In My Defense, I Wasn’t Lying. I Was Just Wrong.

"Corporation stole your life's work? Well if there were UBI you wouldn't mind!"

"Robot stole your job? With UBI you wouldn't need your job!"

"Not enough help for disabled people? If we all had UBI that would replace disability payments!"

"Corporations conglomerating into a few huge unregulatable cartels which hike up the prices of everything forever? Just tax them and do UBI!"

Like, yes UBI would certainly help those problems. I'm not at all saying it wouldn't.

But if we do not actually fix society in a few key ways, we're going to end up right back where we are now.

For instance, if we had UBI nationally (instead of just in test areas), these big colluding megacorporations would simply raise the prices of everything to recapture the money. The only limit in the money they extract from us right now is how much we have. If we had more, they'd take more, and monopoly gives them the ability to do that efficiently.

UBI isn't going to hire a special ed teacher in my kid's school or make your apartment ADA compliant.

UBI shouldn't be a consolation prize for destroying a job someone loved. Humans like to work, and we like to benefit from our own work. I do not want to have my industry demolished to be done worse by a word salad machine, and be compensated by a check.

And of course, with corporations so huge they can buy politicians, they will soon vote the taxes down and UBI back out.

We need, for starters:

robust anti trust

money out of politics

regulations that protect ordinary people without a lawyer

"People back then always married young it's natural!!!" Every single 1800s guide I've ever met casually mentions that, of course, you really shouldn't get married before you're at least 20, and waiting until 25 is usually better.

Or, like. Okay here's a long segment:

Just firmly going "it is crazy sexist to blame The Wife for overspending when thirty seconds of asking questions will immediately establish that her husband was outright lying to her about how much money they had. Talk to your wife like a normal person."

Or--okay, here. A section on being honest and not writing love letters in secret, because that's usually a good sign that there's something untoward going on....

....except that he then immediately acknowledges that sometimes, the reason you're hiding this from your parents is that your parents suck. That there are parents who frankly have not earned the right to approve or disapprove of your partner.

1. The FBI's Famous Cases & Criminals archive (fbi.gov/history/famous-cases) has detailed breakdowns of real fraud cases, Ponzi schemes, and confidence operations. The language they use is clinical and precise, which is perfect for getting the procedural details right.

2. The FTC Consumer Sentinel Network publishes annual reports on the most common fraud tactics in the US. Great for understanding how modern scams actually work and what makes people fall for them.

3. The Smithsonian's American Art Museum has a free digital collection of forgery case studies. If your character forges documents or art, this is gold.

4. Court Listener (courtlistener.com) is a free legal database where you can read actual court transcripts from fraud trials. Want to know how a real con artist talks under oath? This is where you find out.

5. The Internet Archive's collection of old newspaper crime sections. Search for "confidence man" or "swindle" in papers from the 1920s through 1960s and you'll find incredible real stories that would feel too dramatic for fiction.

Bonus: The Psychology of Fraud section on the Association for Psychological Science website has accessible articles about why people trust, how deception works cognitively, and what makes someone a convincing liar. Essential reading if you want your con artist characters to feel psychologically real.

(there is A LOT more, this man is INSANE)

Bonus:

I don't have any experience with the weirder corners of university campuses – my work in that particular job just never happened to take me there. I did, however, once have to do a cable trace in the basement of a former Christian elementary school. It had haphazardly been subdivided into numerous tiny rooms, some as little as ten feet across, with no central hallways or apparent floor plan. Every single room was, for reasons that were and remain unclear to me, full of broken kitchen appliances. One room in particular contained an enormous industrial freezer unit that was larger in its smallest dimension than any of the doors leading to it. Was it delivered in pieces and assembled on site? Did they build the room around it? That one still bothers me a little bit.

My mother- who was a single parent raising me alone in my early youth- has never believed in baby talk. So when I was born, she started from day one talking to me and treating me like I was an adult. 

As a result of this, I had rather high expectations of other adults from a very young age, and despised being talked down to. The worst was being asked sweetly and stupidly y over and over, “can you say “hello”?” in a way that felt like I was an animal being coaxed into performing a trick. 

In my earliest years, I learned that using certain words and phrases could convince new adults to treat me the way I preferred. So to combat the annoyances of being treated like a subhuman idiot, I began purposefully expressing myself with a broad vocabulary. 

My mother started teaching me how to read when I was three. By the time I was five, my favourite thing to read was Calvin and Hobbes anthologies, partly because I loved tigers, but mostly because in every other book I’d read, kids my age were written as stupid babies with no thought process or agency who nobody seemed to think of as capable of thinking or contributing. Calvin, though, was only a year older than me, and had a rich inner world, and was capable of speaking meaningfully and eloquently while still being a kid. Calvin was a kid the way that kids WERE, not the way adults saw us.

As a consequence of this, I think, I developed a prematurely warped sense of humour wherein- again, starting around age five- the funniest thing in the world to me was to approach adults and instigate conversations wildly beyond my age range. Like “oh, you’re slowing yourself down for me? Bold of you to assume I’m not already four steps ahead”.

I imagine this was probably very annoying, as I mostly didn’t actually have the experience or context to fully understand a lot of the subjects I was talking about and was mostly just imitating the persona of a mildly disinterested and somewhat philosophical old woman, but I genuinely understood enough vocab to bluff around the gaps in my knowledge long enough for the funny part to happen. 

My preferences to spend more of my time fucking with adults instead of my peers slowly widened the already-existing gap between me and the majority of my schoolmates, which honestly didn’t bug me much because the two friends I DID have were way more fun than the rest of them anyways.  But I was probably a bit emotionally stunted by this point anyways 

Cut to me, age nine or so. Annoying know-it-all, deeply ironic, and the kind of kid who would rather lick a carrot peeler than suffer through the torture of meaningful emotional vulnerability with any adult ever

First real health class

We get the Puberty talk

Skin-peelingly awkward

Mr. Q, our fifty-ish something teacher, brings out a question box and a bunch of scraps of paper. Says he wants everyone to write down at least one question and he would pull a handful of them out anonymously to answer. 

I cannot resist

We all submit our questions

Question one. “What is a vulva”

Diagram. Clinical and age-appropriate response. 

Question two. “Is love nothing more than a chemical reaction designed to ensure the survival of the species?”

Long awkward pause

Teacher clears his throat

[This is hilarious]

Teacher speaks

“Uh…….”

“Well, um. I suppose… I love my wife. And I love my children. Or I would describe what I feel for them as love.”

Oh No

[Dawning realization that I have trapped myself and everyone in this room in a Feelings Talk]

[Panic and stare directly through the floor until he stops talking about his personal emotions regarding family and society and shit]

[Pain And Suffering And Hell because this is, in fact, what I signed us all up for, because boarding a plane to Alaska means that you are definitely going to Alaska, no matter if it was a joke or not, because the plane doesn’t give a fuck, because it is a plane and you are a moron]

The lessons in humour I learned that day have stuck with me ever since

Sincerity always wins

Character has 2 PhDs: either they did a dual degree program and are braggy about it, had a life-changing experience after their first degree and pivoted their whole career, or they find the structure of being a PhD student, despite all its stress, more comfortable and familiar than the stress of finding a Real Job and have a very indulgent advisor.

Character has 3 PhDs: who keeps accepting them to PhD programs. Either this person needs psychological help or their department needs to be investigated for its academic standards. Probably both