Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Category: economics

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.”

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Discussion with A biologist answering about Covid in quite a lot of detail.

World Economic Forum

As of 23 March, there were 336,000 confirmed cases of COVID-19 in the world, with more than 250,000 cases outside China. Despite these numbers, much is still misunderstood or unknown about the virus which has brought regions of the globe to a standstill and placed huge pressure on the global economy.

Even what we do know – that elderly people are more at risk, that this is a new virus but resembles other known epidemics, that it is highly infectious – requires more explanation.

Here, Belgian virologist Guido Vanham, the former head of virology at the Institute for Tropical Medicine in Antwerp, Belgium, helps answer questions about COVID-19’s origins, its behaviour and its future.

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Among the ongoing mysteries surrounding last week’s arrest of Harvard University nanoscientist Charles Lieber is the precise nature of the research program Lieber was conducting in his cooperation with Chinese researchers.

Lieber was arrested on 28 January on charges of making false statements to U.S. law enforcement officials and federal funding agencies about a collaboration he forged with researchers in China. He was released two days later on a $1 million bond. An affidavit outlining the charges against Lieber notes that in January 2013, he signed an agreement between Harvard and Wuhan University of Technology (WUT) in China. According to the affidavit, “The stated purpose of the agreement, which had a five-year effective term, was to ‘carry out advanced research and development of nanowire-based lithium ion batteries with high performance for electric vehicles.’”

Officials at WUT have not responded to requests for comment on their agreement with Lieber. But it outlines just the kind of high-tech work that U.S. prosecutors involved in efforts to investigate Chinese attempts to acquire advanced technology from U.S.-based researchers say they are concerned about. They allege that the Chinese government has used such collaborations to improperly take advantage of the federally funded research enterprise, and gain an edge in economic and military advances.

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The one thing we can say at this point in time. China cannot be the manufacturing center for the world. Simply, China has failed and the New World Order Economy has to come to an end.

You cannot continue to accept the lies coming out of the Chinese Communist Party. You can no longer accept that the CCP will tell the truth to its trading partners. China simply lacks the honor and the respect to safely manufacture products for their trading partners and they cannot be trusted with common and necessary safety protocols. Simply, that ship has sailed away, and as a culture, they are not going to change.

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When we think of human trafficking, we often think about the despondent faces of women and children who live in slums all over the world. What if human trafficking is much closer to home than we think? In 2019, Markie Dell, stood on the TEDx stage to recount her experience of being a domestic human trafficking victim. She was an awkward teenager who was groomed by a girl that she befriended at a birthday party. She was subsequently kidnapped, drugged, sexually violated, intimidated at gunpoint into dancing in strip clubs for an entire year.

She didn’t know that she was a human trafficking victim until a police officer handed her a book called, “Pimpology”. Then, she knew that she was being human trafficked.

According to the Polaris Project, most human trafficking victims are trafficked by their romantic partners, spouses, family members, including parents. In the U.S., in 2018, there were 23,078 survivors identified and 10,949 cases of human trafficking. Even then, these cases are often drastically underreported.

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Researchers at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem announced on Sunday that they have developed a new method of testing for COVID-19 which is not only 4–10 times faster than the tests most commonly used today, but also significantly cheaper, while supplying the same level of accuracy. Moreover, most of the materials required to perform the new test are already available in Israel, easing significantly both the country’s dire shortage of testing materials and its heavy economic dependence on foreign commercial markets. The method was developed in the labs of Prof. Nir Friedman of the Institute of Life Sciences and the School of Engineering and Computer Sciences and Dr. Naomi Haviv of Hebrew University’s Neuroscience Research Center, and is based on materials which are not affected by global shortages and can be recycled for repeated used on future tests. The method commonly used today for COVID-19 testing involves extracting RNA molecules from a patient’s sample to determine if the molecules produced have viral RNA within them, which confirms the presence of the coronavirus. The new test developed by the researchers performs the same action, but is made from more commonly attainable materials, that produce results at a much higher speed. Dr. Naomi Haviv said that “We have an efficient RNA extraction method, 4–10 times faster than the current method. It is based on magnetic beads and can be performed both robotically and manually.”

Other than the magnetic beads, all of the other materials needed to perform the tests are available for purchase in Israel. The beads themselves are recyclable and can be reused to perform future tests. “The robotic method has already undergone a series of tests at Hadassah Hospital, using hundreds of samples from patients — and is now becoming operational.”

The new test would supply results 4–10 times faster than the current method, and is made almost entirely from materials which are easily available for purchase within the country.

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The Airspeeder vehicle, which weighs about 550 pounds, uses a battery pack that can be swapped out during the race. The packs are expected to last for about 15 minutes. Four 32-horsepower electric motors propel the cars to a top speed of about 125 miles per hour. The vehicle tears through the air between about 15 and 130 feet off the ground.

Matt Pearson, founder of Alauda and the Airspeeder series, said:

In economic terms, the eVTOL (Electrical Vertical Take Off and Landing) sector has the potential to be worth €1.37 trillion ($ 1.5 trillion) by 2040. It is backed by some of the biggest names in aviation, technology, and automotive.

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Talk of a universal basic income (UBI), or regular cash payments with minimal or no requirements for receiving the money, has been brought to the forefront as social distancing and economic concerns have put millions of people out of work.

Amid the COVID-19 pandemic Pope Francis says it might be time for some sort of universal basic income.

“This may be the time to consider a universal basic wage” to “acknowledge and dignify the noble, essential tasks” and to “achieve the ideal … of no worker without rights,” Pope Francis said in a letter to the World Meeting of Popular Movements, an organization representing global grassroots organizations, published on Sunday via the Vatican.

The Pope acknowledged that for many workers, the COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns are making it difficult, if not impossible, for people to earn money.

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In an Easter letter to world leaders, Pope Francis opined that “this may be the time to consider a universal basic wage which would acknowledge and dignify the noble, essential tasks you carry out.”

“It would ensure and concretely achieve the ideal, at once so human and so Christian, of no worker without rights,” the Pope argued.

In the letter, Francis argued that many workers, including “street vendors, recyclers, carnies, small farmers, construction workers, dressmakers, the different kinds of caregivers” were being “excluded from the benefits of globalization,” while “the lockdowns are becoming unbearable.”

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