The idea of a universal basic income—money given to everyone each month to cover minimal living expenses—is having something of a utopian intellectual moment across the political spectrum. But the idea does have two obvious potential pitfalls.
Diners: not a fast food restaurant, but also not a “real” restaurant. Something in between. Seems like it should be in between the price of fast food and a real restaurant. But is it?
Last week, an anonymous man suffered the self-inflicted double humiliation of apparently getting his erect penis stuck inside a roll of tape and asking the experienced masturbators of 4chan's /b/ how to remove his makeshift cockring.
As you may have heard, Americans are living longer these days, and that is a huge pain in the ass for pension plans, which would greatly prefer if you died young, for financial reasons. The scope of this "staying alive" problem is now coming into clear view.
"I got engaged over Christmas. I am really unhappy, though. This will sound shallow but I am pissed the ring is so much smaller than I imagined." The struggle is real.
The U.S. incarceration rate has been on the decline for several years now. That's good. But now we have jails sitting empty all over the place. What do we do with these things?
A new appraisal of the Detroit Institute of Art's collection values the works at up to $4.6 billion (though an actual sale would probably bring in slightly less than $1 billion). Would selling some of these works mean rejecting art? Not at all. It would mean embracing humanity.
Around New York City, one often hears petulant calls for the city to return to the days when it was "real," meaning infested with crime, rather than with Pret A Manger locations. Such pleas are immature. Crime should only be returned to the Times Square area.
Forget East-West, North-South, rich-poor: The new main division in Earth's population is an ever-growing rift between the frightfully obese and the frightfully hungry, experts say.
It seems you can never escape the woes of this world, you know? Rich people got 99 problems just like you and me. You might think it would be nice to be waited on by an army of servants. But what you don't see is the hard part of that.
Today, a rich girl college student takes to the internet to voice her displeasure that "bitter and unhappy" poors are looking at her sideways just because she is, to reiterate, a rich girl. Thought Catalog? Thought Catalog.
Wake up, zombie Americans! It's time to stop wasting our time jabbering about inconsequential matters like sports or cable TV shows or a "government shutdown." Our fellow citizens are, right this moment, facing an actual crisis: waiting in their cars far too long for a Sausage-n-Cheez Biscuit Combo.
The world has 99 problems and women are all of them.
A small handful of huge Wall Street banks are quite literally Too Big to Fail: the failure of any one of these institutions would rip such a large hole in the global economy that we'd all fall in and break our necks. In times of trouble, therefore, these banks will always, always, always be bailed out by the public—…
Last year, about half of all working-age Americans lacked sufficient health insurance. Cool system.
The city of Saratoga Springs, New York has a problem: homelessness. I mean, the problem is not that Saratoga Springs residents are forced to sleep on the streets—the problem is these homeless citizens are sleeping in City Hall. How are the city fathers supposed to conduct their important business of helping out…
Rampant violence in El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras is being blamed for a huge increase in the number of unaccompanied children being held in American detention centers after sneaking into the country. From the LAT:
Economic decline, unemployment, political strife, violence, taxes, crying kids, lazy spouses, broken homes, filthy streets, unwatered lawns, stubbed toes, cracked iPhone screens, food stuck in your teeth. Where does it end? Well, as if that weren't enough to worry about, add one more thing to the list: whooping cough.…
Although it takes slightly more of it to buy a hardback book, for many people the Canadian dollar has value. So it's a bit of a problem that some of Canada's money has reportedly started melting in the summer heat.
The U.S. Justice Department has issued a new set of guidelines designed to stem prison rape, which "may afflict one out of every 10 prisoners," according to the NYT. The guidelines are mostly basic standards of staffing, planning, and other common-sense measures. But I submit to you that the following bit of the…
