内容摘要：Her friends want to get out of the scam business and the economic zone in Laos. But it is not so easy to leave, Jojo said.

Her friends want to get out of the scam business and the economic zone in Laos. But it is not so easy to leave, Jojo said.

So, what exactly is an endowment?An endowment refers to funds or assets donated to a university to keep it financially sustained in the future.

Endowments typically comprise charitable donations from alumni, other donors and companies.The bill before the US Congress sets tax rates for universities based on their effective endowments per student – by dividing their total endowments by the number of full-time students at the institution.Earnings from investments made from endowments will be taxed, if the bill becomes law.

Have universities been taxed so far?Most colleges have not been taxed on their endowments for centuries.

The Revenue Act of 1909 exempted educational institutions as nonprofits which operate for public interest “exclusively for religious, charitable, or educational purposes”. As a result, educational institutions did not pay taxes on their investment gains.

This changed during Trump’s first presidential term. In 2017, the US Congress passed the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, which introduced a 1.4 percent tax on colleges with per-student endowments of at least $500,000, and at least 500 students who paid tuition. Hence, the tax applies only to some of the wealthiest institutions in the country.“We tried to come up with a version of Robinson that does not distort area,” Jenny explained. “So we stretched it in a way such that the different areas are not enlarged or shrunken. So Greenland is 14 times smaller than Africa on the globe, and it’s also 14 times smaller on the Equal Earth map.”

Jenny said the team never set out specifically to correct some of the most highlighted errors of the Mercator projection. Subconsciously, though, he said, they knew they wanted their map to better represent historically distorted regions like Africa.“I would guess any reasonable geographer would support that idea,” the scientist said.

Equal Earth rose in popularity after a NASA scientist saw it online right after it was published, and the organisation immediately switched to it.The World Bank, too, has picked it up. The institution, since 2013, has experimented with different projections, including the Robinson map, but in 2024 settled on the Equal Earth map.