It used to be banks, but now it is tech giants that dominate the US lobbying industry. Can money buy them what they want: less competition, less tax … and more data?
By Olivia Solon in San Francisco and Sabrina Siddiqui in Washington
Hyder Jaffrey, head of strategic funding and fintech innovation at UBS, stated: “We have been in discussions with central banks and regulators and we will continue that over the next 12 months with the aim of a limited ‘go live’ at the back end of 2018.”
‘Utility settlement coin’ aims to launch next year for blockchain settlements.
Work isn’t working anymore. Labour productivity has fallen in the UK since the financial crisis; 13.5 million people are living in low-income households; real wages are falling and the Gini coefficient, which measures inequality, is rising.
The sustainability and quality of jobs in our economy is also decreasing – 7.1 million workers now face precarious working conditions, meaning that uncertainty (and for many, anxiety) itself is now built into our employment system. According to some estimates, 30 per cent of UK jobs could potentially be automated away by the early 2030s. Depending on the sector, this will mean a remarkable reduction of required hours of human labour. With less work to go around, we will find ourselves in heightened competition with machines and each other, ever more desperate for stability.
Is this our only future? No. But in order to change it and move beyond this crisis, we first need to confront our very conception of work. For a long time we have thought of work as a matter of individual choice – a free, private agreement between a single person and an employer. You, the thinking goes, are free to pick whatever job you like as long as the employer is happy to have you on board and there are a sufficient number of jobs created by the free market.
The Department of Homeland Security and FBI issued a new warning on Wednesday that North Korean government hackers are continuing to target critical U.S. infrastructure for cyber attacks.
A technical report by DHS’ National Cyber Awareness System reveals details of the tools and cyber methods being used by North Korean government hackers.
The alert said the North Korean government is using the cyber tools to “target the media, aerospace, financial, and critical infrastructure sectors in the United States and globally.”
Continue reading “Government Warns North Korean Cyber Attacks Continue” »
Amat farms (antimatter farms) consist of large banks of solar power collectors which power multicolliders optimally designed to produce antiparticles. The vast showers of collision products which result are sorted magnetically; antimatter particles and other useful species are collected, cooled and held in electric/magnetic traps.
The first amat farms were established in 332 orbiting Sol just outside the orbit of Mercury, known collectively as the Circumsol ring. Several power corporations were involved in this effort, including the Look Outwards Combine, Jerusalem Macrotech and General Dynamics Corporation. In 524 the Jerusalem Macrotech station B4 was destroyed during an unsuccessful raid by Space Cowboys.
Amat fields designed to produce anti-protons are typically 100km or more in diameter; fields which produce positrons are considerably smaller. The antiprotons and positrons are usually combined into anti-hydrogen and frozen for easier storage.
” … Paul Tudor Jones co-founded JUST Capital to fix the ills of corporate capitalism by identifying the most just or “good” companies. Will it work?”
Set on Sir Richard Branson’s Necker Island, the third annual Blockchain Summit, hosted by BitFury, a leading full service Blockchain company, and Bill Tai, a venture investor and technologist, has come to a close. This event was an intimate, if perfectly balanced, gathering of technology, policy, investment and business leaders from around the world and across sectors. Topics ranged from the public policy implications of what is being heralded as a foundational technology, to new emerging business models that can ride on the very rails that enabled the global bonanza of digital currencies like Bitcoin. A key question that underpinned the Summit is if Blockchain could not have existed without the Internet, what could not exist without Blockchain?
Blockchain technology can undoubtedly change industries, especially those that labor under often byzantine, opaque and friction-laden business models. While many of the early pioneers are focusing on finance and insurance, the opportunities for this radical technology may very well reorder society as we know it. The remarkable case of Estonia, for example, shows a country reinventing itself into a future-proof digital state, where citizen services are rendered nearly instantaneously and to people all over the world. Similarly, promising work inspired by the famed Peruvian economist, Hernando de Soto, on improving land registries is being carried out by BitFury in a host of countries. With land and property being the two largest assets people will own — and the principal vehicle of value creation and wealth transfer — an unalterable, secure and transparent registration process should give the world comfort and elected leaders longevity.
What drives this unique technology is the power of distributed singularity, from which Blockchain’s identity pioneers like Dr. Mariana Dahan, who launched the World Identity Network on Necker Island, and Vinny Lingham of Civic, draw their inspiration. Blockchain operates on the basis of a distributed ledger (or database) system, inexorably marching forward recording and time-stamping transactions or records. While some may herald Bitcoin as Blockchain’s “killer app,” it is easy to maintain that the killer app is not the digital currencies that ride on Blockchain’s rails, but rather the rail system altogether. Two trains can ride on rails. But a high-speed maglev train is a decidedly faster mode of transport than a steam engine. Just as the maglev makes little or no contact with the rails enabling low-friction transport, the Blockchain can greatly reduce the friction in how the world transfers and records value.
Continue reading “Blockchain and the Power of Singularity” »
There is something romantic about disregarding financial realities to push the limit of understanding. At the same time, starting a family dragged me out of this romantic bubble and forced me to think hard about what my heart really wants. I am committed to both my family and my career, and I accept the challenges. To those who are planning a similar course, I hope you will also embrace the burden, and that with all the stress and doubts comes clarity about your choices in life.
“In the end, I may be too poor to achieve my career dreams.”
I do not want to complain about my postdoc salary. My institution pays better than most in the country. The website for incoming postdocs notes that the funding is meant to be enough to support a single trainee—and, indeed, the stipend would be sufficient if I were single. The problem is that my stipend must also support my wife, who was only able to start working a few months ago because of visa issues and is now earning a part-time salary; our two daughters, born while I was a Ph.D. student; and my mother-in-law. With the stunning rents in Silicon Valley and the cost of preschool for our older daughter, we are losing money every month. Financial support from my family in China is the only reason I can afford to continue following my dream.
Gold climbed to the highest since mid-June, pushing up mining-company shares amid military tensions between the U.S. and North Korea.
Equities slid and the Swiss franc and some developed-market government bonds advanced as President Donald Trump threatened North Korea with “fire and fury” following a series of missile tests by the communist regime, boosting demand for haven assets. Gold also climbed after Indian imports of the metal were said to have doubled.
The U.S. North-Korea tensions add to investor angst that has helped push up gold more than 10 percent this year, even with equities hitting records and the Federal Reserve keen to shrink its balance sheet. Should geopolitical tensions intensify, gold is likely to be in demand as a safe-haven, according to analysts at Commerzbank AG.
Just weeks after one research team appeared to put words in a leader’s mouth, here comes a new tool that can check questionable video for a pulse.
A recent demonstration showing how easy it is to spoof video of a world leader recently made headlines, foretelling a future where robot-created videos cause political and financial havoc. But now comes word of an antidote. On Monday, a group of computer scientists from Carnegie Mellon University’s Software Engineering Institute published new research showing how algorithms can tell whether the person on-screen has a human heartbeat. The technique will help future intelligence analysts, journalists, or just scared television viewers detect the difference between spoofed video and the real thing.
Continue reading “AI Will Make Fake News Video — and Fight It As Well” »
