⚡Connection
Good Morning! If you missed yesterday’s, you can find it here.
Year-end is usually a great time to consider what’s going to come next. Whether that’s the same hopeless resolutions we make every year about going to the gym more often or reading more books, the future is on everyone’s mind more during this time.
One of the most important things we hope to accomplish with this newsletter is to become a hub for long-term thinking or what Simon Sinek would call an “infinite mindset.” We first discussed this topic in the summer and have been thinking about better ways to help our community connect some related and/or sequential events to a particular long-term view of the world.
In the upcoming year, we’ll have a stronger web presence, that connects these ideas in an easier and clearer way. We’ll also have a few topics/ideas that we’ll be “tracking” towards a long-term objective. The aspiration is that everyone will be able to better digest these goals and create ways to overcome them.
If you want to get involved in exploring the world’s biggest problems and solutions (ie. writing, ideation, design, etc.), please reach out!
- Jon
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Here’s a few things that have been on our mind:
Allowance: Basic Income for Kids
Mitt Romney and Michael Bennet announced a bipartisan plan to give children basic income.
Alex Wong/Getty Images (Vox)
The quick take: Parent’s get a guaranteed $1,500 in cash every year per child (regardless of income) under the age of 6, and $1,000 per child aged 6 to 17.
Doesn’t that exist? Currently, there are $1,000 in benefits per child, regardless of age, that would be given to parents via the Child Tax Credit that is already in the US tax code. However, it’s only refundable for people earning at least $2,500 per year and not only do benefits come through gradually, but there are also limits. Often times, the people who need it the most are the ones who don’t receive it. The poorest Americans don’t receive the benefit due to disability or unemployment and some don’t get the full benefit due to how low their wages are. This new plan would change that.
The impact. This proposal hasn’t been assessed fully, but the research done on previous proposals by Bennet for basic income for kids suggests that this plan would reduce child poverty by millions and make it less severe for millions more.
How are they going to pay for it? Romney and Bennet want to repeal “stepped-up basis.”
What’s that? Imagine you buy a house for $100,000. You, unfortunately, die a few years later but the property has grown to $1 million. Your will passes it on to your kid who then sells it for $1.5 million. Under “stepped-up basis,” your kid would only pay capital gains tax on $500,000, the increased value between inheriting it and selling it. If Romney and Bennet repeal this rule, your kid would have to pay tax on nearly the full value it grew since you bought it.
Tax the wealthy. They’re proposing to increase tax on the very wealthy to fund a benefit directed at poor and working class families.
It’s looking good. Romney was the first Republican senator to officially endorse the idea and his involvement increases the odds that some kind of refundable benefit makes it into the eventual bill.
India’s Supreme Court Declined Block
Update on India’s controversial citizenship bill.
First hearing results. Supreme Court declined to block the new law despite the petitions challenging it.
What they’re requiring. The court told the government to respond to these petitions that claim the Citizenship Act violates the Constitution. The court will listen to the next case in January.
The current fears. The government recently announced that it plans to carry out a “widespread exercise” to find “infiltrators” from other countries. Some Muslim citizens believe this means they need to provide extensive documentation that proves their ancestors lived in India. If they can’t, they fear they could be made stateless.
Modi’s response. The law “will have no effect on citizens of India, including Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, Jains, Christians and Buddhists.”
Technology that connects
Is this our present and future? People are more and more alarmed on how technology has disrupted human connection. It seems like many of us are viewing our most precious moments through a screen. Instead of watching it live, we’re obsessed with recording it. But, there’s always hope. A pioneer of wearable technology explores how technology could act as a way to better connect us than separate us.
Being aware. Alex “Sandy” Pentland, head of the Human Dynamics group at MIT Media Lab asks the question:
“Are you embedded in your social surroundings?”
What he’s asking is how aware are you of your place and contribution to the community around you.
His thesis. Pentland believes that:
“if technology made it possible for people to know how much, or how little, they invested in each other and their communities, they might give more priority to what’s important (other people) and less to what they think is important in the moment (work, bingeing Netflix).” (QZ)
If we had this information, this data would help us make better decisions. We’d plan our weekends differently and the overall community would design cities and businesses to maximize belonging and safety.
Enter wearable tech. People are obsessed with tracking. Whether that’s looking at how many steps you’ve taken in a particular day or your heart rate or even likes on social media, we want to measure it all. Pentland believes wearable tech could not only make tracking easier, but allow us to track something completely different.
What he wants to study. Pentland, instead of looking at the individual, wants to analyze the community and ultimately measure “human connection.”
“We find that 50-90% of behavior is habitual and predicted by your network of social relationships… Most of human behavior fits into the local community—your community—what you value and choose, so studying groups is important because that accounts for the majority of what you do.”
All of this requires new metrics and ways of understand human connection. We need to be able to measure how we invest in our direct communities and how we can explore new communities.
More tomorrow. We’ll continue on the idea of measuring human connection and what this could mean.
Short takes:
Early newborns. Climate change is impacting pregnancies.
Nightmare. Mitch McConnell believes Democrat’s push for new impeachment testimony will allow future Houses to paralyze future Senates.
Boris Johnson banned MPs from attending WEF in Davos. He wants them to work for the people instead of drinking with the rich.
The oldest chewing gum with DNA. Scientists pulled DNA of a Danish girl from a 5,700 year old lump of tar.
Tomorrow Today
🎟️ We’re thinking February 6th! We’ll have a sign up link and more details soon.
Change cannot be achieved alone, only together. In that spirit, we are hosting community events at our space in New York City. Eat some food, learn from some seasoned, unconventional activists, and meet others aspiring to change the world!
Why are we hosting this?
For us, community is the center of everything. In an age of prolific digitization, there's a great need for greater human connection. It's almost necessary to carve out time and space to purposefully engage in person. While it's amazing to be able to discuss and interact with multiple people online and exchange stories and insights, we don't think anything beats the experience of sharing a meal.
Igniting Tomorrow
💰 $100k-$250k Pre-Seed Funding
UPDATE: We’ve already had multiple people reach out and share their ideas. It gets us super excited to learn more about the projects and companies everyone is working on. Please keep reaching out. We’ll be releasing more information around this in the upcoming year.
Many of you are either already working on a number of world-changing things or have ideas bursting out of you every day. Our goal is to see unconventional activists like you succeed. Let us help connect you into the space and access the financing you need to get started. If you’d like to share your ideas (or know a friend working on something exciting), please reply to this email!
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