THIS POST IS FOR ALL THOSE CHINLESS WONDERS WHO BELIEVE IN PROFIT FOR THEMSELVES.
It’s no longer good enough to measure the overall wealth of a nation whilst glossing over inequality or consequential environmental degradation.
Why?
Because it is quite apparent that capitalism is stuck while the longer-term future has been transformed by the pandemic and climate change.
It has no answers to a host of problems, including disease, inequality, the digital divide, and, perhaps most blatantly, the environmental crisis the biggest problems of our time.
Rethinking the role of government nationally and in the international economy is now reaching critical a point – to put public purpose first and solve the problems that matter to people – are now the central questions for humanity.
It is imperative that responding to the climate and nature emergency is integrated across all economic activity, with an explicit commitment to moving to a more circular and resource-efficient economy.
The capacities and role of government within the economy and society, above all need to recover a sense of public purpose in order to reshape the economic development to invests in people and businesses drive prosperity, and reduce inequality.
Our economic well-being is without any doubt tied to our environmental, cultural, and social well-being.
One can say this till we are blue in the face but the Covid crisis has removed any doubt about the fundamental role of the foundational economy in the well-being of a nation. (This is the part of the economy which could not be shut down as it provides the infrastructure of everyday life)
So investing in social care, childcare, housing, energy, low carbon, and digital connectivity not only addresses the foundational needs of civilized life but can offer meaningful and rewarding careers and be harnessed for economic development.
A holistic approach to the economy, recognizing its potential for harm as well as good, demands a holistic way to measure progress.
None of the above is possible unless we find a way of committing to long-term projects that are both politically and financially sound.
Our problem is that governments are subjected to short electrical terms in office so long-term objectives are not a priority. While the electoral population pays ever-increasing taxes either to fund a project or rectify a mistake, (without any real commitment to the project in the first place) other than a general election and a new manifesto of verbal diarrhea can deserving projects be fulfilled to completion?
What if we were to introduce legal mission statements that could not be changed till achieved, ‘magnet projects’ funded not by taxation but by voluntary participation in the form of willing support in allowing citizens to support projects by buying sustainable green bonds with guaranteed returns and Loto style financial monthly prizes.
If we are to genuinely tackle the problems that we have created lets us genuinely participate by putting our money where our mouths are.
Too often overlooked in economic development.
You also might be led to believe that monetary activism is financial triage against world economic collapse but ask yourself what kind of political creatures are money printing spawning.
What we are seeing is the economy going online with businesses and organizations in receipt of public funding far from being totally transparent with online profit-seeking algorithms that are now driving a hidden non-paying tax economy.
The pandemic points forward to realizing that our economic models are not dealing with the growth of inequalities.
Money must be made to serve the people not the other way around social value
Imagine a society where everyone can have an equal say in the issues that concern them. Above all, a world, in which all the people own and share the wealth that we need in order to live. These would be enormously exciting times because, at long last, human society will have evolved to the position of being able to tackle effectively the challenges facing the modern world.
So here is your chance to contribute by suggesting your solutions or improving on the above suggestion of Mission Economics.
All human comments are appreciated. All like clicks and abuse chucked in the bin.
This post is so the world remembers the Holocaust, its victims, and those of other attempted acts of genocide throughout history. The Holocaust was one of the most unimaginable crimes in human history, resulting in the deaths of an estimated six million Jewish people.
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I am of the mindset that there is more to this question than just debate itself. One has only to look at the state of the world to see that we have not and will not stop killing each other.
Since time memorial it has not changed nor will it.
Climate Change with all its pending consequences is going to lead to conflicts all over the world but it might allow us to develop an ” Objective hatred” in which the hate objects are not a human scapegoat but something impersonal like poverty, disease oppression, or natural disasters to turn our destructive energy to creative use.
It’s not if climate change is going to peel back the layers underlying so many contemporary issues in today’s society, science, and religion, and specifically, creation vs. evolution, ( that hovers very near the surface of the teaching of evolution)
Combined the consequences of climate change with profit-seeking technologies that are already fueling INEQUALITY beyond what we know now and we are looking at a world that no one wants to see.
Thanks to Hollywood, Smart TV, SmartPhone, and Social Media platforms all containing graphics pictures of killings we are evolving as desensitized humans.
If so, where are we going?
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The changes with technology unlike evolution will not be gradual.
“Exciting”, maybe or, indeed, even noticed.
Are we Evolving?
The short answer is “Yes,” we’re still evolving, in different directions but not in ways that excite most people.
Might we be on the verge of a different type of evolution, in which our technological prowess further integrates our biology with machine-like intelligence, processing, and mechanical capabilities?
We’re sick of hearing “Why are there still monkeys?”
Will evolution be a change in the frequency of genes in populations or will it be with personal genetic engineering?
Then we have another situation with a larger variety of different versions of our species, all still being enslaved by technology.
Our brain size might increase but it remains pretty useless in stopping wars.
Might the time be at hand in the next few centuries where we create our replacements altogether morphed by our technologies. Something along the lines of hard drives that expand our brains, connectivity to a hive mind, Borg-like capabilities, machine augmentation of our senses, and the like…so that our evolution shifts from natural forces in the environment to digitalized enhancement.
For many, the Darwinian view of life – a panorama of brutal struggle and constant change is the reason for all the killing.
When Darwin’s theory of evolution was first published in the late 1800s, it covered only biological evolution. What is profound is that the more complete scientific evolutionary story really only started to come together in the last 50 years!
You cannot change one factor without changing another.
Evolution and Creation are essentially creative processes they are no longer separate things in themselves.
Therefore in the first place, it would appear now, with gene editing augmentation and technological advances we will indeed survive only to morph into a digitalized species with all that is good and bad, still fighting each other.
“Nature has shrugged off countless species in the history of the earth, and she will shrug off Homo sapiens with no more concern than any of the rest.” –Louis B. Ziegler
It leaves us with the grand existential question of what meaning it all has for us.
Humans are killing the planet and all its inhabitants.
Why? For what purpose?
Will future population growth along with economic development will be humanity’s fatal flaws, bringing about “unprecedented levels of extinction risk?
The answer is that there is overwhelming evidence that habitat loss and fragmentation, over-exploitation of biological resources, pollution, species invasions, and climate change have increased rates of global species extinctions to levels that are much higher than those observed in the fossil record.
If humans are supposed to be conscious and loving, why do we cause and allow such hideous suffering to happen in our society, including the killing of other fellow humans?
If we are at least partially preprogrammed by evolution to kill our own, what can be done (if anything)?
Why do we kill each other at all?
The reasons are innumerable.
Beliefs, love, jealousy, pride, guilt, revenge, mercy killing, honor killing, drugs (altered states), delusion, self-defense, economic gain, suicide, justice, power, psychopathy, and sport… and all in the name of personal gain, nationality (war), religion, sect, caste, creed or gender.
We want something to change as a result of our actions.
Humans have evolved with a propensity to kill one another that is six times higher than the average mammal. (Maybe, we are beginning to recognize we can feel empathy and feel the urge to take action when the subjects of injustice are not human and need somebody to channel their survival urge.)
However, the level of lethal violence has changed through human history and can be associated with changes in the socio-political organization of human populations.
Most sane humans, if given the choice, will not kill their fellow man.
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In a world in profound transformation. We have to find alternative activities to give that sense of feeling alive of belonging and purpose.
The fact that so many societies throughout the world fail to offer equality makes our future prospects of peace look very bleak.
If these needs are unsatisfied and there is an obvious enemy or oppressor to direst them towards then warfare is almost inevitable.
Instead of focusing on abstract, boring, cold data projects such as The Ocean Cleanup show how huge multilateral issues no government wants to deal with, such as plastic polluting the oceans, can be tackled by building systems that accelerate inequality.
While society provides a hero system that allows us to believe that we transcend death by participating in something of lasting worth the history of life on Earth is a history of extinction and ecological failures, but it is also a story of the formation of new forms.
The best we can hope for society at large is that the mass of unconscious individuals might develop a moral equivalent to war.
No prediction by any expert can tell us whether we will prosper or perish but at what cost do we purchase the assurance that we are heroic?
Expect no miracle cure.
All human comments are appreciated. All like clicks and abuse chucked in the bin.
A shift of a single degree is barely perceptible to human skin, but it’s not human skin we’re talking about. It’s the planet, and an average increase of one degree across its entire surface means huge changes in climatic extremes.
Even if greenhouse emissions stopped overnight the concentrations already in the atmosphere would still mean a global rise of between 0.5 and 1C.
Air temperatures on Earth have been rising since the Industrial Revolution with the average global temperature on Earth having increased by at least 1.1° Celsius (1.9° Fahrenheit) since 1880. Keeping records began in 1880.
A one-degree global change is significant because it takes a vast amount of heat to warm all of the oceans. In the past, a one- to two-degree drop was all it took to plunge the Earth into the Little Ice Age.
The year 2021 had an above-average global tropical cyclone activity with a total of 94 named storms. Snow cover was 9.39 million square miles and the seventh-smallest annual snow cover extent in the 1967-2021 record, with the average temperature across global surfaces 1.51°F (0.84°C) above the 20th-century average.
2021, the sixth warmest year on record. Nine of the ten hottest years or records have occurred in the past decade.
The upper-ocean heat content, which addresses the amount of heat stored in the 0-2000 meters depth of the ocean, was a record high in 2021.
December 2021 also marked the 24th consecutive December with a below-average sea ice extent.
The year 2021 was South America’s sixth warmest year on record at 1.09°C (1.96°F) above average. The year 2021 also marks North America’s 25th consecutive year with temperatures, at least nominally, above average.
The year 2021 was Europe’s ninth warmest year on record at 1.28°C (2.30°F) above average.
Africa had its third-warmest year (tying with 2019) in the 112-year record.
Asia had its seventh warmest year on record.
Oceania had an above-average temperature.
It is irrefutable that we are now looking down the barrel of a Climate Gun.
Mountains are starting to come apart. Polar ice is melting. Greenland will tip into irreversible melt once global temperatures rise past a mere 1.2C.
At the current rate, the whole Greenland ice sheet would vanish within 140 years.
Miami would disappear, as would most of Manhattan. Central London would be flooded. Bangkok, Bombay, and Shanghai would lose most of their area. In all, half of humanity would have to move to higher ground.
Everywhere, ecosystems will unravel. By the time global temperatures reach two degrees of warming in 2050, more than a third of all living species will face extinction.
Beyond two degrees, however, preventing mass starvation will be as easy as halting the cycles of the moon. First millions, then billions, of people will face an increasingly tough battle to survive. In the two-degree hotter world, nobody will think of taking Mediterranean holidays.
In this kind of heat, the death of the Amazon is as inevitable as the melting of Greenland.
Once the veneer of civilization had been torn away a three-degree increase in global temperature the end of the world is nigh.
BETWEEN THREE AND FOUR DEGREES OF WARMING
It would throw the carbon cycle into reverse. Instead of absorbing carbon dioxide, vegetation and soils start to release it. So much carbon pours into the atmosphere that it pumps up atmospheric concentrations by 250 parts per million by 2100.
The stream of refugees will now include those fleeing from coasts to safer interiors. Both poles are certain to melt, causing an eventual rise of 50 meters. Ice sheets have vanished.
We are looking now at an entirely different planet.
Globalism in the five-degree world will break down into something more like parochialism. Customers will have nothing to buy because producers will have nothing to sell. With no possibility of international aid, migrants will have to force their way into the few remaining habitable enclaves and fight for survival.
At the same time, as the ozone layer came under assault, we would feel the sun’s rays burning into our skin, and the first cell mutations would be triggering outbreaks of cancer among anyone who survived.
One more Degree.
It is not too difficult to imagine the ultimate nightmare, with oceanic methane eruptions near large population centers wiping out billions of people – perhaps in days. All the remaining forests burning, and the corpses of people, livestock, and wildlife piling up in every continent, the six-degree world would be a harsh penalty indeed for the mundane crime of burning fossil energy.
The maximum temperatures a human body can stand without dying or suffering severe consequences is 100 F (38 C) but surviving requires continuous fluid intake.
As we look forward to 2022, it’s clear that ambitious net-zero targets pose a myriad of difficulties. As it stands, emissions across the world are not declining.
We can’t afford to wait and hope that the world will stop using fossil fuels in time, it won’t. Because the fragility of our food systems and their dependency on fossil fuels is intrinsically linked with an increasing loss of biodiversity.
We need more than a polluter pays principle so that people who cause damage are financially responsible for their actions.
The reality is that no one wants to suffer the financial costs that affect the changes required to make a difference.
Here below is a suggestion to address this problem.
Here we are once more on the brink of another war with Ukraine as the host venue.
After World War II, the western part of Ukraine merged into the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, and the whole country became a part of the Soviet Union with it gaining its independence in 1991, following the dissolution of the Soviet Union.
Since then Hostilities have simmered for years.
So, what is at the heart of the conflict that has been going on for more than seven years?
Ukraine went through two revolutions in 2005 and 2014, both times rejecting Russia’s supremacy and seeking a path to join the European Union and NATO.
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Amid growing concerns, we now have Russia poised to invade Ukraine, with conflicting news reporting as to what is happening and who is to blame.
As we live in such a fucked up world it’s a wonder that any of us exist so you could not be blamed if you are at a loss.
Is it Nato or Russia?
In Putin’s reality, Russia is encircled and under threat and is required to defend itself from Nato. As Putin sees it, only the threat of war can reopen a conversation that, to many in the West, has long felt like settled history: the expansion of nato eastward, the denial of a Russian veto on questions of regional security, and the underlying sense that Russia lost the Cold War.
So Ukraine presents an opportunity for Russia, once and for all, to reassert its geopolitical relevance. If Ukraine joins nato or is drawn into a de-facto military alliance with it, then Putin’s project has failed; if Ukraine is kept from doing so, Putin has fulfilled his historical role.
The reality is whatever the ultimate composition of Russia’s forces, their ability to overwhelm the Ukrainian military is not in doubt. Once such a sizable military force is in place, it is enviable that it comes to exert its own influence on events.
Russia is now calling on Nato states to formally retract a 2008 pledge that the alliance would one day admit Ukraine and Georgia, promise not to deploy certain weapons systems to states near Russia, and refrain from military drills and maneuvers near Russia’s borders.
Even if the U.S. and other Nato members were ready to negotiate on these strategic questions, there is no realistic scenario in which significant progress, much less a formal agreement, could be made in the compressed timeline that Russia seems to be demanding.
This means that, in the end, the West will cave so as to stave off a war it doesn’t want.
After all, a Russian-Ukrainian war is a lose-lose for Western states: either they look feckless if they do nothing and Ukraine is defeated, or they feel compelled to intervene, risking a wider war with Russia that no one has the stomach for.
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All of this is raising concerns that Europe may again be beset by war.
NATO was established 66 years ago today, on April 4, 1949, since then it has reinvented itself becoming a military pact against Russia undertaking to arm all the nations around Russia.
Sixty-six years later NATO still exists, as many have argued, for no good reason to counteract threats that are either imagined or which only exist because NATO itself exists. Or worse, to lend legitimacy to the geopolitical whims of its only beneficiary.
There is no treaty obligation to defend Ukraine, which is not a NATO member, so some of the toughest decisions could fall on the European Union.
So where are we?
While the UN these days rarely serves anyone well, NATO serves U.S. interests.
If Putin is seeking to restore dialogue with the West, especially the US, the amassing an army next to Ukraine has worked already.
It’s time for a face-to-face between Putin and Biden.
Since 2018, the U.S. has sold hundreds of anti-tank Javelin missiles to Ukraine. Last March, the Pentagon announced a hundred-and-twenty-five-million-dollar military-aid package, which included armored patrol boats.
In November, Ukraine signed a treaty with the United Kingdom that would allow it to buy British warships and missiles.
Given all that weaponry, what would keep Nato armies from establishing bases?
The issue is not so much Ukraine but the underlying principle:
If a military alliance seeks to expand, it has to consider the interests of those who are opposed.
Russia, in other words, can’t be expected to remain a passive observer of actions that it believes violate its core security concerns.
All human comments are appreciated. All like clicks and abuse chucked in the bin
We all know that there is an invisible world and that today it is undeniably digital.
This invisible world is becoming both powerful and dangerous leading to digitalizing without a system of oversight of the way we operate in the world, resulting in not just hidden powers but a decoupling between human rights and democracy.
On one hand, digital democracy, or eDemocracy, uses the internet, social media, and technology to improve our democratic systems of governance.
On the other with our electronic overlords, ( Smartphones, Pads, Apple watches, TV, Web Services), this world of invisibility is been driven by non-accountable, non-transparent commerce, operating profit-seeking algorithms, with self-learning data collection codes, that no one comprehends.
As our day-to-day lives are increasingly immersed in technology, it is easy to lose perspective on things that matter.
The capitalist world of profit and power is disappearing underground.
New technologies – from social media and GPS systems to artificial intelligence and digital twins – make the planet we inhabit unrecognizable from even 20 years ago and it’s only going to get faster, changing how we live.
The rise of the sharing economy, online marketplaces, and digital platforms are shattering old barriers and reducing the distances between industries, societies, and places, all of which are without adequate regulations are vanishing from scrutiny and accountability.
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While it’s true that today, leaders need to deal with unprecedented changes and an unpredictable and challenging future due to the Fourth Industrial Revolution, Climate change, and the covid pandemic they need to be more agile, to deal with sudden changes and challenges that any one of these will bring.
Why?
Because the status quo as the inertia of past success can be crippling for the future.
The paradox of leadership lies in staying focused on the present, while also visualizing the future and creating a roadmap to reach it.
This is a major problem requiring Statmanship on a global scale.
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Why is all of this happening now?
What’s interesting about this question is, there’s no answer to that question.
What I think is so true about that is, with technology even nonconformists are conforming.
Why?
Because these days it’s difficult to not see how real the invisible world is affecting our lives and the systems that govern life.
Today, with the covid pandemic’s we see it is very rare that you find someone that’s not influenced by anyone else.
You don’t have to be a digital native to behave like one.
It’s the invisible world we want to connect with in order to maintain the magic in life.
Why?
Because a world without emotions will be a sterile world.
Yes, the invisible world is real.
It is the limited life of a limited mind.
Increasingly, this limited value is delivered through new cross-sector, outcome-based propositions, rather than traditional sector-specific products and services.
We have all experienced trying to get to speak to a human to solve a problem with a service – press one press two – listen to music – you inquiry- will be answered – press 3 if – till you give up.
If you can spell it you can’t enter it. A society that is dependent on technology can create inequality.
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To stopthis invisible world people must take ownership of things as the digital world is not about technology, but people.
At a time when geopolitical tensions are on the rise are at their highest level this century. And this turbulence is escalating. Even nuclear non-proliferation can no longer be taken for granted.
At the same time, we see trade and technological conflicts that fracture world markets, undermine growth and widen inequalities.
And all the while, our planet is on fire. The climate crisis rages on.
With Climate Change, we are risking a ‘great fracture’ between world powers, each with their own internet and AI strategy, as well as dominant currency, trade, and financial rules, and contradictory geopolitical and military views.
With dwindling natural resources, an unstable world climate, viruses on the rampart, not to mention the effects of pandemics on world trade, inequality, the world does not need politicians that do not think of the next election but statesmen of the next generation.
It is crucial to ensuring a united world.
Those yet to be connected remain cut off from the benefits of this new era and remain further behind. People need money to access the internet and buy the latest devices.
By 2050 there will be 9 billion people to feed, clothe, transport, employ and educate.
Maybe that’s not really bad when you think of what’s coming next. You couldn’t call it a fully digital world yet. It’s not even close.
However, there’s room to dream about building the world we want, instead of the one we’re turning into.
As we pursue unlimited growth, our limitless consumption threatens to crowd out everything else on Earth. We are warming the climate, overspending our financial resources, requiring more fresh water than we have, increasing income inequality, diminishing other species, and triggering shockwaves whenever we can’t cope with a problem. Billions are committed to a growth-driven world economy.
Our world is full of screens. We keep them in our hands, purses, and pockets, next to our beds while we sleep, and surround ourselves with screens on our desks and countertops. Our TV sets are morphing into interactive screens as we put them online so they display everything for free.
What if that networked system brought everyone the world’s best services, resources, and knowledge-based on what we do, as a normal part of everyday life?
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The top-down approach is no longer sustainable in the Economic/ Power/ or Democracy Capital Accountability. Leadership needs to be vigilant and create a long-term sustainable value proposition for all stakeholders.
The same technologies are giving rise to new business models, with organizations using digital to create and monetize new forms of value. Disruptions in the digital world occur at a phenomenal rate.
They have the power to impact the way entire industries operate reshaping entire industries with profit-seeking algorithms.
Although giving up your data was once an afterthought when gaining access to the newest internet services such as Facebook there aren’t many great options available to limit what is seen and known about you online.
YOU BECOME A DIGITAL FORM OF YOURSELF IN THE VIRTUAL WORLD OF THE INTERNET.
How do we define what a digital human is?
Worthless, a form of entertainment to have conversations with yourself without being able to show emotion and behavior as a real human.
So, is the invisible world the real world?
Hard to say, but I think it’s what makes the visible world worth living in.
When someone dies, the essence of that being merely inhabited that form – the life within the form was always invisible.
Digital leaders will have the power to shape the future of our world.
When we want to believe, there is still time to interrupt the announced disappearances of so many plant and animal species which, if we are not careful, will lead to our own end.
This situation cannot go on. It is our common duty to avoid it.
While risks intersect and technologies develop quickly, too often our institutions for governing international security remain reactive and slow-moving.
ALL HUMAN COMMENTS ARE APPRECIATED. ALL LIKE CLICKS AND ABUSE CHUCKED IN THE BIN.
Online banking usage has seen a surge during the pandemic. Banks all over the world have started closing the doors of their physical branches. Further to this, the adoption of wearable payment devices has seen an increase, and experts predict the market value of wearable payment tech to grow at a compound annual rate of 29.8% between 2021 and 2028.
With this growing shift in digital banking habits, banks need to keep their product offerings relevant.
They need to stop playing this game of digital transformation charades and recognize that what they call ” Digital transformation ” may be beneficial in their institution’s short-term performance, but it’s isn’t very transformational when it comes to the reality of not knowing their customers.
Like many organizations, they are now operating behind a maze of impersonalized mechanizes that require pressing and rendering numbers to listen to music while your phone bill sours to be connected to a nonnamed person in India or Pakistan, in contactless solutions that take days.
In other words, when a problem occurs with an account more often than a personal contact you are faced with the escalation of the problem than a de-escalation.
Security is one of the most significant challenges for online banking marketers because of the inherent concerns that are traditionally associated with banking online. Although banking systems are designed to be virtually impenetrable, cyberattacks and fraudulent activity are still a reality.
Mobile browsers and apps account for 71% of fraudulent bank transactions.
No matter how sophisticated the tech, bank servers are still prone to both intentional and accidental downtime so you are well-advised to have an alternative.
Security and technical concerns are all major challenges of online banking that marketers must reconcile to succeed in this field.
The benefits of having a personal relationship with your bank are often overlooked, as navigating challenging banking scenarios can often be made easier by the involvement of bankers. Having an in-person banking relationship can help customers compare their options and find solutions tailored to their needs, something which isn’t as easily achievable through self-service.
Marketers can strive for this blend by letting their customers know how to access real people, but also by ensuring that their digital banking experience is streamlined and easy to understand. This will help keep customers as informed as possible in both the digital and physical banking environment.
The number one reason consumers abandon online banking is NOT JUST THE AMOUNT INFORMATION THAT IS REQUESTED ON OPENING AN ACCOUNT BUT THE AMOUNT OF TIME AND EXPENSE IT TAKE TO CORRECT AN MISTAKE.
All Human comments are appreciated. All like clicks and abuse chucked in the bin.
After twelve years and 10 billion in six months’ time (if everything works ) we are going with the help of the James Webb Infrared Space Telescope peer into the past to see our future.
Unless you happen to live on one of the plants that the telescope will exam you will have noticed that this planet is in trouble sustaining the life it has on it at present.
World conferences after world conferences have proposed solutions to climate change which in the long run are going to cost trillions with no one wanting to pay for it.
THE REASONS FOR THIS REST IN MULTIPLE BARRIERS. TO MANY TO ADDRESS HERE OR IN ANY FUTURE CLIMATE CHANGE CONFERENCES.
LEAVING THESE PROBLEMS ASIDE.
HERE IS AN IDEA THAT PROVIDES AN FAIR WAY OF ADDRESSING THE PROBLEM OF – WHO SHOULD CARRY THE CAN.
The world as we know it is a product that is in the process of being digitalized by technology and the current pandemic.
What is needed to tackle Climat Change is a perpetual fund that does not have to beg, which allows everyone to contribute according to their means.
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Every country has government-operating lotteries and bonds.
There is around 160 Lottery in the world offering billions in prizes. They offer a one-off chance with a lottery ticket to win with the ticket becoming a worthless sheet of toilet paper after the draw, raising billions in revenue.
So what is there to stop the United Nations from creating and underwriting its own World Green Bonds, with guaranteed interest and lotto-style cash prizes drawn every month.
A new Green asset class in global capital markets could emerge.
(A government bond is a type of debt-based investment, where you loan money to a government in return for an agreed rate of interest. This makes bonds a fixed-income asset. Once the bond expires, you’ll get back to your original investment.)
To compete with the Lotto.
The UN Green Bonds could be issued with 8 years of tenure and 5 years of lock-in. (Premature redemption requests will not be allowed)
The bond can be bought by acquiring coupons that add up to a bond.
These coupons can be purchased both online and offline at the same price as a lotto ticket.
On reaching one hundred coupons an investor gets an acknowledged receipt of the purchase and a bond. Then he receives the soft copy of the certificate to his/ her registered email address, a few days later a certificate bond gets issued.
This Certified Bond is then eligible to enter the yearly draw to win 20 million. The coupon is dated and numbered entering a Cash prize monthly or weekly draw like the lotto.
Like the Lotto is the prize is not won it rolls over to the next draw with an additional 20 million.
The owner submits the certified bond online with his chosen lotto numbers.
If the investor does not win the additional value from holding the green asset bond derives from enhanced transparency and association with a green project financed by the bond.
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The role of the UN would be to the underwriter.
To evaluate financial risks, rates, and rules for a loan or investment for a project that meets certain pre-established environmental criteria.
Surety for bonds issues could be not just governments. Digital monopolies like Facebook, Net Flick, Apple, Microsoft, Drug Companies, etc. could be the financial Surety anchors.
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As world economies feel the negative effects of the pandemic the threat of inflation is gathering pace. On the other hand, Green conversion is also gathering pace.
This idea would let all of us invest digital, or not in the future while earning a fixed interest from that investment and if lucky win a cash prize.
Europe has fostered an engaged and active green bond market so why not for the whole world.
All comments are appreciated. All creative suggestions to improve on the idea are welcome. All like clicks and abuse chucked in the bin.
As we know with the flu, figuring out the mutations of viruses takes years. The Coronavirus is no different, it will and is (as we are seeing) mutating into more versions, that will either be more aggressive or less aggressive strains.
Should we be worried?
The word mutates naturally conjures up fears of the unexpected.
It might be a one in a million chance that a mutation will be advantageous to the virus, however, if you let the virus replicate itself 900,000 times, odds are that an advantageous mutation will occur.
Mutations happen by chance, and the rate at which they occur depends on the virus.
For a virus to become more severe or transmit more easily multiple genes have to mutate and once a vaccine has arrived the virus must adapt to it.
We don’t know what those mutations might be doing.
So before we start reading that birds are falling out of the sky, cows getting mad covid, fish jumping out of the sea and we all becoming Hollywood Zombies variants of mass destruction, let’s look at what we truly know.
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Is social media a spreader of the virus?
Yes and No. Social media is a double-edged sword.
The COVID-19 pandemic is at a scale that we have never seen in the age of social media. And it’s critical to use social media to understand what kind of information is being shared and what people believe in order to ensure an effective policy.
The problem is that, just as social media has been really effective at sharing positive messages, it is conducive to people sharing rumors and misinformation that can spread easily.
People are increasingly turning to social media to understand the virus, receive updates, and learn what can be done to stay safe.
Social media is used to boost an individual’s self-esteem as many use social media to depict the highlights of their life, completely neglecting to post the negatives.
Some of its benefits include increasing interactions with others, having more accessible information, social support, and having the potential to influence many policies related to health but it is not completely without faults.
At one end of the spectrum are people just being uninformed and sharing incorrect information that they think is correct and helpful.
Toward the other end of the spectrum, people share actively harmful misinformation that is reinforced by their preexisting beliefs.
The end result is that many now and in the future will rely on the Internet, for the latest news and updates in the world and social media has started to evolve into sharing information about important current events. However, the spread of misinformation can easily result in mass hysteria about current events.
Those who, during the pandemic, learned how to use all types of video platform services are more likely to continue doing so even when lockdown restrictions are lifted.
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What is true is this.
While world economies are shut and open, at the moment we don’t know everything about what’s changed with the delta virus to become the Omicron Varient making it more transmissible and it is now finding ways to get around the immunity that we’re generating in the population through vaccination.
Quarantines may or may not reduce their ability to spread and in doing so reduce the virus’s ability to mutate, however, if the mutations are not beneficial to the virus they will be eliminated by natural selection and the mechanism of evolution so the virus will adapt their environment.
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Is there a limit to how much a virus can mutate or does it just continue to evolve indefinitely?
There is a limit but we don’t know what it is, because the possible genetic mutations that the virus could undergo are greater than all the atoms in the visible universe. ( There are 4^135 atoms in the visible universe.)
Therefore it is not possible to predict what new mutations could emerge. But the rate of mutations is important because the faster a virus mutates, the quicker it changes behavior.
It will not matter which mutations the virus has. It’s not a good virus either way.
The question then becomes, are those changes significant to us?
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According to the (WHO), the current Pandemic could be over by the end of 2022 if the vaccines were shared equitably. With the current inequalities that already exist in the world, this is pie in the sky.
The vaccine prevents disease, but it doesn’t necessarily prevent infection.
It’s the transmission of the virus that has to be stoped. Lifting restrictions and allowing as many people as possible to contract the virus is a recipe for mutations to develop. If we pretend like there’s no pandemic, we’re looking at millions of people dying before 85% of any country achieves herd immunity through natural infection.
The truth is that billions of doses worldwide need to be given before we can start returning to normal life.
We won’t be able to prevent new variants completely but we can reduce the risk by ensuring everyone, everywhere is able to be vaccinated.
How long does immunity last?
We don’t know how the vaccines work in real-time.
The jury is still out on Omicron, as the Virus in whatever variant spreads fast, far, and wide, more than any virus in history, cases have been doubling every two days in some places.
The burnout may take several years. Before it happens, havoc reigns because the virus now circulating almost exclusively among those who are unvaccinated is a potential threat to everyone.
What is a booster?
Is its composition different than its former doses, or identical?
Currently, we are all being encouraged to get a Booster jab as the original vaccine protection wanes after six months.
There appears to be little information as to what is a booster, what it contains, how long it lasts, should it be the same vaccine as you got in the first place, the same amount, or different.
The truth is that further work will be required to generate data at three months and one year after people have received their boosters, which will provide insights into their impact on long-term protection and immunological memory.
So we are still facing hurdles in getting people vaccinated, let alone boosted.
Millions of people will receive a different jab when they show up for their third appointment. Does this mean your booster dose may be different from the vaccines you had for your 1st and 2nd doses?
If you are on your first jab or second jab is there a different requirement with the booster?
Why the AstraZeneca vaccine won’t be offered as a booster jab?
One thing that can often help break through this roadblock, is proper information on each vaccine.
This is hard to unearth.
The ability for providers to not only address questions and misunderstandings about vaccines is so utterly important for general health, but especially during a pandemic.
As such, more efforts should be made to ensure that we understand that giving Covid booster jabs to people every six months is not “sustainable”
Apparently, there isn’t a need for a new, variant-specific vaccine – at least not yet. It’s not that the vaccine isn’t as good as you were told, it’s that we’re fighting a different variant of the virus now.
The third dose of the mRNA COVID-19 vaccines- Pfizer and Moderna- is identical to its first two doses.
If you get the Moderna booster, you will receive half of the original Moderna dose. Please be sure to confirm this with the person giving you the shot.
Like the flu, with regular vaccinations and antiviral pills (COVID-19 isn’t ever going to go away completely ), it will run out the food sooner.
There is light at the end of the tunnel.
At the start of the pandemic, a key mantra was that we needed the game changer of antibody data to understand who had been infected and how many were protected.
As we have learned more about this challenging infection, it is time to admit that we really need the T cell data too. More research needs to be done to fully understand the relationship between our T cells and immunity to COVID-19.
Early findings suggest that they may provide us with long-term protection against the disease by genetically engineering the T-cell.
All human comments are appreciated. All like clicks and abuse chucked in the bin.
Here we are at the start of another year and we are truly living in a very unique time in the history of our civilization, facing several simultaneous challenges and converging crises:
A deteriorating environment, very unequal distribution of dwindling resources, widespread poverty, wars, climate change, oppression of many peoples, and dissatisfaction with life even in those countries with a surplus of material wealth.
For the most part, these crises we humans have brought upon ourselves over the course of many centuries by our attitudes towards each other and towards nature, and by the concepts, we have developed regarding who we are and the very purpose of our being here — in other words, Our worldview.
Who are we?
Where do we come from?
What is our purpose?
Where are we going?
All of these questions are fundamental to how we individually and collectively make meaning. As such they are questions asked by all spiritual traditions and since the very beginning of our species. Even the first cave paintings suggest that as soon as we were human, we started to ask these kinds of questions.
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The only evidence you have that you exist as a self-aware being is your conscious experience of thinking about your existence.
Beyond that, you’re on your own.
You cannot access anyone else’s conscious thoughts, so you will never know if they are self-aware. Nonexistence is the absence of existence, by definition. Therefore there is no such thing as nonexistence.
To say that something does not exist thus seems to be a fallacy since NOTHING does exist.
How are you?
By far the biggest constituent of you is emptiness are atoms, and since all atoms are 99.9% empty space, technically, you’re made of nothing.
We call ourselves humans. We think we behave intelligently but we humans are animals! defined less by rationality and more by stupidity.
At the basic level, you are made of just four types of particles, which have been around for the majority of the lifetime of the Universe.
Atoms make up your body, 12 kg of bones, 33 kg of muscles, and 15 kg of fat. More than half of those cells aren’t exactly your own. They’re bacterial cells that weigh around 2 kg. Your body contains at least 60 chemical elements. For the most part, it’s oxygen and hydrogen forming H2O or water. 99% of the mass of your body is made up of just 6 elements. Of that, 65% is oxygen.
If you wanted to be more poetic, you could say you are made of stardust. All the elements you’re made of were once cooked up in the stars.
By the way, in case you wondered, the uncoiled DNA from all the cells in your body would stretch from here to Pluto and back.
What are you?
Mentally, humanity was created as a rational, volitional agent.
According to the Bible, you are a god. ( God said, “Let us make man in our image, in our likeness” (Genesis 1:26) but God does not have a body so your physical being is nowhere near a god.
Physiologically and anatomically you are an animal struggling for survival on the basis of evolution.
Within just the past 12,000 years, your species, Homo sapiens, made the transition to producing food and changing our surroundings. We have been so successful that we have inadvertently created a turning point in the history of life on Earth.
We have altered the world in ways that benefit us greatly. But this transformation has unintended consequences for other species as well as for ourselves, creating new survival challenges, with our megacity incubators of viruses such as the flu and now Covid.
Where are we going?
Will our species go extinct?
The short answer is yes, replaced by Artificial Intelligence, but not life.
Why?
Because mankind will control life through its varied reproductive activities manipulating life, whether it be by cloning, gene splicing, genetic breeding, etc.
Life in its simplest form, a single-celled organism, has microbial intelligence and can learn and adapt behavior to its environment. However, everything starts with something already alive. Only life begets life and intelligence doesn’t come from non-intelligent sources.
Even the most simple of life forms is beyond our ability to create from non-living sources.
Life is created and is not the result of abiogenesis it controls and regulates the physical processes within each cell.
So since there is no evidence or logical consideration to believe that life is the result of a physical process, we can dismiss the concept of Artificial life as impossible. It isn’t just a gap in our understanding it is a physical impossibility.
However, there may well be life, with or without consciousness, interfacing with the physical components that support life created by an outside intelligence.
This is probably the most pressing and interesting question for the future. How much of life will be controlled by AI?
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The current Covid pandemic is being fought against by a new form of vacation that instructs our immune systems to operate in a particular way rather than the immune system reacting. A step in evolutionary development towards part AI life.
Where is this interpretation of behavior taking place?
What part of the cell decides one food-foraging pattern is preferable to another?
Where is the information stored while it’s being coded into an arrangement of molecules and atoms?
The nucleus of a living cell is often referred to as the “brain” of the cell because it controls cellular processes and functions. However, the nucleus is not capable of conscious levels of intelligence. In fact, we can’t point to any cell part and say, that’s where the intelligence has to be coming from.
Signals received by cells must be transmitted effectively into the cell to ensure an appropriate response. This step is initiated by cell-surface receptors.
How do conscious levels of intelligence now suddenly originate or emerge from unconscious atoms and molecules?
We have to bear in mind that in an evolutionary sense, nothing can influence where we wind up biologically unless it affects individual success in passing along genes. When a new behavior is written to the DNA, the information has to be assigned to an arrangement of atoms that advocate that consciousness exists at the microbial level.
If so, that creates even greater problems, and without going into all of them, the chief problem is that survival sets a pretty low bar.
The question isn’t so much whether humans survive the next three or three hundred thousand years, but whether we can do more than just survive.
The current virus pandemic highlights this problem. The virus hasn’t yet committed to any direction.
However, it is as with all viruses an evolving entity, subject to the same processes of evolution.
With the new mRNA vaccines, we have a choice to make!
Why?
Because it is inevitable that Genome editing is going to be the future.
Because now being alive is not a prerequisite for experiencing, evolution.
We either move into a new phase in the evolution of consciousness and a new era of life on the planet, or we will witness the unraveling of the web of life and the immature end of our species and much of the community of life with us.
The time to make this choice is now!
It starts with a fundamental shift in our dominant worldview.
It is time to grow up! and for us to respect all life.
What is our purpose?
This is explained in the following story.
“In a mother’s womb were two babies. One asked the other: “Do you believe in life after delivery?” The other replied, “Why, of course. There has to be something after delivery. Maybe we are here to prepare ourselves for what we will be later.”
“Nonsense,” said the first. “There is no life after delivery. What kind of life would that be?”
The second said, “I don’t know, but there will be more light than here. Maybe we will walk with our legs and eat from our mouths. Maybe we will have other senses that we can’t understand now.”
The first replied, “That is absurd. Walking is impossible. And eating with our mouths? Ridiculous! The umbilical cord supplies nutrition and everything we need. But the umbilical cord is so short. Life after delivery is to be logically excluded.”
The second insisted, “Well I think there is something and maybe it’s different than it is here. Maybe we won’t need this physical cord anymore.”
The first replied, “Nonsense. And moreover, if there is life, then why has no one ever come back from there? Delivery is the end of life, and in the after-delivery, there is nothing but darkness and silence and oblivion. It takes us nowhere.”
“Well, I don’t know,” said the second, “but certainly we will meet Mother and she will take care of us.”
The first replied “Mother? Do you actually believe in Mother? That’s laughable. If Mother exists then where is She now?”
The second said, “She is all around us. We are surrounded by her. We are of Her. It is in Her that we live. Without Her, this world would not and could not exist.”
Said the first: “Well I don’t see Her, so it is only logical that She doesn’t exist.”
To which the second replied, “Sometimes, when you’re in silence and you focus and listen, you can perceive Her presence, and you can hear Her loving voice, calling down from above.”
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