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Authored by Manuel Garcia Aguilar via TheMindUnleashed.com,

The debate about the existence of alien life has been a topic that has interested humans for a long time and the scientific community has had split opinions regarding our solitude in this amazingly big universe.

Now, new research published in the Astronomical Journal provides further information that invites us to rethink our mindset on this topic.

During the summer of 1950, physicist Enrico Fermi posed a question to his colleagues over lunch:

“Don’t you ever wonder where everybody is?”

He was referring to alien life.

The Earth is 4.5 billion years old, and we could say that that was roughly the time it took a “kind of life” to be capable of space travel. Our universe is approximately 13.8 billion years old.

Fermi proposed that during this time, the galaxy should have been overrun with intelligent, technologically-advanced aliens. Yet, we have no evidence of this despite decades of searching. This postulate became known as the Fermi Paradox.

Briefly, some of the main points of this paradox, formalized by Michael H. Hart, are:

• There are billions of stars in the Milky Way similar to the Sun.

• With high probability, some of these stars have Earth-like planets, and if the Earth is typical, some may have already developed intelligent life.

• Some of these civilizations may have developed interstellar travel.

• Even at the slow pace of currently envisioned interstellar travel, the Milky Way galaxy could be completely traversed in a few million years

• And since many of the stars similar to the Sun are billions of years older, this would seem to provide plenty of time

Now, you can have a clearer view of why this paradox is so interesting for scientists and further investigation is being done, the odds seem to be really high.

The expectation that the universe should be teeming with intelligent life is linked to models like the Drake equation, which suggests that even if the probability of intelligent life developing at a given site is small, the sheer multitude of possible sites should nonetheless yield a large number of potentially observable civilizations.

This new study offers a different perspective on the question: maybe aliens are just taking their time and being strategic.

“If you don’t account for the motion of stars when you try to solve this problem, you’re basically left with one of two solutions,” Jonathan Carroll-Nellenback the study’s lead author said.

“Either nobody leaves their planet, or we are in fact the only technological civilization in the galaxy.”

Stars orbit the center of the galaxy on different paths at different speeds. They occasionally pass each other, so, aliens could be waiting for their next destination to come closer, Caroll-Nellenback’s study says.

Researchers have formulated different theories trying to answer the Fermi Paradox, including the possibility that all alien life forms in oceans below a planet’s surface and there’s even the “zoo hypothesis” which imagines that societies in our galaxy decided to not contact us to “preserve” us in a way analogical to how we preserve some natural places—or even to prevent them from getting some kind of “disease” from us.

A crucial fact to this new study is the fact that, as previously mentioned, the galaxy moves. So, aliens could be waiting for an optimal travel distance to explore new territories.

“If long enough is a billion years, well then that’s one solution to the Fermi paradox,” Carroll-Nellenback said.

Another important thing to notice is that the research team did not attempt to guess at the alien’s motivations or politics, something that usually delayed the attempts to solve the Fermi Paradox.

We have to consider also that our consciousness and our perception of the “civilization” concept may play a crucial part in this kind of studies. So, our predictions may be based on our own behavior.

“We tried to come up with a model that would involve the fewest assumptions about sociology that we could,” Carroll-Nellenback said.

So far, we’ve detected about 4,000 planets outside of our solar system and none have been shown to host life. But we haven’t looked that hard—there are at least 100 billion stars in the Milky Way and even more planets, so we still have a lot more to explore.

Maybe, merging philosophy and science together for a moment, we could believe that at some point, if there is in fact alien life out there in the universe, we (or our kids, grandkids, or great grandkids) will get to know them and make really close contact, assuming all of this in basis of some of the ideas exposed in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, where he says that if something can happen, and there is enough time for that to happen, it will happen.

Who knows how long it could be before Tesla finally starts production and delivery of its Cybertruck? Given the company’s timelines of days past, it could be years. 

Maybe that’s why a group of three men in Russia decided they were just going to make their own knock off of the truck, from a gas powered car, according to Business Insider. And so, that’s exactly what the YouTube channel Pushka Garazh – which translates to “Gun Garage” in English – did. 

And they did it using an early model of a Russian made hatchback. The men started with this: a Lada Samara, a hatchback created by Russian car maker AvtoVAZ.

The group spent about $1,300 USD to create the replica, spray painting the hatchback after covering the car in sheet metal. However, at 13 feet long, the replica is about 6 feet shorter than the actual Cybertruck. 

The replica, however, doesn’t have any doors (just like a Model S in the winter!). So people that want to get in and out are forced to go through the trunk.

The guys even added Tesla branded hubcaps and a horizontal beam brakelight, like the one found on the actual Cybertruck. The replica is also gas powered.

The garage has put the vehicle up for sale for about $10,700, or 666,666 rubles.

It has even been spotted near Russia’s capital and has cause “quite a stir” on social media. 

If you ask us, they did a great job in re-creating the overall hideousness of the vehicle. Given how shoddy it looks, we’re sure those on the street lucky enough to catch a glimpse of the replica likely had no problem believing it was the real thing. 

You can watch the entire episode where they build the replica here:

 

Authored by Paul Joseph Watson via Summit News,

According to experts, climate change will result in “millions” of deaths, major European cities being sunken, nuclear war and global environmental riots…all within the next 5 days.

That’s because they made the prediction back in 2004 and said all that would happen by 2020, which is just 5 days away.

“Climate change over the next 20 years could result in a global catastrophe costing millions of lives in wars and natural disasters,” reported left-wing newspaper the Guardian on February 22, 2004.

“A secret report, suppressed by US defence chiefs and obtained by The Observer, warns that major European cities will be sunk beneath rising seas as Britain is plunged into a ‘Siberian’ climate by 2020. Nuclear conflict, mega-droughts, famine and widespread rioting will erupt across the world,” the report added.

The alarmist document went on to claim that nations would resort to using nuclear weapons to protect dwindling food supplies, a situation that would “bring the planet to the edge of anarchy.”

Remember guys, it’s just 5 days until the UK is “plunged into a Siberian climate.”

From the same trustworthy people who gave you mass starvation of humanity by the 80’s, “ice free” Arctic summers by 2013 and Greta Thunberg.

You can trust them. pic.twitter.com/afGut28mXv

— Paul Joseph Watson (@PrisonPlanet) December 27, 2019

The authors of the report, Peter Schwartz and Doug Randall, also asserted that “By 2020 ‘catastrophic’ shortages of water and energy supply will become increasingly harder to overcome, plunging the planet into war,” causing widespread “crop failure” and “famine.”

So apparently, the UK is just 5 days away from being plunged into a “Siberian climate” and millions of people are about to die in a giant nuclear carnage caused by global food shortages and monster droughts.

Or alternatively, so-called “climate experts” have been proven spectacularly wrong on absolutely everything, from Paul Ehrlich’s prediction of millions of deaths from famine by the 80’s, to Al Gore’s absurd claim that the Arctic would have “ice free” summers by 2013.

Just like the much heralded “secret report” that predicted global catastrophe by 2020, none of it happened.

So why should we trust the same people now?

*  *  *

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The surge in drug overdose deaths linked to powerful opioids like fentanyl and other analogues will likely be remembered as the defining national health crisis of the 2010s. And as the decade draws to a close, one study found that people who use illicit opioids face an increased risk of other “deaths of despair.”

According to CNN, which cited findings from the study initially published Thursday in the medical journal JAMA Psychiatry (one of the more well-respected medical journals in the US) users of illicit opioids (i.e. everyone who uses them without a prescription) face an elevated risk of dying from noncommunicable diseases (like heart disease), infectious diseases and viruses (like HIV and Hep C), suicide and other unintentional injuries (like car accidents).

Suicide deaths among the sample group studied occurred at nearly 8x the expected rate, while unintentional injuries occurred at 7x the expected rate. Deaths from interpersonal violence, while still relatively infrequent, occurred at 9x the normal rate, which is also unsurprising. Heroin addicts will often take risks to get high, including trying to rob drug dealers, who often carry guns to ward off such attacks.

“People might be surprised that although overdose was the most common cause of death, it’s far from the only cause of death that people using opioids outside a prescription experience at excessive rates,” said Sarah Larney, lead author of the study and a senior research fellow at the University of New South Wales’ National Drug and Alcohol Research Centre in Australia.

“Smoking-related illnesses such as cancer and cardiovascular diseases are common. Trauma is another major factor. People are exposed to car accidents, assaults and other causes of injuries at greater than usual rates, and suicide is also much more common than in the broader population,” she said. “It’s really clear that although overdose prevention is critical, we also need to look at the range of poor outcomes that people are experiencing, and work to reduce other causes of excess mortality such as suicide, chronic diseases and infectious diseases.”

Researchers looked at opioid users across 28 countries, and compared their data to data collected from 124 previously published studies, some that were conducted as far back as Jan. 2009.

Unsurprisingly, researchers found that men faced significantly higher rates of drug-related deaths than women (unsurprising since the majority of hard-drug users are men). Older users also faced significantly higher rates of drug-related deaths.

But among women examined in the study, deaths from HIV were particularly pronounced. That’s hardly surprising, since female heroin users will often work as prostitutes to raise money to finance their addictions. Men who consume excessive amounts of alcohol, meanwhile, registered much higher rates of deaths related to liver disease.

Overall, while poisoning- or substance-related deaths were the most common cause of death among opioid users (accounting for 31.5% of deaths), noncommunicable diseases accounted for 24.1% of deaths, while infectious diseases accounted for 19.7% and physical traumas accounted for 18.1%.

“To me the most important message to take from this study is that we need to think beyond the drug. People using opioids are people first and foremost, and have complex health and social needs,” Larney said. “Making sure people have access to essential medicines to treat HIV and Hepatitis C; encouraging smoking cessation through access to nicotine replacement therapies; and ensuring access to nutritious food and safe shelter would all go towards reducing the death toll in this population.”

A report issued in September by the US Congress Joint Economic Committee entitled “Long-Term Trends in Deaths of Despair”  found that “mortality from deaths of despair far surpasses anything seen in America since the dawn of the 20th century…the recent increase has primarily been driven by an unprecedented epidemic of drug overdoses.”

The explosion of opioid use and opioid-related deaths have been the primary drivers of a drop in overall life expectancy in the US for three straight years.

Most of those dying are relatively young white male adults.

Authored by Stephen Davies via The American Institute for Economic Research,

Currently, there is a lot of discussion about the impact of technologies such as artificial intelligence on the world of work and employment.

Some of this is alarmist, and some excessively excited. There will indeed be dramatic changes, but history and economic theory both suggest that these will not radically alter the nature of the economic system. 

However, while we should not fear the changes brought by widespread and extensive automation, we should be concerned about the way the process works and about its short-term and transitional aspects. Devising ways of dealing with these is a real challenge for both public policy and civil society.

In the last few years, there has been a lot of discussion about a new wave of automation that is already under way and starting to transform much of the economy. The central element in this is the combination of telecommunications with artificial intelligence (AI). This makes possible, people both hope and fear, the replacement of a great deal of human labor of many types. It is AI in particular that attracts the attention, not least because of recent dramatic breakthroughs such as the development by the Google-owned firm Deep Mind of an AI that could defeat the world’s best Go player (Go is a game played mainly in the Far East that in terms of its complexity is at least one order of magnitude higher than chess). 

There have of course been many episodes of mechanization and automation before over the last 250 years. The argument made by many is that this time really is different for two reasons:

1. AI replaces not just human labor but the human mind and judgment as well;

2. and the automation will make market signals unnecessary because the key resource will be information, which is inherently abundant and can be reproduced at zero marginal cost. 

There is a consensus that a lot of jobs or kinds of employment are going to disappear in the next two decades or so. There is disagreement over just how many will go as a proportion of currently existing employment. The OECD estimates that just under 10 percent of existing jobs are at high risk of automation. Other studies all conclude that the correct figure is somewhere in the high 40 percent range. The weight of opinion is therefore on the higher side of the two kinds of estimate.

Kinds of Jobs

There is a general agreement about the kinds of jobs that are likely to vanish. They all have certain qualities. One is that they are routine and repetitive, involving the repeated performance of standardized tasks. This includes both simple manual jobs and process-driven desk jobs. Another is that the job or role can be captured in a decision-making tree or flow diagram so that the range of decisions that have to be made is finite (it may still be large) — this means it can be done by an algorithm. 

There is also general agreement about the kinds of work that are at low risk of automation. One is work requiring manual dexterity and manipulation (because of the difficulty of replicating the human hand); another is anything that requires human judgment or creativity, dealing with something that cannot be captured in an algorithm. The OECD study also argues that work involving human interaction is likely to survive simply because people crave human contact. Others are skeptical about this. Finally, there are some cases where stubborn human prejudice will keep the job in existence: it would be much safer if airplanes were entirely automated, but in polls most people would (irrationally) prefer a human pilot. 

Given this, we can easily construct a list of the kinds of employment that are likely to vanish in the next decade or two. These range from jobs such as truck drivers and taxi drivers (replaced by autonomous vehicles), to a lot of logistics and warehouse work (replaced by automated handling systems), to a lot of routine work in the financial-services sector both high and low paid, to most legal work (but not trial lawyers) and most medical work, including diagnosis and prescription (but not surgery). There will thus be substantial losses of both blue collar and white collar jobs — in fact the losses of the second kind are likely to be larger.

Common Responses

Faced with this prospect of a huge upheaval in employment with many kinds of work simply vanishing, one response is to panic. The fear is that there will simply be no work available, or not enough for the people looking for and needing paid work. Others are excited and see this as a huge opportunity. 

A popular reaction at the moment is to see this as the way toward a radical reconstruction of the entire economic system and a move beyond capitalism to some other kind of economic order. The idea is that the connection between work and income will be decisively severed and that we will also move into a world in which many products will be capable of being reproduced at zero marginal cost, which means they will be effectively free: in that case, the price mechanism will no longer operate. 

This view has been eloquently put forth by people on the Marxist left such as Paul Mason (in Post-Capitalism) and Aaron Bastani (in Fully Automated Luxury Communism). These authors see the chance to realize the vision of the young Marx, in which the alienation of work is abolished along with the division of labor. 

There are also people on the free market side who see this kind of outcome as likely, although what they envisage is a capitalist economy in which a large part of the population subsists on free stuff while not working or doing low-paid work. 

New Kinds of Work

Neither panic and despair nor excitement is justified. The question to ask is not whether new technology is going to replace many jobs but whether those jobs will be replaced by new ones. There have been several episodes before where observers have expected the end of employment because of automation, and in every case the actual result has been that while many jobs do disappear, they are replaced by even more new ones. 

Of course, that does not mean the same pattern is bound to happen again — to think so is to commit the fallacy of induction. It really could be different this time. However, there are theoretical reasons to doubt the more excitable predictions. 

Firstly, many theoreticians of AI have a mechanistic view of human consciousness and decision making. For them, the human brain is simply a computer, only more complex and made of neurons rather than silicon. Hence the processes that create human thought are no different from the kind that take place in a computer or an AI, and any and all of them can be reproduced in a sufficiently advanced AI. This would mean that any and all human activities could be performed by an AI. 

This, however, confuses intelligence and consciousness. We truly have no idea what the latter is or how it is produced, but we do know that the two are distinct (there are animals that we can show to have one but not the other). An AI or computer procedure, no matter how advanced, can only do what its programming and algorithm allow for — it cannot originate anything. This means that genuine creativity or the exercise of judgment when confronted by something novel cannot be built in. They remain human capacities.

Secondly, there is the question of knowledge. Even if most activities can be reduced to an algorithmic decision tree, the knowledge that those decisions will be made on is mostly tacit, localized, changing, and therefore incapable of being expressed in writing or numbers. This gives humans an advantage because of their greater flexibility and adaptability (AI can also learn, but this process is not as flexible as in humans). Putting the two things together means that there are many areas where humans will retain an advantage. Even if AI can also do these things, it will do so at a higher cost.

Thirdly, this misunderstands what automation does and hence its effects. What automation of any kind does is to make work more productive and hence to free up time and resources by increasing the intensity of the use of resources. Instead of using X amount of time and Y physical resources to get a given output, you use a fraction of X and Y to get the same result. This frees up the resources and human time for doing other things. 

The result is fewer people doing some things and the people no longer doing them doing other things (often in different places). One challenge is that we do not know what those other things will be (although we can make informed guesses). We should not speak of a displacement of human labor but rather of its being freed up to do new things, in the way that all of the labor once needed to grow food has been released to do a myriad of other tasks. (The argument about zero-marginal-cost production misunderstands the nature of both scarcity and the price system, but that is another argument).

Genuine Challenges

So should we just chill and see what happens? Not so. There are two genuine challenges that these changes pose. The first is that the rewards from the new activity and its output will accrue to a small minority. The historical pattern is that this is what happens in the early phase of any technological transformation, due to first-mover advantage and simple good fortune. 

However, as time passes and the returns to the new technologies decline as it becomes mature and widely adopted, the income and wealth gap that widened in the earlier phase starts to shrink. This is what we can observe in both the 19th and 20th centuries. However, this takes time, and in the meantime you can have serious political and social unrest, for obvious reasons. Moreover, today the high rewards to first movers are artificially heightened and prolonged by the legal system, above all the current regime of intellectual property rights. 

The second challenge is that the transitional costs in human terms of rapid innovation can be very high. Outside the world of economic models, the reallocation of both capital and labor as a result of technological innovation is neither immediate nor frictionless. This is because of the heterogeneity of both labor and capital — they are not uniform. 

In plain English, this means that many capital resources such as buildings and machinery will simply become useless because they are in the wrong place or cannot be readily adapted or changed to a new use. In terms of labor, a person who has a range of skills that are now redundant may find it very difficult to acquire new ones or to move physically to a different place. In human terms, this can be very painful and traumatic and very destructive of both human connections and personal happiness. This is a real challenge – you can write off capital, but writing off human beings (often in large numbers or in concentrated locations) is both wrong in itself and very dangerous. 

What Should Be Done?

If that is the real challenge of AI and automation (as opposed to fantasies of automated luxury communism or panic and despondency about the replacement of humans), what then should be done? Clearly, there is a place for imaginative public policy, which should mainly take the form of institutional reform and innovation rather than paid programs (e.g., radical reform of intellectual property). 

The main step though is to look to social entrepreneurialism. We need people to develop solutions to the challenge of radical change in work and employment at a local level and in a decentralized but networked way. It is mutualism and social action that we need to rediscover and employ. Fortunately, some of the results of the current wave of automation are likely to make this easier, but that is for another column.

After the year SoftBank just had, this is probably the last thing its shareholders want to see.

One of SoftBank’s last two remaining non-executive directors is stepping down from its board after 18 years, removing perhaps the company’s biggest internal skeptic, according to a Reuters report.

Tadashi Yanai, the CEO of Uniqlo owner Fast Retailing and a longtime Masa advisor, said he’s leaving SoftBank to focus more on expanding his own business into new markets, including Italy, India and Vietnam. With a net worth of $25 billion (according to Forbes), Yanai is the wealthiest person in Japan. But at SoftBank, he was known as a close ally and sometimes critic of Masayoshi Son credited with attempting to rein in some of Masa’s more reckless tendencies.

But whatever his reasons for leaving, the fact remains that Yanai’s departure comes at a time when his more conservative outlook is badly needed.

Tadashi Yanai

In one of his most famous quotes, Yanai said “Dreams are all good, but nothing beats realistic management. Let’s keep our feet firmly on the ground.”

Unfortunately, the word “Realistic” was never a big part of Masayoshi Son’s vocabulary. As his reputation as one of the world’s greatest momentum investors grew, Son pushed his firm toward ever-larger bets on Silicon Valley startups, leaving firms like Uber and WeWork with outrageous valuations that many analysts found difficult to justify.

After WeWork scrapped its planned IPO, SoftBank was forced to swoop in with a rescue package to stave off an imminent WeWork bankruptcy filing.

Then, in its Q3 earnings report, SoftBank suffered a staggering $4.6 billion writedown on its WeWork investment. But that wasn’t all: In addition to the WeWork fiasco, SoftBank’s ill-advised bets on Uber and Slack, both of which flopped after their long-anticipated IPOs this year, bringing the firm’s losses in 2019 to somewhere around $10 billion.

After the WeWork fiasco, shareholders were calling for Masa to step aside. Instead, the SoftBank founder and chairman acknowledged that “there was a problem with my own judgment, that’s something I have to reflect on.” He promised to be more conservative in the future.

But according to the FT, it appears that Masa has already changed his mind. Despite the failure of the first SoftBank Vision Fund, a $100 billion pot of mostly Saudi money used to invest in dozens of tech startups, sources close to Masa say the chairman wants to continue investing aggressively by raising a Vision Fund 2 (though it’s not clear where he intends to find the money and investors, now that the Saudis have reportedly soured on their relationship with SoftBank, and Japanese Telecom/Tech/VC/whatever conglomerate’s reputation as a responsible steward of capital lies in tatters.

Back in 2017, Yanai told a weekly Japanese business newspaper that his role was to raise sometimes painful questions.

“I realise he has a knack for investing, but if he’s going to make use of his ability, I want him to be successful as an entrepreneur rather than as an investor,” Yanai said in an interview with weekly paper Nikkei Veritas at the time. “I want him to focus on his core business.”

During a presentation last month, Son joked about being scolded by Yanai, and said his longtime friend could be a “scary external director” at times.

Shortly after, Bloomberg published the latest edition of Bloomberg Businessweek with a cover lampooning Son’s many investing failures.

Omg. pic.twitter.com/wRwCLhyRC6

— Ivan the K™ (@IvanTheK) December 27, 2019

At this point, remaining SoftBank investors should be trying to figure out exactly why Yanai left. Was he simply exhausted after 18 years of service on the board? Or was it Masayoshi Son’s hubris that drove him out the door?

Whatever the reason, with Yanai out, SoftBank’s board is now composed almost entirely of SoftBank executives and employees. That’s definitely a recipe for a more insular company, and more “yes” men surrounding Masayoshi Son.

Authored by Adam Taggart via PeakProsperity.com,

Fifty years ago, an international team of researchers was commissioned by the Club of Rome to build a computer simulation of exponential economic and population growth on a finite planet.

In 1971, its findings were first released in Moscow and Rio de Janeiro, and later published in 1972 under the title The Limits To Growth. The report concluded:

1. Given business as usual, i.e., no changes to historical growth trends, the limits to growth on earth would become evident by 2072, leading to “sudden and uncontrollable decline in both population and industrial capacity”. This includes the following:

   • Global Industrial output per capita reaches a peak around 2008, followed by a rapid decline

   • Global Food per capita reaches a peak around 2020, followed by a rapid decline

   • Global Services per capita reaches a peak around 2020, followed by a rapid decline

   • Global population reaches a peak in 2030, followed by a rapid decline

2. Growth trends existing in 1972 could be altered so that sustainable ecological and economic stability could be achieved.

3. The sooner the world’s people start striving for the second outcome above, the better the chance of achieving it.

Few reports have generated as much debate, discussion and disagreement. Though it’s hard to argue that its forecasts made back in the early 1970s have proved eerily accurate over the ensuing decades.

But most of its warnings have been largely ignored by policymakers hoping (blindly?) for a rosier future.

One of the original seventeen researchers involved in The Limits To Growth study, Dennis Meadows, joins us for the podcast this week. Fifty years later, what does he foresee ahead?

Decline is now inevitable.

We’re without any question moving into the remainder of a century which is going to see, by the end of these decades, a much smaller population, much lower level of energy and material consumption and so forth.

Whether we retain equity amongst people and avoid the more violent forms of conflict remains to be seen. But sustainable development is no longer an option.

This is one of the most important discussions we’ve ever recorded among the hundreds produced over the past decade.

Click the play button below to listen to Chris’ interview with Dennis Meadows (55m:24s).

China has been raiding Bitcoin miners who’ve been illegally using electricity — presents a significant danger since so much of the world’s hash rate is concentrated in one country, reported Asia Times. 

A recent interview with Ethan Pierse, director of the CryptoAssets Institute, said a recent government crackdown on mining facilities was due to miners illegally using electricity. By law, miners have to register with the government to use large amounts of power. Since electricity is so cheap, miners from around the world have flocked to China. 

Pierse said, “People are going around that even still and tapping into electricity where they can and siphoning that off. So basically, they see that and monitor that there are weird peaks of electricity usage in places, and they go and track it down. One miner’s using the same electricity as a single household or dozens of households.”

Pierse said 65% of the world’s hash rate is produced in China. He said the Siachen region is responsible for 50% of that. 

If any network disruption occurred in China, it would be very problematic for the global Bitcoin network.

Pierse said, “If you’re basing your economy or if you’re trying any kind of monetary policy to anything, whether it’s bitcoin or eventually other things, and the mining of that particular cryptocurrency is controlled this much by another government, more or less their ability to shut that down in and of itself can cause severe economic problems for governments or large corporations or other platforms that are leveraging this.”

In June, China’s Bitcoin miners controlled 60% of the global hash rate, and now the figure is up to 65% in December.

Chris Bendkisen, head of research at CoinShares, believes the rapid increase in the Chinese share of hash rate could be due to the deployment of advanced mining technology and cheap electricity. 

“This is beneficial to the Chinese mining industry,” said Bendiksen. “If you are the first to increase your proportion of the hash rate, and you can do that before your competitors, that’s generally good.”

Mining crypto has become more difficult over the last several years as profitability sags. The overall Bitcoin hash rate has risen 80% since June, which in recent times, has created stronger profitability for miners who have access to cheap electricity.

With China controlling more and more of the world’s Bitcoin hash rate, some worry that the US could be falling behind the crypto curve, as Beijing is making a state effort to be a leader in blockchain.

Other top mining hubs are in the US, Russia, and Kazakhstan.

China could be laying the groundwork for a state-backed digital currency in the mid-2020s as it wants to become a leader in crypto in the intermediate timeframe.

The danger at play is that there’s too much hash rate concentrated in China and could lead to global network issues if disruptions in the country were seen. 

Authored by Michael Snyder via TheMostImportantNews.com,

When the Russians take decisive action, it is usually for a reason. As you will see below, the Russians have suddenly decided that now is the time to create an organization that will be tasked with detecting, tracking and potentially destroying incoming asteroids. Are they doing this now because they have finally decided that this is a good idea, or has something gotten their attention? Of course they are not likely to publicly admit if they have come to the conclusion that a gigantic space rock is heading directly toward us. Just like the U.S. government, the Russian government is very interested in maintaining social order, and so they would probably delay telling the public about a potential asteroid impact for as long as possible.

In life, what people do is far more important than what they say, and the new center that the Russians have just created will not just be watching giant space rocks. According to Futurism, this new organization will be in charge of making sure “they don’t collide with Earth”…

Russian space agency Roscosmos is creating a center devoted to monitoring meteors, comets, and asteroids to ensure they don’t collide with Earth — even it means having to blow them up in space.

“As part of the creation of a monitoring system and information support for the safety of space activities in near-Earth space, we plan to launch the Russian Center for Small Celestial Bodies, whose main task will be to detect and track celestial bodies approaching Earth,” Igor Bakaras, a senior official at Roscosmos subsidiary TsNIIMash, told Russian-owned news agency Sputnik.

Certainly nobody can fault the Russians for allocating resources toward this purpose.

Our solar system is full of potentially dangerous giant space rocks, and a big enough impact could literally end our civilization.

But why now?

According to a British news source, this new organization will be evaluating whether it is better “to destroy celestial objects or steer them on to new trajectories and away from Earth”…

Roscosmos, the Russian equivalent of Nasa, wants to work out if it’s possible to destroy celestial objects or steer them on to new trajectories and away from Earth.

This could involve slamming a ‘kinetic impactor’ craft in the rock or using a satellite to drag it onto a new course. Nukes could also be sent into space to blow up the rocks.

A new department at Roscosmos called the Russian Centre for Celestial Bodies will be tasked with looking into space to find comets and asteroids approaching Earth.

Once again, nobody can argue with the value of such a major project, but isn’t NASA already doing all this?

Couldn’t the Russians just sit back and let us Americans do all the work?

I wish someone would ask Vladimir Putin that question.

And this sudden move by the Russians comes just one year after the U.S. issued a “National Near-Earth Object Preparedness Strategy and Action Plan”…

In 2018, The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy released a new report titled the “National Near-Earth Object Preparedness Strategy and Action Plan”.

The 18-page document outlines the steps that NASA and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) will take over the next 10 years to both prevent dangerous asteroids from striking Earth and prepare the country for the potential consequences of such an event.

Maybe U.S. officials suddenly decided last year that having a plan for incoming giant space rocks was a great idea, and maybe the Russians decided that it was such a great idea that they should copy us.

Or maybe both governments know something that they aren’t telling us yet.

Of course the truth is that NASA has not even identified most of the giant space rocks that are floating around out there. For example, back in July a very large asteroid came very close to hitting us…

A 427-foot-wide asteroid whizzed within 45,000 miles of Earth on Thursday.

While that may sound far away, 45,000 miles is what astronomers consider a close shave: It’s less than 20% of the distance between Earth and the moon. This was the closest we’ve come to an “Armageddon”-like scenario in at least a few years.

If that asteroid had actually hit our planet, it would have been the worst disaster that any of us have ever seen by a very wide margin.

And according to leaked emails, officials at NASA only knew about it the day before it whizzed by us…

Travelling at 55,000mph and measuring 426 feet by 187ft (130m x 57m), NASA only realised 2019 OK was coming 24 hours before it passed.

Experts say that had it hit, it would have devastated an entire city like London with over 30 times the energy of the atomic blast at Hiroshima.

So the truth is that we could be hit by a giant space rock at any time, and none of us may have any idea that it is even coming.

With that being said, there are a couple of enormous asteroids that scientists do know about that could potentially be major problems over the next decade.

The first one that I want to discuss is 2007 FT3. That is not a fancy name, and not that much is known about the asteroid, but apparently there is a chance that it “might hit the planet on Oct. 2, 2024”…

In the case of 2007 FT3, Sentry reported that the asteroid could hit Earth between the years 2024 and 2116. During these years, Sentry recorded a total of 164 potential Earth impacts caused by the asteroid. As noted by the monitoring system, there’s a chance that 2007 FT3 might hit the planet on Oct. 2, 2024.

By the way, Rosh Hashanah begins on the evening of October 2nd, 2024. I don’t know if that is important, but I thought I would throw that out there.

According to NASA, this asteroid would hit at a speed of approximately 46,000 miles per hour, and it would “create a crater that’s several miles long”…

Based on the data collected by Sentry, the asteroid has an estimated diameter of about 1,115 feet, which makes it almost as tall as the Empire State Building. The monitoring system noted that it could breach Earth’s atmosphere and hit the planet at a velocity of around 46,000 miles per hour.

Given the asteroid’s speed and size, it is certainly capable of causing high levels of destruction if it ends up colliding with Earth. Upon impact, it would create a crater that’s several miles long. The energy that will be released from the asteroid’s explosion would be powerful enough to level an entire city as well as its neighboring areas.

2007 FT3 is not getting much publicity at all, but a slightly larger asteroid that could potentially hit us in 2029 is getting far more attention.

On April 13th, 2029, it is being projected that Apophis will pass by our planet at a distance that is “ten times closer than the moon”. The following comes from Wikipedia…

The closest known approach of Apophis comes on April 13, 2029, when the asteroid comes to within a distance of around 31,000 kilometres from Earth’s surface. The distance, a hair’s breadth in astronomical terms, is ten times closer than the moon, and even closer than some man-made satellites.[23] It will be the closest asteroid of its size in recorded history. On that date, it will become as bright as magnitude 3.1[22] (visible to the naked eye from rural as well as darker suburban areas, visible with binoculars from most locations).[24] The close approach will be visible from Europe, Africa, and western Asia. During the approach, Earth will perturb Apophis from an Aten-class orbit with a semi-major axis of 0.92 AU to an Apollo-class orbit with a semi-major axis of 1.1 AU.

NASA insists that it will not actually hit us, but other independent researchers are skeptical.

And if Apophis doesn’t hit us then, NASA has listed ten other future dates when it potentially could…

• April 12, 2060

• April 11, 2065

• April 12, 2068

• October 10, 2068

• April 13, 2076

• April 13, 2077

• April 13, 2078

• October 10, 2089

• April 13, 2091

• April 14, 2103

Over in Russia, they are so concerned about this asteroid that they have “developed intercontinental ballistic missiles that aim to destroy asteroid Apophis”…

In what sounds like an elevator pitch for an Armageddon sequel, Russian scientists announced that they’ve developed intercontinental ballistic missiles that aim to destroy asteroid Apophis, which is going to swing by Earth in 2036.

Also referred to as 99942 Apophis, it measures 210-330 meters (690-1080 feet) in diameter. According to a Slate article by astronomer Phil Plait an encounter with Earth would mean not so fun times for our planet; “it would release the energy equivalent to more than 1 billion tons of TNT exploding, at least 20 times more than the largest nuke ever detonated!”

Russian scientists have also warned that Apophis could have “hundreds of opportunities to hit the Earth over the course of the next century”.

But for now, both American and Russian scientists are assuring us that everything is just fine and that there is no reason to panic.

Do you believe them?

Maybe they are telling us the truth.

Maybe there is nothing to be concerned about at all.

But of course both governments have a long track record of being loose with the truth, and it wouldn’t be much of a surprise at all if they weren’t exactly being straight with us.

Japan’s demographic Armageddon made another entry in the history books this week when Japan’s welfare ministry estimated that in 2019, Japan’s population organically shrank by 512,000 people this year compared to 2018. That’s a drop of more than the entire population of the city of Atlanta.

While Japan’s demographic doom is well-known, its severity has taken on a breathless haste in recent years with births in the country — which are expected to drop below 900,000 this year — are at their lowest figure since 1874 according to the NYT, when the population was about 70% smaller than its current 124 million.

Meanwhile, as Japan’s birthrate collapses, the total number of deaths is accelerating with every passing year, and in 2019 the figure is expected to reach almost 1.4 million, 60% more than the number of births, and the highest level since the end of World War II, a rise driven by the country’s increasingly elderly population.

That gap between births and deaths, which has risen above half a million for the first time ever, has put Japan on the path to demographic destruction and deflationary doom, because in a country that shrinks by over half a million people each year, economic concepts such as resource scarcity become increasingly quaint.

Indeed, as the number of births goes down, there are fewer young people entering its work force. That means fewer people to replace retiring workers and support them as they age, a situation that poses a serious threat to Japan’s economic vitality and the security of its social safety net – although, as we noted previously, Japan is not even in the Top 10 list of nations with the heaviest retiree burden; that group is headed by Italy, Greece and France.

Japan is not the only country having to cope with a shrinking society. It’s not even the country with the lowest birthrate: That title, according to the NYT, goes to South Korea. Meanwhile, other countries — including China and the United States — also face declining birthrates, which could spell demographic trouble down the road.

But Japan stands out in one specific way: it is the world’s grayest nation, with almost 28% of its residents over the age of 65.

Japan reached it demographic tipping point over a decade ago, giving Tokyo ample opportunity to find a solution and address the effects of its declining population. The country has been consistently shrinking since 2007, when the country’s population dipped by around 18,000 people. Since then, however, the losses have accelerated, crossing the half-million mark this year for the first time. Across the nation, whole villages are vanishing as young people choose not to have children or move to urban areas in search of better employment opportunities (or they just happen to be close to the Fukushima radioactive wasteland).

Unfortunately for Japan, it’s only going to get worse as there is no end to the decline in sight. The government estimates that the population could shrink by around 16 million people, nearly 13%, over the next 25 years.

In seeking to stave off demographic armageddon, Japan has made efforts to push up its fertility rate defined as the average number of births per woman, from its current level of around 1.4 to a target of 1.8, although still short of the 2.1 considered necessary to hold the population steady. The government has moved to encourage births by increasing incentives for parents to have more children and reducing obstacles that might discourage those who want to.

But like every other failed attempt by the state or economists to dictate behavior, the incentives have proved woefully insufficient as more people in Japan are putting off childbirth — or not having children at all — either to take advantage of economic opportunities or because they worry that economic opportunities do not exist and feel that they cannot afford children. Even for those who do want to be parents, the hurdles remain daunting.

Demand for day care in the country far outstrips supply, making it difficult for working women to juggle careers and children. Meanwhile, working men who want to take advantage of the country’s generous paternity leave can find themselves stigmatized by an entrenched cultural belief that a man’s place is in the office, not in the home.

If this wasn’t enough, the NYT also notes that adding to the government’s worries, marriage is also on the decline. The number of marriages dropped by 3,000 year-on-year to 583,000, according to the data released on Tuesday, part of a steep decline over the last decade.

Ironically, the most practical solution, if only from a labor standpoint, is also a terminal one for Japan as a society: as births continue to drop, Japan has tried to promote robots as a supplement for its shrinking work force. The only problem: robots don’t vote, don’t pay taxes, and don’t have little robot children of their own.

Finally, in an attempt to succeed where Germany, and Merkel’s “Open Door” policies failed, Japan has also committed to accepting limited numbers of immigrants to handle vital work such as caring for the elderly. This year the country began issuing more than a quarter-million visas to immigrants who will do such work. The only problem: the Japanese are notorious nationalists and tend to ostracize, mock and ridicule and gai jin to the point where nobody actually wants to stay in the notoriously closed-off society.