Fluid Imagination“[R]esounding evidence” shows that…corporate profits accounted for about 53% of inflation during last year’s second and third quarters. Profits drove just 11% of price growth in the 40 years prior to the pandemic.
— Half of recent US inflation due to high corporate profits, report finds, The Guardian
The Republican base actively embraces Trump’s grievances; it emulates his pettiness; it supports his childlike inability to accept responsibility. These voters are not sighing in resignation and voting for the lesser of two or three or four evils. They are getting what they want—because they, too, are set on revenge.
A third of Republicans—and four in 10 voters who have a favorable view of Trump—agree with the statement that “true American patriots may have to resort to violence in order to save our country.” But violence against whom? We are not under foreign occupation. When people talk about “resorting to violence” they are, by default, talking about violence against their fellow citizens…
— Trump Wants Revenge—And So Does His Base, The Atlantic
Unlike other seemingly intractable problems, the demise of local news wouldn’t cost very much money to reverse. Journalists are not particularly well compensated. Assuming an average salary of $60,000 (generous by industry standards), it would cost only about $1.5 billion a year to sustain 25,000 local-reporter positions, a rough estimate of the number that have disappeared nationwide over the past two decades. That’s two-hundredths of a percent of federal spending in 2022…If more public or philanthropic money were directed toward sustaining local news, it would most likely produce financial benefits many times greater than the cost.
What do government officials do when no one’s watching? Often, they enrich themselves or their allies at the taxpayers’ expense.
– The Local-News Crisis Is Weirdly Easy to Solve, The Atlantic
During the pandemic, they were called ‘essential workers.’ Now they’ve been discovered to hold the key to power… But these Americans won’t benefit from their new status as essential voters until the parties spend less effort coming up with what they think the working class wants to hear, and more effort actually delivering what it wants and needs.
An economy that gives most people the chance for a decent life doesn’t arise by accident or through impersonal forces. It has to be created [through] political action, such as union organizing, that gives power to the have-nots; a civic ethos that restrains the greed of the haves; and public spending on people, infrastructure, and ideas…
— What Does the Working Class Really Want?, The Atlantic
Donald Trump has made much of the fact that three of the prosecutors who are heading prosecutions against him are Black: Fani Willis, the district attorney of Fulton County, Georgia; Letitia James, the attorney general of New York; and Alvin Bragg, the district attorney of Manhattan. Trump has labelled the three prosecutors “racist,” calls Bragg an “animal” and James “Peekaboo,” and insists that the charges against him are both politically and racially motivated. Sometimes it feels as if the century and a half separating the trial of Jefferson Davis from the trials of Donald Trump were as nothing.
– What Happened When The U.S. Failed To Prosecute An Insurrectionist Ex-President, The New Yorker
We know [the immigrants] come from prisons. We know they come from mental institutions and insane asylums. We know they’re terrorists. Nobody has ever seen anything like we’re witnessing right now. It is a very sad thing for our country. It’s poisoning the blood of our country.
Have You Listened Lately to What Trump Is Saying?, The Atlantic
Forall describes the project of creating an enlightened AI as perhaps “the most important act of all time.” Humans need to “build an AI that walks a spiritual path,” one that will persuade the other AI systems not to harm us.
– The Monk Who Thinks the World is Ending, The Atlantic