How To Fill Privacy Release: Fill & Download for Free

They really go to bat for you.But before we begin, make sure what you're asking for your congressperson can actually help with.Trouble with the payment of Medicare premiums? They would love to help.Boyfriend in prison? Members of congress are strictly prohibited from interfering in the judicial process in anyway.You've had it up to here trying to obtain a visa for a relative? Sure thing.Your neighbor won't shut his dogs up? No .Can't navigate the bureaucracy of a state agency? No, but they'd be more than happy to put you in touch with your state representatives you will in turn be more than happy to help you with that.It's an emergency you need help, like, 10 minutes ago? They will do the best they can to help, but they can't work miracles. Please try to give at least two weeks, at the very, very minimum, if the case is at all time sensitive.Basically, help with a federal agency? Yes.Anything else? Probably not. But still call to check just in case. There are exceptions. For example, they can help with the banks during foreclosures.Now how to contact your congressperson in the way that is the easiest for both you and them.Keep in mind that senators have two different offices- legislative and district. The legislative office is in Washington DC and the office most people think to contact. But you're going to want to contact the district office. The district office has on staff professional whose sole purpose is to assist constituents with federal agencies.The most efficient way to request help is to:Go onto his or her official (not campaign) website (it will end in .gov). On it there should be a, hopefully, easy to locate a tab.Or just right on the pageIt should say something along the lines of "Get Help with a Federal Agency" or "Serving Wisconsinites"or "Constituent Services"There it will give you instructions on how to contact the office.Most likely it will give you several options (online, call, letter)Call them. You'll get a lovely intern or staff assistant who will listen to your story and pass it along to the people who will actually handle your case. Don't demand to talk to that person right away, because there is nobody actually handling your case yet. It will get passed along and assigned to the appropriate staff member, who will then get back in touch with you. Make sure they get your contact information.Figure out if you need to fill out a release. When you call, ask if the type of case you're requesting help with requires you to fill out a Personal Authorization Form. If it does, snail mail, fax, or send it to them as a pdf as soon as you're off the phone. Paperwork is annoying, but it's a pretty quick form and required under the Right to Privacy Act.The release should be easy enough to find once you've clicked on the constituent services tab but if you're having trouble you know the phone number!Gather all appropriate documentation. The more information you provide regarding your situation the better and faster they will be able to help. A lot of the delays during the process are caused by waiting for constituents to gather and find all the necessary papers, records, etc. The process will go much more smoothly if you have it all ready to go.Wait. Someone should be back in touch with you in a timely fashion, though understand that your congressperson represents hundreds of thousands of people, or millions if you contacted a senator. The caseload at most offices can be quite significant, but they do their best to work as quickly as possible. Generally, if someone still hasn't gotten back to you in two weeks follow up with a phone call.Work with the office. A staff member will reach back out to you and then start to work on your behalf. Some disputes are simple. Some are complex. A lot have favorable outcomes. Other's, unfortunately, don't.Bureaucracy sucks, no getting around that. But try to stay patient throughout the process. Every caseworker I've met works hard, but they have heavy workloads. Unfortunately delays in a system as large as the federal government are often unavoidable, more often than not the caseworker will be just as frustrated as you are with the agencies out in DC.Best of luck as you begin this process!

Zcash (ZEC) is a privacy-oriented fork of the Bitcoin protocol, currently ranked 29th on the BraveNewCoin market cap table. The ZEC spot price is down 94% from the all time high set in January 2018. The market cap currently stands at US$357 million, with a reported 31% of the total market cap, or US$110 million, traded in the past 24 hours.A quick comparison between coins with privacy capabilities shows that ZEC is leading the total daily transaction volume by a wide margin. Other coins with privacy features include Monero (XMR), Zcash (ZEC), Grin (GRIN), and PIVX (PIVX). However, both XMR and GRIN obscure the blockchain transaction values and addresses used.After much investigations and research i have made about how to earn more profit on cryptocurrency legitimately, I will recommend libraforex Investment Platform and cloud mining(www.libraforex,io) as it is relatively on for a while now as it was lunched mid 2016 but has become the largest Cryptocurrency Investment Platform right now with a volume of over 150 million dollars where you get different ROI’s of your invested cryptocurrency after every 10 days. It supports variety of cryptocurrency like Bitcoin, Ethereum, Bitcoin Cash and Litecoin and other Altcoins.The ZEC protocol is based on Zerocoin, which was developed in 2013 and later turned into Zerocash, with a difficulty adjustment algorithm adopted from DigiShield v3. The ZEC cryptocurrency went live in 2016 and trading began in late October 2016.The ZEC blockchain currently targets a 2.5 minute block time, with a block size limit of 2MB. The eventual total supply is 21 million, with a current annual inflation rate of 35.56% (brown, chart below). The ZEC inflation rate is among one of the highest of any cryptocurrency. To contrast, the current annual inflation rate of BTC, XMR, DASH, GRIN, and PIVX, are 3.87%, 3.65%, 6.89%, 157%, and 4.34%, respectively.Opposed to the ICO model, ZEC chose to use a "Founders' Reward" for funding development. The Founders’ Reward, which accounts for 10% of all ZEC minted, is distributed as follows; 5.72% for founders, employees, and advisors, 1.65% to initial investors, 1.44% to the Zcash Foundation, and 1.19% to the Electric Coin Company (ECC), formerly the Zcash Company. The ongoing incentive was designed to encourage a dedicated team to provide continual development for the project over several years. According to a Q3 transparency report, ECC operated at a deficit of 30% in Q1.The ECC is led by founder and CEO Zooko Wilcox. The Company constitutes what is described as “the creators and stewards of the Zcash currency.” Notable advisors included Bitcoin developer Gavin Andresen, Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin, and Tezos’ Arthur Breitman. Roger Ver was also one of the Zcash Company's initial investors.The Zcash Foundation, created in February 2017, is an independently operated 501(c)3 whose mission is “dedicated to building Internet payment and privacy infrastructure for the public good, primarily serving the users of the Zcash protocol and blockchain.” Current foundation members include Andrew Miller, Peter Van Valkenburgh, Amber Baldet, Matthew Green, and Ian Miers. Green and Miers were both part of the original ZEC founding team.Recently, the ECC and Zcash foundation have been at odds in regards to the ZEC trademark. The two parties issued a joint statement earlier this week reassuring the community that they are working on a mutually amicable agreement. The dispute has also delayed community sentiment collection for the next hard fork, currently scheduled for October. This debate occurs in the setting of Wilcox asking for further developer funding through a renewed Founders’ Reward, currently set to expire in October 2020.The Foundation has implemented several improvements to the ZEC ecosystem over the past few months. The Foundation announced Zepio in May, which is a privacy-focused wallet that sends shielded transactions by default. In June, the Foundation announced a partnership with Parity Technologies to release a new software client, Zebra. Written in Rust, the open-source client is an alternative to zcashd and brings redundancy should zcashd fail. The client is also designed to detect problems related to the consensus mechanism and implementation-specific bugs. ETH also has two clients, Parity and Geth, for similar reasons.The ZEC protocol leverages zk-SNARKs, or Zero-Knowledge Succinct Non-Interactive Argument of Knowledge, which are based on zero-knowledge proofs. The protocol uses zk-SNARKs for optional privacy elements. ZEC addresses beginning with a "t" are transparent, and addresses that start with a "z" include privacy enhancements and are referred to these as "shielded addresses."The ZEC protocol saw two upgrades in 2018, “Overwinter” on June 26th, and “Sapling” on October 29th. Both upgrades were enacted through hard forks, and both enhanced transaction efficiency and scalability for shielded addresses.The Sapling upgrade has reduced the zk-SNARK proving time from 37 seconds to 2.3 seconds, and introduced zc (legacy shielded) and zs (Sapling shielded) addresses. The shielded transaction count continues to represent a small fraction of total transactions, currently around 15% (blue line, chart below).The shielded pool would be much larger if exchanges did not disable the optional privacy functionality when sending ZEC. In December 2017, programmer jeffq discovered that shielded transactions on ZEC can be linked to non-shielded transactions unless both the sender and receiver were part of the “shielded pool” of anonymous transactions.The current total number of transactions per day on the network (line, chart below) stands at just over 3,000, which is down from a January 2018 high of 11,500 per day, but up from a February 2019 low of 2,000. Transactions per day are, on average, down from levels seen in 2018 and mid 2019. The average transaction value (fill, chart below) is currently US$4,800, up from an April 2018 low of US$62, and recently reached a new all-time high of nearly US$15,000.The average daily block size (line, chart below) has essentially sat at or near all-time lows since October 2018, indicating little network usage. The average transaction fee (fill, chart below) has declined since June 2018, but has risen since May 2019, and is currently US$0.013. The Sapling upgrade made shielded transfers 100 times smaller in size than before the upgrade, which in turn now makes these transactions cheaper to send.The 30-day Kalichkin network value to estimated on-chain daily transactions (NVT) ratio (line, chart below) has fallen dramatically since July 2019, now at an all-time low. A clear downtrend in NVT suggests a coin is undervalued based on its economic activity and utility, which should be seen as a bullish price indicator, whereas an uptrend in NVT suggests the opposite. The 15% of transactions which are shielded are not included in this calculation, meaning the true NVT is likely slightly lower than the metric suggests.Monthly active addresses (MAA) have declined substantially from the January 2018 high of 96,000 to the current 21,500 (fill, chart below). Active addresses are important to consider when determining the fundamental value of the network based on Metcalfe's law. ZEC has fewer MAAs than Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin, EOS, DOGE, Dash, Bitcoin Cash, and Ethereum Classic.The market cap divided by the realized cap (MVRV) is another crypto-native fundamental metric used to asses overbought or oversold conditions. Realized cap approximates the value paid for all coins in existence by summing the market value of coins at the time they last moved on the blockchain. The metric was created through a combination of efforts by Murad Mahmudov, David Puell, Nic Carter, and Antoine Le Calvez.Historically, periods of an MVRV less than 0.4 have represented oversold conditions, whereas periods of an MVRV greater than 1.0 have represented overbought conditions. Of the MVRV levels above four since January 2013, all three have coincided with record highs in price. Currently, MVRV is 0.39 and falling, suggesting the possibility of oversold conditions.The ZEC network currently has 394 unique and active nodes, which is down from 600 in December 2018. Most of the nodes reside in Denmark, the United States, and France. ZEC uses the Equihash Proof of Work (PoW) algorithm, which was originally thought to be ASIC-resistant. However, Bitmain developed ASIC miners for the Equihash algorithm, which first went live on the network in May 2018, and shipped broadly in June 2018. All available Equihash ASICs are currently profitable at US$0.06 per KWh (below).In response to the rise in ASIC use on the chain, the ZEC foundation announced an initiative towards researching ASIC resistance on the chain and the ECC concluded that the “ultimate objective” is the broad inclusion of both hobbyists and professionals. The ZEC community voted and decided to discourage ASIC resistance as a priority and instead focus on currently unused PoW algorithms. Any future changes will need approval through the ZEC Improvement Proposal (ZIP) process.Hash rate and difficulty have continued to increase rapidly since April 2019, setting a new all-time high. The use of ASICs to mine a cryptocurrency can mean that the network becomes much less decentralized over time as the hardware continually squeezes out miners with less hashing power. While constant PoW adjustments decrease ASIC use substantially, the process may also lead to a different type of centralization through the need for constant node upgrades.The ZEC project on GitHub has 16 repositories with 451 commits on the main repo in the past year (top chart, shown below). The Zcash Improvement Proposals repo (bottom chart, shown below) has also been fairly active over the past year. Both repos mainly consist of commits by developers Daira Hopwood and str4d.Most coins use the developer community of GitHub where files are saved in folders called "repositories," or "repos," and changes to these files are recorded with "commits," which save a record of what changes were made, when, and by who. Although commits represent quantity and not necessarily quality, a higher number of commits can signify higher dev activity and interest.The upcoming “Blossom” upgrade is slated for October 28th, 2019 and will include shorter block times. The ECC also has some early plans to build a new chain with sharding and privacy by default. This process would also involve a chain migration, which is similar to the pending migration from ETH 1.0 to ETH 2.0.In the markets, ZEC exchange traded volume over the past 24 hours has predominantly been led by the Bitcoin (BTC) and Tether (USDT) pairs. ZEC has continued to gain exchange listing over the past two years, being added to; Gemini exchange in May 2018, Bittrex in September 2018, Coinbase in December 2018, and eToro earlier this year. Binance also added ZEC/BNB, ZEC/USDT, ZEC/PAX, ZEC/TUSD and ZEC/USDC pairs in March.PS: This article is subject to personal opinion. Any investment to be made should be made critically considered.

This is a great time for economists in tech companies—the most interesting firms in Silicon Valley are hiring chief economists as well as economic teams at a very rapid clip. Every week I am contacted to help fill a position, or I hear about a new hire by firms like AirBnb, Netflix, Pandora, Uber, etc. Amazon has built the biggest team, and has been actively hiring both senior economists and new PhDs. Each tech company, and each chief economist, is different, but there are several main categories.First are microeconomic issues involved in pricing and product design. Hal Varian was one of the first tech firm chief economists, and by his account he worked on the AdWords auction in the early days. At Yahoo! and Microsoft, economists (including myself) worked a lot with online advertising marketplaces. Personally I was involved in many aspects of marketplace design for search advertising, from changes in auction design, to the design of metrics and measures that better reflect the platform’s long term objectives, to strategy. Generally technology firms have fairly novel and complex pricing and product design issues. A nice research paper that illustrates some of the issues involved is by Dinerstein, Einav, Levin, and Sundaresan. Here the way that eBay ranks products in response to a consumer search affects which sellers get more business as well as the extent of price competition. One of my papers (with Denis Nekipelov) models advertiser behavior and looks at the impact of algorithm changes on welfare. Other interesting microeconomic issues arise in the context of on-demand marketplaces like AirBnB and Uber. Former Stanford students Andrey Fradkin (MIT), Chiara Farronato (HBS), and Zoe Cullen (graduating this year) have written interesting research papers that highlight some of the market design issues encountered by tech firms at AirBnB and TaskRabbit, including the role of search frictions for both buyers and sellers; Mike Luca at HBS has analyzed a number of issues with Yelp, and he works closely with them. Another area is advertising effectiveness; Steve Tadelis at eBay ran a large scale field experiment to show that search advertising was much less effective than standard attribution models suggested.Second is corporate strategy. I worked on the Microsoft-Yahoo! search alliance, including understanding the effect of combining the user base and advertising platform. Microeconomists are generally experts at understanding strategy as well as questions about market equilibrium. We can provide a framework for understanding what industry structures may be sustainable, versus not, and think through incentives for acquisitions and vertical integration.Third is public policy. Tech firms are interested in issues like broadband access. Simon Wilkie, former chief economist at FCC and professor at USC, works on this issue at Microsoft. Policies around intellectual property, privacy, data security, etc. all have a great role for economic analysis and an understanding of costs and benefits. Many public policy forums include economists and lawyers in decision-making, and economic research can inform these issues as well.Fourth, and closely related, are direct legal and regulatory challenges—antitrust/competition policy issues and regulatory investigations. There have been numerous high-profile antitrust investigations against Google in every part of the world; the e-Book case is another big one. In-house economists can directly inform regulators and also help outside economic experts learn about the institutional facts, access data, and become informed.More junior economists have a wide variety of roles in tech firms. They can take traditional data science roles, be product managers, work in corporate strategy, or on policy teams. They would typically do a lot of empirical work.In terms of complementing existing non-economist workers, I have found that economists bring some unique skills to the table. First of all, machine learning or traditional data scientists often don’t have a lot of expertise in using observational data or designing experiments to answer business questions. Did an advertising campaign work? What would have happened if we hadn’t released the low end version of a product? Should we change the auction design? Machine learning is better at prediction, but less at analyzing “counter-factuals,” or what-if questions. (I’m currently doing a lot of research on modifying machine learning methods to make them more suitable for causal inference—you can search for some of my papers on arxiv.org).Second, economists are trained to think about equilibrium or feedback effects. There are many decisions in marketplace or platform businesses where the short term and long term effects of a change go in opposite directions. If you stop charging people to post pictures on eBay, conversion rates and customer satisfaction and transaction volume rise—but that requires sacrificing a large revenue stream. If you tighten your criteria for how well a search ad matches a user query, you lose money in the short run, but in the long run the advertisers should bid more for the increased conversion rates of the ad clicks they do receive. Economists often focus on these types of problems which can be ignored or minimized by engineers.Overall adding one economist to a team can bring a really valuable alternative perspective, and I’m not at all surprised that all the top tech firms are hiring them!Economists do face challenges, however. Since they are often in the minority, they have to learn to speak the “native” language (engineering, MBA-speak, legalese), and in tech firms the fact that an idea is well-accepted or standard in economics doesn’t get you anywhere. Economists have to make their ideas convincing from first principles, and they also need to learn how to operate in a technical environment to carry out empirical work. For me, that meant learning large-scale computing, engineering platforms and development tools, machine learning, and all of the nitty gritty around developing metrics and A/B testing platforms. It was fascinating, but required a large investment, and not everyone can succeed in that environment. I certainly loved every minute of what I learned, and indeed it sparked not just one but multiple new research agendas for me.