Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Category: finance – Page 106

Publix is buying excess milk and produce from farmers — and donating it to food banks

👏🙌💪Farmers around the country have been forced to dump milk and waste fresh produce as schools, restaurants and other institutions remain closed due to the coronavirus pandemic. In response, Supermarket chain Publix launched a new initiative Wednesday to help struggling farmers — and get the food to Americans who need it most.

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Farmers around the U.S. have been forced to dump milk and destroy produce as schools, restaurants and other institutions remain closed due to the coronavirus pandemic.

Israeli researchers: Hackers aiming to exploit government financial aid

#Hackers are seeking to exploit the roll-out of government financial relief plans to fill their own pockets at the expense of businesses and affected workers, Israeli cyber researchers have revealed.

Hackers are exploiting the rollout of governmental financial relief to fill their pockets at the expense of businesses and affected workers, according to Israeli cyber researchers.

In recent weeks, governments have sought to ease cash-flow shortages and avoid a recession with ambitious stimulus packages and grants to households, including a massive $2 trillion economic package in the United States.

According to researchers at Israeli cybersecurity giant Check Point, a major increase in malicious and suspicious domains related to relief packages has been registered in recent weeks. The hackers aim to scam individuals into providing personal information, thereby stealing money or committing fraud.

“To do this, they are evolving the scam and phishing techniques that they have been using successfully since the start of the pandemic in January,” the researchers wrote in a recent report.

Frozen in time: You can be cryogenically preserved, but will you ever be revived?

Why is Alcor in Arizona? The main reason is that the risk of earthquakes and other natural disasters is fairly low. People opting for cryonics expect that their bodies might be in stasis for timescales measured in centuries.

As far as financial matters go, many of Alcor’s clients use life insurance policies to cover the cost of preservation and maintenance ($200,000 for a whole body or $80,000 for just the head). People use trust funds if they have net worth they want to recover when revived in the future.

The rationale presented to those considering cryonics is that there’s no guarantee they will ever be revived, but that it is reasonable that they might be. Along with chemicals called cryoprotectants, bodies getting preserved receive a host of medications. The list of the agents used is constantly evolving and continuing research is likely to reveal alternative methods that preserve organ function and cell integrity better. This means that cryopreservation is likely to work better years and decades into the future than it works now, even before getting to the milestone of having somebody revived.

How AI Is Expanding The Applications Of Robo Advisory

For the last couple of years, Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been changing many fields and increasing efficiency by using improved datasets. One of those areas where AI has accelerated evolution is the robo-advisory, which is a field having extensive financial big data to analyze.

Robo-advisors are the systems that use algorithms to automatically perform investment decisions or tasks which are mostly done by human advisors. “Robo advisors are a potential solution to the complexities of financial decision making,” said Jill E. Fisch, a law professor at the University of Pennsylvania at a conference of Pension Research Council.

In the main scheme, robo-advisors are merging customers’ information such as their financial goals, risk tolerances, timeframes, with the right asset allocation that qualifies customer’s needs. While making this merge, they use many algorithms including machine learning models to create the best fit for the customer. In the process of timeframe, they take lots of actions as well such as rebalancing the portfolio or performing tax-loss harvesting. This automatically increases efficiency while taking decisions at the right time for the portfolio.

About the Event 201 exercise

Talk being ahead of the curve;

Event 201 was a 3.5-hour pandemic tabletop exercise that simulated a series of dramatic, scenario-based facilitated discussions, confronting difficult, true-to-life dilemmas associated with response to a hypothetical, but scientifically plausible, pandemic. 15 global business, government, and public health leaders were players in the simulation exercise that highlighted unresolved real-world policy and economic issues that could be solved with sufficient political will, financial investment, and attention now and in the future.

The exercise consisted of pre-recorded news broadcasts, live “staff” briefings, and moderated discussions on specific topics. These issues were carefully designed in a compelling narrative that educated the participants and the audience.

The Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, World Economic Forum, and Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation jointly propose these recommendations.

Preparing for a Dark Future: Biological Warfare in the 21st Century

Of the spread of COVID-19 aboard the aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt and the subsequent relief of its Commanding Officer has highlighted the tension that exists between maintaining military readiness and the need to safeguard the health of members of the armed forces in the face of a pandemic.

The disease has been a feature of war for the vast majority of human history – from the plague that ravaged Athens early in the Peloponnesian War, killing the Athenian strategos Pericles; to the diseases that European settlers brought with them to the New World, devastating local populations; to the host of tropical diseases that caused appalling casualties in the China-Burma-India and Southwest Pacific theaters in World War II. The fact that we were surprised by the emergence, growth, and spread of COVID-19 reflects the false conceit of 21st century life that we have “conquered” disease.

In fact, pandemics are but one class of low-probability but high-impact contingencies that we could face in the coming years, including an earthquake or other natural disaster in a major urban area, regime change in an important state, and the collapse of financial markets leading to a global depression. When I served as Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Policy Planning between 2006 and 2009, we explored a series of such “shocks” as well as the role the Defense Department could play in responding to them as a way of helping the Department’s leaders address such contingencies. During my time in the Pentagon, we also held a series of wargames with members of Congress and their staff, governors of several states and their cabinets, and the government of Mexico, to explore in depth the consequences of a pandemic. Much of what we found then resonates with what we are experiencing now.

Money Is Losing Its Meaning

Doing “whatever it takes” to save the global economy from the coronavirus pandemic is going to cost a lot of money. The U.S. government alone is spending a few trillion dollars, and the Federal Reserve is creating another few trillion dollars to keep the financial system from collapsing. A custom Bloomberg index measuring M2 figures for 12 major economies including the U.S., China, euro zone and Japan shows their aggregate money supply had already more than doubled to $80 trillion from before the 2008–2009 financial crisis.

These numbers are so large that they no longer have any meaning; they are simply abstractions. It’s been some time since people thought about the concept of money and its purpose. The broad idea is that money has value, but that value is not arbitrary. Former Fed Chairman Paul Volcker once said in an interview that “it is a governmental responsibility to maintain the value of the currency they issue. And when they fail to do that, it is something that undermines an essential trust in government.”

Space industry consortium concerned about financial health of small businesses

WASHINGTON — The Space Enterprise Consortium — an organization created in 2017 to attract space companies to work on military contracts — is canvassing firms to gauge the impact of the coronavirus pandemic on businesses.

The consortium known as SpEC is run by the U.S. Space Force’s Space and Missile Systems Center in Los Angeles. It has more than 350 member companies, many of them space startups and small businesses.

In an April 15 email the consortium asked members to identify those that have fewer than 50 employees.

Gold may soon soar to a record $2,000 says analyst: we ‘borrowed from the future, and there is not enough economy to pay it down’

The precious metal has been torn between its potential as a haven investment and a mad scramble to sell the tangible asset in a bid for cash to cover losses in the stock market.

“The Covid-19 outbreak has had a major impact on the gold market, bringing massive price swings as investors react to new developments related to the pandemic,” says Steven Dunn, head of exchange-traded funds at Aberdeen Standard Investments.

“Because of Covid-19, refiners were knocked offline…and the ability to move gold became a challenge as normal means of transport became almost impossible,” he says.