Operating theaters, bowling alleys and home cinemas: Not happy with safe rooms, the super-rich are building luxury fortresses

by Simon Usborne on CNN.com…At the richer end of the spectrum, billionaires are increasingly paranoid about threats to their health, whether from bioterror attacks, viral pandemics or old-fashioned heart failures and accidents. Covid gave a big boost to this part of SAFE’s business, which Corbi’s wife Naomi, a registered nurse, now heads up.

Chartbook 307 To live or not to live with polycrisis: The USA, Mexico and the need for a regional policy in Central America and the Caribbean.

by Adam Tooze in Chartbook…What is needed is not more border controls and militarized policing, but a pooling of governmental resources amongst the stronger players in the region including USA, Mexico the richer Caribbean states and Colombia, not to oppose, but to facilitate, support and invest in the extraordinary human energy, grit and determination that is the counterpart to those remittance flows.

‘Polycrisis’ threatens planetary health; UN calls for innovative solutions

by Sean Mowbray in Mongabay…Environmental, technological and social challenges are colliding to create a global polycrisis. This confluence of issues is in turn placing increased pressure on the already existing environmental challenges of rapid climate change, rampant pollution and biodiversity loss — ultimately threatening planetary health and human well-being.

The wide boundary impacts of AI with Daniel Schmachtenberger

by Nate Hagens in The Great Simplification…Artificial intelligence has been advancing at a break-neck pace. Accompanying this is an almost frenzied optimism that AI will fix our most pressing global problems, particularly when it comes to the hype surrounding climate solutions.

The harms of promoting the lab leak hypothesis for SARS-CoV-2 origins without evidence

by James Alwine, et al in The Journal of Virology…Many questions about the origins of SARS-CoV-2 remain unanswered and may never be fully resolved. We cannot currently disprove the lab leak hypothesis. Nevertheless, the lines of evidence needed to validate one hypothesis over another are not epistemically comparable (16). Validating the zoonotic origin is a scientific question that relies on history, epidemiology, and genomic analysis, that when taken together, support a natural spillover as the probable origin.

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Jul 06 2023

Global polycrisis: The causal mechanisms of crisis entanglement

by Dr. Michael Lawrence at The Cascade Institute….. In this framework, a global crisis arises when one or more fast-moving trigger events combines with...
Oct 10 2024

The collapse is coming. Will humanity adapt?

by Peter Watts in The MIT Press…..Now, Homo sapiens of some form or another is going to survive no matter what we do, short of blowing up the planet with nuclear...
Oct 10 2024

Applying resilience thinking

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Oct 10 2024

Hurricane Helene isn’t an outlier. It’s a harbinger of the future.

by John Morales in The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists…And then came the rain. Preliminary storm-total rainfall measured on the ground included nearly 31 inches...
Oct 10 2024

Chartbook 325: Wrestling with transition thinking. Or on being “interregnumed” and how to resist it. (Hegemony notes 8)

by Adam Tooze in Chartbook 325…The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying but the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of...
Sep 24 2024

Yuval Noah Harari on the eclipsing of human intelligence

Sean Illing of The Gray Area interviews Yuval Noah Harari…If the internet age has anything like an ideology, it’s that more information and more data and...
Sep 24 2024

How rising global heat connects catastrophic floods on four continents

by Scott Dance in The Washington Post…At this time of year, that flood potential amped up by global warming can become especially evident.

Sep 18 2024

Scaling: The state of play in AI

by Ethan Mollick in One Useful Thing…With continued advancements in model architecture and training techniques, we’re approaching a new frontier in AI...
Sep 18 2024

Facing global risks with honest hope

From (ASRA) Accelerator for Systemic Risk Assessment report Facing global risks with honest hope….Transforming Multidimensional Challenges into Multidimensional...
Sep 18 2024

Superbugs ‘could kill 39m people by 2050’ amid rising drug resistance

by Kat Lay in The Guardian…Child deaths from infections see ‘remarkable’ decline but AMR fatalities of over-70s likely to rise by 146%, study finds Analysis:...
Sep 16 2024

Global trends are polarizing us: Can democracy handle it?

by Richard Heinberg in resilience.org….Today the world faces historically unique stresses that are likely to be increasingly polarizing for many societies. These...