Idea: Subscription Retirement
Upon retirement, buy a remainder-of-your-life-lease.
Every month, pay a set amount into the pool – to keep utilities, medical care, food, and other services going. Credit for doing work (in the greenhouse, or as a nurse, etc) or ideas (work to implement) or active participation (training, book writing etc).
Upon your death, the slot is given to someone else.
Why Bob Rubin Sucks
Felix Salmon makes the case.
Video: 1889 Pandemic
“The rapid progression of the 1889 pandemic demonstrates that slower surface travel, even with much smaller traveler flows, sufficed to spread the pandemic across all of Europe and the United States in ~4 months,” the researchers wrote in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on April 26. “This observation supports mathematical model results, which anticipated that restricting air transportation would have little, if any, effect. One possible hypothesis is that the important predictor of the speed of the pandemic is not the absolute numbers of passengers traveling between cities but the connectedness of the network of cities.”
Review: Concrete Underground
At the recommendation of Marc Horne (whose new book I am about to jump into), I read Concrete Underground by Moxie Mezcal. It’s a fast-paced gritty novel, with a very violent bent. Obviously, that’s not really my scene, but I did enjoy reading the book because it is interesting and well written. Think Palahniuk meets film noir meets new-age punk-emo.
As it turns out, I eventually got thrown off the ride that Marc describes as a “… noir plot [that] loops it into a feedback cycle until it breaks.” Still struggling with the end though (not sure what ended up happening, if anything at all).