Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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LTRP Note: The following news story is posted for informational purposes.

By Jean Twenge Business Insider

Around 2012, something started going wrong in the lives of teens.

In just the five years between 2010 and 2015, the number of U.S. teens who felt useless and joyless – classic symptoms of depression – surged 33 percent in large national surveys. Teen suicide attempts increased 23 percent. Even more troubling, the number of 13- to 18-year-olds who committed suicide jumped 31 percent.

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Innovation Group looked at three fundamental pillars of humanity and how they will evolve over the coming 10–15 years: our bodies, our thought, and our behavior. After identifying the driving forces that will transform these fundamental pillars, we extracted key themes emerging from their convergence. Ultimately our goal was to determine the ways in which the changing nature of humanity and transhumanism would affect individuals, society, businesses, and government.

A few of the trends that emerged from this study include the following seven trends. We hope they will spark discussion and innovation at your organizations.

Companies today are strategizing about future investments and technologies such as artificial intelligence, the internet of things, or growth around new business models. While many of these trends will make for solid investments for the next 5–10 years, fewer companies are considering the revolutionary convergence of disparate trends pulled from technology, behavioral and societal changes, and medical advances to understand how they will converge to transform society. This transformation will be messy, complex, and sometimes scary, but signals already point to a future of humanity that will blur our identities into “transhumanism.”

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Another case of idiot MD’s who think they know everything not wanting to test for CJD, and getting mad when something they dont know existed contaminating instruments and spreading diseases.

AI doctors soon please.

Sporadic Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (sCJD), the most common human prion disease, can be transmitted via neurosurgical instruments or corneal or dura mater transplants contaminated by infectious prions. Some epidemiological studies have associated sCJD risk with surgeries that involve the skin, but whether the skin of sCJD patients contains prion infectivity is not known. Orrú et al. now report detectable prion seeding activity and infectivity in skin from sCJD patients, although at much lower levels compared to brain tissues from sCJD patients. These data suggest that there may be a potential for iatrogenic sCJD transmission through skin.

Sporadic Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (sCJD), the most common human prion disease, is transmissible through iatrogenic routes due to abundant infectious prions [misfolded forms of the prion protein (PrPSc)] in the central nervous system (CNS). Some epidemiological studies have associated sCJD risk with non-CNS surgeries. We explored the potential prion seeding activity and infectivity of skin from sCJD patients. Autopsy or biopsy skin samples from 38 patients [21 sCJD, 2 variant CJD (vCJD), and 15 non-CJD] were analyzed by Western blotting and real-time quaking-induced conversion (RT-QuIC) for PrPSc. Skin samples from two patients were further examined for prion infectivity by bioassay using two lines of humanized transgenic mice. Western blotting revealed dermal PrPSc in one of five deceased sCJD patients and one of two vCJD patients.

Continue reading “Prion seeding activity and infectivity in skin samples from patients with sporadic Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease” | >

Government of England pledges to roll out Level 5 Self Driving cars by 2021. And, they estimate 1 million people being left unemployed. Gives an idea of what will happen with automation of the Transportation Industry in the US.

UK chancellor says driverless vehicles will revolutionise people’s lives but says for some it will be ‘very challenging’.

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In a recent blog post, Paul Krugman tried to illustrate a point about the GOP tax cut plan by imagining interplanetary trade with Martians. (At least he’s now entertaining voluntary transactions, rather than an alien invasion.) Yet in his zeal to downplay the potential benefits to workers from a corporate tax cut, Krugman ends up shortchanging the versatility of markets. As a teaching exercise, I’ll walk through the full implications of Krugman’s story about Martians, to show the elegance of capitalism.

Krugman’s Martian Scenario

The context for Krugman’s fanciful thought experiment is the GOP plan to cut the corporate income tax rate from 35 to 20 percent. In order to sell this plan as pro-worker, the GOP defenders are arguing that capital is very mobile on the international market. Therefore, global investors can be picky, and must earn the same after–tax rate of return (due account being made for risk), wherever they invest. This means — so the GOP argument continues — that a large cut in the US corporate tax rate will simply invite a flood of foreign capital into the US, pushing down the pre -tax rate of return to reestablish equilibrium across all countries. Yet this process helps American workers, who are now mixing their labor with a larger capital stock. Because labor productivity is higher with more tools and equipment, wage rates end up rising. Thus, so the argument concludes, the primary beneficiaries of the GOP tax cut won’t be international capitalists, but instead will be American workers.

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