not something that catches you overnight, but is a series of events that occur throughout life, it is like the same stress: you do not reach a maximum level of stress when we talk about money because it arose from one moment to another, but it is a series of events that have already been developed in anticipation, “he emphasized.

According to Salas Méndez, another element that also prevents people from setting long-term financial goals is that talking about money is still taboo in Mexico, which reduces the ability of people to achieve their financial goals.

“Considering the value of money in time is complicated for many people, because they do not see it from a simple, simple, entertaining or everyday perspective; even the talks on financial education and money are almost taboo for Mexican families, ”he explained.

According to the Academic Director of Personal Finance at Banco Invex, on average, Mexicans start saving steadily after the age of 32, which becomes an element that can complicate their long-term plans and goals.

“We are saving too late, we should be saving from high school or college. We must not delay in time saving decisions, because the younger you are, the easier it will be; you can save less an amount that does not get in the way, but then it starts to buy you time, you are older and you have to put more money in and it will get in the way of your plans, “he declared.

Google researcher Timnit Gebru received an email in early December while on vacation. “We accept your resignation immediately, from today,” wrote a vice president of the company.

The problem is that Gebru had not resigned, he had only said that he would do so in the future if conditions were not met. The decision had apparently been prompted by an internal email criticizing the censorship of an academic article.

And he immediately went to Twitter to tell about it: “They have cut me off access to the corporate account. They have fired me lightning. ” “I feel bad for my colleagues, but for me it is better to know the beast than to make it see,” he added in another tweet.

Since that day, and until last Friday, 2,351 Google employees and 3,729 academics from around the world have signed a letter in support of Gebru. The CEO of Google, Sundar Pichai, has written an email to all employees, where he said he wanted to regain the trust of his workers, but without apologizing.

The global community of engineers and researchers dedicated to artificial intelligence has since held a debate on the limits of research funded by large companies and the role of Google as a company, which has already removed all masks after abandoning its original naive slogan of “ do not be bad”.

Gebru is a pioneering researcher in the field of ethics in artificial intelligence (AI). His greatest academic achievement was a 2018 article where, with other co-authors, he discovered that facial recognition was only wrong in detecting the gender of white men 1% of the time, but 35% of black women.

After arriving from Ethiopia at the age of 16, he received a BA in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University and was involved in creating the first iPad at Apple. Then it went through Microsoft. After her doctorate in machine vision with the celebrated professor Fei Fei Li, she came to Google at the end of 2018.

The type of dismissal – by email, on vacation – is not the usual for a figure of this level. “Firing a person with an email is the second worst way after with a post-it,” wrote Spanish professor and engineer Ricardo Baeza Yates in response to Gebru. Speculation about the real causes of the dismissal skyrocketed.

These are the most talked about causes during these days. All reflect at least a certain lack of sensitivity, which leaves Google in a bad place for its generous or delicate behavior with stalkers and other high-profile cases.

1 / Email. The vice president’s email mentioned an email Gebru wrote to an internal list of Google employees. “Some aspects of the email you sent last night to non-management employees reflect behavior that is inconsistent with the expectations of a Google executive.”

What did that email say? Gebru was unable to retrieve it because he no longer had access to his account. But within a few hours he was on the journalist Casey Newton’s newsletter . “After all the micro and macro aggressions and harassment received after submitting my stories here, I had stopped writing,” wrote Gebru.

But that day he had something else to say. The entire text is an outlet, a public complaint about how her superiors had treated her regarding an academic article that she had to “retract” from. “A week before you go on vacation, they give you a meeting,” Gebru said. “Nobody tells you what’s going on.

There they tell you that ‘it has been decided’ that you must rectify the paper in a week. You are not worthy of having conversations since you are someone whose humanity (not to mention your recognized knowledge) is not accepted or valued by this company ”.

It was an email about the alleged censorship of an academic article that Gebru and other researchers, inside and outside of Google, had sent to a conference. Suddenly that item didn’t seem to be of sufficient quality. What information would that article contain that so worried Google?

2 / The academic article. No one has published the entire article. But some journalists have been able to read it. There is nothing explosive for the ethical AI sector. He talks about the huge energy expenditure involved in building AI models: they need a lot of computational power.

It also refers to the biases created by models who write after training with trillions of words found on the Internet. “The structural injustices that exist in society permeate the data. It is very difficult to find unbiased data because society is biased ”, explains Ariel Guersenzvaig, professor at the Elisava University School of Design and Engineering (Barcelona). With language it is obvious: if the models are trained with what we say they will repeat our patterns forever.

“What comes out in the academic article, as published so far, I will not say is known, but anyone who knows the academic literature will not be surprised at anything,” says Guersenzvaig.

3 / “The angry black woman.” If neither the mail nor the article seem explosive, maybe they were just the excuse? “The paper is probably an excuse to get rid of a person who was finding it difficult,” says Mara Balestrini, PhD in Computer Science from the University College of London.

The definition of “angry black woman” is Gebru’s own cartoon about the role that Google’s communications seem to want to give her: a troublemaker who has earned her dismissal for heavy lifting.

“They paint me as the angry black woman because they put you in this terrible workplace and if you talk about it you become the problem,” says Gebru in the only interview she has given so far after the conflict.

One of the verbs that Gebru has used the most is gaslight, which comes from a play from the beginning of the 20th century, later taken to the cinema. A man psychologically harassed his wife, making her believe that she was going crazy. Abuse and load the dead to the other. That’s what Google has done with it, according to Gebru.

These are the facts, but the stir it has caused implies that it has struck a chord. In principle it is just one more layoff in a company with 130,000 employees. Why have you caused such a scandal?

1 / “If they have done this to me”. The big problem that Gebru sees in his situation is that of all the black women who are in a more precarious situation than hers. Gebru founded the Negros en IA group in 2016. “The biggest story for me is that if this happens to me, what is happening to other people?” Gebru says now.

Google has 1.6% black women in its general workforce, only 0.7% in technical positions and 1.1% in managerial positions. Almost 50% of managerial positions are for white men. “You have stalkers who take millions of dollars,” says Gebru.

“You have all those people with such toxic behavior that there are others saying ‘they are valuable to the company’, ‘oh, they are socially rare’ or whatever. And then you have a young black girl who has to prove herself over and over again. I reached a point where my knowledge is valued by people, but not within Google ”, he adds.

2 / “If they have done this to her.” And a company that treats its brilliant employees like this, how will it treat its billions of users? That is the question asked by Anna Jobin, a sociologist and researcher at the University of Lausanne (Switzerland).

“If a company like Google can’t stand what Timnit Gebru has to say and listen and learn to innovate better, what about all the other ethical issues in your business? So it’s no longer that personal matters [like Gebru’s hypothetical problems at Google] don’t matter, it’s not just personal anymore. They are important socially, politically and ethically ”, he adds.

3 / Who will allow us to investigate? Big tech companies are perhaps the biggest source of funding for researchers like Gebru. Universities are essential, but they have much less money. “Intel funded my doctorate for me.

The difference with what a Spanish doctoral student could do was abysmal ”, explains Balestrini. “There are very few employers of this nature. For ethical AI if you are not in university there is no work. Getting to Google or Facebook is the possibility of accessing large volumes of data ”, he adds.

The Gebru deal could be a turning point for hiring AI engineers. If the more sensitive see that the ethics department is despised, they may look beyond Google to work. Balestrini is skeptical: “I don’t want to be pessimistic, but they will not stop having groups of researchers for this.

If these things are going to change, it is because there is more alert to technical problems and at the same time more job opportunities for researchers arise, as will now happen with the Horizon Europe program ”, he says.

The controversy generated recalls that Google is no longer the search hero forever. Problems that occur within your offices are viewed in a different light.

The UK Government finally announced this Tuesday, after an 18-month consultation process, its legal proposals to tackle abusive or illegal content on social media.

Technology companies that do not comply with the new regulations will face fines of up to 10% of their global turnover, with a limit of 18 million pounds sterling (about 20 million euros).

Under the new regulation, companies will be imposed varying degrees of “duty of vigilance”, and the protection of minors will be key to determining the different levels of responsibility. “Social media pages, applications and other services that publish content generated by users themselves, or that allow people to communicate with each other online,

In fact, Brussels on Tuesday laid the foundations for a new digital era in Europe by putting new rules on the table to delimit the playing field of big technology.

The European Commission proposes to burden the giants with responsibilities for everything they disseminate, such as removing illegal content, and forcing them to give public authorities access to their data to verify that they comply with the rules.

Ofcom, the independent British media regulatory body, will ultimately be in charge of implementing the new measures. It will have the capacity to impose financial penalties, block access to the pages and even take criminal action against managers.

This last option is reserved only for cases of reiteration and will require the approval of special legislation that the Government has undertaken to process. “I am a strong supporter of technology, but that cannot mean an open bar,” Minister Oliver Dowden said.

“We are moving towards a new era of responsibility in which companies must protect minors and the most vulnerable users, to restore confidence in that industry while we reinforce freedom of expression with new laws.”

The digital media, and any form of online journalism, will be excluded from the new law, as will the comments of the readers in those same media. Even specific provisions will be approved, the British Government has announced, to protect journalistic content that ends up being shared on social networks.

The field of application to which this offensive is directed includes video sharing platforms, instant messaging platforms, online forums, dating applications, pornographic sites, resale forums, cloud storage services and even video games.

Among the companies included in the highest vigilance duty, Level 1, are giants such as Facebook, TikTok, Instagram or Twitter. All of them will be obliged to equip themselves with the appropriate reporting mechanisms, so that users can warn of abusive or illegal content and even demand its withdrawal.

“The new regulations will protect people’s online rights, and will strengthen the power of adult users to monitor their own security, while preventing companies from arbitrarily removing content. It will serve to defend the invaluable value of a free press, while also driving a new wave of digital growth based on building trust in technology companies, ”said Melanie Dawes, President of Ofcom.

The new regulatory framework will be financed through contributions from the companies themselves, starting from a certain threshold of their annual income.

Not being a diplomat, I can only make a simplistic analysis to try to understand why our governments have refused to apply retaliation measures to those states that have publicly expressed disdain for our country and for Panamanians.

It is about time we take this as a personal affront. Being Panamanians is not crying out loud singing Patria de Rubén Blades, but demanding that the Government defend the dignity and interests of our country.

And if it does not, we must become aware and refuse to buy products from the countries that denigrate us the most, such as France, which keeps us on a unilateral discriminatory list and is the biggest cheerleader for the European Union (EU) to discriminate against Panama.

Are French yogurts, cheeses and perfumes really indispensable? Consume the national for the love of God and more in these times of the coronavirus pandemic (COVID-19). Have a beer or national rum and leave the French wines.

The retaliatory measures, even if they do not have the desired commercial or diplomatic effects immediately, send a clear signal that the country that feels affected has dignity and is willing to defend its interests and those of its population.

Panama cannot be intimidated by the constant and ruthless attacks by the EU and its bureaucratic hordes from the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).

The prominent Panamanian professor of International Law Alonso E. Illueca, in an article titled De Retorión y Contramedidas (La Prensa, February 27, 2019) hit the nail on the head: “That is why, when making a decision between the countermeasures and retaliation, the State must carry out a cost-benefit analysis, as well as assess whether the response would constitute an internationally wrongful act or an unfriendly measure.

This entails weighing how much countermeasures and retaliation can aggravate the controversy, and that these privilege politically and economically powerful states or organizations, since, due to the imbalance of powers, the effects of these measures may be minimal. In no way does this imply a failure to defend the national interest. Unlike,

Our country has adequate legislation to carry out the retaliatory measures necessary to be taken seriously on the world stage.

I refuse to accept that they treat us as a fifth category country. Let’s leave the inferiority complexes. Law 48 of October 26, 2016, in its article 8, establishes a list of tax, tariff, immigration, labor measures, among others that can be applied by the Executive Branch.

What will not be effective? Who knows, but at this point, doing nothing is worse.

The ones that Colombia applied to us worked perfectly. In exchange for forcing us to exchange financial information, the “brother” country publicly branded us as accomplices in the tax evasion of its citizens, money launderers and established tariffs on textiles in the Colon Free Zone (ZLC).

Panama complained to the World Trade Organization (WTO), won the rulings, Colombia ignored it and they achieved their mission. Someone to explain to me how the controversy with France will escalate, for example, if they apply tariffs to their products in protest.

The Government of Panama, by not daring to apply retaliation or other countermeasures, allows Europeans to continue profiting from private and state businesses in Panama, without the slightest fear of reprisals.

If the government insists on using diplomacy (as if we were internationally recognized for being skilled in this science) then let it take the argument that Panama is doing the job and that only an international body like the United Nations (UN) -where all countries have a voice and vote – it must determine whether or not the minimum standards of transparency and exchange of financial information to which we have committed are met.

Those Panamanian businesses that manage to hook the consumer to buy online will be the big winners during seasonal promotions, such as Black Friday .

To do this, they will not only need advice to design an adequate e-commerce strategy but they must also know how the consumer has changed in this time and consider the country’s legal rules.

“Otherwise, they could be hit with significant penalties. It must be remembered that for online sales, in many countries there is already legislation on e-commerce and for physical sales, there are still limitations due to health protocols, established by the authorities of each country, to face the COVID pandemic -19 ”, explained María del Mar Herrera, senior manager of EY Law.

According to the EY Law specialist , the Panamanian business sector has great expectations about how the market will behave in the face of this new Black Friday modality . According to some studies carried out by EY, the consumer has been adapting to making their purchases online.

“Throughout the Central American region, an important sector of consumers has tried the channel and will continue to use it. For this reason, it is important that companies seek advice to design an adequate e-commerce strategy for their seasonal promotions, which ensures that the consumer is hooked on similar terms, to what they did on Black Friday , in person “, he commented .

According to the results of the study Perspectives of the consumer sector after COVID-19 , carried out by EY, the remote experience of 8 out of 10 consumers in Central America was as good or even better, as their physical shopping experience. Therefore, a good percentage of them would be willing to continue buying through this “new” channel.

For its part, EY Law’s E-commerce Report study identified that global trends shaped by data use that were already underway prior to the coronavirus are now shaping overall mindsets and consumer behavior on an unprecedented scale. , promoting new business models and transformation.

The Central American region, with its 26 million Internet users , has also experienced this increase, marking the beginning of new trends or consolidating others already underway, in particular electronic commerce.

To demonstrate this increase and its enormous potential, the revenues generated by e-commerce have risen to more than 800 million dollars in Guatemala, the Dominican Republic and Costa Rica, where young consumers are more attuned to e-commerce.

Panama’s e-commerce revenue (currently estimated at US $ 650 million) is expected to increase dramatically, as well as in the other countries in the region, albeit more slowly.

What to expect for the future?
From EY’s perspective, the next generations will shape even more significant and disruptive changes that can be seen in the next 10 years .

A number of variables such as demand planning, the logistics costs, delivery time, cybersecurity, the data protection will be the real differentiators in consumer preference.