Lifeboat Foundation

What is Universal Basic Income (UBI) and how could it help us deal with the coronavirus outbreak? What if… we gave people free money?

The idea of a basic income is that everybody would receive a modest amount paid each week or each month without conditions, paid equally to every man and every woman with a smaller amount to pay for every child.

Continue reading “Coronavirus and the Case for Universal Basic Income | WIRED UK” »

Can we build a better world with the lessons learned around this pandemic?

There is discussion that globalism will give way to community resilience and local digital manufacture, storage and transportation to provide abundant resources for normal and unanticipated needs.

#CommunityResilience #CommunityResourceCentres

Continue reading “We aren’t just stopping coronavirus. We’re building a new world” »

Quantum computers will revolutionize information technology, ushering in an era where certain types of calculations will be performed with almost unimaginable speed. Practical applications will include healthcare disciplines such as molecular biology and drug discovery; big data mining; financial services such as portfolio analysis and fraud detection; and artificial intelligence and machine learning.

The federal government is helping to create an environment in which quantum computing innovation and experimentation can flourish. The National Quantum Initiative Act puts $1.2 billion into the quantum research budgets of the Energy Department, the National Institute of Standards and Technology, NASA and the National Science Foundation. The law also outlines a 10-year plan to accelerate the development of quantum information science and technology applications.

Meanwhile, The White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy is working to ensure that economic growth opportunities and opportunities for improving the world are baked into quantum policies and systems.

We must remember our values and life will always hold more value than money and or corporate profits.

I have seen a number of posts and comments from Transhumanists putting economy over lives during this COVID-19 Pandemic.

This mentality is not who we are. We hold life as the highest endeavour and it is to be fought for to the bitter end. We do not bow to the Economic Elitists because the costs are too high. I am going to point out some of the finer points from Zero State, a group that existed some time ago that gave birth to a vast number of Transhumanist leaders of today.

The Way Of The Sea

Want to receive this post in your inbox every day? Sign up for the Supply Lines newsletter, and follow Bloomberg Economics on Twitter for more.

Three years ago, manufacturing gadgets in China was a given. That’s changed fundamentally in the era of trade wars and coronavirus.

Under the new reality, the world’s electronics makers are actively seeking ways to diversify their supply chains and reduce their dependence on any single country, no matter how attractive.

Some people have claimed that a “business case” for profitable interplanetary trade with a Mars settlement, or at least the identification a saleable product for trade, is required before such a settlement can be established or supported by business or government. But there is no reasonable prospect for trade in any significant mass of physical material from a Mars settlement back to Earth in the near future due to the high transport costs. In his recent article in the National Review, “Elon Musk’s Plan to Settle Mars,” Robert Zubrin makes exactly the same point: a business case based on physical trade is not necessary and makes little sense. Later trade and commerce via non-physical goods such as software is probable once a settlement is fully operational. More significant and interesting economic situations will occur on Mars.

A good model for the expenditures needed to found colonies is the Greek and Phoenician expansion all across the Mediterranean and Black Sea areas in the period early in Greek history (before about 600 BC), leading to the founding of one of the greatest trading cities in history, Carthage. The cities who founded each colony did not expect immediate profit, but wanted good places for an expanding population and knew that, once the new cities were established, trade would also become established. Most of the cost was probably in building more ships. When European colonies were first established in the New World by Spain and Portugal, the emphasis was initially on a search for treasure, not production of products. English and Dutch colonies later led the way to commerce across the Atlantic, with tobacco, sugar, and cotton suddenly becoming a major part of world trade.

A look at some of the steps required to create a Mars settlement will help us understand at least a little about Mars settlement economics. For a Mars settlement, motivation and economics are interwoven. It is possible for at least a partial business case to be made for the transport of settlers and the materials they will need to initiate some phase of Mars settlement. This includes the current effort to create a large number of reliable, low cost, and reusable super-heavy boosters and spacecraft, able to take payloads of 100 tons or more of cargo and passengers to Mars and land them at the right location. Part of this development and construction cost will be defrayed by commercial and government uses of the same vehicles, such as placing very heavy payloads in LEO and taking equipment and passengers to and around the Moon.

Claims that the cure is worse than the disease rely on a false tradeoff between human needs and the economy.

Gregg Gonsalves, Amy Kapczynski

Circa 2017

Plant viruses, the simple obligate intracellular parasites with small genomes, rely entirely on host machineries for their life cycle including replication, intracellular (cell-to-cell) and systemic movement (Nelson and Citovsky, 2005). Virus infections pose serious threats to agriculture and cause huge economic losses. Despite encoding only a limited number of proteins, numerous interactions of viral RNAs/proteins with host factors have puzzled the plant virologists for over a century and the complexity of these interactions is just becoming understood.

Plants have developed two major strategies to counteract virus infections: resistance (R) gene-mediated, and RNA silencing-based defenses. In addition, the mutation in essential genes for viral infection also causes plant resistance against viruses, called recessive gene-mediated resistance. These approaches have been used in crop protections and have shown significant economic impact (Abel et al., 1986; Whitham et al., 1996; Baulcombe, 2004; Kang et al., 2005; Wang and Krishnaswamy, 2012).

This Research Topic combines 13 publications, including 9 review articles and 4 research articles, covering almost every aspect of plant-virus interactions. The featured in-depth topic reviews in various sub-fields provide readers a convenient way to understand the current status of the related sub-fields and the featured research articles expand the current knowledge in related sub-fields.

The rescue package contains specific measures to address the spike in unemployment claims.

“It is reasonable to expect that some, perhaps many, but not all, of these jobs will come back once we venture back into public,” Mark Hamrick, senior economic analyst at Bankrate.com, said. “One of the goals of the legislation now moving through Congress is to help many businesses survive and retain workers.”

“It’s beyond anything we have ever seen. It’s the speed that is so painful,” Swonk said.