Lifeboat Foundation

Lifeboat Foundation readers are aware that the world has become progressively more chaotic. Part of the danger comes from centralized points of failure. While large institutions can bear great stress, they also cause more harm when they fail. Because there are so few pillars, if one collapses, the whole system is destroyed.

For instance, prior to the federal reserve system, bank runs we extremely common. However, since the financial system consisted of small, competing institutions, failure was confined to deficient banks. So while failure was frequent, it was less impactful and systemic. In contrast, after the establishment of the federal reserve, banks became fewer and larger. Failures, while more infrequent, were large scale catastrophes when they occurred. They affected the whole economy and had longer impact.

This is even more important in political systems, which are the foundation of how a society operates. In order to have a more robust, antifragile social order, systems must be decentralized. Rather than a monopolistic, static political order, there must be a series of decentralized experiments. While failures are inevitable, it can be localized to these small experiments rather than the whole structure.

Continue reading “Startup Societies Summit: A Decentralized Governance Trade Show” »

NEW YORK (AP) — How long has our species been around? New fossils from Morocco push the evidence back by about 100,000 years.

The bones, about 300,000 years old, were unearthed thousands of miles from the previous record-holder, found in fossil-rich eastern Africa. The new discovery reveals people from an early stage of our species’ evolution, with a mix of modern and more primitive traits.

“They are not just like us,” said Jean-Jacques Hublin, one of the scientists reporting the find. But they had “basically the face you could meet on the train in New York.”

Continue reading “This is us: Earliest fossils of our species found in Morocco” »

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And a swimming pool, and massage rooms, and a running track, and more.

No SCUBA certification? No problem: http://kck.st/2rBLJi1

Exceptionally creative people and your average Joe see different things when they look around.

By Jessica Stillman

Continue reading “Creative People Literally See the World Differently, Mind-Blowing Research Shows” »

You can zipline down the Eiffel Tower at nearly 100 km/h and 115 meters above the ground.

Today, Apple announced a brand-new tier of its all-in-one desktop called the iMac Pro. The new product, unveiled onstage at the company’s Worldwide Developers Conference in San Jose, California, is supposed to be a “the most powerful Mac ever,” according to the company. In other words, this computer is going to replace the painfully outdated and woefully mismanaged Mac Pro line, at least for the foreseeable future. The iMac Pro will start shipping this December starting at $4,999, Apple confirmed.

Apple says the computer will ship with an 8-core Xeon processor, with configurations that scale up to an 18-core Xeon processor, 5K display, and an all-new AMD Radeon Vega GPU. You’ll also be able to shell out for up to 16GB of VRAM, up to 128GB of data corruption-protecting ECC RAM, and up to 4TB for SSD storage. There’s a whole bunch of other upgrades in there. Check out the full list Apple shared in its presentation below:

Apparently there are 6–8 people in the world who look exactly like you.

Via Twinstrangers.com