Aesthetic Blog.

This is because they still want nice things and will work for those but the part of their energy that was devoted to worrying about if they have enough money to pay the rent and bills this month is now freed up to do other things.

Policy Brief: Impacts of Unconditional Cash Transfers by Johannes Haushofery and Jeremy Shapiroz - A look at the new trend of charities just giving people in need money and letting them get on with it. (Case study is a charity called GiveDirectly)

Cash Transfers and Temptation Goods. A review of Global Evidence by the World Bank Policy Research Working Group - This study shows that poor people who are just given money do not spend any more than they usually would on luxury goods such as alcohol and tobacco and in some cases the spending on these items actually decreases.

“Cash Transfers for Children. Investing into the Future” An Editorial article in The Lancet - This is the study that out and out says giving people money makes them less lazy and less dependant on the state. Direct quote:

“Emerging data from cash transfers, conditional or unconditional, largely dispel the counter arguments that these programs prevent adults from seeking work or create a dependency culture which perpetuates intergenerational poverty.”

The Town With No Poverty by Evelyn Forget - A look at the case study of Dauphin Manitoba that introduced “mincome” to the poorest citizens to bring everyone above the poverty line.

Why Not Guarantee Everyone a Job? Why Negative Income Tax Experiments of the 1970s Were Successful by Allan Sheahen (warning this link is a download link, not a webpage) - Study of a similar “mincome” experiment in Denver that found that when people did stop working as many hours as they had done before the money it was because they were furthering their education or working hours better suited to raising their children. One woman who had dropped out of High School to get a job in order to provide for her children went back into education and ended up with a psychology degree and a job as a researcher.

“Daniel Moynihan and President-Elect Nixon: How Charity Didn’t Begin at Home” by Peter Passell and Leonard Ross for The New York Times - This is a look at how President Richard Nixon (Yes, that Richard Nixon) wanted to introduce basic income to the USA and was defeated by ignorant congressmen and senators that trusted their gut over the clear evidence. 

The Alaska Permanent Fund Dividend: An Experiment in Wealth Distribution by Scott Goldsmith - This is a look at Alaska’s policy of using the State oil revenue to give every single citizen $1000 a year.

Relationships Between poverty and Psychopathology - A study that outlines how growing up poor exposes children to a myriad of psychological problems and mental illnesses.

Assessing the Economic and Non-Economic Impacts of Harrah’s Cherokee Casino, North Carolina - The Harrah Cherokee Casino is widely studied and a resounding success as a case study for Basic Income.

An Estimate of the cost of child poverty in 2013 by Donald Hirsch - This is a British study that estimates child poverty costs £29 billion (£44 Billion-ish). Basically child poverty is massively expensive for governments and Basic Income could essentially pay for itself by removing these expenses.

When Pundits Blamed White People for a Culture of Poverty by Matt Bruenig - Article that discusses how the idea that poor people are lazy and deserve to suffer is racist, classist and morally dangerous.

Rediscovering Poverty: How We Cured ‘The Culture of Poverty’ Not Poverty Itself by Barbara Ehrenreich - An article on how trying to improve the morals of the poor so they can work harder and get themselves out of poverty is a ridiculous waste of time and money and quite frankly an insult to the people we force into these programs. My favourite waste of money that Ehrenreich points out is the $250 million dollars that President Clinton set aside for ‘Chastity Training’ for impoverished single mothers, the US government in the 90s simply assuming that poor women were too stupid to understand where babies came from and that’s why they were poor, rather than, you know, having no money, no support structures and no affordable child care and healthcare.

In the Shadow of Speenhamland: Social Policy and the Old Poor Law by Fred Block and Margaret Somers - Speenhamland was a town in the UK where a Universal Income was introduced at the end of the 18th Century. After a few years it was declared a terrible failure and proof that poor people are evil and lazy and should be punished for being poor not helped out of poverty. Speenhamland led to the creation of Workhouses and the abolition of the Poor Laws that had worked as a form of social welfare up to that point. For 150 years Speenhamland was used by politicians and academics all over the world as proof that poor people were almost pathologically incapable of being trusted with their own money. Except the whole thing was a lie. The man sent to study Speenhamland hated the project and was unable to correctly interpret the data or factor in cultural issues that were also affecting the town. Modern researchers almost unanimously agree that Speenhamland was a success but the damage that 150 years of ignorance has done is deep and long lasting.

All of these examples and hundreds more can be found in Utopia for Realists by Rutger Bregman which lays out the argument for this issue far better than I ever could and also discusses issues such as raising the minimum wage and drastically cutting working hours. 

How to identify, and then deal with, your emotions

Emotional regulation skills

Conflict resolution skills

Creating and enforcing boundaries

Dialectical Behavioural Therapy skills

Emotional intelligence ideals to aim for

Axes of self-care/wellbeing

Self-care self-evaluation (find out where you’re starting)

How to make a self-care checklist

How to start a self-care habit

Reparenting resources

Crash Course Psychology

KhanAcademy: Understanding the Self and Society (some units more relevant than others)

Emotional education activities for children and teens

Objects of Despair: Inspired by Roland Barthes, Meghan O’Gieblyn’s monthly column examines contemporary artifacts and the mythologies we have built around them.

Fake Meat | Mirrors | Mars | Drones | The 10,000-Year Clock

Concrete: The Most Destructive Material on Earth (more on The Guardian’s “Concrete Week”)

The Unfortunate Fate of Childhood Dolls by Rainer Maria Rilke

AirPods Are a Tragedy

Thinging the Real: On Bill Brown’s “Other Things”

Sum Effects: “Personal or real, tangible or intangible, durable, hard, soft, consumable, or perishable: my grandmother owned none of it. Goldyne Alter died with no possessions.”

A janitor rescued migrants’ possessions from a border facility’s trash. Now they’re art.

Evocative Objects: Things We Think With, ed. by Sherry Turkle

Friendly Floatees

Great Pacific garbage patch

Plastic: an autobiography by Allison Cobb

Fewer Better Things by Glenn Adamson

The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction by Ursula K. Le Guin

Queer Phenomenology by Sara Ahmed (full disclosure this was an assigned reading and a lot of the heavier philosophical stuff started to go over my head but if that’s your thing it is interesting!)

and then. My partner started it. And the SAME THING happened to him.

(also, btw, the book links are to the Storygraph, which includes content warnings for each one!)

smth funny and lighthearted about a security robot who'd rather watch TV then do its job? all systems red by martha wells (first novella in the The Murderbot Diaries series, 6 books, ongoing)

a complex, intricate political space opera following a warship AI who's lost (almost) everything? ancillary justice by ann leckie (first in the Imperial Radch trilogy) (fun fact! bc of space linguistics reasons, all characters in this series are referred to with she/her pronouns, making gender a non-factor - it's really cool!)

a dark story about travelling between parallel universes and a woman who is dead in almost every single one? the space between worlds by micaiah johnson (standalone) (SO good, i don't get to recommend it often enough!!!)

a story about grief and letting go, and a unique take on alien invasion? the seep by chana porter (standalone novella)

hey, how abt some dystopian YA, for old times sake? specifically, one with sapphics and sick mechas? try gearbreakers by zoe hana mikuta (first in duology)

or, if you'd prefer something a bit less angsty, YA about a ragtag group of teens and a space heist? the disasters by m. k. england (standalone)

alternate history steampunk that blurs the line btwn science fiction and fantasy? the black god's drums by p. djeli clark (standalone, novella)

a dark gone girl-esque thriller about clones? the echo wife by sarah gailey (standalone)

poetic sapphic romance and time travel? this is how you lose the time war by max gladstone and amal el-mohtar (standalone)

a hopeful utopian future and a human-robot friendship? a psalm for the wild-built by becky chambers (novella, first out of two) (this author's got a whole bunch of hopepunk sci-fi novels in general, if that's smth you're looking for!)

africanfuturism, coming-of-age, and cool jellyfish aliens? binti by nnedi okorafor (novella, first in trilogy)

spicy lesbian cyborgs? and shall machines surrender my benjanun sriduangkaew (novella, first in the Machine Mandate series, 6 books)

cosmic horror with an autistic scientist, cyborg angels and AI gods? the outside by ada hoffmann (first in trilogy, 2 books are out)

also, if you're a fan of Janelle Monáe, may i draw your attention to the fact that they've recently come out with a Dirty Computer short story collection, each story co-written with a diff writer?

this list is long enough, but have some more authors (who are not cis men) also worth checking out: rivers solomon, yoon ha lee, charlie jane anders, aliette de bodard, xiran jay zhao, mary robinette kowal, corinne duyvis

Parisian Holiday credit: paris.explore

Start helping with citizen science projects

What's a citizen science project? Basically, it's crowdsourced science. In this case, crowdsourced climate science, that you can help with!

You don't need qualifications or any training besides the slideshow at the start of a project. There are a lot of things that humans can do way better than machines can, even with only minimal training, that are vital to science - especially digitizing records and building searchable databases

Like labeling trees in aerial photos so that scientists have better datasets to use for restoration.

Or counting cells in fossilized plants to track the impacts of climate change.

Or digitizing old atmospheric data to help scientists track the warming effects of El Niño.

Or counting penguins to help scientists better protect them.

Those are all on one of the most prominent citizen science platforms, called Zooniverse, but there are a ton of others, too.

Oh, and btw, you don't have to worry about messing up, because several people see each image. Studies show that if you pool the opinions of however many regular people (different by field), it matches the accuracy rate of a trained scientist in the field.

--

I spent a lot of time doing this when I was really badly injured and housebound, and it was so good for me to be able to HELP and DO SOMETHING, even when I was in too much pain to leave my bed. So if you are chronically ill/disabled/for whatever reason can't participate or volunteer for things in person, I highly highly recommend.

Next time you wish you could do something - anything - to help

It’s multiply-checked by more than one person, so don’t worry about fucking it up because your concentration is fucked. Your input is valuable but not the only input.

I find Zooniverse very good, and it does Citizen Historian work too - I spent time digitising concentration camp records because a) families still don’t know what happened to some of their loved ones b) this makes the records available for historians without travelling to archives in person, which I can testify is *invaluable* for disabled historians and helps cut the need for overseas travel to do vital historical work.

(Thanks to everyone who left these in the notes! If you know more, put them in the notes, and I might add them! And ty @enbycrip for the fantastic addition that covered a bunch of details I didn't get to)

Apps/Websites

eBird (birds

Merlin (birds)

citizenscience.gov (big project database, US-based)

iNaturalist (nature)

MapSwipe (collaboration between several Red Cross organizations and Doctors Without Borders, update vital geospatial data) Smithsonian archives (transcriptions, many subjects)

Cornell Bird Lab (birds)

FoldIt (folding proteins)

Fathomverse (sea animals)

Project Monarch (butterflies)

In person

Bioblitz (nature) Species watch (species) Audobon Society (birds)

Also:

This stuff makes a huge difference.

Also, if you want to make the biggest impact on these sites, release any material with the more permissive licenses, like CC-BY. If you add a NC or ND clause, for instance, your photos cannot be included on Wikipedia or bplant or a number of other educational sites, because those license restrictions are incompatible with combining with copyleft material.

So, hey. You. Stop doomscrolling. Take a deep breathe. And if you want, try doing some citizen science or citizen history instead

I'm also going to especially promote MapSwipe, for those who want to do something tangible to help people now.

From their website:

Data Everywhere

It is not saying you should distract yourself from what's going on right now.

It's saying that if you are feeling despair, you will feel and do better if you channel that into something to help.

I especially want to highlight MapSwipe again.

Help make maps accurate so people in war zones, disaster zones, and remote locations can get medical attention, rescue, and hope - by making sure the disaster response and aid workers have good maps!!

More info about MapSwipe and the work they do on their website, and also here.

it's subtitled "A Glimpse Into Extreme Birdwatching," an inaccurately voyeuristic title, because the glimpse is at Themselves.

two unemployed brothers (one an unemployed videographer, one nonspecifically unemployed who has a ferocious new interest in birds) decide: firstly, they are now birders. secondly, to start their birding adventure in a maximalist way by doing A For-Real Big Year.

what's a Big Year? they don't know, they just heard of it now. oh, what's that? they're going and seeing the greatest number of birds from Jan 1 to Dec 31 in the lower 48 by way of their shitass van. they also have about my own exact knowledge of birds, which is: there are bald eagles, great blue herons, crows, and a lot of small brown birds which are all called "sparrows."

a youtube comment correctly remarks that it's like watching oldschool skating videos, where you got maybe 480p of the finally-stomped kickflip down the stairwell, but the joy isn't in that, it's of the camera following the guy as he jumps into the bushes with three cheering friends. they are uniquely new to birding AND uniquely good at cinematography.

the documentary works because These Guys Love Birds. they love birds so much. they are signing up to rare-bird-sighting email lists. they are taking hour-long detours to find a kind of grackle that they later learn lives in every single gas station dumpster they've passed. they're interviewing just about everyone they come across, from award-winning birders to a guy walking down a freeway. they have an instinct for jon bois style stupid-but-emotional bits—they are calling every defunct bird hotline in old birding guides to see if any of them can give them a tip about a local bird; or to see if any of them are still connected at all. they are making fun of quails.

this all works WELL. it is beautiful wildlife cinematography cut with handheld camcorder-quality ski bum video. it is what documentary is for.