Lifeboat Foundation

While there’s no launch date yet, the People’s Bank of China is likely to be the first major central bank to issue a digital version of its currency, the yuan, seeking to keep up with — and control of — a rapidly digitizing economy. Trials have been held this year in a handful of cities and tests have started with some e-wallets and online apps, with the Covid-19 pandemic and need for social distancing providing a new sense of urgency. Unlike cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin, dealing in the digital yuan won’t have any presumption of anonymity, and its value will be as stable as the physical yuan, which will be sticking around too. Behind China’s rush is a desire to manage technological change on its own terms. As one PBOC official put it, currency isn’t only an economic issue, it’s also about sovereignty.

Not all the details are out, but according to new patents registered by the PBOC and official speeches, it could work something like this: Consumers and businesses would download a digital wallet onto their mobile phone and fill it with money from their account at a commercial bank — similar to going to an ATM. They then use that money — dubbed Digital Currency Electronic Payment, or DCEP — like cash to make and receive payments directly with anyone else who also has a digital wallet. Some questions remain, including the impact on Big Tech companies such as Ant Group Co. and Tencent Holdings Ltd. that already offer payment services.

By Taleed Brown

By decree of an anonymous university “supercomputer,” Victoria’s Dan Andrews has opted to extend stage 4 lockdowns. This is once again stalling the economic recovery of the region and plundering the wealth and liberty of millions across the state.

Continue reading “A ‘Supercomputer’ is Deciding the Politics of Australians” »

Boosting seedling survival rates from 10% to at least 90%.

Conserving existing forests, restoring forest ecosystems and reforesting suitable lands is essential if we are to transition to a sustainable pathway for our economies and societies at the required speed and scale.

Such a transformation is the goal of 1t.org – the Trillion Tree Platform announced at the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting 2020 in Davos. Set up to support the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration (2021−2030), 1t.org seeks to raise ambition for 1 trillion tree commitments and empower and connect a global community of innovators and ecopreneurs who are developing the needed solutions to achieve the trillion trees goal.

Continue reading “Trillion Trees” »

Historically, human space exploration was initiated by the Soviet Union with the Sputnik launch into the Earth orbit in 1957. Humankind’s space endeavors grew with more determination after the first animal’s launch, a dog called “Laika”. Marked by the Soviet Union’s Yuri Gagarin trip in the Vostok 1 in 1961 and his compatriot Valentina Tereshkiva’s three-day space orbiting mission in the Vostok 6 in 1963, humankind succeeded to make the giant leap beyond Earth’s boundaries.

Nonetheless, the Yuri Gagarin’s spacewalk and Neil Armstrong’s first steps on the Moon remain the spark to ignite ambitious human prospects on space travel, which unleashed unlimited possibilities on the humankind’s expansion into outer space. The achieved milestones in space endeavors created a shift from a mere inspirational driver and curiosity feeder on existential questions [3] to a space race which grew from a bipolar race between the United States and the former Soviet Union to a different space race in which new actors, particularly private actors, have become essential players [4].

The most prominent ongoing transformation of the global space sector is the race to commercialize space driven by private enterprises and induced by governmental agencies who rewarded these enterprises billions of dollars in governmental space contracts. The evolution of space commercialization could be illustrated through the U.S. space economic emergence from the National Aeronautics and Space administration’s (NASA) monopoly to a more liberalized space sector. Such an emergence came as a consequence of NASA’s struggle to improve its military-based technologies to achieve cost-effective and safe space access [5] in addition to budget reductions and various costly accidents, which led NASA to outsource its spaceship manufacturing.

Continue reading “#SpaceWatchGL Opinion: New Space – Overview and investment Trends” »

The digital yuan and the existing systems are not mutually exclusive. Most consumers are likely to continue using their Alipay or WeChat Pay platforms – or both systems, in many cases – for their multitude of applications and services that have evolved from simple payments to loans, asset management and money-market investments.

China already boasts more digital mobile payment users than anywhere else on earth, in a US$49 trillion market almost 500 times bigger than in the United States. The People’s Bank of China governor Yi Gang wants to hasten the digital transformation of China’s currency and economy.

Continue reading “What will China’s digital yuan mean for Alipay and WeChat Pay?” »

Summary: Lessons from other historic pandemics show social tension accumulated throughout epidemics lead to significant episodes of rebellion.

Source: Bocconi University

If you have not been hearing much of the French Gilets Jaunes or of the Italian Sardines in the last few months, it’s because “the social and psychological unrest arising from the epidemic tends to crowd-out the conflicts of the pre-epidemic period, but, at the same time it constitutes the fertile ground on which global protest may return more aggressively once the epidemic is over,” writes Massimo Morelli, Professor of Political Science at Bocconi, in a paper recently published in Peace Economics, Peace Science and Public Policy.

Public-private partnerships have been central to the development of cybersecurity over the past decade, through the sharing of threat information between commercial organizations and historically secretive government agencies. The opportunity now exists for a new era of public-private partnership, for a new realm of information sharing.

Cyberattacks continue to be reported as a key business risk. In the recent World Economic Forum’s Regional Risks for Doing Business 2019 report, survey respondents in six of the world’s 10-largest economies identified cyberattacks as their number one risk.

Continue reading “How to build a modern public-private cybersecurity partnership” »

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Forty states have already led the way, and the time is now.

Continue reading “One cure for an ailing American economy: Legalize cannabis” »

🤔 My belief is: Many people have ideas on how to fix the global economy. It is only in trying as many ideas as possible to see what works, and what fails. Personally I believe in the ideologies of Scottish Intellectuals David Hume, and Adam Smith. Capital needs to be broadly spread out to the most productive hands of an economy. Currently that would be creatives. Musk and Bezos have multiplied wealth and created jobs, like Steve Jobs. With people cozy to the idea of working a… See More.

The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has asked states to be ready to distribute a coronavirus vaccine by late October. Pfizer (PFE) thinks it will have enough data to ask the US Food and Drug Administration to authorize its potential vaccine next month.

Most experts think it’s unlikely — but not impossible — that a vaccine will be ready ahead of the US election. But with at least seven candidates in phase three trials, it’s very likely that at least one successful vaccine will emerge in the months to come. Pharmaceutical companies are also racing to develop effective treatments for the disease.

Continue reading “A vaccine won’t cure the global economy” »