• ASSETS OF ALL KINDS WILL SOON BE TRANSACTING THROUGH A SINGLE DIGITAL WALLET. The transformation of finance is now fully headed toward ‘tokenization,’ a mechanism that should move assets faster and more securely than systems that have served for decades, principally via listed stocks & bonds that dominate today’s markets. Blockchain processing, which involves recording ownership on digital ledgers, makes it possible for almost any asset (currency, stocks, debt, real estate) to exist on a single digital record that participants can independently verify instantaneously, versus current ‘settlement’ process which expose transfers to risk of timeline constraints, along with risk of parties fulfilling obligations. Regulations and investor safeguards will remain crucial, but by lowering cost, complexity and risk, is expected to help investors diversify and catalyze global growth.  [ECONOMIST]

 

  • INCREASED LIFESPAN ODDITIES RESULTED from a major study of 117 different species of mammals housed in zoos and aquariums worldwide. Findings published in Nature Magazine included: (1) Life expectancy increased by 10 to 20%, depending on timing of treatment and environment exposed to; (2) Post-menopausal females outlive males on average, but suffer increased frailty and poorer overall health during aging; (3) In males, ongoing hormonal contraception from castration increased life expectancy; (4) In females, permanent surgical sterilization similarly increased lifespan, primarily by reducing the substantial energetic & physiological costs of pregnancy, lactation, and caring for offspring. [EUREKALERT.ORG]

 

  • ROUGHLY 3% OF AMERICANS ARE ON WELFARE, some five million people, with most going to people who simply choose not to work. Over the past seven decades, means-tested programs have been turned into “the greatest vote-buying scheme since bread and circuses, and shockingly easy to defraud. According to federal auditor GAO, up to $500 billion has been stolen in fraud perpetrated on programs – including food stamps, housing, addiction services, children’s autism, and Medicaid – paying up to 75% of median income in blue states like California. Literal fraud may be 20% of welfare payments, but up to 98% is fraudulent in the sense it’s not necessary and, to the contrary, vote buying from recipients who are bribed to remain poor.”  [PETER ST ONGE]

 

  • LATEST ANALYSES AND FORECASTS report that: (1) two out of every three people live in countries that have fertility rates below the replacement level of births per woman required to sustain natural population growth; and (2) that global population may rise to as high as ten billion over the next five centuries, but will fall steeply thereafter, with each generation smaller than the last.   [FOREIGN AFFAIRS]

 

THOUGHTS FOR THE WEEK

 

  • Mail thieves are increasingly threatening trust in California’s election system, where 81% of ballots were cast by mail in the last general election, and 88% of the electorate voted by mail in the preceding Primaries. Thieves steal from the boxes to get people’s checks and new credit cards, in organized raids, often with a lookout and in broad daylight, and many have been caught also having taken ballots.  The combination of unverified ballot recipients, the State’s weak justice system, and laws allowing up to a month to count mailed-in votes have unquestionably impacted the number of literally ‘stolen election’ outcomes.   [WASHINGTON EXAMINER]

 

  • AI Hackers Are Coming Dangerously Close to Beating Humans.  Latest experiment, involving Stanford University’s AI bot, Artemis, outperformed nine out of ten human penetration testers in finding network vulnerabilities, using generative AI software to break into major corporations and foreign governments, scan the network, find potential bugs—software vulnerabilities—and then finding ways to exploit them.  Stanford researchers then let Artemis out of the lab, to find bugs in a real-world computer network—the one used by Stanford’s own engineering department – and pitted it against real-world professional hackers, with results that are fascinating but scary.  [STAN STAHL PHD]