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This is a special post for quick takes by philh. Only they can create top-level comments. Comments here also appear on the Quick Takes page and All Posts page.

I listen to podcasts while doing chores, and often feel like I'm learning something but end up unable to remember anything. So, experiment: I'm going to try writing brief summaries after the fact. I'm going to skip anything where that doesn't feel appropriate, e.g. fiction. By default, nothing here is fact checked, either against reality or against the episode itself.

Planet Money #796 (23 Sep 2017): The Basic Income Experiment

This is a 99% Invisible episode on UBI.

UBI is an idea supported by some on both left and right. Finland is currently trying an experiment. In fact, Finland is currently experimenting with experimentation itself: they set up a whole gov department whose purpose is to help run experiments, and enacted some law or something to avoid these experiments falling foul of the constitution. (Because you have to treat people equally, and having an intervention and a control group isn't doing that.)

Finland's problem: high unemployment, and disincentivizing work. You can collect unemployment for 2+ years after your last job, and you can't earn anything on the side. The person they "hired" to do recording in Finland for this episode worked for free, because otherwise he would have lost benefits.

So they're experimenting with UBI. About 2000 unemployed people given unconditional money each month instead of unemployment. It's a bit less money, but now they can do part-time work without an income cliff. Interview with one of those people: she's now looking for part-time work, but hasn't found it yet.

Problems with study: 2000 people is small, only looks at currently unemployed people (can't see if it makes employed people more likely to stop working).

Person running study thinks UBI will fail.

America almost had something like this under Nixon. But people started looking at the data before it was fully in. There were hints of bad effects, including increased divorce rates (scandalous at the time but Roman wants to make sure you know he thinks it's fine). Don't remember what else. When the data was fully in the effects were smaller than they first seemed/had been rumored, but damage was done.

(Occasional names and details checked with wikipedia)

Fall of Civilizations #21: Majapahit - Empire of the Islands

In 1811, the UK took Java from the Dutch. Thomas Raffles was made governor because he spoke Malay and had helped. In 1815 he did some exploring around the island. It was mostly Muslim at the time, but there were a bunch of ruins of an earlier civilization, with statues of Buddha and Hindu gods. He explored one place that the locals said was cursed. They warned him that he'd lose the governorship within a year, which turned out to be true becau... (read more)

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99% Invisible: The Titanic's Best Lifeboat One of the best known things about Titanic is "she only had lifeboats for half her passengers and crew, which is all she was required to at the time". But that's oversimplified. Initially ships just didn't have lifeboats. They had small boats for ferrying cargo and crew to shore, but not many. Most shipwrecks were near land, but if you went down far out you'd basically just die. Some sailors deliberately didn't learn to swim, to avoid drawing it out. At some point someone invented the first lifeboat (called an "unimmersible" or something), with cork and air pockets for bouyancy. But sailing ships didn't have room for them, so they had to be launched from shore if there was a wreck. Then steam ships were invented, and suddenly there's room for the lifeboats. But they're actually pretty shit. Hard to launch, few or no provisions, not great at surviving storms. Multiple occasions of lifeboats just disappearing, sometimes showing up years or decades later with their occupants dead. Once, the women and children were put on lifeboats from a sinking ship, all the boats were capsized or destroyed, and all the women or children died. The ship sank slowly, and the men were rescued the next day. So the idea in ship design was that the ship would be her own best lifeboat. They'd be designed to sink slowly. And now shipping lanes were busier, and there was radio for distress signals reaching hundreds of miles. A half compliment of lifeboats would be plenty, between two ships, to ferry everyone across. Titanic actually had fewer passengers than she was allowed to have, and four extra collapsible lifeboats than required. When she hit the iceberg, there was a bunch of bad luck. Hitting head on would have been mostly fine, but it would have probably killed a bunch of crew. Officer on duty said to kill the engines and try to turn, but that meant it scraped the side and opened 5 out of the 4 compartments that could have been opened with

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Related: SS Eastland capsized maybe in part because of extra weight from the new lifeboats.