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Category: economics – Page 149

“DATA SLAVERY.” Jennifer Lyn Morone, an American artist, thinks this is the state in which most people now live. To get free online services, she laments, they hand over intimate information to technology firms. “Personal data are much more valuable than you think,” she says. To highlight this sorry state of affairs, Ms Morone has resorted to what she calls “extreme capitalism”: she registered herself as a company in Delaware in an effort to exploit her personal data for financial gain. She created dossiers containing different subsets of data, which she displayed in a London gallery in 2016 and offered for sale, starting at £100 ($135). The entire collection, including her health data and social-security number, can be had for £7,000.

Only a few buyers have taken her up on this offer and she finds “the whole thing really absurd”. Yet if the job of the artist is to anticipate the Zeitgeist, Ms Morone was dead on: this year the world has discovered that something is rotten in the data economy. Since it emerged in March that Cambridge Analytica, a political consultancy, had acquired data on 87m Facebook users in underhand ways, voices calling for a rethink of the handling of online personal data have only grown louder. Even Angela Merkel, Germany’s chancellor, recently called for a price to be put on personal data, asking researchers to come up with solutions.

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Soaring global need for cooling by 2050 could see world energy consumption for cooling increase five times as the number of cooling appliances quadruples to 14 billion—according to a new report by the University of Birmingham, UK.

This new sets out to provide, for the first time, an indication of the scale of the implications of ‘Cooling for All’.

Effective is essential to preserve food and medicine. It underpins industry and economic growth, is key to sustainable urbanisation as well as providing a ladder out of rural poverty. With significant areas of the world projected to experience temperature rises that place them beyond those which humans can survive, cooling will increasingly make much of the world bearable—or even safe—to live in. With populations increasing, expanding urbanisation and impacts leading to more frequent heatwaves and temperature rises, the demand for more cooling will increase in the decades ahead.

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It’s amusing that these people know where this is headed, but arent interested enough to stop it.

The co-chief investment officer and co-chairman of Bridgewater Associates shared his thoughts in a Facebook post on Thursday.

Dalio says he was responding to a question about whether machine intelligence would put enough people out of work that the government will have to pay people to live with a cash handout, a concept known as universal basic income.

My view is that algorithmic/automated decision making is a two edged sword that is improving total productivity but is also eliminating jobs, leading to big wealth and opportunity gaps and populism, and creating a national emergency.

Continue reading “Billionaire Ray Dalio: A.I. is widening the wealth gap, ‘national emergency should be declared’” | >

RENTON, Wash. — Forecasts that predict the space industry to grow to a trillion dollars by the 2040s will require the development of new markets, even with the modest annual growth rates needed to achieve that goal.

A panel session June 26 at the Space Frontier Foundation’s NewSpace 2018 conference here noted that several reports in the last year by investment banks predicted that the global space economy, currently valued at about $350 billion, could grow to $1 trillion or more in the 2040s.

One report by Goldman Sachs predicted the industry would reach $1 trillion in the 2040s, noted Jeff Matthews, a consultant with Deloitte who moderated the panel discussion. A separate study by Morgan Stanley projected a “most likely outcome” of a $1.1 trillion space economy in the 2040s. A third study by Bank of America Merrill Lynch was the most optimistic, seeing the market growing to $2.7 trillion by the same timeframe.

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As we develop robots with increasingly human-like capabilities, we should take a closer look at our own. Only by learning to overcome – or at least evade – our cognitive limitations can we have long and fruitful careers in the new global economy.”

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The Cognitive Limits of Lifelong Learning (Project Syndicate):

“As new technologies continue to upend industries and take over tasks once performed by humans, workers worldwide fear for their futures. But what will really prevent humans from competing effectively in the labor market is not the robots themselves, but rather our own minds, with all their psychological biases and cognitive limitations …

Continue reading “To thrive in tomorrow’s economy, workers need to boost lifelong cognitive abilities” | >

Give People Money: How a Universal Basic Income Would End Poverty, Revolutionize Work, and Remake the World” (Crown), by the economic journalist Annie Lowrey, is the latest book to argue that a program in this family is a sane solution to the era’s socioeconomic woes. Lowrey is a policy person. She is interested in working from the concept down. “The way things are is really the way we choose for them to be,” she writes. Her conscientiously reported book assesses the widespread effects that money and a bit of hope could buy.

It has enthusiasts on both the left and the right. Maybe that’s the giveaway, Nathan Heller writes.

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Recorded at “Contra Krugman: The Economic Myths of the 2016 Election”: the Mises Circle at Seattle’s historic Town Hall, on 21 May 2016.

Presidential candidates promise everything from living wages to free health care and college. Proposals about how to run whole segments of the economy are made with a straight face. The most tired and hackneyed ideas about income equality, corporate greed, creating jobs, and paying one’s fair share of taxes are trotted out. And millions of voters apparently believe it all, falling for the same promises of free stuff and prosperity from Washington.

How do political candidates get away with this nonsense, year after year and election after election? More importantly, what can we do as individuals to fight the entrenched economic illiteracy that keeps politicians in business?

Full talk, licenced under creative common: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h6KQY5gbEAM

Continue reading “The Single Greatest Economic Myth” | >

Much Worse than that. And, thankfully, They are too foolish and greedy to stop.

Artificial intelligence is coming for the service economy, according to Allstate Corp. Chief Executive Officer Tom Wilson.

“It’s going to rip through this economy like a tsunami,” Wilson said Thursday in an interview on Bloomberg TV from Aspen, Colorado.

Automation will affect a wide swath of workers, from traders to taxi drivers. McKinsey & Co. estimates that more than 400 million people worldwide could be looking for work by 2030 because technology took their jobs.

Continue reading “AI Will Thrash the Economy Like a ‘Tsunami,’ Allstate CEO Says” | >

I get this question a lot. Today, I was asked to write an answer at Quora.com, a Q&A web site at which I am the local cryptocurrency expert. It’s time to address this issue here at Lifeboat.

Question

I have many PCs laying around my home and office.
Some are current models with fast Intel CPUs. Can
I mine Bitcoin to make a little money on the side?

Answer

Other answers focus on the cost of electricity, the number of hashes or teraflops achieved by a computer CPU or the size of the current Bitcoin reward. But, you needn’t dig into any of these details to understand this answer.

You can find the mining software to mine Bitcoin or any other coin on any equipment. Even a phone or wristwatch. But, don’t expect to make money. Mining Bitcoin with an x86 CPU (Core or Pentium equivalent) is never cost effective—not even when Bitcoin was trading at nearly $20,000. A computer with a fast $1500 graphics card will bring you closer to profitability, but not by much.

The problem isn’t that an Intel or AMD processor is too weak to mine for Bitcoin. It’s just as powerful as it was in the early days of Bitcoin. Rather, the problem is that the mining game is a constantly evolving competition. Miners with the fastest hardware and the cheapest power are chasing a shrinking pool of rewards.

The problem arises from a combination of things:

  1. There is a fixed rate of rewards available to all miners—and yet, over the past 2 years, hundreds of thousands of new CPUs have been added to the task. You are competing with all of them.
  2. Despite a large drop in the Bitcoin exchange rate (from $19,783.21 on Dec. 17, 2017), we know that it is generally a rising commodity, because both speculation and gradual grassroots adoption outpaces the very gradual increase in supply. The rising value of Bitcoin attracts even more individuals and organizations into the game of mining. They are all fighting for a pie that is shrinking in overall size. Here’s why…
  3. The math (a built-in mechanism) halves the size of rewards every 4 years. We are currently between two halving events, the next one will occur in May 2020. This halving forces miners to be even more efficient to eke out any reward.
  4. In the past few years, we have seen a race among miners and mining pools to acquire the best hardware for the task. At first, it was any CPU that could crunch away at the math. Then, miners quickly discovered that an nVidia graphics processor was better suited to the task. Then ASICS became popular, and now; specialized, large-scale integrated circuits that were designed specifically for mining.
  5. Advanced mining pools have the capacity to instantly switch between mining for Bitcoin, Ethereum classic, Litecoin, Bitcoin Cash and dozens of other coins depending upon conditions that change minute-by-minute. Although you can find software that does the same thing, it is unlikely that you can outsmart the big boys at this game, because they have super-fast internet connections and constant software maintenance.
  6. Some areas of the world have a surplus of wind, water or solar energy. In fact, there are regions where electricity is free.* Although regional governments would rather that this surplus be used to power homes and businesses (benefiting the local economy), electricity is fungible! And so, local entrepreneurs often “rent” out their cheap electricity by offering shelf space to miners from around the world. Individuals with free or cheap electricity (and some, with a cold climate to keep equipment cool) split this energy savings with the miner. This further stacks the deck against the guy with a fast PC in New York or Houston.

Of course, with Bitcoin generally rising in value (over the long term), this provides continued incentive to mine. It is the only thing that makes this game worthwhile to the individuals who participate.

So, while it is not impossible to profit by mining on a personal computer, if you don’t have very cheap power, the very latest specialized mining rigs, and the skills to constantly tweak your configuration—then your best bet is to join a reputable mining pool. Take your fraction of the mining rewards and let them take a small cut. Cash out frequently, so that you are not locked into their ability to resist hacking or remain solvent.

Related: Largest US operation mines 0.4% of daily Bitcoin rewards. Listen to the owner describe the effiiency of his ASIC processors and the enormous capacity he is adding. This will not produce more Bitcoin. The total reward rate is fixed and falling every 4 years. His build out will consume a massive amount of electricity, but it will only grab share from other miners—and encourage them to increase consuption just to keep up.

* Several readers have pointed out that they have access to “free power” in their office — or more typically, in a college dormitory. While this may be ‘free’ to the student or employee, it is most certainly not free. In the United States, even the most efficient mining, results in a 20 or 30% return on electric cost—and with the added cost of constant equipment updates. This is not the case for personal computers. They are sorely unprofitable…

So, for example, if you have 20 Intel computers cooking for 24 hours each day, you might receive $115 rewards at the end of a year, along with an electric bill for $3500. Long before this happens, you will have tripped the circuit breaker in your dorm room or received an unpleasant memo from your boss’s boss.

Bitcoin mining farms —

  • Professional mining pool (above photo and top row below)
  • Amateur mining rigs (bottom row below)

This is what you are up against. Even the amateur mining operations depicted in the bottom row require access to very cheap electricity, the latest processors and the skill to expertly maintain hardware, software and the real-time, mining decision-process.

Philip Raymond co-chairs CRYPSA, hosts the New York Bitcoin Event and is keynote speaker at Cryptocurrency Conferences. He sits on the New Money Systems board of Lifeboat Foundation. Book a presentation or consulting engagement.