What I'm Reading 2/2/2020

This is what I was listening to as I put this together

Al Jazeera - Trump's Middle East plan may have a silver lining -

Yet, none of these actors - US, Israel and Arab regimes can impose unjust solutions as long as the Palestinians are united in their resistance. But this requires radically different approaches and strategies that effectively break with structures and realities the Oslo accords created - most importantly the PA system and its pro-Israel's security functions.

In this sense, Trump's plan may have a silver lining: It could help Palestinians dismantle the Oslo order and push for a paradigm shift in Palestinian political thinking towards a long-term struggle for equal rights for all within the framework of one state. 

I am going to go out on a limb and say this guy is not a fan of Trump's plan.

Slashdot - Move Over, Silicon Valley: St. Louis, Atlanta, Small Cities Gaining Tech Jobs -

Silicon Valley remains a world of high salaries — but the cost of living in the Bay Area remains extraordinarily high, which chews into that higher-than-average paycheck. And that's before we factor in issues such as grinding commutes. In Seattle, New York City (also known as "Silicon Alley"), and other well-established tech hubs, costs are similarly high, which only makes up-and-coming tech hubs more potentially attractive to technologists.

Perell - What is the Point of Universal Basic Income? -

UBI spearheads a resurging utopian energy to ground economic policy in radical, pragmatic visions of a better world. UBI matters, but coaxing that renascent energy into bloom really matters. The conviction behind this essay is not that we need a UBI. Rather, we need a fitting policy framework to guide utopian energy back into mainstream economic thought. 

Daily Mail - Liberalism's 'cesspit'?: IAN BIRRELL says tech giants have turned San Francisco into a dystopian nightmare of addiction, homelessness and criminality -

‘San Francisco has always had hobos but we’ve never seen anything like this. It’s become a vision of some kind of strange dystopian future,’ says Joel Kotkin, a widely respected professor in urban studies.

He can reel off damning statistics to back his claim that San Francisco symbolises the Golden State’s descent into ‘high-tech feudalism’ including America’s highest poverty levels, its worst rates of property crime and its biggest gap between top and middle incomes. 

But one statistic stands out: almost half of homeless people in the United States are in California, according to a recent White House study.