Next weekend is going to be pretty cold in Minneapolis. Maybe cold enough to convince some ICE goons that they’d be better off on disability in Kentucky.
I mean, every ICE goon has probably slipped on the ice at least once. Probably every one of those falls could be turned into a disability claim.
I am (just barely) old enough to remember the Black Panthers in the 1960s, when a group of black people tried to carry legal firearms to protect themselves, before they were mostly murdered by the police, the FBI, and one another.
I also remember the 1980s, when the NRA was trying to convince all marginalized groups (blacks, women, lesbians, gays, socialists, etc.), that arming themselves was a great idea. The NRA was sincere, I think—they just wanted more people to have guns.
Most people, especially black people, were well aware of the fact that walking around armed would make it much more likely that they’d be killed by the police. (They remembered what happened to the Black Panthers, presumably better than I did.)
Over the last couple of years, and especially over the last few days, I think perspectives are changing. First, a lot of white people are walking around armed, and even killing people, with minimal consequences. Second, the increasingly fascist police have been killing unarmed people at increasing rates, and looking like they’ll not only get away with it, but looking like they’re glorying in it.
There are definitely some black people thinking once again that being armed is a good idea. I hope they’re not horribly wrong about that.
This article, which had a really annoying headline, turns out to have some really great thinking.
In particular, the political perspective it is describing has more than a little overlap with the stuff I was writing about in my articles at Wise Bread.
An economic vision that … encompasses antimonopoly policies, right to repair and regulatory changes to smooth the path for people to start businesses, buy and work land, even build their own houses and invent things.
Source: NYT
Steven suggested that I should revisit my Wise Bread posts. There’s a lot of useful stuff there. It was stuff that had seemed a bit less relevant over the last few years (I started writing in June of 2007, right at the start of the Great Financial Crisis, and carried on for 10 years.) But with government having gone all-in on fascism, racism, and gangsterism this year, a lot of those themes are feeling much more on point than they had for a while.
So I think I’ll do that. A lot of my Wise Bread posts still feel just right. On a few, my perspective has changed a bit. I’ll write some new posts to talk about what’s changed.
Stay tuned.
A bunch of people in the AI industry have blithely suggested that it will be fine if huge numbers of people lose their jobs to AI, because we’ll create some sort of universal basic income (UBI) to support them.
I think that’s a great idea, and think we should put their money where their mouths are. Starting immediately, any firm with any significant business producing AI should be taxed 50% of their gross revenue, and all that money should be divided up equally among all Americans as a UBI. (Firms with a “significant” AI business that are also in other businesses as might want to spin off the AI part of the business, so that they don’t have to pay this special tax on the non-AI parts of their gross income.)
This wouldn’t immediately produce a big enough UBI to make it unnecessary for someone to work, but I figure about the time it became impossible for an ordinary person to find a job because they’d all been displaced by AI, the AI industry would be making enough money for half their revenues to fund an adequate UBI.
In a similar vein, every firm paying for AI, rather than paying for workers, should have to pay a tax on all that AI spending equal to what they’d pay in withholding taxes if they were paying that money to an employee.
I don’t think this would produce nearly enough to fund a UBI, but I think it might be enough to go a long way toward shoring up Social Security and Medicare.
Anybody who didn’t see this coming a decade ago hasn’t been paying attention.
“Payment systems are blocked for him, as US companies like American Express, Visa, and Mastercard have a virtual monopoly in Europe.”
https://www.heise.de/en/news/How-a-French-judge-was-digitally-cut-off-by-the-USA-11087561.html
Heavy-handed sanctions have mostly landed on people who deserve them, which has made them seem okay. But as I’ve been pointing out for years now, without proper rule-of-law, anybody can be crushed at the whim of a couple of people in the U.S. government.
As an annoying privacy/security nerd of longstanding, I’m very pleased to hear this:
Plenty of annoying nerds have been ringing alarm bells since the 90s, going on about code and privacy and open source software and FREEDOM, mostly in annoying ways. And it is genuinely annoying, even to me, to say this, but they were right all along.
I’ve been hearing for years about how much trouble Social Security is in, and how pretty soon there won’t be enough money left in the trust fund to pay everyone’s pensions in full, and how we’ll have to raise taxes or cut benefits. That’s almost entirely false.
The Greenspan commission that restructured Social Security back in 1983 got almost everything right (which is why we haven’t needed to change Social Security tax rates, diddle around with the cost of living adjustments, nor change the age at which people retire for forty years). The one thing they got wrong?
Back then, about 90 percent of all wages were subject to Social Security payroll taxes. Today, that’s dropped to around 82.6 percent as more income has shifted above the taxable maximum.
Source: Actually, Social Security Nailed It In 1983
The most common suggestion for “fixing” Social Security is to get rid of the ceiling on the amount of income subject to the tax, but that’s the wrong way to think about it. Getting rid of the ceiling would decouple the size of the eventual pension from the size of the income that earned it, which would give conservatives yet another hook for criticizing the program.
The right fix is to boost incomes of those at the bottom, so that once again 90% of all wages are under the Social Security tax ceiling.
Making sure that lower-income people earn enough money to live on will fix Social Security as a side-effect.
Pretty cool, eh?
I have an idea for reducing surveillance capitalism:
Every time a company sells (or gives away as part of a commercial transaction) any information about you (name, location, unique identifier, website you visited, etc.), they have to mail you a postcard telling you what they sold and who they sold it to.
Bonus: Boosts the post office as well!
It seems like every business now has its own app, which usually offers remote ordering, as well as discounts. I do my best not to use any of them, because they demand (and transmit to the business) all sorts of private information from my phone. This seems to me like something my phone ought to fix.
It ought to be pretty easy on the phone to provide a virtual machine which only passes to an app whatever information the phone owner wants to pass on. For example, you could configure a video loop to provide, if the app wants to turn on the camera, or an audio file to provide if the app wants to turn on the microphone.
You could get quite fancy about things like location, if you wanted to. For example, a fast food app could be provided a random location, but one that was a configurable distance from the fast food restaurant. (I’m imagining that the fast food apps either already do, or soon will, adjust the price based on where you are. For example, if you’re already in the parking lot, they can raise the price, assuming that you’ve already decided to buy from them. They can cut the price if a competitor is closer to your location, to reduce the chance that you’ll stop there instead. The phone could pick a location to maximize your discount, to the extent that people had been able to figure out and share the algorithm.)
These sorts of tweaks would be easy to implement, but there’s no functionality in phones to provide them. It’s as if the manufacturers of the phones want to rat you out to every business with a phone app.
I resist by strictly limiting which apps I install on my phone. But I’d be a lot happier with a virtual machine which would put me in control of what data about me those installed apps could get.
I do not understand why anyone would want their drivers license on their phone (iPhone Driver’s License Support Expands to Iowa). It purely facilitates a cop taking your phone away and doing who-knows-what to it.
Maybe on a burner phone….
