The Post-Partisan Emporium

  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...

 Thanks to BrahmaFear for recommending this article... America's Next Motorcycle Philosopher? He's a bestselling writer with a penchant for bikes, but "Archedelia" author Matthew Crawford offers a new kind of wisdom. A Substack Q&A MATT TAIBBI  AND  EMILY BIVENS In 1974 a fictionalized account of writer Robert Pirsig’s 17-day motorcycle trip with his son in 1968 hit bookstores after surviving 121 rejections, and quickly became one of the all-time surprise publishing hits. Connecting with audiences all around the world, Pirsig could soon claim to have authored the top-selling  philosophy-themed book in American history , selling over 5 million copies. This was despite the fact that even its fans rarely knew how to describe the book, with  New York Times  reviewer Christopher Lehmann-Haupt concluding that whatever its philosophical worth, it was “ intellectual entertainment of the highest order .” Author Matthew Crawford has a bestselling book with a moto...