Earlier this month I shared, before a house committee, the story of Ashley, a 31-yr old app-based health care worker in PA. We met earlier this year via research w/ Fairwork. For 2 yrs, Ashley has worked in nursing homes for ShiftKey, which allows her to bid on shifts. 🧵

This is what portable benefits by gig companies actually mean: "Swiggy’s weekly ranking system allows workers to access health insurance depending on the number of 'perfect' deliveries they make." restofworld.org/2024/swiggy-...

This delivery app takes away health insurance when workers don’t meet quotas

Rest of World spoke with 40 riders for Swiggy in India. Many described losing coverage when they needed help the most.

longitudinal work like this helps drive the point home about basic income, but I think also supports the kind of point abolitionists make (particularly the Gilmore school within prison abolition, but I think largely applies to the police abolition rationale) for largely the same reasons

SSscottsantens.comApr 13, 2024 2:10pm

A natural basic income experiment began in the mid-1990s and how the kids — now in their 30s and 40s — are doing is incredible. As adults, they have fewer drug problems and their average IQ is higher. By age 26, the benefits of the UBI exceeded its cost by 3-to-1. academicminute.org/2014/06/jane...

Incredible. Once again—“ai” is people.

I loved this line, too: "The right is fighting to take control of these platforms, while liberals and some on the left are fighting to expand vectors of platform control, without thinking hard enough about who will wield this power and who is likely to get hurt."

Our task, as Meredith Whittaker generously and brilliantly reminds us, is to "dismantl[e] the dangerous centralized power of the tech industry, and to do the work of mapping and thinking together." lpeproject.org/blog/social-...

Tomorrow ▶️ eastsidefreedomlibrary.org/events/love-...

Congratulations to former #USFPostdoctoralFellow@katiejwells.bsky.socialow.ly/zf6850R18pp

"We urgently need a countervision of what government can and should be, and how public resources and infrastructure can be deployed to foster social connection and repair the social fabric so that democracy can have a chance...to flourish." www.nytimes.com/2024/03/21/o...

Opinion | The One Idea That Could Save American Democracy

We need to do more than defeat Donald Trump and his allies. We need to make cultivating solidarity a national priority.

new byline: "Wells et al. are a trio of UNABASHEDLY left-wing academics, the type of people who talk about 'neoliberalism' like it’s a bad thing, and no conservative or centrist will change his entire worldview after reading this book." www.washingtonexaminer.com/magazine-lif...