Morning Thoughts: Basic Income; Open Marriages; Electric Cars

Okay, I have been awake for almost three hours. I have sucked down the Coke Zero and worked through the emails. Well, most of them. I need to take a break before I go onto what else needs to be done here.

It is rainy and gloomy here. The new computer is supposed to be on its way. Which raises a problem - I changed the address on billing to show the apartment number and forgot to do the same for the delivery address. Getting this thing is a major effing PITA. But the eyes cannot take this small laptop screen much longer.

 ‘We’ve got to release the dead hand of the past’: how Ireland created the world’s best alternative music scene (The Guardian) came in a few days ago. Ireland and escaping its history was an instant must-read. I suspect James Joyce would agree. However, what I took away from the story was this:

Another huge boost came in October, when the Irish government announced that a pilot basic-income scheme for artists would become permanent. Public support has been strong, and an independent study from Alma Economics found it improved recipients’ creative productivity and mental wellbeing. With artists receiving €325 (£286) a week, the pilot scheme cost €25m a year, a relatively small investment to keep an entire arts scene thriving. Daniel “Lango” Lang of the Scratch says high youth unemployment once drove them to music: “The big challenge for young artists now is the cost of living, but a thriving scene breeds confidence.”

That confidence isn’t just firing up this new generation of acts – it’s changing the way Irish people think about themselves. “As a people, we are very self-effacing,” NewDad’s Dawson says. “We feel sincerely thankful – and even surprised – that people show up for us. I never thought a band formed by a bunch of teenagers in Galway would one day stand up on a big stage in Japan.

People will continue to work under UBI. I know of enough science fiction stories where UBI leads to cultural stagnation. It seems to me that this presupposes all workers, all people, to be goldbrickers. People prefer working. They want to be useful. UBI does let people do the work they want to do without the control of employers or the need to stay in an employment stifling their creativity. Perhaps this freedom is what its opponents fear most.

Here is the voice of experience speaking: open relationships do not work. The first one I proposed because I thought the girlfriend and I were too young to know what we really wanted. She did not like the idea. Four years later she was off to Florida and in five she was married. So, Postscript to an Open Marriage: On Lily Allen’s West End Girl (The Paris Review) is well within my interests. Jean Garnett wrote several paragraphs I think well worth thinking about:

I would love to hear a version of West End Girl in which a wife not only heartily consents to and partakes of openness but sings her heart out as she stands under the cascading consequences of her own desire. Because there are always consequences; that is what we open to when we open a marriage, and no provisos, no “rules” can fully insulate us from them. Maybe part of our discomfort with nonmonogamy is bound up in a teaching that “good” romance is safe romance, and that we deserve and owe each other emotional safety. We do not; in our hearts we know this, and in fact part of open marriage’s appeal, and part of its expansive potential, is precisely in how it makes us less safe. The pursuit of desire is a dangerous, vulnerable business; like Roy Orbison sang, love hurts. We can be thankful for this. Where would we be as a species without the mind-altering pain that reckless passion and tenderness and sex and betrayal can cause, the way they can dismantle and force us to rebuild more honestly? What would our art be, what would our music be, if loving was safe? 

I always thought what as good for the goose was good for the gander, and vice versa.  

Is it possible that we default to a view of straight open marriage as a husband’s imposition on a passive wife in part because we are, as a culture, still threatened by a mother’s extramarital desire? Is it possible that the double standard of female aging articulated by Susan Sontag in 1972 requires zero revision half a century later? Men are expected to go on wanting forever, while for women, “the time at which they start being disqualified as sexually attractive persons is just when they have grown up sexually.” Are we so viscerally uncomfortable with the force and clarity of a middle-aged woman’s libido that we refuse to conceive of open marriage as potentially liberating for wives?

For the kids out there, regardless of your age, women become only more interesting as they get older. I do think the same can be said for us men. 

The heart is what I think makes open relationships unworkable, not the libido. Too many think love is a zero-sum game, not a cascading event. There are women with whom I slept with for whom I did not have an attachment to; those were mistakes on my part. Two come to mind out of many more. Love them all, love them well, but do not think that you will not get attached to others and others will not get attached to you. All we can do is have humility about and forgiveness for our passions.

And for something completely different: GM freezes $2.6B megafactory and cuts over 3,000 workers.

General Motors is hitting the brakes on one of its most ambitious electric-vehicle investments and shedding thousands of factory jobs, a sharp reset that cuts across assembly lines and battery plants in several states. The company is pausing construction on a multibillion-dollar battery megafactory while eliminating more than 3,000 positions tied to its EV rollout, signaling a tougher, slower path to the all-electric future it has been promising investors and policymakers.

I see this as more than a single corporate cost-cutting move. Taken together, the halted project and the wave of layoffs show how quickly the economics of electric vehicles can shift when demand cools, subsidies change and construction costs climb, leaving workers and communities exposed to strategic pivots that are largely out of their control.

This is not how to create an industrial policy; this is not how to compete with the Chinese.

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