The more things change, the more they stay the same. The future, it turns out, is not all that difficult to predict. All you have to do is think about now and extrapolate a little. You’ll probably get more right than wrong unless you’re really reaching.

Case in point: back in ’98, Gallup and USA Today asked 1,055 Americans to imagine life in 2025. The result of that survey has been released, and people mostly nailed it, with a few laughable exceptions here and there.

Most Americans believed the country would elect a Black president, that same-sex marriage would be legal and common, and that a deadly new disease would emerge. That last one seems hilariously and frighteningly spot on in retrospect. What did 1998 landline-owning adults know that 13-year-old me at the time was blissfully unaware of?

So that’s three spot-on predictions. Here are some more: 1998 people were right to doubt that space travel would become routine for regular citizens, but could they have ever predicted that Katy Perry would find a way to be cringy in space? Good job, Nostradumbasses. Sticking to the space theme, the respondents also believed that we would not make contact with aliens. They were right about that, but that depends on how deep the alien conspiracy YouTube/TikTok rabbit hole you’ve gone down. If you’re one of the many who have taken that particular interstellar trip down social media, you probably think the aliens are wearing human skin suits among us.

As for the stuff that didn’t age well, about two-thirds of respondents assumed the United States would’ve elected a woman president by now. Close, but not quite. More than half expected a cure for cancer. While we were not there yet, mRNA vaccines could get us close to it. Sixty-one percent thought living to 100 would be routine. That is kind of happening, just not at a mass scale. The US centenarian population is projected to quadruple over the next 30 years, according to a 2024 Pew study, but that’s still not exactly “routine.”

Some other stuff that people from the distant past of 1998 got depressingly right: 70 percent thought that quality of life would improve, but only for the rich. Opinions were split on whether the same would be said for the middle class, and people definitely thought things were going to get worse for the poor.

Some stuff is easy to see even when you’re living in relatively good times. Nearly 80 percent predicted less personal privacy, and a majority expected less freedom overall. Check and check. Most anticipated higher crime. In reality, crime rates have been in a steady freefall for decades, a trend that there’s currently no reason to believe won’t continue.

Respondents also mostly believed that race relations would improve and that medical care would become more available. Not much to say about those other than lol.

The starkest, most telling change between now and then is in the general mood of the era. In 1998, about 60 percent of people said they were satisfied with the direction of the country.

Today, that number sits at 24 percent.

The post People in 1998 Made Frighteningly Accurate Predictions About 2025 appeared first on VICE.

According to executive officer Tim Mendham, no one has even passed the first stage of the multi-part challenge. He says it means the Skeptics—who describe themselves as “a loose confederation of groups and individuals who are interested in and regularly investigate pseudo-scientific and paranormal claims”—are doing their job. That is, they’re protecting the public from costly hoaxes, and calling out scammers who prey on naivety.

We spoke to Tim from the Sceptics’ headquarters in Sydney, to ask him about the prize: what kinds of people he’s tested, how the tests have worked, and what kind of cases he’s seen.

VICE: Hi Tim. So the reward was offered back in 1980, how many people have tried to claim it?
Tim Mendham: I get emails every week from people who claim to have some sort of paranormal or psychic ability. However, 90 percent of them drop out when they realise they have to undergo a test. We’ve probably investigated 200 claims more seriously, but none of those have got past the first stage which is designed to see the claimant’s skills in action.

Can you tell me more about the testing process? What’s the first stage?
Every test is different depending on the claim. Sometimes it’s really easy. For a palmist we’ll just show them prints and have them determine what kind of person they are. Male or female. Clinical work or manual labour. How old they are, what their past was like—things like that. To pass, they need to be specific. Nothing like oh they’ve had problems. Haven’t we all?

Sometimes though, testing can be more difficult. I once had a guy claim he could move the surface of the sun. How do you test that? We’d say okay, then create a sun spot there and now. But he’d reply saying it takes a long time to do, and couldn’t be rushed—so the test eventually fell through.

So as I say, no one has actually passed this “pre-trial” stage. However if they do we’ve partnered with a team of mathematicians, physicists, and scientists, who will act as consultants to create a more rigorous scientific testing process that follows strict protocol. That’s the next stage.

Who do you most commonly get approached by?
We get a lot of water diviners. The last test we did was on a basketball court, and we had about 40 of them show up. It was a really simple test. We simply put bottles out, filled with water or sand, covered by a cloth. They had a 50/50 chance, but the odds we were looking for was one in a million. So if they got it right over 20 times in a row, they were the odds we were happy with, but no one did.

The people who usually fail the fastest are those who claim they have psychic powers, clairvoyant powers, or telekinesis powers—that is, people who claim they can move things with their minds. We had a guy claim he had telepathic powers, and could transmit information to his friends in New York. He approached us in 2010 with a lawyer, and we created a test where we would create a list of Australian artists, countries, flowers, poets and, at his insistence, native American people. Then we’d roll a dice to determine one item from each list, and he’d “transmit” this information to his “receiver” in New York who would record the answers on a sheet. He told us he expected to get a perfect score, which would only happen once in a million if chance was operating alone.

And how did he go?
He actually failed to even make contact with his people in New York, so we never got to do the test. We had our own people in New York at an agreed meeting place on a corner, in the snow for his people to turn up. Which they did not because they were stuck in a lift without phones. How he knows that, I do not know.

While you’re here and thinking about crackpot ideas, you should watch ep 3 of our series on conspiracy theories:

Okay, so what’s the single most impressive case you’ve seen?
I get asked that a lot. And honestly? None. Because most of these people drop out, and all of the people have failed the pre-test, performing no better than chance.

What are some of the worst cases you’ve seen?
Oh I’ve seen some particularly bad ones. One guy seriously believed he could make paper move. He showed me a video of himself moving paper, and I could see he was clearly moving his hand. He kept coming back to me with new tricks and it just got to the point where I was like, “Maybe you need to find something else to do. Or see a doctor.”

As a sceptic, what are you most sceptical of? Is there anything you do believe in?
The people I take most seriously are the water diviners. I believe that they’re genuine people, who really believe in their skills. Im most sceptical of psychics and mediums . If you see recordings of them, the information they give is pathetic. I once heard about a case where someone spent $50,000 on a phone psychic service that was charged by the minute. And we’ve had sceptics go and apply for those psychic phone jobs to experiment, and they all got it easily. You need no skill, you just need to know how to keep people on the phone for as long as possible. They’re just trained at cold reading techniques. And when it gets to that stage, it’s evil.

Astrology is particularly ridiculous too. Constellations aren’t really there—they’re just perceptions from our angle on earth. Also, how can the moon determine your personality? Why is it based on when you’re born and not when you’re conceived? That doesn’t make any sense. What if you were born prematurely, does that mean you’re a completely different person? There are many things about astrology that are just ridiculous.

Who funds the $100K reward?
It’s actually money that we’ve kept from a bequest. We have that money, in a bank account, ready to go. We’ve also set up a foundation where we fund proper scientific research into these things. We have scientists, we have engineers, we have mathematicians, and we have physicists, all on board and happy to help us with our testing processes. We take it very seriously.

My last question, and I hope you don’t mind me asking, but wouldn’t you like to believe in the unbelievable?
Yes, I’d really love for such things to be true. How great would that be? I’d love for there to be aliens and and Loch Ness monsters. They’re fun, and they won’t do any harm. But until I have proof, I’m not going to just believe. I’m going to keep investigating.

Interview by Laura Woods. You can follow her on Instagram

The post There’s a $100K Reward Going for People Who Prove They’re Psychic appeared first on VICE.

Polygon begins on a remote ocean island, where a military crew is finishing preparations for what looks like a firing range — cutting down palm trees, leveling sand, kicking out the natives.

A tall, bearded man clad in white approves the construction from the crew that tell him that the next closest island is five kilometers away, and the land they are on is far away from major shipping lanes and airways.

The next shot depicts the man in white standing next to what looks like a tank or a self-propelled howitzer. As soon he puts his hand on the armor plating, the viewers are treated to a flashback — a younger version of the character watches as his son runs toward him from the family house.

He picks up the boy and playfully tosses him. Mid-air, the boy transforms into a soldier parachuting down with a gun. Bullets rip the parachute to shreds. Now the man is back in the present on the island. “Tomorrow, the committee arrives,” he says ominously.

Russian president Vladimir Putin has called for “effective development of military autonomous robotic complexes.” Although behind the curve in building and fielding such systems compared to the United States, Israel, NATO countries or even China, Russia is undertaking a major effort to build unmanned combat ground systems.

Polygon predicted this … in 1977. Classified as “adult viewing” owing to its controversial content, the film was seldom shown to Soviet audiences. The main character — “the professor,” everyone calls him — has built an A.I.-driven tank.

The tank reacts to the desire to destroy it, the “hatred impulse,” by catching biological currents — the thoughts and intentions of the enemy — and quickly reacting to them. “In that sense, the enemy essentially controls the tank’s movements without realizing it,” the professor explains as the military committee watches the robotic tank dodge incoming artillery and missile fire.

But the truly devious side of the machine is its offensive mode, the professor admits. He flips a switch on the tank’s side panel, briefly exposing the viewer to complex electronics that eavesdrop on the committee members as they discuss the weather and beer.

The tank needs “a fear impulse,” the professor explains. “The enemy, fearing his destruction, will communicate to the machine its weak points and vulnerabilities, prompting the tank to launch advance attack.”

The debate over whether man can — or should — cede decision-making to autonomous systems has been going on for some time. Future wars may notallow meaningful human control over fast-acting drones that could populate the battlefield.

As “Polygon” continues, the professor keeps seeing flashbacks to his son’s death in “the colonies” during a conflict the military officers keep alluding to. “This is war,” the senior officer says nonchalantly. “And in war there are casualties.”

“Yes,” the professor replies, “this is war. You like to fight? You like my new weapon? You will test it on yourselves. Try not to think of danger — the tank will read your thoughts. I have nothing to fear — I have no one left on this earth.”

The tank is on “fear” mode. It takes out the terrified committee members one by one. One officer tries to control his thoughts and almost survives. Ultimately, his fear overpowers his control.

The professor walks up to the dying senior officer, who pleads for help. The professor hands the officer the medal that his son won posthumously.

In the final flashback sequence, the professor tells his son that he has taken revenge for his death — but fear and uncertainty have crept into his mind, as well. Back in the present, the tank senses the professor’s terror. The film ends with island’s native children playing on top of a tank buried in the sand.

This article was originally published on War Is Boring.

The post A Soviet Film Predicted Our Robot Apocalypse—In 1977 appeared first on VICE.

All the people that will disappoint you in one comforting picture. Photo via Adrian Wyld / THE CANADIAN PRESS

There have been a few words spilled recently over Prime Minister Justin Trudeau (god, that feels weird to write) actually going through with his promise of a cabinet split 50-50 along gender lines. “The cabinet should be based on merit, goddamit!” a bunch of crusty political writers have told us, as if they have forgotten the merit-based appointments of Julian Fantino, Bev Oda, Maxime Bernier, and This List Could Go Back To 1867 So I Am Stopping.

So, here we are: Trudeau unveiled his cabinet Wednesday and we writer types get to say things like “generational change” and “I’ve actually never heard of this person.” But while I’ll leave it to the regular pundits to bitch about why cabinet minister X is a disgrace and why MP Y should have been cabinet minister X, I’ll stick to the singular truth—we will be angry with all of these people within five years.

Photos courtesy the Government of Canada

Name: Justin Trudeau
Portfolio: Prime Minister
Region: Quebec
Gender: M
Will this affect their job performance: No
Generation: X
Likely scandal by 2020: Real change turns out to be more of the same, but with a smile.

Name: Bill Morneau
Portfolio: Finance
Region: Toronto
Gender: M
Will this affect their job performance: No
Generation: X (barely)
Likely scandal by 2020: We discover his gold-plated car and when questioned about it, says, “Well, we ran on running deficits, so that one is on the people of Canada.”

Name: Stéphane Dion
Portfolio: Foreign Affairs
Region: Quebec
Gender: M
Will this affect their job performance: No
Generation: Boomer
Likely scandal by 2020: Dion gets lost in the Berlin airport and a crack team of Canadian Forces special ops must be dispatched to find him. Many good men are lost to the EDM scene.

Name: Catherine McKenna
Portfolio: Environment
Region: Ontario
Gender: F
Will this affect their job performance: No
Generation: X
Likely scandal by 2020: Greenhouse emissions are barely cut despite lofty goals, still no national carbon reduction system. Ocean swallows Newfoundland.

Name: Ralph Goodale
Portfolio: Public Safety and Emergency Preparedness
Region: The Prairies
Gender: M
Will this affect their job performance: No
Generation: Whatever born in 1949 is.
Likely scandal by 2020: He is not prepared for incontinence.

Name: Chrystia Freeland
Portfolio: Trade
Region: Toronto
Gender: F
Will this affect their job performance: No
Generation: X
Likely scandal by 2020: After finally pissing off one too many journalists by passive aggressively saying, “When I was a journalist, I would never ask that question that way,” it is revealed her pen name is Heather Mallick.

Name: Marc Garneau
Portfolio: Transport
Region: Quebec
Gender: M
Will this affect their job performance: No
Generation: Boomer
Likely scandal by 2020: Loses cool with Quebec construction union, screams, “I went to fucking space, you asshats, I don’t need your goddamn excuses!” Also, is caught on Periscope calling Chris Hadfield “a shitty musician and a worse astronaut.” Double also, gives billions to Bombardier to build a spaceship, which they fail to deliver on time.

Name: Jane Philpott
Portfolio: Health
Region: Ontario
Gender: F
Will this affect their job performance: No
Generation: Boomer
Likely scandal by 2020: Threatens violence across the aisle after Conservative Party interim leader Michelle Rempel won’t stop making marijuana jokes about her last name in Question Period.

Name: Hunter Tootoo
Portfolio: North and fisheries
Region: The North
Gender: M
Will this affect their job performance: No
Generation: X
Likely scandal by 2020: Cod stocks return, collapse again, Newfoundland gives up (before being swallowed by ocean).

Name: Harjit Sajjan
Portfolio: Defense
Region: Vancouver
Gender: M
Will this affect their job performance: No
Generation: X
Likely scandal by 2020: He is unable to defend himself from Andrew Leslie’s coup.

Name: Dominic LeBlanc
Portfolio: House Leader
Region: The Maritimes
Gender: M
Will this affect their job performance: No
Generation: X
Likely scandal by 2020: After Buzzfeed Canada figures out how to play an old VHS tape, it discovers video of Leblanc and Trudeau dancing to Milli Vanilli in the early 1990s. Numerous staffers are trampled to death as they try to make GIFs of the incident.

Name: Judy Foote
Portfolio: Public Works
Region: Newfoundland
Gender: F
Will this affect their job performance: No
Generation: Boomer
Likely scandal by 2020: Federal-funded Scarborough Subway is named after Rob Ford, who is mayor of Toronto again.

Name: Jody Wilson-Raybould
Portfolio: Justice
Region: BC
Gender: F
Will this affect their job performance: No
Generation: X
Likely scandal by 2020: Doesn’t get Justice’s shit together on legalizing pot. A single person spends another day in jail for simple pot possession.

Name: Mélanie Joly
Portfolio: Heritage
Region: Quebec
Gender: F
Will this affect their job performance: No
Generation: Catalano
Likely scandal by 2020: Heritage minute about the Drake-Meek Mill feud of 2015 comes under fire for overplaying Norm Kelly’s role. Found wandering through downtown Ottawa after a year in office, demanding to know “what the fuck people do for fun in this one-horse town.”

Name: Scott Brison
Portfolio: Treasury Board President
Region: Maritimes
Gender: M
Will this affect their job performance: No
Generation: X
Likely scandal by 2020: When he takes over he finds that Tony Clement left the computer logged into Twitter. As a joke Brison starts tweeting nonsense. Like just utter drivel. “Really enjoying the new Our Lady Peace album,” he tweeted, snickering to himself in late 2015. The Twitter jokes continue until May 2018, when Clement realizes he stopped paying his Twitter ghostwriter months ago.

Name: Carolyn Bennett
Portfolio: Indigenous and Northern Affairs
Region: Toronto
Gender: F
Will this affect their job performance: No
Generation: Boomer
Likely scandal by 2020: Holy shit, where to start. A national inquiry into missing and murdered Indigenous women results in few substantial changes. Many First Nations still don’t have access to clean water. Inadequate housing is still a thing. Little is accomplished about higher rates of incarceration of Indigenous people….sadly, this list could go on for a while.

Name: John McCallum
Portfolio: Immigration
Region: Ontario
Gender: M
Will this affect their job performance: No
Generation: Boomer
Likely scandal by 2020: He falls asleep.

Name: James “Jim” Carr
Portfolio: Natural Resources
Region: Manitoba
Gender: M
Will this affect their job performance: No
Generation: Timeless
Likely scandal by 2020: Is reported to HR for continually asking people to call him “Big Jim.”

Name: Kirsty Duncan
Portfolio: Science
Region: Ford Nation
Gender: F
Will this affect their job performance: No
Generation: X
Likely scandal by 2020: An appearance on Quirks and Quarks goes awry when she cannot properly explain quantum field theory. Bob MacDonald calls it “our great national shame.”

Name: Maryam Monsef
Portfolio: Democratic Institutions
Region: Ontario
Gender: F
Will this affect their job performance: No
Generation: Millennial
Likely scandal by 2020: Canadians shocked to learn that the Senate still exists, then get saddled with an electoral system that involves math. Resigns in shame.

Name: Amarjeet Sohi
Portfolio: Infrastructure and Communities
Region: Alberta
Gender: M
Will this affect their job performance: No
Generation: Xish
Likely scandal by 2020: A national infrastructure program spends billions in Quebec. Weirdly, no one knows where the money went.

Name: Lawrence MacAulay
Portfolio: Agriculture
Region: PEI
Gender: M
Will this affect their job performance: No
Generation: He’s 69!
Likely scandal by 2020: Is found to be in the pocket of Big Potato. Eats too many carbs.

Name:Jean-Yves Duclos
Portfolio: Families, Children, and Social Development
Region: Quebec
Gender: M
Will this affect their job performance: No
Generation: X
Likely scandal by 2020: The Liberals introduce a tax credit that does not directly target families with children.

Name: Marie-Claude Bibeau
Portfolio: International Development and La francophonie
Region: Compton, Quebec
Gender: F
Will this affect their job performance: No
Generation: X
Likely scandal by 2020: Makes a not terrible ‘Straight Outta Compton’ parody, causing Eazy-E to rise from the dead to ask ‘What the fuck?’

Name: Kent Hehr
Portfolio: Veterans Affairs, and Associate Minister of National Defence
Region: Alberta
Gender: M
Will this affect their job performance: No
Generation: Boomer
Likely scandal by 2020: Whenever he’s asked tough questions about veterans issues, he responds ‘Would you rather Julian Fantino was taking care of this?’ Nobody challenges him.

Name: MaryAnn Mihychuck
Portfolio: Employment Workforce Development and Labour
Region: Manitoba
Gender: F
Will this affect their job performance: No
Generation: Boomer
Likely scandal by 2020: Crosses the floor to the NDP to challenge Tom Mulcair’s leadership in 2017.

Name: Diane Lebouthillier
Portfolio: National Revenue
Region: Quebec
Gender: F
Will this affect their job performance: No
Generation: Grandmother
Likely scandal by 2020: Gently suggests tax system is getting too complicated.

Name: Carla Qualtrough
Portfolio: Sport, and Persons with Disabilities
Region: BC
Gender: F
Will this affect their job performance: No
Generation: X
Likely scandal by 2020: Supports Toronto’s winning bid for the Olympics, which Rob Ford fights against and rides a wave of populism back into the Mayor’s Office.

Name: Bardish Chagger
Portfolio: Small Business and Tourism
Region: Ontario
Gender: F
Will this affect their job performance: No
Generation: Close enough to millennial
Likely scandal by 2020: All you still reading this? I dunno, something involving an Uber driver?

Name: Navdeep Bains
Portfolio: Minister of Innovation, Science, and Economic Development
Region: Ontario
Gender: M
Will this affect their job performance: No
Generation: X
Likely scandal by 2020: Meets with a young programer in 2016 from Waterloo’s Cyb3rdyne Syst3ms, claiming he has developed advanced new defense technologies that will assist in drone warfare and missile defense. Bains enjoys the young programmer’s moxie and assists in getting Cyb3rdyne Syst3ms a significant grant towards building their new technology. When the machines finally reach his office in 2019 after laying waste to most of Ottawa, they offer their gratitude.

Follow Josh Visser and Justin Ling on Twitter.

The post Introducing Justin Trudeau’s Cabinet: Here’s Why You’ll Hate Them Within Five Years appeared first on VICE.

Photo by Maggie West

Last week, the Los Angeles City Council went and did something crazy: They passed a measure that will raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour over the course of five years. That put analysts in the position of having to explain what this would mean, and they all said different things.

Leftists rejoiced and fiscal conservatives grieved, naturally, just as they did when Seattle similarly hiked its minimum wage last year. But unlike most partisan debates of this sort, we’ll be able to look back in a few years and know which side was more correct.

Will the higher wage really “lift hundreds of thousands of people out of poverty,” as Councilman Paul Krekorian told VICE in an interview? Or will it do literally the exact opposite, as Warren Buffett wrote in a Wall Street Journal op-ed, and “reduce employment in a major way, crushing many workers possessing only basic skills”?

The City Council had “the benefit of three comprehensive economic analyses, and a peer-review of those analyses,” Krekorian says. But two of the analyses were at odds over many details.

UC Berkeley’s Institute for Research on Labor and Employment performed one of those studies and found that operating costs for businesses only stand to increase by 0.9 percent. (That study actually looked at a slightly different plan, which would have raised the minimum wage to $15.25 by 2019.) Consumer demand would fall thanks to higher prices, the study found, but the wage increase would more than make up for that.

However, the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce sponsored a study of their own, conducted by the independent research firm Beacon Economics. Beacon took direct aim at the claims in the Berkley study, and said that minimum wage earners might suddenly be able to inject their walking-around money into the economy, yes, but that the “cost hit taken on by business is of greater magnitude.” They claim that this will cause job growth to stagnate.

For more on work and wages, check out our documentary on underage miners:

In FiveThirtyEight, Ben Casselman stayed away from either partisan position, writing that this isn’t actually much of a raise at all. First of all, he argued, by 2020, $15 will be just $13.75 in today’s dollars. And when you further adjust those $15 for the horrifying cost of living in LA, the picture gets even worse:

The bigger issue is that $15 doesn’t go as far in Los Angeles as it does in most of the rest of the country. Not even close. According to data from the Council for Community and Economic Research, it costs workers about 40 percent more to live in Los Angeles than in the average American community. That means that $15 in LA is the equivalent of less than $11 in the US overall.

Put the two together and LA’s new minimum wage of $15 in 2020 is worth about $9.75 to the typical American worker today.

Taking a cue from some data generated by a March report on housing prices that the Economic Policy Institute released, the local blog Curbed synthesized a brutally pessimistic view of the city after the wage increase, and titled it “Every Single Part of Los Angeles is Unaffordable on $15 [an] Hour.”

One problem is that Los Angeles isn’t good at providing affordable housing. “I think there’s a wide agreement that we need more housing in Los Angeles, and we need more affordable housing so that we address that unaffordability problem on the cost end as well,” Krekorian acknowledges.

Read more about minimum wage fights from VICE News.

Krekorian says that there’s going to be “additional economic analysis in the third year,” and claims that while the the new law puts the city on track for some kind of change, the government is not stuck to that track if it turns out to be “unduly harmful.”

But predictions aren’t just about what’s about to happen in Los Angeles. This is thought to be catching on, and possibly becoming a national movement.

Towns like Seattle and San Francisco approved similar measures, but those are two of America’s coastal liberal strongholds, chock full of tech money, and—perhaps most importantly—both with populations under 1 million. Los Angeles, meanwhile, is the second largest city in America with almost 4 million people.

Krekorian says he hopes the move it will “shape the national dialogue around the minimum wage,” and that similar strategies will be necessary “until our Congress, and every state acts to try to address this terrible problem of increasing wage inequality that we have in this country.”

After Los Angeles passed its measure, New York Mayor Bill de Blasio said the shift toward $15 an hour was a “grassroots movement.” Democratic Presidential candidate Martin O’Malley—who successfully pushed for a minimum wage increase a year ago in Maryland when he was that state’s governor—also came out in favor of a $15 wage.

Others, like Arindrajit Dube, an economist who backs some minimum wage increases, are withholding their endorsements. Dube balked slightly at $15 an hour for fast wood workers in a New York Times story from 203, citing “concerns that it might lead to the substitution of automation for workers.” In a Washington Post blog post that same year, he was quoted as saying, “We just do not know what a $15 [an] hour minimum wage would do based on the type of careful research designs that have become the hallmark of modern labor economics.”

John Cassidy of The New Yorker pointed out that there’s precedent for this increase, though. Back in the 1990s, Princeton economists studied a sudden and controversial wage increase and found that paying workers in New Jersey drastically more than those in neighboring Pennsylvania didn’t have much of an effect on employment. Other economists tried to replicate their experiments. Some confirmed them. But some endorsements were less glowing, and a few showed that low-skilled workers were adversely affected by the hike.

Cassidy didn’t use the New Jersey–Pennsyvania example to show that the wage hike will help more than it hurts. Instead, he pointed out that this isn’t the first time there’s been a huge scale experiment into what giving people a big raise actually does.

Even if there’s no definitive answer about where we’re headed, Krekorian says he sees minimum wage earners in Los Angeles as living in a “painful economic environment.” Only will tell whether this latest idea will alleviate some of that pain.

Follow Mike Pearl on Twitter.

The post Will LA’s $15 Minimum Wage Really Lead to Better Lives for Workers? appeared first on VICE.

Hunter Lee Soik. Photo by the author

Icelanders call it Berdreymin—the ability to see the future in dreams. On my travels collecting dreams from around the world, clairvoyance has been one of the most persistent themes. I’ve met Ukrainians in Donbass who report having dreamed about the war before it began, New Yorkers who recounted dreams of plane crashes and smoke-filled rooms on the morning of 9/11, and people across the globe who claim to have foreseen the deaths of loved ones.

Historically, there has never been a scientifically rigorous way to evaluate these experiences. Still, clairvoyance and other forms of ESP have been taken seriously enough that both the KGB and CIA had extensive Cold War Era programs. More recent experiments into the phenomena have yielded inconsistent results. Skeptics commonly cite false-memory research to dismiss believers, while supporters often blame unfavorable results on unrealistic laboratory settings.

A new app called Shadow is poised to answer skeptics and believers alike. The app records dreams (which you submit upon waking) and enters them into a massive database, allowing thousands of the time-stamped transcripts to be searched by keyword. Clairvoyance could be identified through specific keyword spikes before major events. While the app was first envisioned as an introspection tool for the Quantified Self Movement, it may end up finally answering a fundamental question about the nature of consciousness.

I met with Hunter Lee Soik, the 33-year-old visionary behind Shadow—a man seeking to predict the future by creating it.

VICE: What was your original goal for Shadow?
Hunter Lee Soik: The first goal was to just give people a mirror to look at their own subconscious data and say, “Oh, I didn’t even realize it was doing that. I didn’t even realize I was worried about these things.” The goal is to bring some of these subconscious issues into the conscious mind where they can be addressed.

How has that process played out for you?
Well, I was adopted, and I’ve gone through a lot of things. I know what pain feels like. I know what loss of identity feels like. I went through all of that, and I came out on the other side, and now everything is awesome. We all have that one thing we have to deal with, and it’s not something that can be suppressed. When you suppress something, it always comes out in some weird way. You have to address it, get past it, and move on to the critical question of, “Why am I here?”

How did your issues show up in your dreams?
If we talk about that, some things will have to be off the record.

Is there a meaningful dream that you can talk about?
Well, in one, I died—well, I don’t know if was really dead, but I had gone somewhere else. I had this glimpse of some sort of other world. And, when I woke up, I was sad because I had to come back.

What was the world like?
It was the most religious thing I’ve been through, without being really religious—more spiritual than religious. But it had all the underpinnings of the typical religious story. I had the feeling of tumbling, and felt like I was going into some sort of underground negative world. Then I remember coming back up on this conveyor belt and seeing light. [In the dream] I attached God to that concept, and made that the reality.

It’s remarkable how often mystical concepts appear in dreams. When I first heard about Shadow, it struck me as a massive experiment about collective unconsciousness.
Could be. I mean, what happens if we can start looking at precognitive dreams, and say, “Oh there are actually correlations that are happening in real time.” If we had this data back during 9/11, we could point to a time-stamped audio file describing the dream that predates the actual event. So, how could you then refute that kind of hard data? But, then what happens, when that reality becomes the reality? It’s kind of like Schrodinger’s Cat. What kind of loop happens there?

What have you found so far?
We have a very small user base right now of 9,000, so we don’t have a large enough dataset. But there is something to be said about media content going into dream consciousness. I could be completely unaware of what’s happening in the news, but I would know what the top trending things are because they come up in the dreams: ISIS, Ebola, Robin Williams.

What’s your ultimate aim now for the app?
Ultimately, we want to use technology to make people more human. Dreams are a perfect way to start. The idea is, if someone can trust us with their dreams, then they’re likely to trust us with other important aspects of their lives. And what I mean by that is if you walk 10,000 steps in a day, do you fall asleep faster? Do you record more positive dreams? Does the mattress you sleep on make a difference? Right now, technologies are providing a tremendous amount of service, but the business psychology is wrong. [Corporations are] on an ad-based revenue model, so they have a lot of data about you which they don’t share with you. They can use it to manipulate you.

What’s the alternative?
I think there’s a sunrise on a new paradigm where we use data intelligently to help people live better and find better products.

And you’re giving the data back to the people who generate it?
Absolutely. And you’re helping people use the data to make connections. Who else is dreaming what you’re dreaming, for example? I really believe a lot in quantum field mechanics. And I believe that a lot of the science jargon [means] simply: If you’re happy, and you hang out with someone, you make them happy, and they make someone else happy. That’s what I believe it’s all about.

Follow Roc’s latest project collecting dreams from around the globe at World Dream Atlas.

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