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Archive for the ‘economics’ category: Page 147

Sep 4, 2017

BRICS countries considering own cryptocurrency as settlement mechanism

Posted by in categories: cryptocurrencies, economics, finance

The BRICS Finance Committee is discussing a joint virtual currency for the five nation bloc of developing economies, according to the Russian Direct Investment Fund (RDIF) chief Kirill Dmitriev.

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Sep 4, 2017

Leasing out federal land could provide free money for all Americans

Posted by in categories: business, economics, government

Here’s a people-friendly/business-friendly plan to replace Labor Day with Basic Income Day in America. Your half million dollars is waiting and yours! http://www.businessinsider.com/basic-income-with-federal-lan…2017-7 #FederalLandDividend


Futurist and 2018 libertarian candidate for California governor Zoltan Istvan outlines his plan to give everyone a government kickback from untapped land.

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Sep 3, 2017

Transhumanism and Libertarianism Are Entirely Compatible

Posted by in categories: bioengineering, biotech/medical, cyborgs, economics, government, robotics/AI, sex, transhumanism, virtual reality

Article out by Ron Bailey at Reason Magazine that discusses #transhumanism and #libertarianism:


Kai Weiss, a researcher at the Austrian Economics Center and Hayek Institute in Vienna, Austria, swiftly denounced the piece. “Transhumanism should be rejected by libertarians as an abomination of human evolution,” he wrote.

Clearly there is some disagreement.

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Aug 31, 2017

Social Experiment Known as Privacy Won’t Survive the Future

Posted by in categories: economics, privacy

To help you understand the significance of this, in terms of cameras, we’re looking at 6 times more than the total number of our global population today. And in terms of sensors, we’re looking at 133 times more than the total number of our global population.

To quote economics theorist Jeremy Rifkin at length:

While privacy has long been considered a fundamental right, it has never been an inherent right. Indeed, for all of human history, until the modern era, life was lived more or less publicly, as befits the most social species on Earth. As late as the sixteenth century, if an individual was to wander alone aimlessly for long periods of time in daylight, or hide away at night, he or she was likely to be regarded as possessed. In virtually every society that we know of before the modern era, people bathed together in public, often urinated and defecated in public, ate at communal tables, frequently engaged in sexual intimacy in public, and slept huddled together en masse.

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Aug 31, 2017

The Universal Basic Income: Why Finland Is Giving Away Free Money

Posted by in categories: economics, government

The Finnish government is giving its citizens money, plain and simple. But what’s the catch? And will it work?

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Aug 29, 2017

The National Space Council for American leadership in space industries

Posted by in categories: economics, satellites

Dear vice president mike pence, chairman of the national space council:

Thank you for your leadership of the National Space Council that has been recreated under the authority of President Trump. In 1962, when the Council was first formed under the leadership of Vice President Johnson, its executive director, Edward Welsh, played a decisive role in the drafting and passage of the Communications Satellite Act, which led to the creation of COMSAT and the subsequent formation of INTELSAT, an intergovernmental communications satellite organization initially with 14-member governments in 1964 that was privatized in 2001. COMSAT was the first major step towards the commercial use of outer space. In 1967, after Johnson had been elected president, he reported that “the Communications Satellite Act of 1962 [has] brought mankind to the threshold of a full-time global communications service to which all nations of the world may have equal access.”

The world is at a watershed moment regarding outer space. Governments have dominated in outer space. Increasingly, though, private investment will shape the future in space. The US does not have a strategy nor is it organized to effective ly advance private space development and the emergence of a self-sustaining space economy. This is the principal challenge to be addressed by the Space Council.

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Aug 29, 2017

What would happen if we upload our brains to computers?

Posted by in categories: economics, robotics/AI

Meet the “ems” — machines that emulate human brains and can think, feel and work just like the brains they’re copied from. Futurist and social scientist Robin Hanson describes a possible future when ems take over the global economy, running on superfast computers and copying themselves to multitask, leaving humans with only one choice: to retire, forever. Glimpse a strange future as Hanson describes what could happen if robots ruled the earth.

About the speaker.

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Aug 27, 2017

The great outer space LAND GRAB of the near future: Conflicts over space rock mining rights

Posted by in categories: economics, geopolitics, governance, law, space travel, treaties

(Natural News) Space has become a veritable goldmine of natural resources for many companies, yet can anyone lay claim to them? That’s the question legal experts claim will become relevant in the future as firm turn to the stars for precious metals and minerals, and it’s one that also needs to be answered as soon as possible to avoid hostility between competing firms and countries.

Barry Kellman, law professor of space governance at DePaul University in Chicago, explained: “There is a huge debate on whether companies can simply travel to space and extract its resources. There is no way to answer the question until someone does it.”

According to one international treaty, this need not even be an issue. The Outer Space Treaty of 1967, formally known as the Treaty on Principles Governing the Activities of States in the Exploration and Use of Outer Space, Including the Moon and Other Celestial Bodies, has served as the main standard for sharing space. As per the 1967 treaty, no single country can claim “national appropriation” of celestial bodies “by occupation or by other means”. (Related: MINING just one large asteroid could COLLAPSE the world economy due to surge of new supply for valuable metals.)

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Aug 27, 2017

Cyberattacks, not North Korea, pose greatest security threat

Posted by in categories: cybercrime/malcode, economics, military

Based on the news, one would think the greatest threat to our nation is North Korea’s looming capability to strike the continental United States with nuclear tipped intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs).

While the Hermit Kingdom’s ability to launch missiles with miniaturized nuclear payloads that can reach the U.S. is alarming, another threat to our national and economic security — targeted cyberattacks by state-sponsored advanced persistent threat (APT) groups and terrorist and criminal non-state actors — is being overlooked.

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Aug 26, 2017

It’s possible that we can build a society where people don’t have to work – here’s how

Posted by in categories: economics, employment, finance, sustainability

Work isn’t working anymore. Labour productivity has fallen in the UK since the financial crisis; 13.5 million people are living in low-income households; real wages are falling and the Gini coefficient, which measures inequality, is rising.

The sustainability and quality of jobs in our economy is also decreasing – 7.1 million workers now face precarious working conditions, meaning that uncertainty (and for many, anxiety) itself is now built into our employment system. According to some estimates, 30 per cent of UK jobs could potentially be automated away by the early 2030s. Depending on the sector, this will mean a remarkable reduction of required hours of human labour. With less work to go around, we will find ourselves in heightened competition with machines and each other, ever more desperate for stability.

Is this our only future? No. But in order to change it and move beyond this crisis, we first need to confront our very conception of work. For a long time we have thought of work as a matter of individual choice – a free, private agreement between a single person and an employer. You, the thinking goes, are free to pick whatever job you like as long as the employer is happy to have you on board and there are a sufficient number of jobs created by the free market.

Continue reading “It’s possible that we can build a society where people don’t have to work – here’s how” »