Lifeboat Foundation

The financial-technology boom that turned China into the world’s biggest market for electronic payments is now changing how banks interact with companies that drive most of the nation’s economic growth. As MYbank and its peers crunch reams of new data from payment systems, social media and other sources, they’re growing more comfortable with smaller borrowers that they previously shunned in favor of state-owned giants.

Jack Ma’s online bank is leading a quiet revolution in the way China lends to small businesses, taking aim at a credit bottleneck that has held back Asia’s largest economy for decades.

Using real-time payments data and a risk-management system that analyzes more than 3,000 variables, Ma’s four-year-old MYbank has lent 2 trillion yuan ($290 billion) to nearly 16 million small companies. Borrowers apply with a few taps on a smartphone and receive cash almost instantly if they’re approved. The whole process takes three minutes and involves zero human bankers. The default rate so far: about 1%.

Continue reading “Jack Ma’s $290 Billion Loan Machine Is Changing Chinese Banking” »

Now, it seems this nascent industry’s time has come. A growing demand for batteries to power electric cars and to store wind and solar energy has driven up the cost of many rare-earth metals and bolstered the business case for sea-bed mining. What’s more, the industry’s long-awaited regulations — in the form of a mining code — are due to be finalized by 2020, putting in place a process whereby contractors can apply for 30-year licences to mine assigned ‘claim areas’ in parts of the international sea bed such as the CCZ. Already, miners are exploring the potential wealth of these claim areas, but no commercial extraction will begin until the regulations are in place. Investments in this industry are now growing.

Plans are advancing to harvest precious ores from the ocean floor, but scientists say that companies have not tested them enough to avoid devastating damage.

https://www.prweb.com/releases/regenerage_international_iime…449142.htm

Time is the indefinite continued progress of existence and events that occur in an apparently irreversible succession from the past, through the present, to the future.^[1][2][3] Time is a component quantity of various measurements used to sequence events, to compare the duration of events or the intervals between them, and to quantify rates of change of quantities in material reality or in the conscious experience.^[4][5][6][7] Time is often referred to as a fourth dimension, along with three spatial dimensions.^[8]

Time has long been an important subject of study in religion, philosophy, and science, but defining it in a manner applicable to all fields without circularity has consistently eluded scholars.^{[2][6][7][9][10][11]} Nevertheless, diverse fields such as business, industry, sports, the sciences, and the performing arts all incorporate some notion of time into their respective measuring systems.^[12][13][14]

Time in physics is unambiguously operationally defined as “what a clock reads”.^[6][15][16] See Units of Time is one of the seven fundamental physical quantities in both the International System of Units and International System of Quantities. Time is used to define other quantities – such as velocity – so defining time in terms of such quantities would result in circularity of definition.^[17] An operational definition of time, wherein one says that observing a certain number of repetitions of one or another standard cyclical event (such as the passage of a free-swinging pendulum) constitutes one standard unit such as the second, is highly useful in the conduct of both advanced experiments and everyday affairs of life.

Carbon offsetting initiatives have been offered by private companies – including British Airways and Shell – for many years. These voluntary schemes give customers the choice to pay a premium, on the understanding that the company will offset some greenhouse gas emissions. Since carbon offsetting became an option, projects around the world have resulted in a saving of approximately 994m tonnes of carbon dioxide (CO₂) equivalent. But given that global CO₂ levels in 2018 were 33.1Gt, it’s fair to say that a lot more could be done.

The UK could become net zero emissions tomorrow if the government wished, but it would cost the tax payer dearly. In 2017, the UK’s total greenhouse gas emissions were 460m tonnes. If, for example, the government used the Gold Standard offsetting scheme, at an average cost of £10/tonne, that would amount to an astonishing £4.6 billion bill. Most would agree this would be an excessive cost for the government to bear, and anyway the public, private and third sectors should share responsibility for tackling emissions.

Local authorities have an important role to play in meeting this target, given their ability to work with residents, charities and businesses to make meaningful changes at a local level. Some local authorities are leading the way by setting ambitious targets: Liverpool City Council aims to become the UK’s first “climate positive” city by the end of 2020. The council has formed a partnership with a private sector organisation – the Poseidon Foundation – to achieve this through carbon offsetting.

Virgin Galactic is preparing to become the first publicly traded spaceflight company, and the venture is setting a course to be profitable by August 2021, which would put it lightyears ahead of the profitability projections of another transportation-based company that simply moves people around on Earth: Uber.

The Wall Street Journal reports that Virgin Galactic is merging with Social Capital Hedosophia Holdings (SCH), which will take a 49 percent stake and invest about $800 million into the space tourism endeavor.

There are now only two days to go before the Ending Age-Related Diseases 2019 conference at the Cooper Union in New York City. This is our annual conference that brings together industry leaders from biotech research and business.

We have almost sold out of tickets, so if you are thinking about attending, you should act today to secure your place.