Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Month: January 2019

I love hearing the enthusiasm and joy in the voices of first time home buyers who are going to save money, bond and remodel their house together. Brand new doctors, seasoned lawyers, accountants, project managers, the boldest of GenX and Millennials who grew up swinging VR joystick in lieu of hammers. But they’ve watched Property Brothers and Love It or List and have the best database of YouTube videos for home remodeling in their entire subdivision or building. They even park in the “Pro” section at Home Depot and have their very own monogrammed Leatherman construction gloves.

You can remodel your own home. Even “just” your kitchen or “just” your bathroom. You can read and have all the resources at your disposal. But don’t. Don’t even fucking think about it. Remember how you tried to cook Thanksgiving dinner last year and ended up burning up your kitchen, which is why you need to replace it? Those were simple enough directions too, right?

But what does this have to do with blockchain and more importantly your business?

Glad you asked. Well, your business is like your house. Blockchain is like a remodel. You can do it yourself. You’re after all a pro at your business. But your business isn’t blockchain. Your business is shipping, consulting, farming, logistics, banking, money exchange, insurance, lending, maybe even selling pizzas. Your business is a business. Your business isn’t a way of doing business or a business tool like blockchain. Your business is a way of generating you income to provide for your family, workers, community, financial security and future. It ain’t a way to decentralize any of those, unless you want to find out what a “decentralized” retirement looks like. (Hint, think working poor at 75 years old. #GigEconomy).

So! Before you decided to attempt to blockchain your business, ask yourself, “Could I remodel my house?” 99.99% of the time the answer is “Fucking, hell, no!” You should no more attempt to “blockchain” your business than you should remodel your house. So what do you do?

Hire a professional

Can’t afford one? Then you’re not ready to remodel your house or “blockchain” your business.

By the way, do you even know what the fuck “blockchaining your business” even is? I’m like an expert in this industry and I don’t recommend 99% of businesses “blockchain” any part of their business. Cause did you know you can “blockchain” parts of your business operations, functions and processes and not the entire business? I’ll tell you a secret, blockchain is just a tool you use to do your business. It ain’t a business itself, a panacea for customer acquisitions or guarantee of increased sales or revenue. It’s like a hammer that’s shiny and brand new, but in your hands it’s more likely to tear giant holes in your business’ model, customer base and revenue streams.

So, like you would a plumber, carpenter or WiFi guy, before you go to “blockchain your business” hire a professional. Cause the funny part is once (if) you blockchain your business, then you’ve got to run your business. Remember, blockchain isn’t your business. Your business is. Don’t allow the hype of DIY tech nerds get you wild with excitement leaving you swinging a proverbial sledge hammer through your internal operations and revenue streams.

Hire a professional. And much like building a house, don’t start by hiring a painter to lay the foundation. Hire a General Contractor to guide you through the process. And whatever you do, do not let the plumber and electricians (coders and programmers) charge you by the hour. As then, it’ll take three times as long, cost 10 times as much and your odds of being electrocuted when you drop a deuce are high.

Who is a “Blockchain General Contractor”? Axes and Eggs of course.

Blockchain plumbers, carpenters, electricians, painters, engineers and designers: Chainhaus — they’re your one stop shop. But you can always go to the Home Depot of Blockchain Deloitte Ireland.

Fly by night, Tim the Tool man, unpermitted, lien inclined, blockchain enthusiast.… On the advice of our legal counsel (www.cogentlaw.co) I won’t name those decentralized con artist. But they probably showed up to give you an estimate driving a Lamborghini and offered you custom views of the moon. So you know who they are.

Conclusion

Stick to your business. It’ll ultimately make you more money.

Oh, and if you need a real Construction General Contractor, visit www.mattbeth.com

My name is Samson. I’m an Adjunct Professor at Univ of New Hampshire School of Law, human and an anthropologist at Axes and Eggs, a Washington, DC based Think Tank and digital advisor. If you like what you read, share it! If you disagree, share what you know or how you feel in the comment section below. Feel free to hit me up on Twitter or Instagram @HustleFundBaby or follow me onLinkedIn. Finally, I would say thoughts are my own but I probably stole them from a woman.

WASHINGTON — A new study offers some of the strongest evidence yet of the connection between the marketing of opioids to doctors and the nation’s addiction epidemic.

It found that counties where opioid manufacturers offered a large number of gifts and payments to doctors had more overdose deaths involving the drugs than counties where direct-to-physician marketing was less aggressive.

The study, published Friday in JAMA Network Open, said the industry spent about $40 million promoting opioid medications to nearly 68,000 doctors from 2013 through 2015, including by paying for meals, trips and consulting fees. And it found that for every three additional payments that companies made to doctors per 100,000 people in a county, overdose deaths involving prescription opioids there a year later were 18 percent higher.

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The problems with cryptocurrencies and their energy usage are well-known. However, Ethereum is planning to address the issue. They’re planning on doing a 99% decrease in the amount of energy used in obtaining new coins.

It would be good for other cryptocurrencies to take this problem just as seriously.

The cryptocurrency is going on an energy diet to compete with more efficient blockchains.

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In December, NASA released a report on looking for “technosignatures” which are indirect pieces of evidence for extra-terrestrial civilizations. It covers a bunch of different scenarios.

NASA’s final report from their Technosignature Workshop is now out and addresses all the ways in which humanity is looking for evidence of extra-terrestrial civilizations.

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This is a horrible, horrible idea. The company wants to create a series of satellites that can unfurl, which will reflect light, and that can be manipulated to send messages to earth. The entire collection, comprised of CubeSats, will provide an area of about 50 sq. km. and create a whole new kind of orbital debris.

According to the website, “When phones don’t work, during zero visibility, power cuts and catastrophical emergencies – government can use the display for urgent notifications for the population.” We can ignore the idea of them being seen during zero visibility, but can you imagine a message floating in the sky that you can’t just turn off?

It was bound to happen.

While the rest of us look up at the night sky, and wonder at what we’re seeing, ponder how it all fits together, and strain ourselves trying to understand how our origins are intertwined with all that we see, others don’t. They look up at the magnitude of the night sky and think none of these things.

Instead they think, “Hmmm…that’s a big, empty billboard. How can I make money from it?”

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A trio of researchers at the University of Wisconsin has discovered that a common soil bacterium produces a chemical that is more effective in repelling mosquitoes than DEET. In their paper published in the journal Science Advances, Mayur Kajla, Gregory Barrett-Wilt and Susan Paskewitz describe their search for the chemical made by the bacteria and their hopes for its future.

DEET has been the leading mosquito repellent since the late 1940s and multiple studies have shown it to be safe to use—still, some believe its synthetic nature suggests it might be causing harm. Because of that, scientists have continued to look for a natural repellent. In this new effort, the researchers report that they have found a naturally occurring that is even more repellent than DEET, though it will have to undergo extensive study to see if it is safe to use.

The researchers report that their study began with Xenorhabdus budapestensis, a type of bacteria that takes up residence in soil-dwelling nematodes. The nematodes actually use the bacteria to help them parasitize insects. The researchers wanted to learn more about how the bacteria help kill insects and, in the process, found that were quite averse to its presence. This suggested the bacteria produced a chemical that caused the mosquitoes to stay away.

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Biological life extension may hit limits. “Clearly, there are biological reasons for each species’ average lifespan, so why would anyone think that people could live for much longer than we do now?” Perhaps new breakthroughs will nudge lifespans upwards, but maybe these scientists are correct. This is why I still work on artificial death (non biological uploading to MVT awareness engines). Even if average ages go up many folks will still become terminally ill, and apart from MVT artificial death (second best to life) they will only have expensive cryogenics or doubtful religious faith as alternatives.

The average age of people over 110 has not increased for nearly 50 years.

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