Lifeboat Foundation

This is a guest post by Shahrokh Shahidzadeh, CEO at Acceptto

These past two months have been among the most extraordinary times any of us can remember. The COVID-19 (CV-19) impact is all around us, indiscriminately impacting all of our lives, our work, the economy and for sure we are on the onset of a new normal that we are learning how to deal with daily.

There are always two stages of dealing with a change of this magnitude. First, we react immediately, thinking about what we must do differently now. Soon, we will begin to think in the longer term, reacting to and planning for permanent changes that result from the CV-19 pandemic.

Instead of shutting down, Sweden opted for much milder measures to stop the spread of the coronavirus. The idea looked appealing, with the possibility of containing the pandemic at a much lower economic cost. So far, however, the statistics suggest the Swedish model is more disaster than panacea.

US President Barack Obama called the Ebola outbreak in West Africa a threat to global security on Tuesday and broadly expanded the US response by ordering thousands of troops to the region along with an aggressive effort to train health care workers and build treatment centres.
He called on other countries to quickly provide more helpers, supplies and money.
“If the outbreak is not stopped now, we could be looking at hundreds of thousands of people affected, with profound economic, political and security implications for all of us,” Obama declared after briefings at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta.
Obama acted under pressure from regional leaders and international aid organisations who pleaded for a heightened US role in confronting the deadly virus, especially in the hardest-hit countries of Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea.
“In West Africa, Ebola is now an epidemic,” Obama said.
“It’s spiralling out of control, it is getting worse.“
The stepped-up US response includes sending 3,000 troops to the region, including medics and corpsmen for treatment and training, engineers to help build treatment facilities and logistics specialists to assist in patient transportation.
Obama also announced that Major General Darryl Williams, head of US Army Africa, will head a military command centre based in Liberia.
The announcement came the same day the World Health Organisation warned that the number of West African Ebola cases could begin doubling every three weeks and that the crisis could end up costing nearly 1 billion US Dollars to contain.
Nearly 5,000 people have become ill from Ebola in Liberia, Sierra Leone, Guinea, Nigeria and Senegal since it was first recognised in March.
The World Health Organisation says it anticipates the figure could rise to more than 20,000.
Obama described task ahead as “daunting” but said what gives him hope is that “the world knows how to fight this disease.“
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This new paper argues that continued economic growth on Earth will hit a thermodynamic limit within the third millenium, if economic activities and energy consumption cannot be decoupled. The maximum size would be up to 7000 times the current one. An in-space economy would offer a way out.

“Energy Limits to the Gross Domestic Product on Earth” https://arxiv.org/abs/2005.05244

(Image: Wikipedia — https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Sky_mile_tower.jpg)

A new, radical paradigm shift is in progress. The U.S. economy may shrink as much as 40% in the first semester of 2020. China, already the world’s largest economy by PPP for a few years now, may soon become the world’s largest economy even in exchange rate terms.

by Pepe Escobar

Continue reading “One thought on ‘Get Ready for the Next Game-Changer: The Gold-Backed Digital Yuan’” »

Deep reinforcement learning has trained AIs to beat humans at complex games like Go and StarCraft. Could it also do a better job at running the economy?

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• Will Douglas Heaven archive page

Tony Webster / Flickr.

If you think tracking apps will keep people safe as economies reopen, look to South Korea, Singapore, and Australia to see why you’re mistaken.

As expected, they discovered large fluctuations in the composition and daily changes of the human and mouse gut microbiomes. But strikingly, these apparently chaotic fluctuations followed several elegant ecological laws.

“Similar to many animal ecologies and complex financial markets, a healthy gut microbiome is never truly at equilibrium,” Vitkup says. “For example, the number of a particular bacterial species on day one is never the same on day two, and so on. It constantly fluctuates, like stocks in a financial market or number of animals in a valley, but these fluctuations are not arbitrary. In fact, they follow predictable patterns described by Taylor’s power law, a well-established principle in animal ecology that describe how fluctuations are related to the relative number of bacteria for different species.”

Other discovered laws of the gut microbiome also followed principles frequently observed in animal ecologies and economic systems, including the tendency of gut bacteria abundances to slowly but predictably drift over time and the tendency of species to appear and disappear from the gut microbiome at predictable times.

Continue reading “Dynamics of gut bacteria follow ecological laws” »

Overview global economy.

America has dominated global finance for decades. But could covid-19 tip the balance of financial power in China’s favour?

Continue reading “How covid-19 could change the financial world order | The Economist” »