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And it’s all out of a desire to maximize profits. But what if, like IGA, newspaper companies didn’t solely exist to maximize that profit, but to respect the value of the local community? What if Gannett decided to donate one of its papers to a local philanthropist who has a larger stake in the community than Gannett does? Gannett could help run some of the most profitable and technical functions, but the company would otherwise be hands-off on how to control the paper. It could offer some guidelines, but the destiny’s in the community’s hands.

That approach is what IGA does, largely. The store stays in local hands, with local interests, and local history. IGA helps them keep up with trends, without losing track of the store’s identity in the process.

And, largely, it works. It really should be studied in business books.

Any theory of being American must explain one salient and striking fact: cruelty. America is the most cruel nation among its peers — even among most poor countries today. It is something like a new Rome. It has little, if any, functioning healthcare, education, transport, media, no safety nets, no stability, security. The middle class is collapsing, and life expectancy is falling. Young people die for a lack of insulin they cannot crowdfund. Elderly middle-class people live and die in their cars. Kids massacre each other in schools — when they’re not self-medicating the pain of it all away. The combination of these pathologies happens nowhere else — not a single place — in the world. Not even Pakistan, Costa Rica, or Rwanda. Hence, the world is aghast daily at the depths of American cruelty — yet somehow, they seem bottomless.(Of course I don’t mean that all Americans are cruel. I just mean that in the same way we say countries have attitude, dispositions, that there’s such a thing as a French or German national attitude or disposition, so, too there is an American one. Nor do I mean America is “the most cruel society in the world”. Can we really ever judge that? But it is uniquely cruel — a kind of special example — in weird, needless, and singular ways.)Let me throw that into relief. Scandinavians are the happiest, longest-lived, and most prosperous people in the world because they do not punish one another constantly — but lift one another up. But Americans do not believe this reality. The underlying sentiment that unites America’s manifold problems is a myth of cruelty.

The ability for everyone to say “No” to any and all employers would have an undeniable effect on bargaining power. It’d mean greater profit sharing, higher wages, shorter days and/or weeks, improved working conditions, more flexibility, etc. UBI can even function as a universal strike fund.

Everyone should have the power to refuse to work for another as a condition for their existence. The right to exist is unconditional, and so no one has the right to command your wage labor with the threat of destitution.What unconditional basic income achieves is nothing less than profoundly historic. UBI is the declaration that all wage labor should be fully voluntary, all work, both paid and unpaid should be recognized, and that the goal of technology is to increase our control over our time.

But new research finds one factor that influences the rate at which our brains age is largely outside our control: our socioeconomic status.

"Engaging and resourceful environments associated with higher socioeconomic status may provide a buffer or delay against aging," the researchers write. "Inadequate health conditions associated with lower socioeconomic status environments (such as exposure to toxins and poorer nutrition), together with continual stress, may accelerate the aging process."

Using neuroimaging, the researchers evaluated participants' brains in two ways, measuring "functional network organization and cortical gray matter thickness." They found both measures demonstrated greater aging in people of lower socioeconomic status, even after accounting for demographic differences and personal health.

If it works, then why in the world are we not basing our whole economy on the finite construct of “time”? It would nearly be infallible, versus the legacy commodities model, which is full of holes and reject-able logic.A “time based economy” can be used with any nation state, group, or community based economics model. To make it simple, the value at the transaction would be time dollars in the form of a digital debit.

In the time based economy, each person enrolled, anywhere in the world would have an online account which is controlled by the debit card (not a citizenship card).

The time based economy primarily functions through the education, civics, and knowledge sector.