Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
Toggle light / dark theme

Blog

Category: government – Page 57

View insights.

Since 2011, the UK government has been providing a tax-payer funded discount on the sale of battery electric vehicles. Known as the “plug-in car grant”, it was designed to help persuade motorists make the switch from diesel or petrol and commit to electric driving.

But last month the grant was scrapped with immediate effect. It wasn’t exactly a surprise, given that the amount buyers were able to claim back had gradually been whittled down from £5,000 to £1,500; or that it was recently available only for new vehicles costing less than £32,000 (the average cost of electric cars is around £43,000).

In fact, the government had been trying to scrap the grant completely for a while. Only a major backlash a couple of years ago forced the government to do a speedy handbrake turn and keep it going for a while longer.

Continue reading “UK’s ‘plug-in-grant’ is no more — what happened to making EVs affordable for everyone?” | >

Carbon labelling gives consumers a weapon to fight climate change at the cash register.

What’s Involved with Carbon Labelling

Today, nutritional and content labelling can be found on packaged foods. The Government recently announced plans to enhance those labels. Why, because of concerns that Canadians need to learn more about what they eat so that they can make healthier choices.

Carbon labelling would serve a similar purpose by allowing Canadians to make healthier choices about carbon emissions. A carbon label would let consumers understand the environmental impact of items they purchase and consume. The label would contain the total carbon footprint of the product.

Continue reading “The Time for Carbon Labelling is Now” | >

The U.S. Department of Justice seized roughly $500,000 in ransom payments that a medical center in Kansas paid to North Korean hackers last year, along with cryptocurrency used to launder the payments, Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco said Tuesday.

The hospital quickly paid the attackers, but also notified the FBI, “which was the right thing to do for both themselves and for future victims,” Monaco said in a speech at the International Conference on Cyber Security at Fordham University in New York City.

The notification enabled the FBI to trace the payment through the blockchain, an immutable public record of cryptocurrency transactions.

Read more | >

Tokyo confirmed 20,401 new COVID-19 cases Wednesday, topping 20,000 for the first time since Feb. 5, while Osaka Prefecture reported a record high 21,976 infections, contributing to an unprecedented nationwide daily total of over 150,000 new cases.

Asked earlier in the day about prefectures reporting high case counts, Chief Cabinet Secretary Hirokazu Matsuno had reiterated that the central government would not be imposing any restrictions on people’s movements.

Read more | >

In November last year, an undercover agent with the FBI was inside a group on Amazon-owned messaging app Wickr, with a name referencing young girls. The group was devoted to sharing child sexual abuse material (CSAM) within the protection of the encrypted app, which is also used by the U.S. government, journalists and activists for private communications. Encryption makes it almost impossible for law enforcement to intercept messages sent over Wickr, but this agent had found a way to infiltrate the chat, where they could start piecing together who was sharing the material.

As part of the investigation into the members of this Wickr group, the FBI used a previously unreported search warrant method to force one member to unlock the encrypted messaging app using his face. The FBI has previously forced users to unlock an iPhone with Face ID, but this search warrant, obtained by Forbes, represents the first known public record of a U.S. law enforcement agency getting a judge’s permission to unlock an encrypted messaging app with someone’s biometrics.

According to the warrant, the FBI first tracked down the suspect by sending a request for information, via an unnamed foreign law enforcement partner, to the cloud storage provider hosting the illegal images. That gave them the Gmail address the FBI said belonged to Christopher Terry, a 53-year-old Knoxville, Tennessee resident, who had prior convictions for possession of child exploitation material. It also provided IP addresses used to create the links to the CSAM. From there, investigators asked Google and Comcast via administrative subpoenas (data requests that don’t have the same level of legal requirements as search warrants) for more identifying information that helped them track down Terry and raid his home.

Read more | >

The bottomless bucket is Karl Marx’s utopian creed: “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.” In this idyllic world, everyone works for the good of society, with the fruits of their labor distributed freely — everyone taking what they need, and only what they need. We know how that worked out. When rewards are unrelated to effort, being a slacker is more appealing than being a worker. With more slackers than workers, not nearly enough is produced to satisfy everyone’s needs. A common joke in the Soviet Union was, “They pretend to pay us, and we pretend to work.”

In addition to helping those who in the great lottery of life have drawn blanks, governments should adopt myriad policies that expand the economic pie, including education, infrastructure, and the enforcement of laws and contracts. Public safety, national defense, dealing with externalities are also important. There are many legitimate government activities and there are inevitably tradeoffs. Governing a country is completely different from playing a simple, rigged distribution game.

I love computers. I use them every day — not just for word processing but for mathematical calculations, statistical analyses, and Monte Carlo simulations that would literally take me several lifetimes to do by hand. Computers have benefited and entertained all of us. However, AI is nowhere near ready to rule the world because computer algorithms do not have the intelligence, wisdom, or commonsense required to make rational decisions.

Read more | >

A new language model similar in scale to GPT-3 is being made freely available and could help to democratise access to AI.

BLOOM (which stands for BigScience Large Open-science Open-access Multilingual Language Model) has been developed by 1,000 volunteer researchers from over 70 countries and 250 institutions, supported by ethicists, philosophers, and legal experts, in a collaboration called BigScience. The project, coordinated by New York-based startup Hugging Face, used funding from the French government.

The new AI took more than a year of planning and training, which included a final run of 117 days (11th March – 6th July) using the Jean Zay, one of Europe’s most powerful supercomputers, located in the south of Paris, France.

Read more | >

By Subscription? – In California, You Can and it’s a Tesla Model 3 EV.

A Santa Monica, California-based company can put you into a Tesla Model 3 using its cellphone app which is now available for both Android and iPhones. The company offering the Car-as-a-service (CaaS) model is Autonomy. Although currently available only in California, the future plans include rolling it out to other U.S. states.

Until the outset of the global pandemic, owning a car was on a dramatic decline. Ride-sharing was exploding, and because cars were becoming pricier, young people entering the workforce were less inclined to join their parents’ generation of car owners.

Isolation and lockdowns temporarily took drivers off the road, as did sticker shock. The latter has been particularly true for electric vehicles (EV) which without government rebates and incentives can cost tens of thousands of dollars more than cars running on gasoline and diesel.

Continue reading “Want to Get Your Next Car” | >

White House asks the public for ideas on what to do when we return to the Moon and cislunar space.

The U.S. has plans to return to the moon by the middle of this decade through NASA’s Artemis Program. But going back to the lunar surface and cislunar space isn’t just about putting boots on the ground. That’s why the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy on behalf of the Cislunar Science and Technology Subcommittee of the National Science and Technology Council has issued a request for ideas (RFI) with a deadline of Wednesday, July 20, 2022, for interested parties to make submissions.

The U.S. government has defined cislunar space as the entire region beyond Earth’s geostationary orbit subject to the gravity of both our planet and the Moon. The RFI covers both orbiting and lunar surface activities.

The government is seeking help in creating research priorities, technical standards and the development of a sustainable presence for human activity in cislunar space.

Continue reading “U.S. Government’s Office of Science and Technology Issues Call for Cislunar Strategies” | >

Surveillance, Preparedness & Health Security In Critical Disease Emergencies — Dr. Rosamund Lewis, MD, Head, WHO Smallpox Secretariat, Technical Lead for Monkeypox.

Dr. Rosamund Lewis, MD, is Head, WHO Smallpox Secretariat, Emerging Diseases and Zoonoses Unit, World Health Emergencies Programme, at the World Health Organization in Geneva, Switzerland, leading on emergency preparedness and advising on health security for the agency in this very critical domain, including as technical lead for Monkeypox. She also holds an appointment as Adjunct Professor in the School of Epidemiology and Public Health, University of Ottawa.

Previous to this role, Dr. Lewis joined the WHO COVID-19 response team as the health sciences lead for management of infodemics.

Continue reading “Dr Rosamund Lewis MD — Head, WHO Smallpox Secretariat — Surveillance, Preparedness & Health Security” | >