Category: News

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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.

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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.

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In the latest news from the Urban Management journal Duh:

perhaps we need to thin the fuel of the community itself.

Oh, sorry, I meant the latest news from this opinion piece in the NYT: Which City Burns Next?

I mean, I understood this in 1986 (as I described in this post, about why I moved out of Los Angeles).

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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.

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Just a smidgen longer than my previous long run, but this time I added some intervals along about the midpoint, where I ran hard for one minute, and then spent two minutes recovering, and repeated for a total of 5 times. Probably not the smartest choice (embedding that in a long run), but I enjoyed it anyway.

My fitbit says I did 4.75 miles in 1:13:26.

Just a spot where you can choose which part of the footpath to follow