A remarkable new study by a director at one of the largest accounting firms in the world has found that a famous, decades-old warning from MIT about the risk of industrial civilization collapsing appears to be accurate based on new empirical data.

In 1972, a team of MIT scientists got together to study the risks of civilizational collapse. Their system dynamics model published by the Club of Rome identified impending ‘limits to growth’ (LtG) that meant industrial civilization was on track to collapse sometime within the 21st century, due to overexploitation of planetary resources.

The study was published in the Yale Journal of Industrial Ecology in November 2020 and is available on the KPMG website. It concludes that the current business-as-usual trajectory of global civilization is heading toward the terminal decline of economic growth within the coming decade—and at worst, could trigger societal collapse by around 2040.

“The worsening health profiles we found in gen X and gen Y is alarming,” lead researcher and Ohio State sociology professor Hui Zheng said in a press release.

“If we don’t find a way to slow this trend, we are potentially going to see an expansion of morbidity and mortality rates in the United States as these generations get older,” he added.

A Manhattan private school aiming to use more “inclusive language” is encouraging its students to stop using the terms “mom,” “dad” and “parents” because the words make “assumptions” about kids’ home lives.

The Grace Church School in Noho — which offers academic courses for junior kindergarten through 12th grade — issued a 12-page guide to students and staff explaining the school’s mission of inclusivity.

Have you ever taken a look at old family photos and think, “These just aren’t creepy enough!” or “I wish these looked more like the characters from The Polar Express,” perhaps? Now they can!

Psychology and other “helping professions” such as counselling and social work are often regarded as quintessentially human domains. Unlike workers in manual or routine jobs, psychologists generally see no threat to their career from advances in machine learning and artificial intelligence.

Economists largely agree. One of the most wide-ranging and influential surveys of the future of employment, by Oxford economists Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael Osborne, rated the probability that psychology could be automated in the near future at a mere 0.43%. This work was initially carried out in 2013 and expanded upon in 2019.

We are behavourial scientists studying organisational behaviour, and one of us (Ben Morrison) is also a registered psychologist. Our analysis over the past four years shows the idea psychology cannot be automated is now out of date.

Psychology already makes use of many automated tools, and even without significant advances in AI we foresee significant impacts in the very near future.

Remember, if you want to be respected, you have to show respect.

Even if human-caused greenhouse gas emissions can be reduced to zero, global temperatures may continue to rise for centuries afterward, according to a scientific study published Thursday.

"The world is already past a point of no return for global warming," the study authors report in the British journal Scientific Reports. The only way to stop the warming, they say, is that "enormous amounts of carbon dioxide have to be extracted from the atmosphere."

The burning of fossil fuels such as oil, coal and gas release greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide and methane into the atmosphere, causing global temperatures to increase and sea levels to rise.

The scientists modeled the effect of greenhouse gas emission reductions on changes in the Earth's climate from 1850 to 2500 and created projections of global temperature and sea level rises.

Millions of unemployed Americans faced an income "cliff" in July when the extra $600 in pandemic jobless benefits came to an end. But millions more are now facing another — and perhaps more dire — hit to their income as they exhaust all their unemployment options at both the state and federal levels.

"People are saying, 'Oh my god, I'm running out of money,' and they have no idea what's to come," said Alex Emanuel, an actor, filmmaker and musician in New York whose unemployment aid ran dry two months ago.

The issue is affecting a range of workers, including people who lost their jobs toward the end of 2019 and have run through multiple unemployment aid extensions provided by Congress earlier this year. Gig-economy workers and others who tapped the federal Pandemic Unemployment Assistance (PUA) program early in the crisis are also about to run out of aid.

These benefits aren't particularly generous — the typical weekly unemployment check amounts to $333 a week — but out-of-work adults tell CBS MoneyWatch that the additional money has helped them pay for necessities like utilities and rent.

The United States is in the midst of a crushing economic recession, COVID-19 infection rates are spiking, and thousands of schools and childcare facilities have yet to reopen in-person classrooms. The group bearing the brunt of this torrent of bad news? Women.

Between August and September, 865,000 women dropped out of the labor force, according to a National Women’s Law Center analysis of the Bureau of Labor Statistics September jobs report. In the same time period, just 216,000 men exited the workforce. Meanwhile, one in four women are considering reducing work hours, moving to part-time roles, switching to less demanding jobs, taking leaves of absence from work, or stepping away from the workforce altogether, according to an annual Women in the Workplace study published in September by McKinsey & Co. and Lean In.

“If we had a panic button, we’d be hitting it,” says Rachel Thomas, the CEO of Lean In, a gender equity advocacy group co-founded by Facebook executive Sheryl Sandberg. “We have never seen numbers like these.”

Women’s decisions to exit the labor force this year will likely impact their own professional and financial goals for the rest of their lives. It’s an imprecise comparison, but studies done on students who graduate into a recessions and are then either unemployed or forced to take jobs below their qualification levels lose out on earnings compared to students who finished college amid rosier economic circumstances. The losses amount to about 9% initially, and tend not to fully dissipate until about a decade after graduation day.

Grocery stores across the United States are stocking up on products to avoid shortages during a second wave of coronavirus.

Still, paper towel shortages have been ongoing, going in and out of stock on Amazon (AMZN) and at Costco (COST) and local stores. And when paper towels are available, customers can't always get the brand they want.
Part of the reason for the shortage is people keep hoarding them: There was a massive surge in sales of Bounty paper towels in July, Procter & Gamble (PG) reported, as customers swept them off store shelves. Bounty paper towel sales surged in July as people began scrubbing down their homes and washing their dishes more often during the pandemic.

Do not waste your time and emotional energy planning around an imminent game-changing injection or pill in the coming months. A pandemic is not a problem that will be fixed in one move, by any single medication or a sudden vaccine. Instead, the way forward involves small, imperfect preventive measures that can accumulate into very effective interventions. Groups of practices that minimize the spread of disease are sometimes known as prevention bundles. Our COVID-19 bundle includes important drugs, such as dexamethasone and remdesivir, which seem to help certain patients in specific situations. It also involves behaviors, too, such as distancing and masking. “Any action you take has the potential for numerous secondary and tangential benefits,” Thomas said.

On april 13, Robert Redfield, the director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, appeared on the Today show and assured viewers that the worst was nearly behind us.

By July, the number of daily cases had doubled. The death total had shot past 100,000. As Redfield looked ahead, his tone became more ominous. The fall and the winter, he said in an interview with the Journal of the American Medical Association, “are going to be probably one of the most difficult times that we’ve experienced in American public health.”

A vaccine will be part of our bundles, hopefully before too long. But it will not instantly eliminate the need for everything else. If we can accept that masks will be a part of our lives indefinitely, we can focus on improving their effectiveness and making them less annoying to wear, Yale’s Ko said. “And it’s not just the design of masks themselves; we can come up with more innovative ways to promote face-mask use.” For one thing, they could be made more ubiquitous by employers and state agencies. Governments could even, as Luxembourg’s did, send masks to everyone by mail.

Japan has the oldest population in the world, and that's causing an acute labor shortage. With almost a third of the population aged 65 and above, finding workers can be a challenge.

Increasingly, companies are turning to technology as a solution — including two of the biggest convenience store franchises in Japan, FamilyMart and Lawson.
This week, Lawson deployed its first robot in a convenience store, in Tokyo. FamilyMart trialled the same robots last month, and says it plans to have them working in 20 of its stores by 2022.

Engineering firm Furrion has built a massive, four-legged mech suit called Prosthesis, a 9,000 pound monstrosity straight out of “Pacific Rim” — and it wants you to pilot it.

The company recently put out a call on Kickstarter, asking enthusiasts if they’d like to help them build a “global racing league that would pit multiple world-class athletes in head-to-head competitions, through complex technical obstacle courses, wearing giant powered mech suits.”

Depending on the level of commitment, fans are able to receive “one-on-one mech pilot training,” or watch the action unfold in person at live events.

An Army engineer working on soft robotics says that his work is directly inspired by the T-1000, the shape-shifting (and fictional) robot villain from the 1991 James Cameron blockbuster “Terminator 2.”

Frank Gardea, an aerospace engineer at the Army Combat Capabilities Development Command’s (CCDC) Army Research Laboratory, is leading a project to develop robotics out of flexible, self-repairing and self-reconfiguring materials, according to Military.com.

Gardea envisions self-repairing drones and other uncrewed aircraft, but the ultimate goal is machines with the “reconfiguration characteristics of the T-1000 character in the Hollywood film, ‘Terminator 2,'” he said in a release.

Suddenly I’m thinking of moving to Spain.

A bill introduced recently in the nation’s parliament would require that Spanish children do housework and homework. They would also be required to “participate in family life” and “respect their parents and siblings.”

Wow. Good luck with that.

Back here in the United States, I can barely get my 16-year-old to take out the trash. Sometimes, it feels like Middle East peace talks must be easier.

Meanwhile, other parents don’t even ask their kids to pitch in—either because they’ve completely surrendered, have concluded that it’s easier to do the job themselves, or have decided that after-school activities and playtime are more valuable. Children have gone “from being our employees to our bosses,” Jennifer Senior notes in her book All Joy and No Fun: The Paradox of Modern Parenthood.