Mother’s Day Is Sunday May 8, 2017May 5, 2017 So how about giving her the gift of mental acuity? Help take 10 years off her mental age and avoid dementia? If you give your mom a year of BrainHQ you’ll get — as a bonus — a free year yourself! (Sure, you’re just 39 — but so is Tom Brady, and he swears by it.) “And wait — there’s more!” Take advantage of this special Mother’s Day offer and get, also, a free download of Soft-Wired: How the New Science of Brain Plasticity Can Change Your Life by much-awarded BrainHQ inventor Michael Merzenich. (“What if you had the power to change your brain for the better? In Soft-Wired, Dr. Michael Merzenich–a world authority on brain plasticity–explains how the brain rewires itself across the lifespan, and how you can take control of that process to improve your life. In addition to fascinating descriptions of how your brain has produced your unique memories, skills, quirks, and emotions, Soft-Wired offers sound advice for evaluating your brain and gives clear, specific, scientifically proven guidance for how to rejuvenate, remodel, and reshape your brain to improve it at any age.”) You can send Mom the gift electronically or print out a certificate to deliver in person. If she does the BrainHQ exercises an hour a week for ten weeks this year — and four more hours four years from now — a 10-year study of 2,800 subjects suggests she’ll have a 48% lower likelihood of developing dementia than if she just did crossword puzzles. And (as I’ve written before, being an enthusiastic shareholder in this enterprise): imagine how low that risk would fall if she did, say, 10 hours a year of these exercises every year. By 90%? Not a bad gift for a holiday whose commercialization its founder found appalling. Or you could just give her chocolates.
Why Is This Complicated? May 5, 2017May 5, 2017 Obamacare takes billions from the wealthy to subsidize health care for the rest of us. The just-passed Republican bill takes those billions away from health care and gives it back to the wealthy. It’s that simple. If wealth for the wealthy trumps health care for the rest of us, yesterday’s vote was, as the Republicans argue, a great achievement. Here are 10 ways it breaks their promises and could affect you personally. Trump got elected saying he would give “everybody” “great health care” at “a tiny fraction of the cost.” But how will he do it? By increasing the number of doctors and nurses but paying them just a “tiny fraction” of what we do now? By switching to a single-payer system modeled after those in the rest of the civilized world? That would actually be a great step forward, but it’s clearly not what he has in mind. He has nothing in mind except to make wild promises that play on people’s frustrations and naivete. In Rare Unity, Hospitals, Doctors and Insurers Criticize Health Bill. Have a great weekend.
Billy Kimmel May 4, 2017May 3, 2017 Did you see where Jimmy Kimmel spoke movingly about his newborn son? And how health care for children should transcend partisan politics? Whether or not you take 13 minutes to watch on YouTube, as more than 7 million others have . . . . . . take one minute to click “Jimmy Kimmel Really Changed A Lot Of Minds In The Fox Audience (No, He Didn’t)” and read the comments. E.g.: Nobody wants to hear about your kid. Millions are going through the same thing stuck with the Obamacrap that you support. Cry them a river. David Zippel: “Even though I am a realist, it shocked me. But then I remembered the gay veteran who asked a question about health insurance at a Republican Presidential primary Q&A and some in the crowd shouting ‘Let him die.'” Wanted: a kinder, gentler nation. Less, “Let him die!” or “Lock her up!” More, “Blessed are the meek.”
Musk See TV May 2, 2017 His interview was called “The Future We’re Building — And Boring.” I referred to a lot of it yesterday, but now here it is. So exciting! (Separately, I ran into a friend last night who knows Elon’s mother. She kept not accepting a free Tesla — she didn’t want to waste his money — until finally, apparently, after years driving around in some ratty old Chevy or something, he said, “Mom, you’re embarrassing me. You have to drive one of my cars.” So she relented.) Oh! And did you watch Al Gore’s trailer? When I put something in bold print, that means you have to do it. It’s a law. And have you shared the Ted Halstead’s idea for unlocking the climate puzzle — the carbon dividend we should all be getting? C’mon, people — we have a planet to save!
An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth To Power Unlocking The Climate Puzzle April 30, 2017May 3, 2017 Al Gore was at TED. We’re making progress. Solar’s now cheaper than coal in some places — and continuing to fall. It’s too late to avoid disaster: everything from more powerful storms to longer Zika transmission windows. Kiss low-lying areas good-bye. But even Republican senators have told Al privately they’re on the verge of publicly acknowledging the crisis and joining efforts to confront it. Imagine that! Pre-order An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth To Power — here. Watch the trailer here. Seriously: watch the trailer here. Within a few decades, why would anyone build a house without a solar roof? Or replace an old one with one that fails to generate electricity? (Another advantage: solar roofs won’t leak or need replacing.) Calculate your current solar economics here. Fueling cars from the sun — via your roof — is around the corner. Gas stations are the Blockbuster Videos of the future. Today’s five-year-olds may never need one — or a driver’s license. If they grow up owning cars at all, those cars will be (a) self-driving; (b) electric; (c) able to generate revenue from those who won’t bother owning one. In a few years, you’ll have your car drive you to work and then — if you choose — send it off to make money driving others. The choice will be yours: share it with no one; with friends and family; with anyone willing to pay when you don’t need it. Self-driving technology will put millions out of work — truck drivers, cab drivers, Uber and Lyft drivers, parking lot attendants, DMV clerks . . . . . . and it will avoid millions of accidents, saving tens of thousands of lives each year in the U.S. alone — and putting yet more people out of work: insurance agents, claims adjusters, emergency room attendants. Climate change could increase cloud cover, but that (we learned from the cloudologist who immediately followed the glaciologist) works both ways. Increased low-altitude clouds would cool us by their shade, but increased high-altitude clouds could warm the planet even more. Spewing chalk dust into the upper atmosphere could deflect enough sunlight to cool Earth back to pre-industrial levels — a single fire hose spewing nonstop would provide sufficient volume, this inventor told us, and chalk dust is so safe we put it in baby food — but hang on, we were assured by everyone else: this is a terrible idea. It would be used to treat the symptoms of our problem, not the problem itself; would do nothing about the acidification of our oceans; could affect things that rely on traditional levels of sunlight — like plants. No, Greenland and pretty much everything else is melting; the 16 hottest years on record have occurred in the last 17 years; we need to stop spewing billions of tons of CO2 into the atmosphere each year. Enter Ted Halstead, who unlocked the climate puzzle — a plan fore a gradually rising carbon tax, every penny of which would be remitted in dividends each year to every adult American, 70% of whom (especially the least affluent) would come out ahead and should thus want to vote for politicians who favor it. (Bonus: we save our planet for future generations, but that’s a harder sell.) . . . The carbon tax would be collected at the refinery or at the first point that fossil fuels enter the economy—typically the mine, well or port—and then passed on to consumers in the form of, for instance, higher gasoline prices, airfare, and electricity bills (depending on your source of power). If your carbon footprint were precisely at the nation’s median, you would get back in dividends essentially the same amount as your costs increase. But since the wealthy have larger carbon footprints on account of their more lavish lifestyles, the majority would come out ahead, even before they start altering their behavior. [But] . . . wouldn’t such a system encourage manufacturing companies and the jobs they provide to move to another jurisdiction? The answer . . . is border adjustments, levied on the carbon content of imports from countries with no or lesser carbon pricing. . . . . . . Suppose the United States puts such a system in place: any products it imports from Europe or China would be subject to border adjustment taxes, in turn distributed to all Americans via dividends. The European and Chinese publics would soon realize that they are being disadvantaged by such a system, as the dividends that should be going to them are in fact going to Americans. The obvious cure is to push for similar legislation in their own lands. Prominent Republicans back this plan — he flashed several faces up on the screen — George Schultz! James Baker! — and this is absolutely something the world should do — should have begun 30 years ago. Start pushing it. Pre-order Al’s book. And seriously: watch the trailer here. This is all so important, I may take the rest of the week off.
Saving The Trumps Billions April 27, 2017 By eliminating the alternative minimum tax, Trump’s tax plan would have saved him 85% of the federal income tax he paid in 2005. By eliminating the estate tax (if his estate is truly worth $10 billion), it will save his heirs $4.5 billion. There are probably other ways Trump would benefit from his plan, but we can’t know because — remarkably — his 2015 tax returns were selected for audit within seconds of filing. All his tax returns are under audit, always. No audit has ever been completed on any year of his taxes, ever. And that — along with the unprecedented crowds at his inauguration and the fact that, frankly, we’ve been winning so much we’re actually tired of winning — is why his tax plan makes so much sense. If rich people and corporations pay less tax, we’ll have the money to rebuild our military, renew our infrastructure, and assure everyone gets better health care at lower cost. Herewith, Nick Kristof’s less sarcastic analysis. TED is inspiring. It confirms (for me, at least) that these next few decades will be either the beginning of the end or the end of the beginning for our species. Do we hurtle off the rails? Or do we successfully harness the technological explosion that will make virtually anything possible? We have a president excited by the future of coal.
I’m At TED April 26, 2017April 26, 2017 So I’m bursting with things to share. (We had the Pope yesterday!* I rode a lithium-battery-powered bike!) Mainly, from yesterday: the future of robots and artificial intelligence — and the need for an incentives-enhanced universal guaranteed income. But let’s start with Dollar Street: a website that sent photographers to 240 homes in 46 countries to document 135 different items — their beds, their toys, their toilets — that shows how similarly people at similar income levels live all over the globe. I.e., yes, you live in Ohio or Zimbabwe, but you also live at a particular income level. Take the tour. Everyone needs to eat, sleep and pee. We all have the same needs, but we can afford different solutions. Select from 100 topics. The everyday life looks surprisingly similar for people on the same income level across cultures and continents. More tomorrow — or soon. TED talks are free. Ideas worth spreading. *Via Satellite, but still.
The Minimum Wage WORKS April 25, 2017April 23, 2017 Not everyplace is doing as well as Seattle — or is as expensive to live in — so an immediate jump all the way to $15 everywhere may not compute. But consider: Friends, The unemployment rate in Seattle is at a near-record low of 2.9 percent. Weird, since we were told over and over again by corporate lobbyists and right-wing politicians that raising the minimum wage to $15 would lead to job losses across the board. It’s almost as if trickle-downers have been lying to us. Despite the repeated threats we’ve heard from minimum wage-law opponents, this great news for Seattle workers and our economy is hardly unprecedented. The National Employment Law Project analyzed 70 years of historical data and found no correlation between raised minimum wages and employment levels.1 Economists know this, too. In 2014, more than 600 experts, including seven Nobel laureates, signed a letter stating that “the weight of evidence (is) now showing that increases in the minimum wage have had little or no negative effect on the employment of minimum-wage workers, even during times of weakness in the labor market.”2 Our state also raised the minimum wage recently (it went from $9.47 to $11 on Jan. 1, and will soon reach $13.50), and things are looking up. The recent jobs report from the Washington Employment Security Department showed that state unemployment is at a nine-year low.3 Still, don’t get your hopes up that anti-worker ideologues will change their tune. The wealthy and powerful desperately need the public to believe it’d be bad if the rest of us became more wealthy and powerful. The pervasive myth that paying workers a living wage will make jobs disappear has been a go-to right-wing argument since the first 25 cents/hour minimum wage was set in 1938.4 As @TBPInvictus wrote, “There is scant evidence to be had that Seattle’s higher minimum wage experiment has thus far been anything but a resounding success. Three years of arguing against it have proven futile although, sadly, the ideological naysayers are hard-wired to deny fact-based, data-driven evidence.” Help pile more evidence in front of your trickle-downer friends and relatives by sharing my latest video update on Facebook. In solidarity, David Rolf President, SEIU 775 1. “Raise wages, kill jobs? Seven decades of historical data find no correlation between minimum wage increases and employment levels,” National Employment Law Project, May 5, 2016 2. “Economist Statement on the Federal Minimum Wage,” Economic Policy Institute, Jan. 14, 2014 3. “Unemployment rate hits nine-year low in Washington,” Employment Security Department, March 22, 2017 4. “F.D.R. makes the case for the minimum wage,” New York Times, March 7, 2014 Watch and share David’s video if you have a chance. Raising the minimum wage — apart from being the equitable and uplifting thing to do — would lower the cost to taxpayers of food stamps, the Earned Income Tax Credit, and health care assistance.
Greatest Birthday Ever April 24, 2017April 23, 2017 I got a Ferrari! All electric. Radio controlled. Also: a golden unicorn (head only; not real gold), a gold pocket watch (real gold!); The New York Times Essential Guide to Grilling (and a certificate for a grill!); a 1000-piece New Yorker cartoon jigsaw puzzle (beautifully wrapped and perfect for regifting, it being the thought that counts); number 11-of-40 of a limited edition Asher Levine outfit (here’s an example of his remarkable work) — “beachwear” I could not have pulled off even at 25 but will enjoy trying on for my friends to laugh at; two orchids I am determined not to kill (did I ever tell you about the astonishing giant silk orchid I inherited? that I always admired on my mom’s windowsill — it never lost a leaf — so I put it in a windowless hallway and got lots of compliments — what a beautiful orchid! — and then it died! It hadn’t been fake after all! I still can’t believe it!); and a dry-ice packed dinner-for-two flown up from Joe’s Stone Crabs, complete with crabs, mallet, tiny-forks, bibs, cole slaw (Joe’s cole slaw will change your life), creamed spinach (so rich it could end your life), New England clam chowder, and a key lime pie (worth dying from the spinach for, because one slice of Joe’s key lime pie and you feel, at least, as though you’ve gone to heaven). And I got a surprise party! Not a surprise like my 30th, when I was genuinely surprised. (It was at the apartment of the love of my life who had swapped me out for — well, I couldn’t blame him, but it was not my idea of fun to be feted at the home of my ex and my replacement.) And not a surprise like my 40th, when I was totally mind-blowingly surprised — brilliantly thrown off the scent by a kind of lame “fake” surprise party on my actual birthday, so that when, a few days later, I got home from a diversionary trip to find the whole house decorated and filled with friends from all over, I was completely and entirely coulda-burst-into-tears-but-managed-not-to flabbergasted. Nor a surprise like my 50th, to which Charles had sent out beautiful misspelled invitations (“SUPRISE!”), that I got wind of early on — though it was pretty great. Nor a surprise like my 60th — the surprise there being that there wasn’t one. Which made more sense. Indeed, not a surprise at all, technically speaking, because various people over the previous weeks had told me how sorry they were that they wouldn’t be able to make it. (“Three may keep a secret, if two of them are dead.”) But even though I knew to save the night, I had no idea what or where or who it would be — and when a car arrived, I got in, kind of assuming it would take me to Brooklyn. Right? Or New Jersey, maybe? Instead, it stopped at a familiar address on 17th Street. No one was downstairs but the door was unlocked and I climbed the stairs preparing to act surprised . . . a lot of stairs for a 70-year-old, but I pretend to be younger . . . and was surprised! There was the couple who’d sent the Stone Crabs up from Miami, and there were a couple who’d texted to say happy birthday “from London,” and there were . . . well, I don’t want to brag, but it was only the nicest crowd of people ever assembled. With videos on a giant movie screen, a sushi bar, a guy with a microphone in his lapel seemingly oblivious to the party reading a book (was he the event manager? why was he reading a book in the middle of my party?) that turned out to be my book — you couldn’t hear it above the music (maybe at first, before it filled up?), but so diligent! He just kept his head down, slogging through for three hours, past the part where I swung at a wild pitch on a three-two count at the top of the ninth (I’ve never been great under pressure) and past . . . well, who knows? no one could hear him, but it was a great touch. As were the stacks of toilet paper purchased in bulk, with $70 wrappers around each (if you don’t know whose face is on the $70 bill, now you do). And margaritas! And — this was hysterical — the same photographer the DNC uses at all its fundraisers, following me around the entire night. (Hi, Beatrice!) It was very democratic. How did they even find so many of my friends to invite? WikiLeaks? There were no camels — one of my b-school pals imported camels and acrobats to his recent 70th — but do you know what? I don’t think even camels could have made the party any better. Though it would have been interesting watching them attempt to climb all those stairs. So here’s the thing about turning 70. It’s great. If you’re fortunate enough to have your health — which along with friends and a decent internet connection are all that matter — it’s just the best, because it’s like the first day of school. I am now officially the youngest old guy around. The envy of 73-year-olds, 80-year-olds, 91-year-olds, 102-year-olds. The Sixties were an amazing decade in which to reach adulthood; but one’s own sixties? Speaking here only in terms of branding, there’s just no way to make an age starting with the word “sixty” sound young. But seventy? And with a party like that to kick it off? And three-quarters of Joe’s key lime pie still in my freezer? And readers like you? Thank you, thank you, thank you.