The pattern from Ireland and New York matches the pattern from every saturation basic income pilot we've ever run, going all the way back to Dauphin, Manitoba in the 1970s. When you give everyone in a community a floor of income, entrepreneurship skyrockets. New businesses get started. People take risks they wouldn't have otherwise taken. This isn't surprising. Starting a business is terrifying when the downside is losing your house. It's a lot less terrifying when the downside is falling back on a basic income.

Ireland did not do this because it was a nice thing to do for artists. Ireland did it because art is an enormous economic and cultural engine, and the current system is incredibly wasteful of the people who run that engine. The Irish government calculated a monetary value for art and discovered what should have been obvious: investing in art pays more than it costs. We can apply that same math to everything a basic income unlocks.

The no-go zone paradox: Chornobyl's wildlife thrives amid pro-nuclear shift. I used to be against nuclear power because disasters are inevitable. Now I'm for it because disasters are inevitable, and any place that humans can't go, non-human life does better.

And here in Seattle, Pike Place Market Pedestrianization Pilot Boosts Sales and Visits. They finally closed off cars from driving right through the middle of the market, so of course people would rather go there.

On a tangent, I kind of agree with right wing opposition to renewable energy, not for the reasons they give, which are dumb, but because every time humans get more energy, we use it to make the world worse. I used to think society would collapse from running out of energy. Now I think, if we had magical unlimited energy, society would collapse faster.

I agree, its late stage capitalism. If it's theft by the homeless, why do they have these in midwestern towns with hardly any homeless? If it's general moral decay, why did they not have this in previous decades when violent crime was much higher? If it's left wing economic policies, why did they not have this in the 1950s when the rich were taxed at 90%? If it's soft on crime policies, why are prison populations still so high? If it's anything specific to America, why do they have this in Europe?

People have given up on the social contract, because the ethic of capitalism is every man for himself. Every source of the meaning of life other than money has been wiped away. This is a slow-motion version of what happens in every disaster where people grab everything they can get. The disaster is the death of a culture in which leveraging money into more money is the highest good.

Next, an archive of a good Washington Post article about the rise of Nihilistic Violent Extremism, which prosecutors define as motivated by "a hatred of society at large and a desire to bring about its collapse by sowing indiscriminate chaos, destruction, and social instability."

I'll never understand the right. If society is fucked up, why would you want a strongman leader and uniformed thugs bullying whoever has the lowest status? That's going exactly the wrong direction. But nihilism I get. If society is becoming more and more prison-like, if our public institutions have abandoned the nourishment of human thriving and are only trying to herd us through padded cells until our merciful deaths, then fuck it, let's tear it all down. Let's destroy all fences, all locks, all credentials, all money, nothing but atomized humans coming back together in some new way.

I don't actually support that because, through pure luck, my life is pretty good, and I don't want to starve. I think we have a decent chance at a bumpy transition to a less fucked up world. I'm not going to kill myself, because I don't want to be remembered as having given up. But I can confidently predict a rising tide of both nihilistic extremism and suicide acceptance. You can see it already in this Reddit thread from three weeks ago: At what point does choosing to die become okay?

Whatever the gibbon has got hold of is already something else; it's the next thing he's going to have hold of. The present thing is not being replaced by the next thing he's going to catch; it already is the next thing, and the next thing after that is already coming into place, coming at him, coming to him. There's no way that it can't come, or that he would miss it. His catching it is not only built into his body and his rhythm, but it's built into the branch or the limb or the part of a wall that he takes into the rhythm. His whole environment gives itself to him in the rhythm, it flows around him, everything is linked, everything is together for him, and is part of his motion, it's all flow and it's all him, as long as he keeps it up.