WSJ: “The prime years for making smart financial decisions are, on average, 53 and 54. At around that age, people have accumulated knowledge and experience about money, spending and saving, but haven’t begun losing key analytic cognitive skills. It’s also roughly the age when adults make the fewest financial mistakes, related to things like credit-card use, interest rates and fees. Knowing what leads to the financial strength of your early 50s is valuable. Younger adults can delve more deeply into basics like inflation and interest rates to hedge against lack of experience, and those who are older can work to keep their analytical skills sharp. “As we get older, we seem to rely more on past experience, rules of thumb, and intuitive knowledge about which products or strategies are better,” says Rafal Chomik, an economist in Australia at the ARC Centre of Excellence in Population Ageing Research.”
WSJ: “Scientists obsessed with aging are sketching a road map of how our bodies change as we grow old in the hopes that it will lead to treatments that could help us live longer, healthier lives. They call this road map the “hallmarks of aging”—a set of biological features and mechanisms linked to our inexorable march toward death. Over the past decade, the hallmarks have helped guide the development of drugs that clear away cells that have stopped dividing and gene therapies that appear to restore cells to a more youthful state. Scientists in Europe codified nine hallmarks in a 2013 paper in the journal Cell that is widely cited in the aging field. They include: shortening of telomeres (DNA segments at the ends of chromosomes); cell senescence, when cells stop dividing; and breakdowns in how cells regulate nutrients. The hallmarks appear to manifest with age and accelerate aging when enhanced. They are interconnected in ways researchers are trying to understand. Some believe this could unlock insights into why we age.”
FT: “Wasim Khaled, co-founder of Blackbird AI, a New York state-based start-up that helps counter misinformation, tells me we have already blown through the uncanny valley when it comes to still images. A survey by the Syzygy Group media company in Germany this year found that only 8 per cent of respondents correctly identified the photograph of a real human face when lined up against three other AI-generated images. It is only a matter of time before moving images pass through the uncanny valley, too. But Khaled suggests that the internet has long warped our perceptions of reality anyway. The images of people we see most often are probably Photoshopped Instagram photos or touched-up covers of film stars in magazines and these are used to train AI. “AI is not a representation of humanity. It is a representation of the digital version of humanity, which is an aberration or an exaggeration of what we are,” he says. That raises the possibility that we may be entering a world in which artificial versions of reality appear more real than reality itself.”
Cato: ““Globalization” is a common term that’s commonly misunderstood. It is the gradual convergence of prices and markets that results from humans freely doing what they have done throughout history—work, innovate, and transact for mutual benefit. The first globalization was part of a wider liberal movement yet only lasted until the beginning of the First World War. The present and second globalization began after the end of the Second World War, aided greatly by new technologies and the reversal of government barriers, and has freed billions from dire poverty. Popular worries about globalization are misguided: global inequality has declined; innovation has benefited the environment; manufacturing productivity in rich countries has increased; local cultures and arts are celebrated, not suppressed; and human liberty has expanded, allowing unprecedented creativity and invention to flourish. Globalization is elementary liberty. It has been the great teacher and, through efficiency and innovation, the great enricher. Long, long may it reign.”
