Up For Discussion

How Can We Get Young Californians to Prepare for Their Financial Future?

Make Retirement Contributions a Simple, Default Option for a New Labor Force

The good news: It turns out the millennial generation (born between 1982 and 2003) are super savers, and have banked more than either Generation X or baby boomers had at the same age. The bad news: Millennials hop from job to job so often that they lose thousands in potential 401(k) retirement savings. Perhaps worse: Most of this new labor force will not retire until age 73. That will leave your average millennial with about 11 years of retirement to enjoy, given an average life expectancy of 84.

Will short (or …

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More In: Up For Discussion

No, Carmaggedon Is Not Inevitable

From Peak Time Tolls to Smarter Parking Meters, Some Ideas That Could Get Angelenos Moving

It makes sense now that the first movie ever filmed in Los Angeles was of nothing but traffic. The 30 seconds of shaky film, shot downtown on Spring Street in …

Will We Have Any Privacy After the Big Data Revolution?

Corporations Know More about Their Customers’ Lives Than Ever Before. But the Information Economy Doesn’t Have to Leave Us Exposed.

Does the rise of big data mean the downfall of privacy? Mobile technologies now allow companies to map our every physical move, while our online activity is tracked click by …

With Great Scientific Power Comes Great Responsibility

If Synthetic Biology Allows Us to Play God, What are the Rules?

Synthetic biology has been called “genetic engineering on steroids.” It’s also been described as so difficult to pin down that five scientists would give you six different definitions. No matter …

How Do We Put Fewer Californians in Prison?

From Texas and Mississippi to New York and Georgia, Other States Are Finding Alternatives to Incarceration

In 2009, overcrowding in California’s prisons had gotten so bad—140,000 inmates crammed into prisons built to house just 80,000—that federal judges ruled it violated prisoners’ civil rights. Under order to …

Let’s Violate the Laws of Physics

Ideas from Science Fiction That Should Become Reality

Science fiction writers can be eerily prescient. Consider what John Brunner got right about our world in 2010, as described in his 1968 novel Stand on Zanzibar: a world shaken …


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