Credit: thedailyblog.co.nz
Happy Basic Income Day! Sure, May 1st may be better known as International Workers’ Day, but some activists are trying to rebrand it. “Labor Day should not be about demanding ‘more jobs’ or higher wages,” the official Basic Income Day website explains. “Labor Day should be about struggling for the emancipation from unnecessary labor, unchosen labor, exploited labor.” And the way to get that emancipation, it argues, is through a basic income.
But wait — what is a “basic income” anyway? Here are the basics (get it?) of the idea, in eleven questions.
1) What is basic income?
“Basic income” is shorthand for a range of proposals that share the idea of giving everyone in a given polity a certain amount of money on a regular basis. A basic income comes with no categorical eligibility requirements; you don’t have to be blind or disabled or unemployed to get it. Everyone gets the same amount by virtue of being a human with material needs that money can help address.
There are a […]
Getting close to the end of the road? Thank you, House GOP.
Credit: TNS
Living down to our worst expectations, the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology voted Thursday to cut deeply into NASA’s budget for Earth science, in a clear swipe at the study of climate change.
The committee’s markup of the NASA authorization bill for fiscal 2016 and 2017 passed on a party-line vote, Republicans in the majority. The action followed what appears to be a deliberate attempt to keep Democrats out of the loop. According to Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson (D-Texas), the committee’s ranking Democrat, her caucus “did not even know [the markup] existed before last Friday. … After we saw the bill, we understood why.”
It’s hard to believe that in order to serve an ideological agenda, the majority is willing to slash the science that helps us have a better understanding of our planet. – Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson (D-Texas)
As outlined by Marcia Smith at […]
Credit: Shutterstock
We sometimes refer to people in comas as “vegetables,” a word choice that’s begun to fall out of favor, for understandable reasons — a person, even one who has lost his or her sensory and motor capabilities, is still a person. And at the risk of sounding like a parody of political correctness, the term isn’t really fair to vegetables, either.
So argues Stefano Mancuso, a Florence-based plant physiologist whom Michael Pollan dubbed the “poet-philosopher” of the plant intelligence movement. Plants, as Mancuso and co-author Allesandra Viola write in “Brilliant Green,” a short primer/manifesto on the history and science of this emerging field, can move — with intention. They have the same five senses as we humans, along with 15 others: along with being able to detect light and smells, they can sense the presence of water, for one, as well as chemical signals sent from other plants.
That’s right — according to Mancuso, plants have social lives, too.
You’re permitted some time to wrap your mind around this — the mainstream scientific community […]
