For I-don't-know-how-many weeks, I have been mostly reading:

• Everyone loves Bernie Sanders. Except, it seems, the Democratic party — Trevor Timm in the Guardian: If you look at the numbers, Bernie Sanders is the most popular politician in America – and it’s not even close. Yet bizarrely, the Democratic party – out of power across the country and increasingly irrelevant – still refuses to embrace him and his message. It’s increasingly clear they do so at their own peril.
• Who's to blame for rising house prices? We are, actually — Peter Martin: In September 1999 the government halved the headline rate of capital gains tax, making negative gearing suddenly an essential tax strategy. […] The invasion of negative gearers has been followed by an invasion of foreign buyers, who push aside would-be owner-occupiers in exactly the same way. Rather than living in the homes they've bought, they treat them as investments and either leave them empty or rent them out to tenants who would have once had a chance of owning them. The 2011 census found an extraordinary 12 per cent more dwellings than households, some of them not bought to live in, others bought as holiday homes and second homes.
• Cookies — Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal:
  
• The case for basic income — Chris Dillow: How can we protect workers who lack bargaining power whilst at the same time not stifling new businesses and flexible forms of work? This is where the citizens’ income enters. In giving people an outside income, it empowers them to reject bad jobs. But it also gives them the flexibility to work a few hours as they please. We thus get the best of the gig economy – proper entrepreneurship and flexibility – without the worst: egregious exploitation.
• The Conversation About Basic Income is a Mess. Here’s How to Make Sense of It. — Charlie Young in Evonomics: UBI is in fact not a single proposal. It’s a field of proposals that’s perhaps better thought of as a philosophical intervention, a new conception of macro-economic and political structure. It’s unusual to argue wholeheartedly against representative government, taxation or universal suffrage, while it is common to disagree on which party should govern, whether taxes should be raised or cut, and particular elements of voting procedure. In the same way, we shouldn’t argue all-out for or against UBI but instead inspect the make-up of each approach to it – that’s where we can find not only meaningful debate, but also possibilities for working out what we might actually want.
• The Great Divide - The new fat cats in Australia’s universities — Richard Hil and Kristen Lyons at the Ngara Institute: While the lower orders scratch around in precarious employment for what in many instances amounts to a subsistence wage, the privileges enjoyed by many senior managers border on the obscene. It is not unusual to hear of vice chancellors flying first class around the world and staying in high-end hotels, while at home benefiting from subsidised housing and generous superannuation and performance bonuses. Casual employees, on the other hand, are usually denied access to holiday and sick pay, career pathways and, more often than not, an office.
• The Best Way to Predict the Future is to Issue a Press Release — Audrey Watters: “The best way to predict the future is to invent it,” computer scientist Alan Kay once famously said. I’d wager that the easiest way is just to make stuff up and issue a press release. I mean, really. You don’t even need the pretense of a methodology. Nobody is going to remember what you predicted. Nobody is going to remember if your prediction was right or wrong. Nobody – certainly not the technology press, which is often painfully unaware of any history, near-term or long ago – is going to call you to task.
• Trump to America: "Giraffes Are Jerks!" — Tom the Dancing Bug by Ruben Bolling at Boing Boing: