In the U.S., at least three early candidates for president from both parties “want to make it clear they would not support any proposals for a central bank-backed digital US dollar,” reports Bloomberg — which may be a little premature, because “A central bank digital currency, or CBDC, is far from reality in the U.S.”

Some officials at the Federal Reserve have expressed doubt over the need for one, especially for use by everyday Americans. The Fed has also said it would want approval from Congress before moving forward with a digital dollar. But that hasn’t stopped the relatively niche issue from emerging as a flash point for individuals eyeing a presidential run.

The idea of a digital dollar has already faced backlash from Wall Street and other banks, because lenders are worried about it acting as a direct competitor to private bank deposits. Digital-asset companies like Circle Internet Financial LLC that issue stablecoins — a form of cryptocurrency traditionally tied to reserve assets like the US dollar or gold and that offers similar features to a retail digital dollar — have also pushed back against certain CBDCs. Circle’s Head of Global Policy Dante Disparte said he’d be opposed to a digital dollar if it allows the Fed to control users’ access to funds, compromises privacy or disrupts a two-tiered banking and payments system. “I’ve gone as far as saying that’s the version that is un-American,” he said in an interview. In a report published last year in response to a Federal Reserve discussion paper, Circle also warned that a digital dollar could “destabilize” the banking sector.
In Congress, Republicans on Capitol Hill have introduced legislation to ban such direct-to-consumer CBDCs, saying they could be used by the federal government to surveil US citizens.

Proponents of a CBDC have argued that it could offer real benefits, including making payments — especially cross-border payments — faster and ensuring the dollar’s dominance in the global economy. It could be particularly useful for settling certain financial-market transactions, such as interbank transfers, some Fed officials have said. The government has also indicated it would prefer to have private-sector intermediaries offer accounts and facilitate CBDC payments, rather than taking on that role itself. Supporters have argued it can be tailored in a way to protect consumer privacy, which the Fed has also said is critical if it decides to move forward.

Bloomberg also summarized the analysis of one political consultant specializing in cryptocurrency. “In addition to the potential appeal to libertarian voters and to constituents in banking and crypto, pushing back against a U.S. digital dollar can provide a relatively safe avenue for candidates to attract votes from conspiracy theorists who have rallied around the anti-CBDC movement.”

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Source: Slashdot – Opponents to a US Digital Dollar Include Several US Presidential Hopefuls

CNN reports on this year’s “State of the Climate” report from the World Meteorological Organization (the UN agency promoting international cooperation on atmospheric science a d climatology).

The report “analyzes a series of global climate indicators — including levels of planet-heating pollution, sea level rise and ocean heat — to understand how the planet is responding to climate change and the impact it is having on people and nature.”

CNN’s conclusion? “The world just failed its annual health checkup.”=
– Oceans reached record high temperatures, with nearly 60% experiencing at least one marine heatwave.

– Global sea levels climbed to the highest on record due to melting glaciers and warming oceans, which expand as they heat up.

– Antarctica’s sea ice dropped to 1.92 million square kilometers in February 2022, at the time the lowest level on record (the record was broken again this year).

– The European Alps saw a record year for glacier melt, with Switzerland particularly badly affected, losing 6% of its glacier volume between 2021 and 2022.

– Levels of planet warming pollution, including methane and carbon dioxide, reached record highs in 2021, the latest year for which there is global data…

Last year, climate change-fueled extreme weather “affected tens of millions, drove food insecurity, boosted mass migration, and cost billions of dollars in loss and damage,” WMO Secretary-General Petteri Taalas said in a statement. In 2022, China had its most extensive and long-lasting drought on record. Droughts also affected East Africa, with more than 20 million people in Ethiopia, Kenya and Somalia facing acute food insecurity as of January this year. Many western and southern US states experienced significant drought and Europe’s punishing heatwave is estimated to have led to 15,000 excess deaths. In Pakistan, record-breaking rainfall left huge swaths of the country underwater, killing more than 1,700 people, with almost 8 million displaced, and causing $30 billion in damages…

Last year is unlikely to be an outlier, as temperatures continue their upwards trajectory. The past eight years were the hottest on record, despite three consecutive years of the La Niña climate phenomenon, which has a global cooling effect. The global average temperature last year climbed to about 1.15 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, according to the report, as the world continues its march towards breaching 1.5 degrees of warming for the first time. With the predicted arrival later in the year of El Niño, which brings warmer global temperatures, scientists are deeply concerned that 2023 and 2024 will continue to smash climate records. The hottest year on record, 2016, was the result of a strong El Niño and climate change, said Baddour. “It is only a matter of time before that record is broken….”

“The droughts and level of heatwaves that we saw throughout 2022 were quite remarkable,” Samantha Burgess, deputy director of Copernicus, told CNN. “This is really a wake up call that climate change isn’t a future problem, it is a current problem. And we need to adapt as quickly as possible,” she added.

Omar Baddour, head of the Climate Monitoring and Policy Division at the WMO, also told CNN that “Communities and countries which have contributed least to climate change suffer disproportionately.”

And for more bad news, CNN notes a report from the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service found Europe experienced its hottest summer ever recorded, unprecedented marine heatwaves in the Mediterranean sea, and widespread wildfires.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – CNN: Planet Earth ‘Just Failed Its Annual Health Checkup’

While medical textbooks teach that our movements are controlled solely by the brain’s motor cortex — that may be wrong, reports NPR, with another area keeping track of the entire body.

“Scientists at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis have found that previously overlooked areas of the brain’s motor cortex appear to link control of specific muscles with information about the entire body and brain.”

As a result, the act of, say, reaching for a cup of coffee can directly influence blood pressure and heart rate. And the movement is seamlessly integrated into brain systems involved in planning, goals and emotion. Textbooks, though, still portray a motor cortex in which “the region that controls your finger is not going to be connected to a region [that asks], ‘what am I going to do today?’ ” says Dr. Nico Dosenbach, an author of the study and an associate professor of neurology and radiology.

But the MRI data leaves little doubt that “there is this interconnected system,” says Evan Gordon, an assistant professor of radiology and the study’s first author. “It always was there, but we had not perceived it because of our training, because of the things we learned in the first neuroscience class that we ever took….” There’s two interleaved systems,” Dosenbach says. So right below an area controlling the fingers, for example, the team would find an area involved in “whole body integrative action….”

The new view of primary motor cortex may help explain how the brain solves a difficult problem, says Peter Strick, chair of neurobiology at the University of Pittsburgh. “Even simple movements require nuanced control of all organ systems,” he says. “You have to control heart rate. You have to control blood pressure. You have to control so called fight and flight responses….” A system that weaves together movement and mental states also could explain why our posture changes with our mood, or why exercise tends to make us feel better.

“How you move can have an impact on how you feel. And how you feel is going to have an impact on how you move,” Strick says. “You know, my mother would tell me, ‘stand up straight, you’ll feel better.’ And maybe that’s true.”

Thanks to Slashdot reader Tony Isaac for sharing the article.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – Researchers Discover Our ‘Motor Cortex’ Actually Links to Other Parts of the Brain

Cory Doctorow just wrote a new thriller “about cryptocurrency shenanigans that will awaken you to how the world really works,” according to his publisher. Doctorow calls Red Team Blues “a book about the financial rot at the center of Silicon Valley… a kind of anti-finance finance thriller.”

The publisher describes the book’s hero as “a self-employed forensic accountant, a veteran of the long guerilla war between people who want to hide money, and people who want to find it. ”
He knows computer hardware and software alike, including the ins and outs of high-end databases and the kinds of spreadsheets that are designed to conceal rather than reveal. He’s as comfortable with social media as people a quarter his age, and he’s a world-level expert on the kind of international money-laundering and shell-company chicanery used by Fortune 500 companies, mid-divorce billionaires, and international drug gangs alike.

He also knows the Valley like the back of his hand, all the secret histories of charismatic company founders and Sand Hill Road VCs. Because he was there at all the beginnings. He’s not famous, except to the people who matter. He’s made some pretty powerful people happy in his time, and he’s been paid pretty well. It’s been a good life.

Now he’s been roped into a job that’s more dangerous than anything he’s ever agreed to before — and it will take every ounce of his skill to get out alive.
“I write when I’m anxious, and right now these are anxious times,” Doctorow explained last month in Publisher’s Weekly, describing what he’d learned about selling audiobooks without going through Amazon’s service Audible. This time Cory got 4,080 backers to pledge $152,735 to fund an audiobook for Red Team Blues read by Wil Wheaton that his Kickstarter campaign stressed would be DRM-free. (“Every audiobook sold on Audible be wrapped in Amazon’s Digital Rights Management technology, which is a felony for you to remove, even if the copyright holder asks you to. It’s punishable by a five-year prison sentence and a $500,000 fine!”)

Red Team Blues is the first book in a new trilogy, and Cory is now making in-person appearances to promote the book — starting today (and tomorrow) at the LA Times Festival of Books at the University of Southern California. Tuesday he’ll be in San Diego, and a week from Sunday he’s appearing in San Francisco, before heading to Portland, Mountain View, Berkeley, and Gaithersburg Maryland.

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Source: Slashdot – Cory Doctorow’s New Thriller Dramatizes ‘Cryptocurrency Shenanigans’ and ‘Financial Rot’

The Washington Post reports on “a relatively young app called Beeper that pulls all your chats into one place.” This is significant, the Post argues, because “we’re better off if we have the freedom to pick up our digital lives and move on. Tech companies should feel terrified that you’ll walk if they disappoint you…”

If different people send you messages in Apple’s Messages (a.k.a., iMessage), WhatsApp, LinkedIn and Slack, you don’t have to check multiple apps to read and reply. Maybe the best promise of Beeper is that you can ditch your iPhone or Samsung phone for another company’s device and keep your text messages…

Eric Migicovsky, Beeper’s co-founder, told me that if you’re pulling Apple Messages into Beeper, you need a Mac computer to upload a digital file. All chat apps have different limits on how much history you can access in the app.

There’s also a wait list of about 170,000 people for Beeper. (Add yourself to the list here.) The app is free, but Beeper says it will start charging for a version with extra features.

To put this all in context, the Post’s reporter remembers the hassle of using a cable to transfer a long history of iPhone messages to a new Google Pixel phone, complaining that Apple makes it more difficult than other companies to switch to a different kind of system. “Many of you are happy to live in Apple’s world. Great! But if you want the option to leave at some point, try to limit your use of Apple apps when possible…”

They look ahead to next year, when the EU “will require large tech companies to make their products compatible with those of competitors” — though it’s not clear how much change that will bring. In the meantime, the existence of a small company like Beeper “gives me hope that we don’t have to rely on the kindness of technology giants to make it easier to move to a different phone or computer system… You deserve the option of a no-hassle tech divorce at a moment’s notice.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – Can Consumers Break Free of the Tech Industry’s Hold on Their Messaging History?