Lifeboat Foundation

Why is Alcor in Arizona? The main reason is that the risk of earthquakes and other natural disasters is fairly low. People opting for cryonics expect that their bodies might be in stasis for timescales measured in centuries.

As far as financial matters go, many of Alcor’s clients use life insurance policies to cover the cost of preservation and maintenance ($200,000 for a whole body or $80,000 for just the head). People use trust funds if they have net worth they want to recover when revived in the future.

Continue reading “Frozen in time: You can be cryogenically preserved, but will you ever be revived?” »

For the last couple of years, Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been changing many fields and increasing efficiency by using improved datasets. One of those areas where AI has accelerated evolution is the robo-advisory, which is a field having extensive financial big data to analyze.

Robo-advisors are the systems that use algorithms to automatically perform investment decisions or tasks which are mostly done by human advisors. “Robo advisors are a potential solution to the complexities of financial decision making,” said Jill E. Fisch, a law professor at the University of Pennsylvania at a conference of Pension Research Council.

In the main scheme, robo-advisors are merging customers’ information such as their financial goals, risk tolerances, timeframes, with the right asset allocation that qualifies customer’s needs. While making this merge, they use many algorithms including machine learning models to create the best fit for the customer. In the process of timeframe, they take lots of actions as well such as rebalancing the portfolio or performing tax-loss harvesting. This automatically increases efficiency while taking decisions at the right time for the portfolio.

Talk being ahead of the curve;

Event 201 was a 3.5-hour pandemic tabletop exercise that simulated a series of dramatic, scenario-based facilitated discussions, confronting difficult, true-to-life dilemmas associated with response to a hypothetical, but scientifically plausible, pandemic. 15 global business, government, and public health leaders were players in the simulation exercise that highlighted unresolved real-world policy and economic issues that could be solved with sufficient political will, financial investment, and attention now and in the future.

The exercise consisted of pre-recorded news broadcasts, live “staff” briefings, and moderated discussions on specific topics. These issues were carefully designed in a compelling narrative that educated the participants and the audience.

Continue reading “About the Event 201 exercise” »

Of the spread of COVID-19 aboard the aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt and the subsequent relief of its Commanding Officer has highlighted the tension that exists between maintaining military readiness and the need to safeguard the health of members of the armed forces in the face of a pandemic.

The disease has been a feature of war for the vast majority of human history – from the plague that ravaged Athens early in the Peloponnesian War, killing the Athenian strategos Pericles; to the diseases that European settlers brought with them to the New World, devastating local populations; to the host of tropical diseases that caused appalling casualties in the China-Burma-India and Southwest Pacific theaters in World War II. The fact that we were surprised by the emergence, growth, and spread of COVID-19 reflects the false conceit of 21^st century life that we have “conquered” disease.

In fact, pandemics are but one class of low-probability but high-impact contingencies that we could face in the coming years, including an earthquake or other natural disaster in a major urban area, regime change in an important state, and the collapse of financial markets leading to a global depression. When I served as Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Policy Planning between 2006 and 2009, we explored a series of such “shocks” as well as the role the Defense Department could play in responding to them as a way of helping the Department’s leaders address such contingencies. During my time in the Pentagon, we also held a series of wargames with members of Congress and their staff, governors of several states and their cabinets, and the government of Mexico, to explore in depth the consequences of a pandemic. Much of what we found then resonates with what we are experiencing now.

Kebotix, which is developing a lab automation platform that leverages AI and robotics, has raised $11.5 million in venture capital.

Doing “whatever it takes” to save the global economy from the coronavirus pandemic is going to cost a lot of money. The U.S. government alone is spending a few trillion dollars, and the Federal Reserve is creating another few trillion dollars to keep the financial system from collapsing. A custom Bloomberg index measuring M2 figures for 12 major economies including the U.S., China, euro zone and Japan shows their aggregate money supply had already more than doubled to $80 trillion from before the 2008–2009 financial crisis.

These numbers are so large that they no longer have any meaning; they are simply abstractions. It’s been some time since people thought about the concept of money and its purpose. The broad idea is that money has value, but that value is not arbitrary. Former Fed Chairman Paul Volcker once said in an interview that “it is a governmental responsibility to maintain the value of the currency they issue. And when they fail to do that, it is something that undermines an essential trust in government.”

WASHINGTON — The Space Enterprise Consortium — an organization created in 2017 to attract space companies to work on military contracts — is canvassing firms to gauge the impact of the coronavirus pandemic on businesses.

The consortium known as SpEC is run by the U.S. Space Force’s Space and Missile Systems Center in Los Angeles. It has more than 350 member companies, many of them space startups and small businesses.

In an April 15 email the consortium asked members to identify those that have fewer than 50 employees.

The precious metal has been torn between its potential as a haven investment and a mad scramble to sell the tangible asset in a bid for cash to cover losses in the stock market.

“The Covid-19 outbreak has had a major impact on the gold market, bringing massive price swings as investors react to new developments related to the pandemic,” says Steven Dunn, head of exchange-traded funds at Aberdeen Standard Investments.

“Because of Covid-19, refiners were knocked offline…and the ability to move gold became a challenge as normal means of transport became almost impossible,” he says.

Frustrated by Europe’s lack of home-grown tech giants, Commission officials hope EIC will help small tech firms grow in Europe, instead of being lured away to Silicon Valley. “The aim here is to close the big gap that exists between Europe and the United States,” says Mark Ferguson, Ireland’s chief scientist and EIC board chair. But one challenge will be backing risky but promising startups without becoming “the financiers of last resort for all the failing companies that aren’t going to do very well,” says Christopher Tucci, a professor of technology management at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Lausanne, who advised the Commission while it drafted Horizon Europe.

European Innovation Council buys shares in disruptive technology startups.