It’s almost like…giving people enough to money to live instead of survive…is good
Imagine how much better those numbers would be if people had faith that basic income would continue and was available to everyone, everywhere.
The reason all of these things happen is, simply, because people are no longer held over a barrel by the threat of starvation and homelessness. They can afford to choose a job that they like and find fulfilling, or focus on developing their skills or educating themselves so that they can go into the fields they find genuinely interesting, instead of scrabbling to get whatever job - and whatever income - they can find and cling to it, white-knuckled, for fear of losing it all and becoming destitute at the drop of some rich fucker’s hat.
These people are living for themselves, rather than pissing their lives away to line the pockets of their bosses.
He missed one:
Road accidents go down.
Seriously, in one experiment, basic income reduced the number of car accidents. There’s no indication as to exactly why, but my personal assumption is people who are less stressed by money drive better.
Also, the same experiment showed no decrease in employment except for high school students (who concentrated on their studies) and those in the third trimester of pregnancy or within six months of giving birth (who were able to concentrate on their offspring).
Don’t let the right wing hijack this concept. They’re trying.
I don’t think the reduced car accidents are specifically because of less money stress. Instead, I’d guess that it’s just a result of people taking less risks on their commute to work, because being late can’t ruin them anymore. If you’re late for work, you might lose your job, and for people living paycheck to paycheck… sudden unemployment will probably kill them. So if they’re late, and driving safely won’t get them to work in time, driving like a lunatic is genuinely the safer option for them.
But with universal basic income, losing a job isn’t devastating, so people aren’t forced to gamble their lives to try and get to work on time. So they’re not crashing, and they’re not being a hazard to other people on the road, which means everyone’s commute is a lot safer and less accidents are happening.
also people aren’t sleep-deprived from working multiple jobs. we all know sleeplessness kills.
There’s some other reasons university basic income might reduce car accidents from a mechanic’s point of view. People with better financial security can afford to better maintain their vehicles avoiding say brake or tyre issues becoming critical whilst driving.
Recipients may also be able to own or finance newer vehicles less likely to have an accident causing failure in the first place.
Also people on UBI may not need to drive to work at all. Fewer cars on the road = fewer accidents.
You’re fourteen and you’re reading Larry Niven’s “The Protector” because it’s your father’s favorite book and you like your father and you think he has good taste and the creature on the cover of the book looks interesting and you want to know what it’s about. And in it the female character does something better than the male character - because she’s been doing it her whole life and he’s only just learned - and he gets mad that she’s better at it than him. And you don’t understand why he would be mad about that, because, logically, she’d be better at it than him. She’s done it more. And he’s got a picture of a woman painted on the inside of his spacesuit, like a pinup girl, and it bothers you.
But you’re fourteen and you don’t know how to put this into words.
And then you’re fifteen and you’re reading “Orphans of the Sky” because it’s by a famous sci-fi author and it’s about a lost generation ship and how cool is that?!? but the women on the ship aren’t given a name until they’re married and you spend more time wondering what people call those women up until their marriage than you do focusing on the rest of the story. Even though this tidbit of information has nothing to do with the plot line of the story and is only brought up once in passing.
But it’s a random thing to get worked up about in an otherwise all right book.
Then you’re sixteen and you read “Dune” because your brother gave it to you for Christmas and it’s one of those books you have to read to earn your geek card. You spend an entire afternoon arguing over who is the main character - Paul or Jessica. And the more you contend Jessica, the more he says Paul, and you can’t make him see how the real hero is her. And you love Chani cause she’s tough and good with a knife, but at the end of the day, her killing Paul’s challengers is just a way to degrade them because those weenies lost to a girl.
Then you’re seventeen and you don’t want to read “Stranger in a Strange Land” after the first seventy pages because something about it just leaves a bad taste in your mouth. All of this talk of water-brothers. You can’t even pin it down.
And then you’re eighteen and you’ve given up on classic sci-fi, but that doesn’t stop your brother or your father from trying to get you to read more.
Even when you bring them the books and bring them the passages and show them how the authors didn’t treat women like people.
Your brother says, “Well, that was because of the time it was written in.”
You get all worked up because these men couldn’t imagine a world in which women were equal, in which women were empowered and intelligent and literate and capable.
You tell him - this, this is science fiction. This is all about imagining the world that could be and they couldn’t stand back long enough and dare to imagine how, not only technology would grow in time, but society would grow.
But he blows you off because he can’t understand how it feels to be fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, seventeen and desperately wanting to like the books your father likes, because your father has good taste, and being unable to, because most of those books tell you that you’re not a full person in ways that are too subtle to put into words. It’s all cognitive dissonance: a little like a song played a bit out of tempo - enough that you recognize it’s off, but not enough to pin down what exactly is wrong.
And then one day you’re twenty-two and studying sociology and some kind teacher finally gives you the words to explain all those little feelings that built and penned around inside of you for years.
It’s like the world clicking into place.
And that’s something your brother never had to struggle with.
This is an excellent post to keep in mind when you see another recent post criticizing the current trend of dystopian sci-fi and going on about how sci-fi used to be about hope and wonder.
Embossed braille should be standard on computer keyboards.
It would raise braille literacy more than anything else I could imagine - among both the blind and the sighted. Currently braille is actually vanishing due to an increasing reliance on audiobooks and screen readers.
I think that braille has a lot of potential use among non-blind groups. As an alternative to traditional writing for dyslexics. As a way to help photosensitive people type with their eyes closed. Or simply as a means to help sighted people find things without needing the lights on all the time!
Accessibility note: It’s important that braille doesn’t vanish because it’s one of the only written language that works for blind and sight-impaired people. It is necessary for them to interact with the real world where screen readers and audio devices are not available to them, such as elevators, most major metro systems, stairwells, doorways, the bumps in the sidewalk at corners are actually developed in conjunction with audio signals so blind people don’t step off the curb into traffic before the correct time.
Digital technology has made accessibility so much easier for all of us disabled people, but we still *need* the real-world accommodations that we fought and died for
fun fact about languages: a linguist who was studying aboriginal languages of Australia finally managed to track down a native speaker of the Mbabaram language in the 60s for his research. they talked a bit and he started by asking for the Mbabaram word for basic nouns. They went back and forth before he asked for the word for “dog” The man replied “dog” They had a bit of a “who’s on first” moment before realizing that, by complete coincidence,
Mbabaram and English both have the exact same word for dog.
on a similar note, a traditional Ojibwe greeting is “Nanaboozhoo” so when the French first landed in southern Canada they thought that they were saying “Bonjour!” Which is fucking wild to think about. Imagine crossing the ocean and the first people you meet in months somehow speak French.
One of my university linguistic textbooks had a list of identical or near identical words in Ancient Greek and Hawaiian. They were all coincidences of course, but it was wild.
The whole point of the list was showing how there’s a finite number of sounds human can produce, and it’s possible that multiple languages will end up assembling similar sounding words meaning roughly the same thing, and that therefore assuming that similar sounding words MUST be related is hubrys.
My favourite one of these is swedish and japanese Koja and Koya (小屋). Both are pronounced basically the same (ko-ya), and both mean “hut/small hosue”, but they are not related to eachother in the slightest. Japanese koya comes from Ko- (prefix meaning “Small”) and Ya meaning “dwelling”. Swedish Koja on the other hand comes from Koj (a sleeping place on a ship), in turn from latin Cavea (enclosure/cage/cavity), probably via Dutch Kooi.
What people think why i became a bookbinder: Oh she wants to explore her artistic horizon with those pretty leather bound books of hers. She even gives them out as gifts to her friends. It most likely helps her with anxiety or maybe she just wanted a more special costume made notebook.
Why I actually became a bookbinder: I just illegally downloaded and printed out several of my favourite fanfics and books and started binding them into books cuz I love reading them but looking at screens for too long gives me headaches.
op youre fucking big brained oh my god
If you want to i can send you a link to some of the Tutorial videos i started binding my fanfic books.
so was no one was gonna tell me that the painting saturn devouring his son was found painted directly onto the walls of the artist’s home after he died and that it may not even be depicting the greek legend, that’s just the most common interpretation??????
hello????
Not only was it painted on the wall of his house, it was painted on the wall of his dinning room.
Like imagine you go over to your boy’s house for dinner and that’s across from you while you eat. Like would you say something or just
This is the painting is question by Francisco Goya. Not only was this painting found, but a series of 13 other disturbing pieces of art called his “Black Paintings”. At this point in Goya’s life he had lost his hearing (well most of it) and had moved into a villa where he became a recluse. This was directly after the Napoleonic wars. These paintings were never meant to be found. They were never commissioned and he solely made these for himself.
This is where they think each of those paintings was placed in the house.
What in the goddamn…?
tumblr finding out about fucked up art history is so fun to watch
