by Bill Betzler:
I'm concerned that your monthly newsletter is too macroscopic to be of help in microscopic actions. I've been working one-on-one w/ people experiencing homelessness for 15 years. I start out w/ a systems POV & end up w/ some specific possible action steps. I recognize like you do that systems change is an essential element of the solution & I believe there are things we can do now on a community level to begin to mend the circle.
Read MoreNOTE: This info has not been fact-checked.
I asked ChatGPT, “How can we preserve and strengthen family farms?” It responded:
Preserving and strengthening family farms is crucial for sustaining rural communities, protecting the environment, and ensuring food security. Here are some strategies that can help achieve this goal:
Read MoreWhat are healthy and unhealthy forms of leadership? Is a co-equal partnership the ideal or merely one option? Must some one person ALWAYS be in charge (in control)? If not, then when must someone be in charge? Are there examples of democratic hierarchies? Are there examples of viable collective/collaborative leadership? Do we need to cultivate more collective/collaborative leadership?
Never easy, the relationship between the vaunted political system and economic order appears to be in crisis. New books by historians and economists sound the alarm.
By Jennifer Szalai
The documentary series “Free to Choose,” which aired on public television in 1980 and was hosted by the libertarian economist Milton Friedman, makes for surreal watching nowadays. Even if Ronald Reagan would go on to win the presidential election later that year, it was still a time when capitalism’s most enthusiastic supporters evidently felt the need to win the public over to a vision of free markets and minimal government. Today’s billionaire donors may be able to funnel money to their favored candidates without even bothering to pay lip service to American democracy, but the corporate funders of “Free to Choose” set out to make their case.
They had an enormous audience: The 15 million viewers who watched the first episode saw an avuncular Friedman (diminutive and smiling), leaning casually against a chair in a Chinatown sweatshop (noisy and crowded), surrounded by women pushing fabric through clattering sewing machines. “They are like my mother,” Friedman said, gesturing at the Asian women in the room. She had worked in a factory too, after immigrating as a 14-year-old from Austria-Hungary in the late 19th century. Friedman explained that these low-wage garment workers weren’t being exploited; they were gaining a foothold in the American land of plenty. The camera then cut to a tray of juicy steaks.
Read MoreAnnie Galvin
So one more question that relates to the environment. Alyssa asks, “How do you reconcile the need to build more housing for people with catastrophic biodiversity loss” that might come along with that effort to build?
Ezra Klein
So I don’t think those are in tension, really. A lot of the pressure to build more housing comes from people who want to see dense places zoned so you can build up. And I don’t think it’s the case that if we just made it easier to add stories to buildings in San Francisco, you would have any more biodiversity loss. The biodiversity in San Francisco proper is — it’s already pretty lost.
Read MoreEzra Klein Interview
Annie Galvin
…Simon has a really interesting question: “What does think of Jason Hickel’s argument that degrowth is humanity’s best hope for addressing climate change?” So maybe could you just quickly gloss what degrowth is, and then give your opinion on it?
Ezra Klein
Yeah. And maybe we should do an episode on this. I have very complicated feelings about degrowth. So one is that it is tricky to talk about, as you say, because I find its advocates will continue to say that you’re defining it wrong. So let me use a definition from Hickel, which is, and I’m quoting him here, “Degrowth is a planned reduction of energy and resource throughput designed to bring the economy back into balance with the living world in a way that reduces inequality and improves human well-being.”
And so I’d note two things here. One is “designed.” Degrowth is, as its advocates understand it, a act of global economic planning really without equal anywhere in human history. It is an act of extraordinary central planning. So that’s one thing that is going to become important in my answer.
Read MoreBy John Sanger
Before the Industrial Age reached its zenith, it exerted one more impact on rural America; loss of transportation options. Fifty years ago there was bus, plane and rail service from regional centers and even many small towns throughout the country, today almost all of that has disappeared. Only the automobile remains and it is subject to the vagaries of weather and other interruptions. For a rural based teleworker that needs to have time-dependent, reliable and fast access to their employer, this poses another challenge to the decision to move to a rural community and to help rebuild their demographics. The Smart Region.US concept selects Personal Rapid Transit (PRT) to fill this void.
Read MoreBy Eyal Press
After the recession in 2008, Harriet Krzykowski was hired as a mental health aide at the Dade Correctional Institution, a prison in South Florida. Her salary was modest — $12 an hour.
But the low pay bothered her far less than hearing about guards visiting abuse on the mentally ill prisoners entrusted to her care. Some of these prisoners were being starved, Ms. Krzykowski was told. Others were locked inside a scalding shower. Among the prisoners subjected to this sadistic punishment was Darren Rainey, a mentally ill man who collapsed in the stall and died. Autopsy photos later leaked to the press showed that much of the skin on Mr. Rainey’s chest, back and legs had peeled off.
Read MoreBy Peter Hoffman
Few business sectors have experienced such violent swings between feast and famine in the last year as restaurants. Early in the pandemic, there was a demand problem: Few to no customers were willing to take the risk of eating in a dining room. Today, people are going out to eat again, and amid overwhelming demand, there’s a supply issue: A serious labor shortage confronts restaurants across the country.
As a chef and former restaurant owner, I know that the root causes of this predicament date to well before the pandemic. To address it, restaurants must fundamentally change. Diners must, too.
Read MoreBy Michelle Cottle
Growing old is an increasingly expensive privilege often requiring supports and services that, whether provided at home or in a facility, can overwhelm all but the wealthiest seniors. With Americans living longer and aging baby boomers flooding the system, the financial strain is becoming unsustainable.
Consider the demographics. In 2018, there were 52.4 million Americans age 65 or older and 6.5 million 85 or older. By 2040, those numbers will hit 80.8 million and 14.4 million, respectively. From now until 2030, an average of 10,000 baby boomers will turn 65 every day. Already, demand for care dwarfs supply. The Medicaid waiting list for home-based assistance has an average wait time of more than three years.
Read More…AT A BASIC LEVEL, the goal of A.I. and Faith and like-minded groups I came across in Toronto, San Francisco, London and elsewhere is to inject a kind of humility and historicity into an industry that has often rejected them both. Their mission is admittedly also one of self-preservation, to make sure that the global religions remain culturally relevant, that the texts and teachings of the last several centuries are not discarded wholesale as the world is remade. It is also a deeply humanistic project, an effort to bring different kinds of knowledge — not only faith-based, but also the literary, classical and oral traditions — to bear upon what might very well be the most important technological transformation of our time.
Read MoreIs technopessimism our new future?
By Thomas B. Edsall
A decade ago, the consensus was that the digital revolution would give effective voice to millions of previously unheard citizens. Now, in the aftermath of the Trump presidency, the consensus has shifted to anxiety that online behemoths like Twitter, Google, YouTube, Instagram and Facebook have created a crisis of knowledge — confounding what is true and what is untrue — eroding the foundations of democracy.
These worries have intensified in response to the violence of Jan. 6, and the widespread acceptance among Republican voters of the conspicuously false claim that Democrats stole the election.
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