I’m extremely interested in universal basic income, and I think we’re going to need UBI or something like it if we’re going to make it into the future without catastrophically upending society. I’ve just recently started reading about negative income tax, which has the same effect, but might be significantly easier to implement.

I’ll seize this opportunity to plug GiveDirectly, where your money simultaneously supports people in enormous poverty, and contributes to the largest study ever done on UBI.

This town in California’s Central Valley has long functioned as a display case for wrenching troubles afflicting American life: The housing bust that turned Stockton into an epicenter of a national foreclosure disaster and plunged the city into bankruptcy. The homeless people clustered in tents along the railroad tracks. Boarded-up storefronts on cracked sidewalks. Gang violence.

Now, Stockton hopes to make itself an exhibition ground for elevated fortunes through a simple yet unorthodox experiment. It is readying plans to deliver $500 a month in donated cash to perhaps 100 local families, no strings attached. The trial could start as soon as the fall and continue for about two years.

It’s worth noting that the article makes a fundamental and very common error: “In the United States, a program supplying $10,000 a year to every American would cost $3 trillion.” But of course (all else being equal) everyone receives $10k a year, and because the money has to come from somewhere, everyone pays an extra $10k a year (on average) in taxes. In other words, the base cost is zero. Because we have a progressive income tax system (as we should!), people who are poor enough to pay no taxes end up $10k ahead. People who have enormous wealth will end up paying considerably more than is offset by the $10k they receive. So it’s basically a low-bureaucracy way of making our tax system more progressive, at no intrinsic cost.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/30/business/stockton-basic-income.html

Tokyo is home to the world’s busiest train stations, with the capital’s rail operators handling a combined 13 billion passenger trips annually. Ridership of that volume requires a deft blend of engineering, planning, and psychology. Beneath the bustle, unobtrusive features are designed to unconsciously manipulate passenger behavior, via light, sound, and other means. Japan’s boundless creativity in this realm reflects the deep consideration given to public transportation in the country.

https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2018/05/the-amazing-psychology-of-japanese-train-stations/560822/

Very cool stuff. Warning: the article gets pretty far down into the weeds.

The accuracy of the cesium clock has improved greatly since 1955, increasing by a factor of 10 or so every decade. Nowadays, timekeeping based on cesium clocks accrues errors at a rate of just 0.02 nanosecond per day. If we had started such a clock when Earth began, about 4.5 billion years ago, it would be off by only about 30 seconds today.

But we can do better. A new generation of atomic clocks that use laser light instead of microwave radiation can divide time more finely. About six years ago, researchers completed single-ion versions of these optical clocks, made with an ion of either aluminum or mercury. These surpassed the accuracy of cesium clocks by a full order of magnitude.

Now, a new offshoot of this technology, the optical-lattice clock (OLC), has taken the lead. Unlike single-ion clocks, which yield one measurement of frequency at a time, OLCs can simultaneously measure thousands of atoms held in place by a powerful standing laser beam, driving down statistical uncertainty. In the past year, these clocks have managed to surpass the best single-ion optical clocks in both accuracy and stability. With further development, they will lose no more than a second over 13.8 billion years—the present-day age of the universe.

https://spectrum.ieee.org/aerospace/satellites/introducing-the-worlds-most-precise-clock

Very interesting read. I hadn’t realized that politicians’ stances on impeachment might well play a major role this November.

Today, the impeachment of Donald Trump exists on the brink of plausibility. The sine qua non of an impeachment investigation, to say nothing of actual votes to charge and remove the President, is a Democratic takeover of the House in the November elections. Such a change now looks better than possible, maybe even probable. At the same time, the President appears to be in ever-greater legal peril from dual investigations, one led by Robert Mueller, the special counsel, and the other by federal prosecutors in New York. In April, F.B.I. agents raided the offices of Michael Cohen, Trump’s longtime lawyer and fixer, and removed telephones and business records. Cohen has not been charged with a crime, but the prospect of a case against him, with the chance that he might plead guilty and reveal everything he knows, represents a substantial risk for the President. In Washington, Michael Flynn, Trump’s former national-security adviser, and Rick Gates, who worked on Trump’s campaign and in his White House, have both already pleaded guilty to charges brought by Mueller and agreed to coöperate with his investigation. The full extent of Mueller’s findings is not known, raising the possibility that more legal and political damage to the President is yet to come. While Rudolph Giuliani, Trump’s attorney, may or may not be correct that Mueller believes he lacks the legal authority to indict the President, the possibility of impeachment clearly exists—if Congress has the evidence, and the will, to proceed.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/05/28/will-the-fervor-for-impeachment-start-a-democratic-civil-war

This is an absolutely terrific teardown of the problems with “Universal Basic Jobs.” It looks like Basic Jobs will be an issue in the Democratic primaries, so if you’re likely to vote Democrat, this is an important read.

I grudgingly forgive capitalism the misery it causes, because it’s the engine that lifts countries out of poverty. It’s a precondition for a free and prosperous society; attempts to overthrow it have so consistently led to poverty, tyranny, or genocide that we no longer believe its proponents’ earnest oaths that this time they’ve got it right. For right now, there’s no good alternative.

But if we have a basic jobs guarantee, it will cause all the same misery, and I won’t forgive it. The flimsy justifications we can think up won’t be up to the task of justifying the vast suffering it will cause. We can’t excuse it as necessary to produce the goods and services we rely on. We can’t excuse it as a necessary condition for political freedom. If a worker asks “why?”, our only answer will be “because Cory Booker thought a basic jobs guarantee would play better among the electorate than basic income, now get back to packing boxes and collapsing from dehydration”. There will be an alternative: a basic income guarantee. We will have rejected it.

I feel like as a quasi-libertarian, I sometimes downplay how awful private industry, capitalism, and the modern workplace are. If so, I apologize. The only possible excuse for defending such a flood of misery is what inevitably happens when people meddle with it. But the price of such morally tenuous greater-good style reasoning is that you need to stay hyper-aware of times when you don’t need to defend the system, when there is a chance to do better without destroying everything. I think basic income is such a chance. And I think basic jobs are a tiny modification to the idea, which destroys its potential and perpetuates all the worst parts of the existing system.

Basic Income, Not Basic Jobs: Against Hijacking Utopia

The news last week that scientists had developed a brain implant that boosts memory — an implantable “cognitive prosthetic,” in the jargon — should be astounding even to the cynical.

NYT

During Trump’s march to Washington, he framed his mission as nothing less than regime change: America’s capital was a defeated empire in need of occupation. In the months after the Inauguration, as I watched that rhetoric turn to action, the tactics and personae started to remind me of another experience with regime change. As a reporter embedded with the Marines, I arrived in Baghdad in April, 2003, on the day that Saddam’s statue fell. I covered Iraq off and on for two years, a period in which the U.S. occupation was led from the Green Zone, a fortified enclave in the country’s capital, where Americans lived and worked in a sanctum of swimming pools and black-market Scotch. The Green Zone—officially, the home of the Coalition Provisional Authority—functioned as an extension of the White House, led by political appointees, staffed by civil servants, and attended by waiters in bow ties and paper hats. It was Iraq as the war planners had imagined it would be: orderly, on-message, and driven by the desire to remake the country in the name of capitalism and democracy.

After a year, the Green Zone had acquired another connotation, as a byword for disastrous flaws in the invasion: the failure to stop looters or to restore Iraq’s electricity; the decision to disband the Iraqi Army; the blindness to a growing resistance to the occupation. As the problems accumulated, so did the vacant offices in the Green Zone, because people in Washington were unwilling to join. The Administration turned, more than ever, to loyalists. Officials screening new American prospects sometimes asked whether they had voted for Bush and how they saw Roe v. Wade. A cohort of recent college grads, recruited because they had applied for jobs at the Heritage Foundation, were put in charge of Iraq’s national budget. The rebuilding of the stock market was entrusted to a twenty-four-year-old. “They wanted to insure lockstep political orientation,” Wilkerson recalled. “And what we got out of that was a lockstep-stupid political orientation.”

In the outside world, the mistakes were well documented. But inside the Green Zone the lights and air-conditioning were always on, there was no unemployment, and no one debated America’s role in Iraq. It was rhetoric over reality (“Mission Accomplished!”), and appearances mattered most: the press office distributed rosy, misleading statistics and obscured the dismal progress in restoring electricity and recruiting new police. The philosophy of governance—defined by loyalty, hostile to expertise, and comfortable with lies—created a disaster, even as its adherents extolled American values. Those who recognized the self-delusion and incompetence began referring to the Green Zone as the Emerald City.

The early mistakes in Iraq were like land mines sown in the soil. They continued erupting for years, in the form of division and decay. Similarly, the mistakes that the Trump Administration has made are likely to multiply: the dismantling of the State Department; the denigration of the civil service; the exclusion of experts on Iran and climate change; the fictional statistics about undocumented immigrants; and the effort to squelch dissent across the government. Absent a radical change, the Administration has no mechanism for self-correction. It will not get normal; it will get worse.

Trump is less impeded than ever, a fact that impresses even those he has mocked and spurned. Stephen Bannon (who Trump said had “lost his mind”) recently told me, “He is unchained. This is primal Trump—back to the leader he was during the campaign, the same one the American people voted into office. There are no more McMasters in the apparatus. He’s got shit he’s got to get done, and he’s just going to get it done.”

Midway through its second year, Trump’s White House is at war within and without, racing to banish the “disloyals” and to beat back threatening information. Bit by bit, the White House is becoming Trump’s Emerald City: isolated, fortified against nonbelievers, entranced by its mythmaker, and constantly vulnerable to the risks of revelation.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/05/21/trump-vs-the-deep-state

https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/coffee

Ha!