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Showing posts from August 11, 2024

Universal Basic Incompetence

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  Universal Basic Incompetence Simplicius Last week a watershed study on UBI—Universal Basic Income—was published,  which you can find here . Particularly noteworthy is it was carried out by Sam Altman’s Open Research, a cutout of OpenAI, to test theories of UBI’s potential future impact on society, given that it’s OpenAI’s radical developments in the AI field which threaten to replace the human workforce with machines in the not-so-distant future. In essence, the study gave $1,000 dollars per month to 1,000 low-income Americans for three years, with another 2,000 people serving as control group with $50 a month. The money was given unconditionally, meaning they could spend it on anything they want, unlike various forms of Welfare with severe restrictions on its usage. It’s said to be the largest scale experiment of its type in America, though there have been others elsewhere, like a well-known  UBI pilot study in Finland in 2017 . The researchers aimed to answer a series of questions,

How a BRICS Trio Is Staring Down Israel

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  How a BRICS Trio Is Staring Down Israel Pepe Escobar   The Global Majority is fully aware that the genocidals in Tel Aviv are trying as hard as they can to provoke an apocalyptic war – with full US military support, of course. Contrast that combative mindset with 2,500 years of Persian diplomacy. Iran’s acting Foreign Minister, Ali Bagheri Kani, has recently remarked how Tehran is trying hard to prevent “the Israeli regime’s ‘dream’ of triggering an all-out regional war.” But one should never interrupt the enemy when he is in total panic. Sun Tzu would have approved this maxim. Iran certainly won’t interfere as the US and G7 members pull out all stops to come up with some semblance of a Gaza ceasefire deal between Hamas and Israel to prevent a serious military retaliation by Iran and the Axis of Resistance. Earlier this week, that warning bore fruit: Hamas representative in Lebanon, Ahmed Abdel Hadi,  reported  yesterday that Hamas will not show up at the tentative negotiation round

Our Hawk Tuah Presidential Race

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  Our Hawk Tuah Presidential Race Getting weirder and weirder Donald Jeffries Too many Americans have become accustomed to voting for the “lesser of two evils.” Few seem to question just why we only have candidates of varying degrees of evil to choose from. Surely, with over 350 million citizens in America 2.0, we ought to be able to come up with a presidential candidate, once in a while, that isn’t evil. Those of us who were awake in the 1990s thought that Bill Clinton would be hard to beat, in terms of evilness. I mean, the Body Count alone really puts him on an impressive level. Explaining that, “it depends on what the meaning of the word is is” branded him as something special. Being accused of actual rape was also a plus in his favor. Although rape isn’t a rare allegation among our lesser and greater evil presidents. Ronald Reagan was accused of rape while he was in Hollywood, before he became a crisis actor politician. Both George W. Bush and Joe Biden were accused of rape, so it