January 9, 2017
From Matt Bruenig: “The average person in the top 1% receives a UBI equal to 7.5 times the average income in the country.” / Medium
“Chuck [Schumer] wants issues to have no negatives, but it’s the Trump era. He’s looking at polls showing 60 percent for the Carrier deal and thinking to himself, Maybe we should support that.” The main takeaway from this excellent profile of Harry Reid as he exits the Senate is how very, very ill-suited the current Senate Democrats are to deal with President Trump, especially without Reid. / New York
Footage of the Senate’s Obamacare repeal vote, which passed 51-48. Watch on mute, pair perhaps with a dirge of your choice. / popculturemadness.com
Even if Senate Republicans seem to be mellowing on the idea of going forward with an immediate repeal, an enormous range of benefits are at risk. / Politico
Applying fees successfully changed behavior of hospitals with high rates of patients who had trouble after leaving care. / STAT
Hillary Clinton’s goal was to double the child tax credit to spur childcare, an important public health investment, “the most important investment in lifelong health and well-being.” / NPR, vtdigger.org
“Behavioral science shows that people are biased in favor of the status quo, and have a tendency to avoid cognitively onerous activities like reevaluating the health insurance plan they are on.” Better to have been insured and lost than never to have been insured at all. Psychology suggests people will push to regain Obamacare-related policies. / STAT
Obama says he’s happy to let Trump take up the healthcare reform mantle, even offering to let him call the replacement Trumpcare. / foxnews.com
Sometimes when work’s frustrating or rough (hello, Monday), it’s appealing to look at other people’s lives and see what they face.
1. The latest business innovation: “Radical candor.” / BuzzFeed
2. The more immigrants arrive in France, the more natives’ wages go up. / sciencedirect.com
3. London possibly isn’t the best place to work: in five days, it breached its annual pollution limit. (See also: A Chinese doctor turns to poetry to explain the connection between smog and lung cancer.) / The Guardian, Quartz
4. An interesting job? At Danish zoos, surplus animals are killed and then dissected before the public. / The New Yorker
5. “How to be productive in terrible times.” / kottke.org
“‘Generation’ occurs in Obama’s speeches almost as often as ‘story,’ and it might be the quintessential Obama term. It has both a biblical and a marketing resonance: it calls to mind both Ecclesiastes and Adweek.” An examination of eight years of Obama’s speeches. / n+1
Ever wonder how comics get made? A master class conversation on the writing and illustrating process, with Limbo creators Caspar Wijngaard and Dan Watters. / The Creators Project
“Donald Trump’s Republican Congress convened only three days ago, and members are already finding that eliminating Obamacare will be far messier, politically, than devising and implementing it was for Democrats.” If Republicans are smart, they’ll work to improve the parts of Obamacare that their constituents want improved, while leaving the general framework in place. / The New Republic
“Only a tiny fraction of people who were exposed to the original false story end up learning of the retractions.” Bad information, once disseminated, is hard to bring back, and publishers have little incentive to reverse the situation. / The Intercept
The incoming Ghanaian president is being lampooned for lifting passages word-for-word from George W. Bush and Bill Clinton for his inauguration speech. / Al Jazeera
Hawaii’s homelessness problem—the worst in the country—was partially created after the U.S. Military evacuated some Micronesian islands and repatriated their tens of thousands of inhabitants to American soil so their former homes could be used for nuclear testing. / The New York Times, Mother Jones, Wikipedia
Related: The Marshall Islands, part of the Micronesian island region used for nuclear testing, is now staring down destruction at the hands of climate change. / The Washington Post
Trump’s Treasury Secretary pick, the impossible-to-pronounce Steven Mnuchin, ran a bank that tried to force people out of their homes without any actual cause, was accused of of “widespread misconduct” by an initial California Department of Justice investigation (that Kamala Harris declined to prosecute), and cultivated close ties to the LAPD by funding disturbing “scared straight”-style boot camps for young children. / ProPublica, The Intercept, blog.littlesis.org, marketwired.com, dailynews.com
“Policies that subsidize electric vehicles and solar panels for the wealthy raise energy prices and harm the black community.” The Koch Brothers are funding initiatives to convince communities of color that environmentalism is evil, resulting in sentences like the above showing up in the platform of the National Black Political Convention in pollution-riddled Gary, Ind. / The New York Times
In a last-minute attempt to document its work before the entire division is shoved into a volcano by Jeff Sessions, the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division published a report detailing the police reform investigations it’s opened, mostly under Obama. / justice.gov
Related: Obama’s lengthy Harvard Law Review reflection on the president’s role in criminal justice reform. / harvardlawreview.org
Coachella sucks even more than you thought: Owner Philip Anschutz has a “conservative agenda” supported by ticket sales of his sports, concerts and entertainment giant AEG. / Politico, teenvogue.com
How to see dead people again and again: Industrial Light and Magic explains re-birthing Leia and Tarkin for the latest Star Wars film. / Gizmodo