Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Category: government – Page 102

While leaded gasoline was fully phased out in 1996 with the passage of the Clean Air Act, it still fuels a fleet of 170000 piston-engine airplanes and helicopters. Leaded aviation fuel, or avgas, now makes up “the largest remaining aggregate source of lead emissions to air in the U.S.,” according to the Environmental Protection Agency.

Meanwhile residents continue to live with the air quality that comes with living near an airport where small planes burning leaded fuel fly in and out, said Alarcon, who is also a volunteer organizer with the nonprofit tenant advocacy group Vecinos Activos. It’s also unclear to air quality experts and residents what is arguably safe.

“There is no bright line that says ‘Above this concentration lead is safe and below this concentration’ that it is not. You’d have to make a policy decision,” said Jay Turner, an engineering education professor at Washington University in St. Louis and member of the EPA’s Science Advisory Board. “We’re really careful to come back to this point that just because public areas might meet the EPA standard [for lead] doesn’t mean zero risk or zero concern.”

Piston-engine airplanes have been a mainstay in aviation since they were first introduced in the early 20th century, according to Walter Desrosier, vice president of engineering and maintenance with the aviation industry group General Aviation Manufacturers Association. Since World War II, piston engines have been widely used by pilot hobbyists, aviation students and government agencies because of their high-performing engines and reliability to stay aloft amid rapid changes in temperature, pressure and altitude. They also cost less at $400000 to $500000.

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Are we gonna get paid just to live in an automated world?

We may need to pay people just to live in an automated world, says Elon Musk. He reckons the robot revolution is inevitable and it’s going to take all the jobs.

For humans to survive in an automated world, he said that governments are going to be forced to bring in a universal basic income—paying each citizen a certain amount of money so they can afford to survive. According to Musk, there aren’t likely to be any other options.

“There is a pretty good chance we end up with a universal basic income, or something like that, due to automation,” he told CNBC in an interview. “Yeah, I am not sure what else one would do. I think that is what would happen.”

The idea behind universal basic income is to replace all the different sources of welfare, which are hard to administer and come with policing costs. Instead, the government gives everyone a lump sum each month—the size of which would vary depending on political beliefs—and they can spend it however they want.

Continue reading “Musk: “We Need Universal Basic Income Because Robots Will Take All the Jobs”” | >

We do a fundraiser for the collection of support signatures for the admissions of the German Party for Health Research to the German federal election and to the state elections in Berlin and Thuringia. Those three elections take place on September 26th 2021.

Attention: According to the law, we are not allowed to receive more than 1000 Euro per year per donor from donors, who live outside the European Union.

Unlike in other countries, in Germany parties with 5 % of the votes or more get into parliament and can be part of the government (a government coalition). Also parties get funds from the state, if they receive at least 0.5 % of the votes in the federal election or at least 1 % of the votes in a state election.

The donations are needed in a large part to hire people, who help to collect the required support signatures.

The goal of the fundraiser is 45 thousand Euro. That is 3000 Euro per state for the federal election for our 13 state associations and 3000 Euro for each of the two state elections.

But even with less total funds we could still achieve a lot: If we only manage to get enough support signatures for the three states North Rhine-Westphalia, Bavaria and Baden-Württemberg for the federal election, we would already be on the ballot papers of about 51 % of the voters, if one assumes, that the percentage of residents equal the percentage of voters in a state. And if we would manage to be admitted additionally in the four states Lower Saxony, Hesse, Saxony and Berlin, we would be on the ballot papers of about 77 % of all voters (for all 13 states, where we have state associations, it would be about 96 %).

The deadline for submitting the support signatures is the 19th of July 2021. But we ask you to donate as soon as possible, so that there is still enough time for collecting the support signatures.

Continue reading “Super Election Year Fundraising Campaign” | >

The Art Of Human Care For Covid-19 — Dr. Hassan A. Tetteh MD, Health Mission Chief, U.S. Department of Defense (DoD), Joint Artificial Intelligence Center, The Pentagon.

Dr. Hassan A. Tetteh, MD, is the Health Mission Chief, at the Department of Defense (DoD) Joint Artificial Intelligence Center, serving to advance the objectives of the DoD AI Strategy, and improve war fighter healthcare and readiness with artificial intelligence implementations.

Dr. Tetteh is also an Associate Professor of Surgery at the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences, adjunct faculty at Howard University College of Medicine, a Thoracic Staff Surgeon for MedStar Health and Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, and leads a Specialized Thoracic Adapted Recovery (STAR) Team, in Washington, DC, where his research in thoracic transplantation aims to expand heart and lung recovery and save lives.

In the past, Dr. Tetteh has served as Chief Medical Informatics Officer, United States Navy, and Division Lead for Futures and Innovation at Navy Medicine’s Headquarters, a Command Surgeon for the National Defense University, and as a Robert Wood Johnson Health Policy Fellow, assigned to the U.S. Congress, Congressional Budget Office, (CBO).

Dr. Tetteh served as Ship’s Surgeon and Director of Surgical Services for the USS Carl Vinson, deployed as a trauma surgeon to Afghanistan’s Helmand and Nimroz provinces, and has supported special joint forces missions to South America, the Middle East, the South Pacific, Australia, and Africa. He earned both the Surface Warfare Medical Department Officer and Fleet Marine Force Qualified Officer designations, and his military honors include two Meritorious Service Medals and the Joint Service Commendation Medal.

Continue reading “Dr. Hassan Tetteh, MD — Health Mission Chief — DoD/JAIC — The Art of Human Care For COVID-19” | >

Starship SN15 is expected to undergo a Static Fire test as early as Tuesday to clear the path for a test flight no earlier than Wednesday as SpaceX’s rapidly reusable interplanetary launch and landing system gained a massive sign of NASA approval – and a ton of government cash to boot.

SpaceX was the sole winner of NASA’s initial Human Landing System (HLS) award worth in total more than $2.9 billion, meaning the human return to the Moon’s surface will be via Starship.

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The growth of space businesses makes this “the most exciting time” to be involved in the industry, but one CEO says private and government organizations must do more to tap the next generation of U.S. workers.

“I do think there’s opportunities for everybody to participate in the excitement … [and] it’s a great opportunity for the government to really lean in on looking for those public-private partnerships,” Steve Isakowitz, CEO of The Aerospace Corporation and former president of Virgin Galactic, told attendees of the America’s Future Series Space Innovation Summit. The event ran on April 6 and 7.

“We need to do more and expand the candidate pool — we’ve got to make sure that all of America has the benefit of being part of the STEM, K-12, opportunities that are out there,” he added, referring to the academic discipline that includes science, tech, engineering and math.

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Interesting initiative (US Smart Cities) that could be applied to space cities.

Jeffrey Berns, CEO of Nevada-based Blockchains LLC, envisions a city where people not only purchase goods and services with digital currency but also log their entire online footprint — financial statements, medical records and personal data — on blockchain. Blockchain is a digital ledger known mostly for recording cryptocurrency transactions but also has been adopted by some local governments for everything from documenting marriage licenses to facilitating elections.

The company wants to break ground by 2022 in rural Storey County, 12 miles (19 kilometers) east of Reno. It’s proposing to build 15000 homes and 33 million square feet (3 million square meters) of commercial and industrial space within 75 years. Berns, whose idea is the basis for draft legislation that some lawmakers saw behind closed doors last week, said traditional government doesn’t offer enough flexibility to create a community where people can invent new uses for this technology.

“There’s got to be a place somewhere on this planet where people are willing to just start from scratch and say, ‘We’re not going to do things this way just because it’s the way we’ve done it,’” Berns said.

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Spot was apparently being used for reconnaissance.

Pictures of the exercises were shared on Twitter by France’s foremost military school, the École Spéciale Militaire de Saint-Cyr. It described the tests as “raising students’ awareness of the challenges of tomorrow,” which include the “robotization of the battlefield.”

A report by French newspaper Ouest-France offers more detail, saying that Spot was one of a number of robots being tested by students from France’s École Militaire Interarmes (Combined Arms School), with the intention of assessing the usefulness of robots on future battlefields.

Boston Dynamics’ vice president of business development Michael Perry told The Verge that the robot had been supplied by a European distributor, Shark Robotics, and that the US firm had not been notified about this particular use. “We’re learning about it as you are,” says Perry. “We’re not clear on the exact scope of this engagement.” The company says it was aware that its robots were being used with the French government, including the military.

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In a Universal-nutshell, Physix assists the World (People, Government, Corporations, Non-Profits, Climate, Nature, Technology) in Making it Better!

Quality Vote or Q-vote.

Is an anonymous feedback voting and posting metric, via the scale as shown. It will display wave length patterns in how people feel on various topics after a user has voted on it. Eventually the team plans to allow commenting, that will also enable you to take a color rating feedback (timestamps) based on your comment, and others as well. This will give weighted value to these timestamped ratings comments when in competition with many on one post. It is currently in working alpha prototype testing mode now.

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With full court approval.

In what’s believed to be an unprecedented move, the FBI is trying to protect hundreds of computers infected by the Hafnium hack by hacking them itself, using the original hackers’ own tools (via TechCrunch).

The hack, which affected tens of thousands of Microsoft Exchange Server customers around the world and triggered a “whole of government response” from the White House, reportedly left a number of backdoors that could let any number of hackers right into those systems again. Now, the FBI has taken advantage of this by using those same web shells / backdoors to remotely delete themselves, an operation that the agency is calling a success.

“The FBI conducted the removal by issuing a command through the web shell to the server, which was designed to cause the server to delete only the web shell (identified by its unique file path),” explains the US Justice Department.

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