“Inevitably, the compromises of the Paris Agreement make it both a huge achievement and an imperfect solution to the problem of global climate change.”
“This abundance of data can be a gold mine for discovery and insights, but finding the nuggets can be arduous, requiring special skills.
A project coming out of the M.I.T. Media Lab on Monday seeks to ease that challenge and to make the value of government data available to a wider audience. The project, called Data USA, bills itself as “the most comprehensive visualization of U.S. public data.” It is free, and its software code is open source, meaning that developers can build custom applications by adding other data.”
Income inequality in the United States has risen sharply in recent years and continues to get worse. Widespread unemployment is becoming imminent, as more and more traditional jobs are replaced by technology and automation. Without serious intervention, we could face massive increases in poverty and civil unrest in the years ahead.
A guaranteed Basic Income, which would directly provide all Americans with enough money each month to live on, would both end poverty in the US and shift our economy to one that doesn’t require full employment. It’s a simple program that could save us from the looming economic crises.
It’s time for the federal government to create a social safety net designed for the 21st-century. We’re calling on President Obama and members of the United States Congress to enact a Basic Income for all Americans.
Continue reading “Pres. Obama and Congress: Enact a Basic Income for all Americans” »
#nutrition #CrapScience
So after 40 years of prescribing low fat diets & demonising cholesterol, the largest & longest clinical experiment ever (40 years, 9,000 patients, randomly assigned diets) shows that “Patients who lowered their cholesterol, presumably because of the special diet, actually suffered MORE heart-related deaths than those who did not.”
In other words, if you’ve been cutting on steaks, butter etc. for 4 years or more, you may have INCREASED your mortality rate from heart disease by %8.
With 3D printers; many small mom-and-pop manufacturers are easy to set up anywhere. Which brings in some interesting challenges when thinking about regulatory compliance and safety. Imaging a neighbor who was laid off gets a 3D printer and begins building and shipping things from their home. Plus they’re stock piling chemicals and other things in their basement or garage as “bi-products” in the production of the goods that they are building with their $15K 3D printer. Question for many is — how safe is it? how can this be monitored and controlled?
Manufacturers haven’t been able to fully exploit advancements in new materials, because computer-aided design and engineering tools haven’t kept pace, says a program manager for the government agency.
Continue reading “DARPA Project to Seek Lightyear-Like Leap in Design, Manufacturing” »
My new story for Vice Motherboard on why transhumanists wage a war against death:
In the fight against death, sometimes you have to fight the government.
Continue reading “The Church of Perpetual Life Wants to End Deathism” »
They will visit Hiroshima Peace Park and conclude their gathering with a “Hiroshima Declaration” that will likely express hope for a world without nuclear weapons.
The future of such weapons and how to reduce them is shaping discussions in Tokyo and Hiroshima this year, following the nuclear security summit held in Washington on March 31 and April 1 and the upcoming G-7 Ise-Shima summit at the end of next month.
But even as Japan seeks to play a larger role in international nonproliferation efforts, past personal statements by Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, his allies, and, more recently, official government replies about nuclear weapons for Japan, raise questions about how politically credible any leadership in that role might be.
The Japanese government is considering giving away money ‘vouchers’ to poor young people to boost consumption, according to reports.
Following the examples of Finland, Canada and the Netherlands, Japan is considering the introduction of basic income, a tax-free income, after recent surveys showed that under-34s in Japan have cut spending by 11.7 per cent year on year.
Proponents of basic income say that not only does it reduce financial poverty but it has a number of other benefits, such as rewarding unpaid activities not recognised as economic contributions (parenting, for instance).
Continue reading “Japan is considering giving away free money” »
Three months after a Department of Homeland Security intelligence report downplayed the threat of a cyber attack against the U.S. electrical grid, DHS and the FBI began a nationwide program warning of the dangers faced by U.S. utilities from damaging cyber attacks like the recent hacking against Ukraine’s power grid.
The nationwide campaign by DHS and the FBI began March 31 and includes 12 briefings and online webinars for electrical power infrastructure companies and others involved in security, with sessions in eight U.S. cities, including a session next week in Washington.
The unclassified briefings are titled “Ukraine Cyber Attack: Implications for U.S. Stakeholders,” and are based on work with the Ukrainian government in the aftermath of the Dec. 23 cyber attack against the Ukrainian power infrastructure.
