Lifeboat Foundation

Pan’s company is at the vanguard of a trend that could have devastating consequences for Asia’s poorest nations. Low-cost manufacturing of clothes, shoes, and the like was the first rung on the economic ladder that Japan, South Korea, China, and other countries used to climb out of poverty after World War II. For decades that process followed a familiar pattern: As the economies of the early movers shifted into more sophisticated industries such as electronics, poorer countries took their place in textiles, offering the cheap labor that low-tech factories traditionally required. Manufacturers got inexpensive goods to ship to Walmarts and Tescos around the world, and poor countries were able to provide mass industrial employment for the first time, giving citizens an alternative to toiling on farms.

Automation threatens to block the ascent of Asia’s poor. Civil unrest could follow.

A new interview I did on my transhumanist California Governor run:

On August 4th, Zoltan Istvan joined Merion West’s Erich Prince for an interview to discuss his campaign for Governor of California. Running in this race as a Libertarian, Mr. Istvan previously ran in the 2016 presidential election as a member of the Transhumanist Party. Working previously for National Geographic, Mr. Istvan is well-known for his writings on transhumanism, the movement that aims to improve human life and extend longevity through science. A pillar of his campaign for Governor of California includes a proposal for implementing universal basic income.

Erich Prince: Mr. Istvan, thank you for joining us this morning. Could you start by explaining the connection that you see between transhumanism, the movement you’re so involved with, and libertarianism?

Continue reading “Merion West Interviews Zoltan Istvan, Candidate for Governor of CA” »

Unprecedented acute concentration of wealth happens alongside these expulsions. Advanced economic and technical achievements enable this wealth and the expulsion of surplus groups. At the same time, Sassen writes, they create a kind of nebulous centerlessness as the locus of power:

The oppressed have often risen against their masters. But today the oppressed have mostly been expelled and survive a great distance from their oppressors … The “oppressor” is increasingly a complex system that combines persons, networks, and machines with no obvious centre.

Surplus populations removed from the productive aspects of the social world may rapidly increase in the near future as improvements in AI and robotics potentially result in significant automation unemployment. Large swaths of society may become productively and economically redundant. For historian Yuval Noah Harari “the most important question in 21st-century economics may well be: what should we do with all the superfluous people?”

Continue reading “Could the quest for super-intelligence and eternal life lead us into a dystopian nightmare?” »

IT IS odd that North Korea causes so much trouble. It is not exactly a superpower. Its economy is only a fiftieth as big as that of its democratic capitalist cousin, South Korea. Americans spend twice its total GDP on their pets. Yet Kim Jong Un’s backward little dictatorship has grabbed the attention of the whole world, and even of America’s president, with its nuclear brinkmanship. On July 28th it tested an intercontinental ballistic missile that could hit Los Angeles. Before long, it will be able to mount nuclear warheads on such missiles, as it already can on missiles aimed at South Korea and Japan. In charge of this terrifying arsenal is a man who was brought up as a demigod and cares nothing for human life—witness the innocents beaten to death with hammers in his gigantic gulag. Last week his foreign ministry vowed that if the regime’s “supreme dignity” is threatened, it will “pre-emptively annihilate” the countries that threaten it, with all means “including the nuclear ones”. Only a fool could fail to be alarmed.

What another Korean war might look like

Yet the most serious danger is not that one side will suddenly try to devastate the other. It is that both sides will miscalculate, and that a spiral of escalation will lead to a catastrophe that no one wants. Our briefing this week lays out, step by step, one way that America and North Korea might blunder into a nuclear war (see article). It also lists some of the likely consequences. These include: for North Korea, the destruction of its regime and the death of hundreds of thousands of people. For South Korea, the destruction of Seoul, a city of 10m within easy range of 1,000 of the North’s conventional artillery pieces. For America, the possibility of a nuclear attack on one of its garrisons in East Asia, or even on an American city. And don’t forget the danger of an armed confrontation between America and China, the North’s neighbour and grudging ally. It seems distasteful to mention the economic effects of another Korean war, but they would of course be awful, too.

Continue reading “How to avoid nuclear war with North Korea” »

With Russia looking to cure its economy of a hydrocarbon addiction, a consortium of the country’s biggest banks is proposing that it explores a different kind of gas for the answer.

The lenders, including Sberbank PJSC and VTB Group, aren’t developing gas of the natural variety. It’s also the name of a virtual unit based on the blockchain of ethereum, the world’s biggest cryptocurrency after bitcoin. The banks are hoping that by adopting the technology they will make payments safer and faster, while thrusting Russia to the forefront of a trend that’s transforming the financial industry.

By David Hambling

The accidental discovery of a novel aluminium alloy that reacts with water in a highly unusual way may be the first step to reviving the struggling hydrogen economy. It could offer a convenient and portable source of hydrogen for fuel cells and other applications, potentially transforming the energy market and providing an alternative to batteries and liquid fuels.

“The important aspect of the approach is that it lets you make very compact systems,” says Anthony Kucernak, who studies fuel cells at Imperial College London and wasn’t involved with the research. “That would be very useful for systems which need to be very light or operate for long periods on hydrogen, where the use of hydrogen stored in a cylinder is prohibitive.”

Continue reading “Nano aluminium offers fuel cells on demand – just add water” »

“Something is destroying our forests. In tropical regions alone, we lose an area of forest the size of Austria every year.”

Read more

Robert Stark and co-host Sam Kevorkian talk to Zoltan Istvan about his proposal for a California State Basic Income. Zoltan is a Trans-Humanist and futurist writer, philosopher, and journalist. He was the Transhumanist Party’s candidate for president in 2016, has written for Vice, Newsweek, the Huffington Post, and Psychology Today, was a reporter for the National Geographic Channel, and is the author of The Transhumanist Wager.

Topics:

Zoltan’s campaign for President

Continue reading “Robert Stark talks to Zoltan Istvan about his Proposal for a California State Basic Income” »

Yesterday was D-Day in the Bitcoin world: On Tuesday, Aug 1st 2017, Bitcoin Cash (BCH) forked off of Bitcoin (BTC). For anyone with control over their wallet and private keys, they now have an equal amount of BTC and BCH.

I have a Bitcoin wallet. Yet, I don’t have any new Bitcoin Cash—and I have no one to blame but myself. Will I ever get the BCH associated with my pre-fork coins? I think that it is likely, though certainly not assured. If not, it will still be my fault. After all, I had fair warning from the company that I trust as custodian of my assets.

A Cryptocurrency Mantra:
“Woe be the person who trusts decentralized cash to a custodian”

I trust Coinbase for good reason. I left my BTC in my Coinbase wallet and vault throughout the fork. Let me tell you how I view the risks of failing to remove my coins before August 1…

Continue reading “BCH: Did I throw away $$$$? Perhaps…” »