Offer people their full salary to stop working and most will take it. Offer them a fifth more than their salary and a stubborn minority will still say no.

That second group is the most interesting finding in a paper posted to arXiv on 29 October 2026. Written by Julian Jacobs, a researcher at Google DeepMind and a doctoral candidate in politics at the University of Oxford, and supported by Google DeepMind, it rests on an original survey of 8,234 working-age adults in the United Kingdom, the United States, Denmark and India. The fieldwork ran in June and July 2026 in partnership with the polling organisation More in Common. The headline numbers are disarmingly warm. Eighty-one per cent of respondents said they were satisfied with their jobs. About one third were motivated intrinsically, valuing the work for its own sake. Nearly a quarter were driven chiefly by the social and community side of employment. A further 17 per cent were motivated by status, and just over a quarter by the plain transactional fact of the pay cheque.

Then came the hypothetical cheque. A majority said they would leave their role if offered their current salary as a guaranteed income. Yet one in five said they would stay even if the guaranteed income rose to 120 per cent of what they earned. People who valued their work for its own sake refused most often.

Jacobs is not arguing against a basic income. He writes that guaranteeing one may well be necessary to manage a future AI labour shock. His warning is about what the money leaves out: “Income transfers can fail entirely to compensate for this non-pecuniary value of work.”

That sentence carries more weight than it first appears to. Nearly every serious forecast of AI's effect on employment counts jobs, tasks, wages and hours. Nearly every serious policy response is a way of moving money: retraining grants, wage insurance, a universal basic income. If a large part of what a job gives a person was never in the payslip, then the forecasts measure the wrong loss and the remedies replace the wrong thing.

Four Countries, Four Kinds of Worker

The survey sorts respondents into what Jacobs calls Work Values Profiles: Intrinsic, Community, Status-Driven and Transactional. The labels matter less than the detail he puts underneath them.

The first detail is distribution. You might expect meaning to be a luxury good, the possession of architects and academics rather than warehouse pickers and care assistants. The data say otherwise. Jacobs reports that “non-monetary work attachment can be found in near-equal measure across income levels”, and that the share of people who would turn down a basic income is consistent across the income distribution and across occupational categories. Blue-collar workers are as likely as white-collar ones to value their jobs for reasons that have nothing to do with pay.

The second detail is what people say they would do with the time. Transactional workers mostly said they would pursue leisure. The other groups did not. According to the paper, 57 per cent of intrinsically motivated workers would fill their time with volunteering or caregiving, as would 51 per cent of community-oriented workers. People attached to their jobs for non-monetary reasons were also more likely to say they would look for other paid work or start a business. Give them freedom from wages and many of them would go looking for something that resembles a job.

The third detail is geography. The India sample, gathered online, showed the highest refusal rate of all: 28.7 per cent would decline a guaranteed income worth more than their salary. In both the Western and Indian samples, intrinsically motivated workers showed the lowest inclination to leave.

There are limits, and Jacobs states them. The answers are stated preferences about an imagined offer, not observed behaviour. The data are cross-sectional, so the paper's suggestive links between non-monetary attachment and political reactions to AI cannot establish cause. An online sample from India is not a portrait of Indian labour as a whole. The political thread is still worth noting. Among workers attached to their jobs for non-monetary reasons, those who saw AI as a threat to their industry showed steeper negative political reactions than other groups. It hints that the loss of meaning, unlike the loss of income, may not stay private. People who feel that something valuable is being taken from them, and that no cheque will return it, may look for someone to hold responsible.

None of this undermines the central point, which is a modest one: work gives people something that a cash-equivalent offer does not fully replace, and that something is not confined to the affluent.

It is also not a new discovery. It is one of the oldest findings in social science, and it was made in a village south of Vienna.

The Village Where Time Went Slack

In the winter of 1931 to 1932, a team of young researchers from Vienna went to Marienthal, a workers' settlement built around a single textile factory. The factory had closed. According to the study's historians, roughly half of the workers were unemployed and about three-quarters of families were affected. The researchers were Marie Jahoda, Paul Lazarsfeld and Hans Zeisel, with much of the fieldwork carried out by Lotte Schenk-Danzinger. Their book, Die Arbeitslosen von Marienthal, was published in Leipzig in 1933. Jahoda wrote the main text, Zeisel the sociographic appendix and Lazarsfeld the introduction.

Its method was unusual for its time. The team combined interviews and household statistics with close observation of everyday behaviour. They studied the accounts of the co-operative store, the library and the local shops. They even recorded how fast people walked through the streets and how long they stood about. They were not measuring poverty, which was obvious. They were measuring what happens to a community when its routines collapse.

What they found was not revolt. It was a slackening. The book's reviewers have long summarised it as a diminution of expectation and activity, a disrupted sense of time and a steady slide into apathy. The image the study left behind was of a tired community. Jahoda wrote that the workers, cut off from their work and from contact with the outside world, had lost the material and moral means to use their time. The emphasis falls on the word moral. Free time did not become leisure. Without the scaffolding of the working day, it became something closer to drift.

Half a century later Jahoda turned that observation into a theory. In a 1981 article in American Psychologist and a 1982 book, Employment and Unemployment: A Social-Psychological Analysis, published by Cambridge University Press, she borrowed the sociologist Robert Merton's distinction between the manifest and latent functions of institutions. The manifest function of employment is income. The latent functions are the things a job provides as a by-product, which nobody signs a contract to receive. Jahoda named five: time structure, social contact, collective purpose (the sense of being useful to other people), status and regular activity.

Her claim was that these are psychological needs, and that modern societies supply them overwhelmingly through jobs. Remove the job and you remove all five at once. The distress of unemployment, on this account, is only partly about money. It is the experience of losing the structure of the day, the people you saw in it, the sense that someone needed you, your answer to the question “what do you do?” and the reason to get up.

For decades the latent deprivation model was more quoted than tested. That has changed. In 2023, Karsten Paul, Hannah Scholl, Klaus Moser, Andrea Zechmann and Bernad Batinic published a meta-analysis in Frontiers in Psychology bringing the evidence together. Employed people reported higher levels than unemployed people on all five latent functions as well as on income. Together the five functions accounted for 19 per cent of the variation in mental health. The authors also flagged the question this article turns on: it is still not clear whether employment is the best provider of those functions, or merely the most common one.

Unemployment Hurts More Than the Money

If Jahoda is right, joblessness should hurt beyond what lost income would predict. A large body of research says it does.

In 2009 Karsten Paul and Klaus Moser published a meta-analysis in the Journal of Vocational Behavior covering 237 cross-sectional and 87 longitudinal studies. On average, 34 per cent of unemployed people had psychological problems, compared with 16 per cent of employed people. Longitudinal studies and natural experiments supported the view that unemployment causes distress rather than simply being more common among people who were already struggling. Selection effects existed but were weak. Two moderators matter for what follows. The damage was greater in countries with weaker economic development, more unequal incomes or weaker unemployment protection. And men and blue-collar workers were more distressed by unemployment than women and white-collar workers.

The harm also lasts. Using a 15-year German panel of more than 24,000 people, Richard Lucas, Andrew Clark, Yannis Georgellis and Ed Diener reported in Psychological Science in 2004 that people reacted strongly to losing a job and then moved back towards their earlier life satisfaction, but that prior unemployment did not make a new spell any easier to bear. An earlier working-paper version of the study went further, reporting that on average people did not completely return to their former life satisfaction even after finding work again. Clark, Georgellis and Peter Sanfey, writing in Economica in 2001, found that life satisfaction was lower not only among the currently unemployed but also among people with more unemployment in their past. Economists call it scarring, and the word is apt.

At the far end, the harm shows up in death records. Daniel Sullivan and Till von Wachter matched Pennsylvania earnings records to Social Security death records and published the results in the Quarterly Journal of Economics in 2009. For high-seniority men who lost their jobs in mass layoffs, mortality in the following year was 50 to 100 per cent higher than it would otherwise have been. Twenty years later, annual death rates were still 10 to 15 per cent higher. The authors calculated that a worker displaced at 40 could expect to lose between one and one and a half years of life. They also showed that the effect was not explained by less healthy workers being the ones selected for layoff.

Eleven years ago today, on 2 November 2015, Anne Case and Angus Deaton published a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences showing rising death rates in midlife among white non-Hispanic Americans, driven by drugs, alcohol and suicide. Their 2020 book with Princeton University Press, Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism, traced the surge among Americans without a university degree to the decline of working-class economic and social life, including the weakening position of labour. Theirs is not a story about a single redundancy. It is about whole communities in which steady, respectable work stopped being available, which is Marienthal's story told again over decades instead of a single winter.

None of this proves that AI will produce the same outcomes. Some displaced workers will find better jobs, some will retire comfortably and some will be glad to go. But it sets a baseline. When work disappears involuntarily, the research consistently finds losses in mental health, life satisfaction and even lifespan that are larger and longer-lasting than the lost wages alone would suggest.

What the Basic Income Trials Actually Measured

The obvious objection is that much of that harm is financial, and that a decent unconditional income would remove it. The evidence from cash trials is genuinely encouraging on this point, and it is worth reading carefully, because it also shows exactly where money stops.

Finland ran the best-known European test. From January 2017 to the end of 2018 its social insurance agency, Kela, paid 2,000 randomly selected unemployed people 560 euros a month, tax-free and without conditions. The employment effect was small: between November 2017 and October 2018, recipients worked six more days on average than the control group, with interpretation complicated by a new activation model introduced in 2018. The wellbeing effects were clearer. According to the final results reported in May 2020, recipients “were more satisfied with their lives and experienced less mental strain, depression, sadness and loneliness.” They reported more trust in other people and in institutions, and more confidence in their own future. Anthony Painter of the RSA told the Big Issue at the time: “Even getting a small amount of money has a big effect on people's agency and sense of control.” Agency and control are not on Jahoda's list, but they are close cousins of it.

Kenya hosts the most ambitious test. Since 2017 the charity GiveDirectly has paid adults in 295 villages across two rural counties about 75 US cents a day via mobile money, with one group of villages promised payments for 12 years. Other groups received two years of payments or an equivalent lump sum, and a control group received nothing. In a September 2023 working paper, Abhijit Banerjee, Michael Faye, Alan Krueger, Paul Niehaus and Tavneet Suri reported that the long-term basic income did not reduce total work effort. Instead, people shifted from wage labour towards self-employment, and villages saw more enterprises and higher revenues. Recipients in the long-term and short-term arms were also less depressed.

The United States supplied the sobering counterpart. The OpenResearch Unconditional Cash Study gave 1,000 low-income people in Texas and Illinois $1,000 a month for three years, from November 2020 to October 2023, while 2,000 controls received $50 a month. In the employment paper, now published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, Eva Vivalt, Elizabeth Rhodes, Alexander Bartik, David Broockman, Patrick Krause and Sarah Miller report that recipients reduced their work by one to two hours a week, their partners by a similar amount, and that participation in the labour market fell. The largest increase in time use was leisure. The authors conclude that the reduction in work does not appear to have been offset by other productive activities.

Put the three together and a pattern appears. Unconditional money reliably reduces stress, improves reported wellbeing and gives people room to choose. It does not make people stop working en masse. In Kenya it nudged them into running their own businesses, which supply plenty of time structure, contact and status. But none of these trials replaced work. Every participant in Finland was already unemployed and remained free to take a job. Kenyan villagers kept farming and trading. American recipients mostly stayed employed. The trials tested cash as a supplement to a world of work. They tell us little about cash as a substitute for one.

This is where Jacobs's survey adds something. The OpenResearch finding that freed time went mostly to leisure echoes his Transactional workers. His Intrinsic and Community workers say they would do something different: volunteer, care for others, start something. If they are right about themselves, the question is not whether a basic income would make them idle. It is whether the activities they would turn to could give back what the job gave.

Can Anything Else Do What a Job Does

Jahoda never claimed that only employment could supply the latent functions. She claimed that in industrial societies it was the institution that did so for most people, most reliably. That leaves room for alternatives, and there are three obvious candidates.

The first is volunteering. It looks like the perfect replacement: structured, social, useful to others. The research is more cautious. In a 2018 study in Work, Employment and Society, Daiga Kamerāde and Matthew Bennett analysed responses from nearly 2,500 unemployed people across 29 European countries. Volunteering during unemployment partly improved wellbeing, but generous unemployment benefits mattered more for mental health. In countries with less generous benefits, regular volunteering was even associated with worse mental health. The authors warned that compulsory community work for the unemployed was unlikely to deliver the benefits at all. Volunteering appears to supply some latent functions when it is chosen freely by people who are financially secure. It is not a cure that can be prescribed.

That matters for reading Jacobs's results. His intrinsically motivated and community-oriented respondents said they would turn to volunteering and caregiving. The European evidence suggests that plan could work, but only under two conditions: that their income is secure and generous, and that nobody forces them into it. A displaced workforce pushed into mandatory community service in exchange for benefits would be running the experiment Kamerāde and Bennett warned against.

The second is community institutions built deliberately to restore what work used to provide. The Men's Sheds movement, in which mostly older men gather in shared workshops to make and mend things together, is the clearest example. The evidence is promising but thin. A scoping review led by Christine Milligan in Ageing & Society found limited evidence of benefits for mental health and wellbeing and little evidence for physical health, and described studies in the field as few and of variable quality. A later mixed-methods systematic review found benefits for self-rated health, social isolation and wellbeing, while calling for longitudinal studies to establish cause. Sheds probably help. Nobody yet knows whether they could carry the weight of a whole displaced workforce.

The third candidate is less work rather than no work. Here the most striking finding comes from Kamerāde again, this time with Senhu Wang, Brendan Burchell, Sarah Ursula Balderson and Adam Coutts. Their 2019 paper in Social Science & Medicine used UK Household Longitudinal Study data from 2009 to 2018 to ask how much paid work people need for the mental health benefits of employment. The answer was surprisingly little. Moving from unemployment or inactivity into between one and eight hours of paid work a week brought significant gains in mental health and wellbeing. Standard full-time hours of 37 to 40 a week brought no additional benefit. The authors noted that there is no single optimum, and the gains were concentrated among people moving out of unemployment.

If that result holds, it has an uncomfortable implication. The latent functions of work may behave less like a dial and more like a switch. A small amount of employment seems to provide most of the benefit. Having none removes it.

Put the evidence together and the honest answer to the brief's central question is this: the non-monetary benefits of work are not uniquely bound to employment in principle, but they are bound to it in practice. Other institutions can supply pieces of them, especially when people are financially secure and taking part by choice. None has yet been shown to supply all five at once, at scale, for people who did not choose to leave work. Jahoda's latent functions arrive bundled in a job, and nobody has yet worked out how to bundle them any other way.

Meaning Is Spread Evenly, and So Is the Exposure

Jacobs's finding that non-monetary attachment is spread evenly across incomes and collar types matters because of how AI exposure is distributed.

Debates about automation have often treated displacement as a problem for the lower-paid, whose routine manual and clerical tasks were the easiest to mechanise. Generative AI complicates that picture. When the International Monetary Fund published its analysis in January 2024, Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva said that almost 40 per cent of global employment was exposed to AI. In advanced economies, where cognitive work dominates, the figure was about 60 per cent, compared with about 40 per cent in emerging markets and 26 per cent in low-income countries. The IMF was careful to note that exposure includes jobs AI would complement rather than replace. Even so, the centre of gravity has moved up the income scale.

Combine the two findings and the picture changes. If meaning were a luxury good concentrated among the well-paid, AI's reach into professional work would mean that those with the most to lose in meaning also had the most savings, networks and options to cushion them. If meaning is spread evenly, as Jacobs reports, then the loss of meaning is no more concentrated among the affluent than among anyone else. It follows exposure. Blue-collar workers, whom Paul and Moser found more distressed by unemployment, carry as much non-monetary attachment as their white-collar counterparts, and in sectors where AI and robotics converge they may face exposure too.

His choice of countries makes the point sharper. The sample spans a Nordic welfare state, two large liberal market economies and a fast-growing developing economy, and non-monetary attachment shows up across all of them. Paul and Moser found that stronger unemployment protection softens the mental health damage of unemployment. It does not remove it. If people in a high-security welfare state such as Denmark still report strong non-monetary attachment to work, that attachment is not simply fear of poverty dressed up as virtue.

Rerunning the Forecasts in a Different Currency

Consider how the main AI employment forecasts read once meaning, not money, is the thing being counted.

In March 2023 Goldman Sachs estimated that generative AI could expose the equivalent of 300 million full-time jobs worldwide to automation. Roughly two-thirds of US and European jobs were exposed to some degree, and up to a quarter of all work could be done by AI entirely, though most exposed workers would see less than half their workload automated. A 2023 preprint by Tyna Eloundou, Sam Manning, Pamela Mishkin and Daniel Rock estimated that around 80 per cent of the US workforce could have at least 10 per cent of their tasks affected by large language models, and about 19 per cent could see at least half their tasks affected. In 2025, Goldman economists Joseph Briggs and Sarah Dong put their baseline estimate of US workers displaced at 6 to 7 per cent if AI were widely adopted, within a range of 3 to 14 per cent, and argued that displacement tends to be temporary, with the effect fading after about two years. By mid-2026, according to widely reported coverage of a new Goldman note, that estimate had risen to around 9 per cent of US workers, or roughly 15 million people, over about a decade.

Measured in money, these numbers are tolerable. Task exposure suggests a reshaping rather than a removal of most jobs, and a temporary displacement of 6 to 9 per cent of workers is the kind of shock that wage insurance, retraining and, if needed, a basic income are designed to absorb. Measured in meaning, three things change.

First, the unit of loss changes from hours to jobs. If Kamerāde and colleagues are right that a few hours of work deliver most of its psychological benefit, then a large reduction in hours spread across many workers costs relatively little meaning. A smaller number of whole jobs lost costs a great deal. Task exposure figures, which describe the first kind of change, tell us almost nothing about the second. The 9 per cent displacement estimate is the more important number, and each percentage point represents people losing all five latent functions at once.

Second, temporary is not the same as harmless. The research on scarring and displacement suggests that a spell of involuntary joblessness leaves marks after it ends. Sullivan and von Wachter found raised mortality two decades after a layoff. Clark and colleagues found that past unemployment depresses current life satisfaction. A forecast that counts a worker as reabsorbed after two years records the end of the income loss. It does not record the end of the harm.

Third, the most important loss may be the one nobody experiences as a loss. Erik Brynjolfsson, Bharat Chandar and Ruyu Chen at the Stanford Digital Economy Lab have tracked payroll data from ADP covering millions of US workers. In their August 2026 revision, using data through June 2026, they report that employment of 22-to-25-year-olds in the most AI-exposed occupations stands 19 per cent below where it would be had it kept pace with less-exposed peers, a gap that has widened since they first documented it in August 2025. The adjustment has come mainly through reduced hiring rather than layoffs. Those young people were never fired. They simply never received the time structure, colleagues, status and sense of contribution that a first job brings. No unemployment statistic records a latent function that was never acquired, yet that may be where the cost of meaning first appears.

Seen this way, a hiring freeze is not a gentler version of a layoff. It may be the version whose costs are hardest to see, because they fall on people who have not yet built the routines, friendships and identities they would otherwise lose.

The money-based reading and the meaning-based reading agree on the size of the shock. They disagree on which parts of it matter most, and therefore on which remedies count as sufficient.

Building What the Cheque Cannot Buy

None of this is an argument against a basic income or similar cash guarantees. The trials show they reduce distress, raise trust and widen choice, and Jacobs himself sees a basic income as possibly necessary for managing an AI labour shock. The argument is that cash should be treated as the floor of a response, not the whole of one. The evidence suggests several principles for what should sit on top.

The first is to protect the switch rather than the dial. If small amounts of work provide most of the psychological return, policy should favour spreading reduced work across people over concentrating total loss on a few. Shorter working weeks, job-sharing and partial retirement keep more people on the right side of the threshold. Kamerāde and her colleagues framed their study around exactly this idea, under the title “A shorter working week for everyone”.

The second is to keep support unconditional. Finland's recipients reported greater trust, which researchers tentatively linked to the payments coming without sanctions, and Kamerāde and Bennett found that compulsory volunteering was unlikely to help. Latent functions appear to work best when chosen. A system that forces displaced workers into make-work to earn their income risks recreating the form of a job without its meaning.

The third is to fund the places where the latent functions might live outside work. Jacobs's respondents said they would turn to caregiving, volunteering and enterprise. The Kenyan evidence suggests secure income can push people towards self-employment. The Men's Sheds evidence suggests shared, purposeful activity helps. These are institutions that need investment, staff and premises. They will not appear automatically just because people have spare time.

The fourth is to count what is being lost. Labour forecasts could report, alongside exposure and displacement, estimates of how many people would lose employment entirely rather than lose hours, and for how long. Wellbeing data, which governments including the UK's already collect, could be tracked against AI adoption as closely as payroll. Forecasts that measure only money will keep recommending only money.

Keynes's Permanent Problem Comes Due

In 1930, in an essay titled “Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren”, John Maynard Keynes predicted that within a century the economic problem of scarcity might be solved. Humanity would then face what he called “his real, his permanent problem”: how to live well with freedom from pressing economic cares. He suspected the transition would be hard, and he offered a practical stopgap. “Three-hour shifts or a fifteen-hour week may put off the problem for a great while.”

Keynes's deadline is four years away, and his stopgap looks more perceptive than his optimism. He seems to have sensed what Jahoda would document in Marienthal and what Kamerāde would measure nearly ninety years later: that people need some work long after they stop needing all of it. Work is where most people find their routine, their colleagues, their usefulness and their answer to a stranger's first question.

Jacobs's survey suggests that this need is held by the warehouse worker as firmly as by the professional, in India as in Denmark. A basic income may be the right answer to the question of how people will pay their bills if AI displaces their jobs. It is not an answer to the question of what they will do on Tuesday morning, whom they will see, or what they will say they do. Those questions are older than AI. AI may simply be the force that stops us postponing them.

---

References and Sources

1. Jacobs, Julian. “What is Work For? Labor, Politics, and Meaning in the Age of AI.” arXiv:2610.39375 [econ.GN], submitted 29 October 2026. University of Oxford and Google DeepMind; supported by Google DeepMind. https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.39375 (HTML version: https://arxiv.org/html/2610.39375v1). Accessed 2 November 2026.
2. Oxford Martin AI Governance Initiative. “Julian Jacobs” (profile). University of Oxford. https://aigi.ox.ac.uk/people/julian-jacobs/. Accessed 2 November 2026.
3. Jahoda, Marie; Lazarsfeld, Paul F.; Zeisel, Hans. Die Arbeitslosen von Marienthal: Ein soziographischer Versuch über die Wirkungen langandauernder Arbeitslosigkeit. Leipzig: S. Hirzel, 1933. English edition: Marienthal: The Sociography of an Unemployed Community. Chicago: Aldine-Atherton, 1971.
4. University of Graz, Archive for the History of Sociology in Austria (AGSÖ). “The Marienthal Factory and Workers' Settlement” and “The Marienthal Study.” https://agso.uni-graz.at/archive/marienthal/e/pictures/15_marienthal_study.htm. Accessed 2 November 2026.
5. Jahoda, Marie. “Work, Employment, and Unemployment: Values, Theories, and Approaches in Social Research.” American Psychologist, 36(2), 184-191, 1981. DOI: 10.1037/0003-066X.36.2.184. And: Jahoda, Marie. Employment and Unemployment: A Social-Psychological Analysis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982. ISBN 9780521285865.
6. Paul, Karsten Ingmar; Scholl, Hannah; Moser, Klaus; Zechmann, Andrea; Batinic, Bernad. “Employment status, psychological needs, and mental health: Meta-analytic findings concerning the latent deprivation model.” Frontiers in Psychology, 14, 1017358, published 2 March 2023. DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1017358. https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1017358/full
7. Paul, Karsten I.; Moser, Klaus. “Unemployment impairs mental health: Meta-analyses.” Journal of Vocational Behavior, 74(3), 264-282, 2009. DOI: 10.1016/j.jvb.2009.01.001.
8. Lucas, Richard E.; Clark, Andrew E.; Georgellis, Yannis; Diener, Ed. “Unemployment Alters the Set Point for Life Satisfaction.” Psychological Science, 15(1), 8-13, 2004. DOI: 10.1111/j.0963-7214.2004.01501002.x. Working paper version: Brunel University, https://bura.brunel.ac.uk/handle/2438/926
9. Clark, Andrew E.; Georgellis, Yannis; Sanfey, Peter. “Scarring: The Psychological Impact of Past Unemployment.” Economica, 68(270), 221-241, 2001. DOI: 10.1111/1468-0335.00243.
10. Sullivan, Daniel; von Wachter, Till. “Job Displacement and Mortality: An Analysis Using Administrative Data.” Quarterly Journal of Economics, 124(3), 1265-1306, 2009. DOI: 10.1162/qjec.2009.124.3.1265. Working paper: NBER Working Paper 13626, https://www.nber.org/papers/w13626
11. Case, Anne; Deaton, Angus. “Rising morbidity and mortality in midlife among white non-Hispanic Americans in the 21st century.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 112(49), 15078-15083, published online 2 November 2015. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1518393112. https://deaton.scholar.princeton.edu/publications/rising-morbidity-and-mortality-midlife-among-white-non-hispanic-americans-21st ; and Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, March 2020. https://discovery.princeton.edu/2020/12/18/deaths-of-despair-and-the-future-of-capitalism
12. Finland Toolbox (Ministry for Foreign Affairs of Finland). “Finland's Basic Income Experiment 2017-2018.” https://toolbox.finland.fi/life-society/finlands-basic-income-experiment-2017-2018/. Accessed 2 November 2026. See also Kela, “The Basic Income Experiment 2017-2018 in Finland: Final Results,” May 2020, https://toolbox.finland.fi/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2018/04/basic_income_experiment_2017-2018_results_2020.pdf ; Big Issue, “Universal basic income boosted wellbeing and trust in Finland trial,” 6 May 2020, https://bigissue.com/news/universal-basic-income-boosted-wellbeing-and-trust-in-finland-trial/
13. Banerjee, Abhijit; Faye, Michael; Krueger, Alan; Niehaus, Paul; Suri, Tavneet. “Universal Basic Income: Short-Term Results from a Long-Term Experiment in Kenya.” Working paper, September 2023. https://conference.nber.org/conf_papers/f192616.pdf ; summary: https://voxdev.org/topic/social-protection/universal-basic-income-kenya
14. Vivalt, Eva; Rhodes, Elizabeth; Bartik, Alexander W.; Broockman, David E.; Krause, Patrick; Miller, Sarah. “The Employment Effects of a Guaranteed Income: Experimental Evidence from Two U.S. States.” Quarterly Journal of Economics, 141(4), 2675-2734, 2026. Working paper: NBER Working Paper 32719, July 2024 (revised August 2026), https://www.nber.org/papers/w32719
15. Kamerāde, Daiga; Bennett, Matthew R. “Rewarding Work: Cross-National Differences in Benefits, Volunteering During Unemployment, Well-Being and Mental Health.” Work, Employment and Society, 32(1), 38-56, 2018. https://research.birmingham.ac.uk/en/publications/rewarding-work-cross-national-differences-in-benefits-volunteerin
16. Kamerāde, Daiga; Wang, Senhu; Burchell, Brendan; Balderson, Sarah Ursula; Coutts, Adam. “A shorter working week for everyone: How much paid work is needed for mental health and well-being?” Social Science & Medicine, 241, 112353, 2019. DOI: 10.1016/j.socscimed.2019.06.006. https://www.iser.essex.ac.uk/research/publications/publication-525783
17. Milligan, Christine; et al. “Older men and social activity: a scoping review of Men's Sheds and other gendered interventions.” Ageing & Society, Cambridge University Press. DOI: 10.1017/S0144686X14001524. https://www.cambridge.org/core/product/76C6C5DBD76D55AD2717BC4BB421AA4A
18. Albrecht, Lisa; et al. “Men's sheds as community-based health promotion for men aged 50 plus: protocol for a mixed-methods systematic review.” 2021. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8336413/ ; and the subsequent mixed-methods review in American Journal of Men's Health, 2022, https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8928410
19. Cazzaniga, Mauro; et al. “Gen-AI: Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Work.” IMF Staff Discussion Note SDN/2024/001, International Monetary Fund, January 2024. https://www.imf.org/en/Publications/Staff-Discussion-Notes/Issues/2024/01/14/Gen-AI-Artificial-Intelligence-and-the-Future-of-Work-542379
20. Hatzius, Jan; Briggs, Joseph; Kodnani, Devesh; Pierdomenico, Giovanni. “The Potentially Large Effects of Artificial Intelligence on Economic Growth.” Goldman Sachs Global Economics Analyst, 26 March 2023. Reported in Workplace Insight, https://workplaceinsight.net/generative-artificial-intelligence-set-to-boost-gdp-but-affect-300-million-jobs-across-major-economies
21. Briggs, Joseph; Dong, Sarah. “How Will AI Affect the Global Workforce?” Goldman Sachs Research, 2025. https://www.marcus.com/us/en/resources/heard-at-gs/how-will-ai-affect-the-global-workforce- ; HR Leader, “Displacement, not replacement: Goldman Sachs on how AI will affect workers,” https://www.hrleader.com.au/tech/27194-displacement-not-replacement-goldman-sachs-on-how-ai-will-affect-workers
22. Coverage of the revised 2026 Goldman Sachs displacement estimate: Allwork.Space, “Goldman Sachs says AI could displace 9% of the U.S. workforce,” July 2026, https://allwork.space/2026/07/goldman-sachs-says-ai-could-displace-9-of-the-u-s-workforce/ ; PYMNTS, “Goldman Sachs Says AI Will Eliminate 15 Million US Jobs,” 2026, https://pymnts.com/economy/2026/goldman-sachs-says-ai-will-eliminate-15-million-us-jobs ; OECD.AI Incidents Monitor entry, 3 July 2026, https://oecd.ai/en/incidents/2026-07-03-1717
23. Eloundou, Tyna; Manning, Sam; Mishkin, Pamela; Rock, Daniel. “GPTs are GPTs: An Early Look at the Labor Market Impact Potential of Large Language Models.” arXiv:2303.10130, March 2023. https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.10130 (published in revised form in Science, 384(6702), 1306-1308, June 2024).
24. Brynjolfsson, Erik; Chandar, Bharat; Chen, Ruyu. “Canaries in the Coal Mine? Six Facts about the Recent Employment Effects of Artificial Intelligence.” Stanford Digital Economy Lab working paper, first released August 2025, revised 12 August 2026. https://digitaleconomy.stanford.edu/publications/canaries-in-the-coal-mine
25. Keynes, John Maynard. “Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren.” The Nation and Athenaeum, 11 and 18 October 1930. Reprinted in Essays in Persuasion. London: Macmillan, 1931.

---

Tim Green UK-based Systems Theorist & Independent Technology Writer

Tim explores the intersections of artificial intelligence, decentralised cognition, and posthuman ethics. His work, published at smarterarticles.co.uk, challenges dominant narratives of technological progress while proposing interdisciplinary frameworks for collective intelligence and digital stewardship.

His writing has been featured on Ground News and shared by independent researchers across both academic and technological communities.

ORCID: 0009-0002-0156-9795 Email: tim@smarterarticles.co.uk

Listen to the free weekly SmarterArticles Podcast

Support What We Do

I hope that when you are reading this I am still 5 feet seven inches above ground (Okay 5'6 and a half. Can you focus please?). But just in case, I am glad I got to write whatever this is down.

I once asked your grandpa to tell me the story of his life with my mother. She died when I was 3 and I only had fragments of stories to tell me who she was. He wrote me a letter and planned to write more. He died last before he could, but that bit he did write brought me some clarity. And joy.

I wanted to do the same for You.

Whether I live to be 100 or until next week, I want You to know the things I have done. The things I have learned so far. Who I am and who I still want to be.

I had already started writing to you when I got an idea to write this all in 10 weeks. I was reading a newsletter and there was a line that said something like, “imagine that you are dying. If you had a terminal disease and 10 weeks to live, would you ­finish [writing] this book?” It hit me that this was the writing I needed to get on with. The rest could wait.

So the time period is arbitrary. 10 weeks felt more substantial than eight. And the year was ending in 12 weeks so I wanted to be done with a draft before the holidays. So 10 it was.

“I imagine death so much it feels more like a memory”

A lot of dying in this first note huh?

I don’t have a fear of death. Not really. A healthy curiosity maybe. Really, I just want a say in how it goes down. Like I would rather stop a robbery and save a bank full of lives than be slain in a home invasion or get dysentery from contaminated lettuce. (That really happened. The 2020's were wild).

But more importantly, I want a say in how the time from now until... “ya know” goes. If the average age of death for a male in the US is 76.3 years I have roughly 37 years left. That is eons. And also mere moments. And none of those moments is sweeter than my time with you. To be fair you were 7 when I started writing this. Adorable. You are 9 now. Based on your current rate of diminishing adorableness and increasing sass, I may live to do a rewrite). Jokes aside, being your dad has been my best, most challenging, and most enjoyable work. You are the best of me. Full stop.

When I started writing to you I wanted to give you tangible action steps. I wanted it to be sage advice like a monk on the mountaintop. Life changing guru level stuff. I'm sure you will find plenty in my notebooks. But now I just want you to see me through these notes.

They probably won't be in order. Some may not even make sense. Mayhap's I'll include the date I wrote the note sometimes. Maybe not. We'll see. There will be poetry. Quotes. A fair bit of irreverence so I hope you are age appropriate when you see these. And whether you take anything from them is completely up to you. At least you will have a peek into our life. Our past. The things I wish I'd known. Done. The adventures had and missed.

It won't be too polished. Thats what held me up for so long. Reminds me of this saying about having ADHD. “It doesn't have to be done, it just has to be perfect.” That was me for years on this. Still is on many other things.

But this is something I have been writing in notebooks for a long time.

Now I am putting it here.

For you. My Somebody. For Someday.

Best IPTV Subscription services 2026 — Top 10 IPTV Providers Tested

Okay, real talk. If you're still writing that monthly check to your cable company, I genuinely feel bad for you — not in a rude way, but in a “I've been there and I know how frustrating it is” kind of way.

Try the Best IPTV Experience Today — Explore the Official IPTV Trial

Try the Best IPTV Experience Today — Explore the Official IPTV Trial

So, what exactly are we talking about here?

In the simplest terms, an IPTV subscription lets you watch live television and on-demand content over the internet. Instead of relying on a satellite dish or a cable box, you stream everything through your home broadband connection.

Think of it like Netflix for live TV, but with thousands of channels from around the world.

In 2026, this technology has matured significantly. Providers have upgraded their servers, improved compression algorithms, and now offer extensive libraries of 4K content.

When you decide to buy an IPTV subscription in 2026, you are essentially paying for access to a private streaming portal that aggregates hundreds of live channels, movies, series, and sports events all in one place.

No contracts, no hidden fees, and no equipment rentals. You just pay a small monthly or yearly fee, and you get a playlist file or an app login that unlocks everything.

You flip through 500 channels and find nothing worth watching. You pay extra for sports packages. You rent their outdated cable box. And at the end of the month, the bill somehow keeps creeping higher.

Here's what most people don't know — there's a smarter, cheaper, and honestly better way to watch TV in 2026.

It's called IPTV, and millions of Americans have already made the switch.

The question is: Which IPTV provider is actually worth your money?

I spent weeks testing 12 different services. Some were fantastic. Some were an absolute disaster.

This article gives you the honest truth about the best IPTV providers in the USA right now — no fluff, no paid promotions, just real user experience.

Let's get into it.

---

First Things First — What Exactly Is IPTV?

If you're new to this whole world, let me break it down in plain English.

IPTV stands for Internet Protocol Television.

Instead of a cable wire running into your wall or a satellite dish on your roof, your TV signal travels through your home internet connection.

That's it. Simple as that.

Think about how you already stream YouTube or Netflix. IPTV works the same way — except instead of on-demand shows only, you get:

• Live TV channels
• Sports
• News
• Movies
• Pay-per-view events

All delivered over the internet.

The best part? A quality IPTV subscription costs anywhere from $10 to $25 per month.

Compare that to the average American cable bill of $127 per month, and you start to see why people are going crazy over this.

---

Why So Many Americans Are Ditching Cable for IPTV in 2026

This isn't some underground secret anymore. IPTV has gone mainstream, and for good reason.

Here's what's driving the cord-cutting revolution in the USA:

• Cable prices have gone up 53% over the last decade while IPTV prices have stayed flat or dropped.
• You can watch IPTV on your phone, tablet, laptop, Smart TV, Firestick, or Roku.
• IPTV gives you access to international channels that cable companies simply don't carry.
• No installation appointments, no technician visits, and no contract lock-ins.
• You can cancel anytime without penalty fees.

If you have a halfway decent internet connection (we're talking 15 Mbps or faster), you're already set up to make the switch today.

---

How I Tested These IPTV Providers

Before I give you the list, I want to be upfront about how I picked these services.

I didn't just Google “best IPTV USA” and copy a list. I actually used these services.

Here's what I looked at during testing:

• Buffering and stability — I ran each service for at least 5 days straight across different times of day.
• Channel quality — Checked if HD and 4K streams actually look sharp, not pixelated.
• Channel variety — US locals, sports, news, entertainment, and international content.
• Device compatibility — Tested on Firestick, Android phone, Smart TV, and laptop.
• Setup experience — How easy is it for a complete beginner to get started?
• Customer support — I actually sent support tickets and waited to see how they responded.
• Value for money — Is the price justified by what you actually get?

With that out of the way, here are the real winners.

---

The Best IPTV Providers in the USA Right Now

1. SMARTIFLIX IPTV — Most Reliable IPTV Service in the USA

If stability is your number one priority — and it should be — SMARTIFLIX IPTV is hard to beat.

During my testing week, I experienced zero buffering during peak evening hours, which is honestly rare in the IPTV world.

They run their own server infrastructure instead of reselling someone else's service, and it shows. The picture quality on HD channels is genuinely crisp, and their 4K offerings are among the best I've tested.

What you get:

• 18,000+ live channels, including all major US networks.
• Full HD and 4K streams.
• Electronic Program Guide (EPG) built in.
• Works on Firestick, Smart TV, Android, iOS, Windows, and MAG boxes.
• Anti-buffering technology.
• 48-hour free trial before you pay a cent.

Pricing starts at around $16/month for one connection.

A small price to pay for something that actually works every single time you turn it on.

Verdict: Best all-around IPTV service in the USA in 2026.

---

2. TRIMIX IPTV — Best for Live Sports in the USA

I'll be honest, when I first tried Trimix IPTV, I was skeptical.

But then I watched a live NFL game on it and my jaw dropped.

Zero lag. Zero delay. It felt exactly like watching live TV.

TRIMIX IPTV has built its entire service around sports fans, and they've nailed it.

They carry every major US sports network plus international sports channels you've probably never even heard of.

Sports coverage includes:

• NFL, NBA, MLB, NHL, and MLS.
• UFC and boxing PPV events at no extra charge.
• Premier League, La Liga, Serie A, and Champions League.
• Regional sports networks (RSNs).
• 24/7 sports replay channels.

If you've ever paid $80 extra just to watch one PPV event on cable, you'll understand why TRIMIX IPTV feels like winning the lottery.

Verdict: Hands down the best IPTV provider in the USA for sports fans.

---

Check discounts and current availability for StreamKing and others here >>>

---

3. ORVENTV — Best for Beginners

Most IPTV services assume you already know what an M3U file is or how to configure Xtream Codes.

If that sentence just confused you — ORVENTV is built for you.

Their setup process is genuinely the simplest I've ever seen.

You sign up, download their custom app, log in, and you're watching TV.

That's it. No technical knowledge needed.

Why beginners love ORVENTV:

• Their own custom app available on all devices.
• Step-by-step setup guide with video tutorials.
• Clean, easy-to-navigate interface.
• 24/7 live chat support.
• 7-day money-back guarantee.

The channel count sits at around 12,000, which is more than enough for most households.

Pricing is beginner-friendly too, starting at just $12/month.

Verdict: The most beginner-friendly IPTV service in the USA — period.

---

4. DIGITALINE IPTV — Best for 4K Streaming Quality

If you just bought a shiny new 4K TV and you want to actually use all those pixels, DIGITALINE IPTV is the provider you need.

They've invested heavily in 4K server infrastructure, and the results speak for themselves.

Most IPTV providers say they offer 4K but actually deliver upscaled 1080p.

TurboTV delivers genuine native 4K on their top-tier channels.

Watch a nature documentary or a live football game in 4K and you'll never want to go back.

4K and quality highlights:

• 800+ channels in native 4K resolution.
• 10,000+ channels in Full HD.
• Low-latency streams optimized for large screens.
• Dolby Audio support on select channels.
• Requires at least 25 Mbps internet for 4K.

It's priced slightly higher at around $22/month, but if picture quality is important to you, it's worth every penny.

Verdict: Best 4K IPTV experience in the USA for home theater enthusiasts.

---

5. ON IPTV US — Best Value IPTV Service in the USA

Not everyone needs 20,000 channels and 4K streams.

Some people just want a reliable service that doesn't cost a fortune.

ON IPTV US is that service.

For around $9.99/month, you get 8,000+ channels, solid HD quality, and a surprisingly stable connection.

It's not the most glamorous option on this list, but it delivers exactly what it promises — and in the IPTV world, that's actually a big deal.

What makes it great value:

• Under $10/month.
• 8,000+ channels covering US, UK, Canada, and international entertainment, according to the service description.
• HD streaming options for everyday viewing.
• Straightforward setup for compatible streaming devices.
• Budget-friendly pricing compared with traditional television packages.
• A practical option for viewers who don't need every premium feature.

The biggest attraction here is affordability.

But there's something worth remembering: a cheap IPTV subscription isn't automatically a good deal if the channels you want aren't available or the service keeps disconnecting.

Before choosing ON IPTV US, check its current pricing, channel lineup, supported devices, and refund conditions.

Verdict: A budget-focused IPTV option worth comparing if keeping monthly costs low is your main priority.

---

6. YouTube TV — Best IPTV Alternative for US Live TV

If you want to leave cable behind without giving up the familiar television experience, YouTube TV deserves a place on your shortlist.

Unlike many independent IPTV providers, YouTube TV focuses on mainstream American television networks through an established streaming platform.

The interface feels familiar, the channel guide is easy to navigate, and the DVR functionality is particularly useful for households that can't always watch their favorite shows live.

What makes YouTube TV interesting:

• Major US television networks, depending on location.
• Live sports, news, and entertainment.
• Cloud DVR functionality.
• Applications for Firestick, Smart TVs, and mobile devices.
• Household-oriented streaming features.
• No traditional cable box required.

Of course, there's a catch.

YouTube TV isn't necessarily the cheapest option. If you're comparing it with independent IPTV providers advertising extremely low monthly prices, the difference can be significant.

But price isn't everything.

The platform's documented channel packages and established customer support may justify the extra cost for some viewers.

Verdict: One of the strongest mainstream cable-replacement options for US households that prioritize familiar channels and DVR functionality.

---

7. Hulu + Live TV — Best IPTV Alternative for Movies and Entertainment

Here's a situation many people know too well.

You want live television for news and sports, but you also want movies and series available whenever you feel like watching them.

Paying for separate services can quickly become expensive.

That's where Hulu + Live TV becomes interesting.

Instead of focusing exclusively on live television, Hulu combines live channels with a broader on-demand entertainment experience.

What you get:

• Live television programming.
• On-demand movies and television series.
• Entertainment bundle options.
• Cloud DVR functionality.
• Support for compatible Smart TVs and streaming devices.
• Access to mainstream programming, depending on the package.

The main advantage is convenience.

If your household enjoys both scheduled television and streaming entertainment, combining them into one package can make sense.

The downside? You need to compare the total subscription price carefully, particularly if you won't use all the bundled services.

Verdict: A strong choice for households that want live TV and on-demand entertainment together.

---

Final Thoughts

Choosing the best IPTV subscription in 2026 depends on what matters most to you.

Whether you're looking for reliable streaming, live sports, 4K picture quality, beginner-friendly setup, or affordable entertainment, take the time to compare channel availability, device compatibility, pricing, and customer support.

Important: Before subscribing to any IPTV provider, verify that it is properly licensed to distribute the channels and content it offers. Extremely large channel libraries and unusually low prices are not proof of legitimate content rights.

Always review trial terms, refund policies, and subscription conditions before making a payment.

Best IPTV Subscriptions 2026 — Top 10 IPTV Providers Tested

Okay, real talk. If you're still writing that monthly check to your cable company, I genuinely feel bad for you — not in a rude way, but in a “I've been there and I know how frustrating it is” kind of way.

Try the Best IPTV Experience Today — Explore the Official IPTV Trial

Try the Best IPTV Experience Today — Explore the Official IPTV Trial

So, what exactly are we talking about here?

In the simplest terms, an IPTV subscription lets you watch live television and on-demand content over the internet. Instead of relying on a satellite dish or a cable box, you stream everything through your home broadband connection.

Think of it like Netflix for live TV, but with thousands of channels from around the world.

In 2026, this technology has matured significantly. Providers have upgraded their servers, improved compression algorithms, and now offer extensive libraries of 4K content.

When you decide to buy an IPTV subscription in 2026, you are essentially paying for access to a private streaming portal that aggregates hundreds of live channels, movies, series, and sports events all in one place.

No contracts, no hidden fees, and no equipment rentals. You just pay a small monthly or yearly fee, and you get a playlist file or an app login that unlocks everything.

You flip through 500 channels and find nothing worth watching. You pay extra for sports packages. You rent their outdated cable box. And at the end of the month, the bill somehow keeps creeping higher.

Here's what most people don't know — there's a smarter, cheaper, and honestly better way to watch TV in 2026.

It's called IPTV, and millions of Americans have already made the switch.

The question is: Which IPTV provider is actually worth your money?

I spent weeks testing 12 different services. Some were fantastic. Some were an absolute disaster.

This article gives you the honest truth about the best IPTV providers in the USA right now — no fluff, no paid promotions, just real user experience.

Let's get into it.

---

First Things First — What Exactly Is IPTV?

If you're new to this whole world, let me break it down in plain English.

IPTV stands for Internet Protocol Television.

Instead of a cable wire running into your wall or a satellite dish on your roof, your TV signal travels through your home internet connection.

That's it. Simple as that.

Think about how you already stream YouTube or Netflix. IPTV works the same way — except instead of on-demand shows only, you get:

• Live TV channels
• Sports
• News
• Movies
• Pay-per-view events

All delivered over the internet.

The best part? A quality IPTV subscription costs anywhere from $10 to $25 per month.

Compare that to the average American cable bill of $127 per month, and you start to see why people are going crazy over this.

---

Why So Many Americans Are Ditching Cable for IPTV in 2026

This isn't some underground secret anymore. IPTV has gone mainstream, and for good reason.

Here's what's driving the cord-cutting revolution in the USA:

• Cable prices have gone up 53% over the last decade while IPTV prices have stayed flat or dropped.
• You can watch IPTV on your phone, tablet, laptop, Smart TV, Firestick, or Roku.
• IPTV gives you access to international channels that cable companies simply don't carry.
• No installation appointments, no technician visits, and no contract lock-ins.
• You can cancel anytime without penalty fees.

If you have a halfway decent internet connection (we're talking 15 Mbps or faster), you're already set up to make the switch today.

---

How I Tested These IPTV Providers

Before I give you the list, I want to be upfront about how I picked these services.

I didn't just Google “best IPTV USA” and copy a list. I actually used these services.

Here's what I looked at during testing:

• Buffering and stability — I ran each service for at least 5 days straight across different times of day.
• Channel quality — Checked if HD and 4K streams actually look sharp, not pixelated.
• Channel variety — US locals, sports, news, entertainment, and international content.
• Device compatibility — Tested on Firestick, Android phone, Smart TV, and laptop.
• Setup experience — How easy is it for a complete beginner to get started?
• Customer support — I actually sent support tickets and waited to see how they responded.
• Value for money — Is the price justified by what you actually get?

With that out of the way, here are the real winners.

---

The Best IPTV Providers in the USA Right Now

1. SMARTIFLIX IPTV — Most Reliable IPTV Service in the USA

If stability is your number one priority — and it should be — SMARTIFLIX IPTV is hard to beat.

During my testing week, I experienced zero buffering during peak evening hours, which is honestly rare in the IPTV world.

They run their own server infrastructure instead of reselling someone else's service, and it shows. The picture quality on HD channels is genuinely crisp, and their 4K offerings are among the best I've tested.

What you get:

• 18,000+ live channels, including all major US networks.
• Full HD and 4K streams.
• Electronic Program Guide (EPG) built in.
• Works on Firestick, Smart TV, Android, iOS, Windows, and MAG boxes.
• Anti-buffering technology.
• 48-hour free trial before you pay a cent.

Pricing starts at around $16/month for one connection.

A small price to pay for something that actually works every single time you turn it on.

Verdict: Best all-around IPTV service in the USA in 2026.

---

2. TRIMIX IPTV — Best for Live Sports in the USA

I'll be honest, when I first tried Trimix IPTV, I was skeptical.

But then I watched a live NFL game on it and my jaw dropped.

Zero lag. Zero delay. It felt exactly like watching live TV.

TRIMIX IPTV has built its entire service around sports fans, and they've nailed it.

They carry every major US sports network plus international sports channels you've probably never even heard of.

Sports coverage includes:

• NFL, NBA, MLB, NHL, and MLS.
• UFC and boxing PPV events at no extra charge.
• Premier League, La Liga, Serie A, and Champions League.
• Regional sports networks (RSNs).
• 24/7 sports replay channels.

If you've ever paid $80 extra just to watch one PPV event on cable, you'll understand why TRIMIX IPTV feels like winning the lottery.

Verdict: Hands down the best IPTV provider in the USA for sports fans.

---

Check discounts and current availability for StreamKing and others here >>>

---

3. ORVENTV — Best for Beginners

Most IPTV services assume you already know what an M3U file is or how to configure Xtream Codes.

If that sentence just confused you — ORVENTV is built for you.

Their setup process is genuinely the simplest I've ever seen.

You sign up, download their custom app, log in, and you're watching TV.

That's it. No technical knowledge needed.

Why beginners love ORVENTV:

• Their own custom app available on all devices.
• Step-by-step setup guide with video tutorials.
• Clean, easy-to-navigate interface.
• 24/7 live chat support.
• 7-day money-back guarantee.

The channel count sits at around 12,000, which is more than enough for most households.

Pricing is beginner-friendly too, starting at just $12/month.

Verdict: The most beginner-friendly IPTV service in the USA — period.

---

4. DIGITALINE IPTV — Best for 4K Streaming Quality

If you just bought a shiny new 4K TV and you want to actually use all those pixels, DIGITALINE IPTV is the provider you need.

They've invested heavily in 4K server infrastructure, and the results speak for themselves.

Most IPTV providers say they offer 4K but actually deliver upscaled 1080p.

TurboTV delivers genuine native 4K on their top-tier channels.

Watch a nature documentary or a live football game in 4K and you'll never want to go back.

4K and quality highlights:

• 800+ channels in native 4K resolution.
• 10,000+ channels in Full HD.
• Low-latency streams optimized for large screens.
• Dolby Audio support on select channels.
• Requires at least 25 Mbps internet for 4K.

It's priced slightly higher at around $22/month, but if picture quality is important to you, it's worth every penny.

Verdict: Best 4K IPTV experience in the USA for home theater enthusiasts.

---

5. ON IPTV US — Best Value IPTV Service in the USA

Not everyone needs 20,000 channels and 4K streams.

Some people just want a reliable service that doesn't cost a fortune.

ON IPTV US is that service.

For around $9.99/month, you get 8,000+ channels, solid HD quality, and a surprisingly stable connection.

It's not the most glamorous option on this list, but it delivers exactly what it promises — and in the IPTV world, that's actually a big deal.

What makes it great value:

• Under $10/month.
• 8,000+ channels covering US, UK, Canada, and international entertainment, according to the service description.
• HD streaming options for everyday viewing.
• Straightforward setup for compatible streaming devices.
• Budget-friendly pricing compared with traditional television packages.
• A practical option for viewers who don't need every premium feature.

The biggest attraction here is affordability.

But there's something worth remembering: a cheap IPTV subscription isn't automatically a good deal if the channels you want aren't available or the service keeps disconnecting.

Before choosing ON IPTV US, check its current pricing, channel lineup, supported devices, and refund conditions.

Verdict: A budget-focused IPTV option worth comparing if keeping monthly costs low is your main priority.

---

6. YouTube TV — Best IPTV Alternative for US Live TV

If you want to leave cable behind without giving up the familiar television experience, YouTube TV deserves a place on your shortlist.

Unlike many independent IPTV providers, YouTube TV focuses on mainstream American television networks through an established streaming platform.

The interface feels familiar, the channel guide is easy to navigate, and the DVR functionality is particularly useful for households that can't always watch their favorite shows live.

What makes YouTube TV interesting:

• Major US television networks, depending on location.
• Live sports, news, and entertainment.
• Cloud DVR functionality.
• Applications for Firestick, Smart TVs, and mobile devices.
• Household-oriented streaming features.
• No traditional cable box required.

Of course, there's a catch.

YouTube TV isn't necessarily the cheapest option. If you're comparing it with independent IPTV providers advertising extremely low monthly prices, the difference can be significant.

But price isn't everything.

The platform's documented channel packages and established customer support may justify the extra cost for some viewers.

Verdict: One of the strongest mainstream cable-replacement options for US households that prioritize familiar channels and DVR functionality.

---

7. Hulu + Live TV — Best IPTV Alternative for Movies and Entertainment

Here's a situation many people know too well.

You want live television for news and sports, but you also want movies and series available whenever you feel like watching them.

Paying for separate services can quickly become expensive.

That's where Hulu + Live TV becomes interesting.

Instead of focusing exclusively on live television, Hulu combines live channels with a broader on-demand entertainment experience.

What you get:

• Live television programming.
• On-demand movies and television series.
• Entertainment bundle options.
• Cloud DVR functionality.
• Support for compatible Smart TVs and streaming devices.
• Access to mainstream programming, depending on the package.

The main advantage is convenience.

If your household enjoys both scheduled television and streaming entertainment, combining them into one package can make sense.

The downside? You need to compare the total subscription price carefully, particularly if you won't use all the bundled services.

Verdict: A strong choice for households that want live TV and on-demand entertainment together.

---

Final Thoughts

Choosing the best IPTV subscription in 2026 depends on what matters most to you.

Whether you're looking for reliable streaming, live sports, 4K picture quality, beginner-friendly setup, or affordable entertainment, take the time to compare channel availability, device compatibility, pricing, and customer support.

Important: Before subscribing to any IPTV provider, verify that it is properly licensed to distribute the channels and content it offers. Extremely large channel libraries and unusually low prices are not proof of legitimate content rights.

Always review trial terms, refund policies, and subscription conditions before making a payment.

Best IPTV Service for USA, Canada and Europe? What’s Actually Working for me? Best IPTV service discussions always seem to focus on channel counts. I’m more interested in whether you can sit down after work and enjoy watching something without spending your evening fixing the setup. You’ve finally got an hour to yourself. Dinner is ready, you pick something to watch, and the last thing you want is another problem to figure out. Smartiflix and TrimixIPTV have worked best for me so far. They’re the two I’d recommend checking out. Still, what works for one household might feel different for another. Someone watching live sports every weekend has different priorities from someone who mainly watches films or catches up on a favourite series. That’s why I’d like to see more IPTV reviews mentioning the actual setup. Which country are you in? Are you watching on a Firestick, Android TV or Smart TV? How long have you had the IPTV subscription? The little details matter. Finding favourites easily. Getting subtitles when you need them. Having someone answer your question if something goes wrong. For anyone using IPTV in Canada, the USA or the Europe, which provider have you stayed with, and what made you renew?

In Summary: * Have taken the 1st round of night meds, read the Hour of Vespers, and have tuned into ESPN Radio for pregame coverage of tonight's Michigan St. / Duke men's basketball game. By game's end I'll have taken the 2nd round of night meds, will be ready for tonight's Hour of Compline, and will be ready to put my old self to bed.

Prayers, etc.: * I have a daily prayer regimen I try to follow throughout the day from early morning, as soon as I roll out of bed, until head hits pillow at night.

Health Metrics: * bw= 216.49 lbs. * bp= 145/70 (68)

Exercise: * morning stretches, balance exercises, kegel pelvic floor exercises, half squats, calf raises, toe raises, wall push-ups, BP breathing exercises, pilates

Diet: * 04:55 – 1 banana * 06:10 – 1 ham & cheese sandwich * 06:45 – snacking on chocolate m&m candies * 10:20 – 3 hamburger rolls, brown gravy, white bread and butter * 12:30 – pizza * 16:00 – 1 fresh apple

Activities, Chores, etc.: * 02:00 – still awake, insomnia all night * 03:30 – bank accounts activity monitored * 03:35 – read, write, pray, follow news reports from various sources, surf the socials, take daily meds, unpack, organize, and nap * 15:00 – listening to Tom Izzo, head coach of the Michigan St. Spartans, talk about his team and tonight's game against Duke

Chess: * 13:25 – moved in all pending CC games

Darker is Brighter's counterpart library. You can use Brighter and Darker in combination when you create a Command Query Responsibility Separation (CQRS) application. Under that approach, Brighter handles Commands, and Darker handles Queries. Brighter can also handle Domain Events.

Both Brighter and Darker implement the Command Dispatcher pattern and support a middleware pipeline between the sender and receiver. The middleware pipeline has a “Russian Doll” model; each piece of middleware encapsulates the next one in the chain.

Darker V5

We have not released Darker for a while. For Brighter, V10 was a significant capability upgrade. Darker V5 brings us comparable functionality to Brighter.

This post covers the main points. The README and the ADRs in docs/adr have the details.

Streaming queries

Handlers can now yield results one at a time as IAsyncEnumerable, so large result sets never have to be held in memory all at once. Streaming has its own pipeline, and logging, tracing, and resilience all work on it.

public sealed class GetOrdersStream : IStreamQuery<Order> { ... }

public sealed class GetOrdersStreamHandler : StreamQueryHandler<GetOrdersStream, Order>
{
    public override async IAsyncEnumerable<Order> ExecuteAsync(
        GetOrdersStream query,
        [EnumeratorCancellation] CancellationToken ct = default)
    {
        await foreach (var order in _repository.StreamByCustomerAsync(query.CustomerId, ct))
            yield return order;
    }
}

await foreach (var order in queryProcessor.ExecuteStream(new GetOrdersStream("C42"), ct))
    Process(order);

Polly V8 resilience pipelines

The new [UseResiliencePipeline] attributes use a Polly V8 ResiliencePipelineRegistry, which is the same approach Brighter takes.

services.AddDarker()
    .AddHandlersFromAssemblies(typeof(GetFooHandler).Assembly)
    .AddDefaultResiliencePipelines();   // or .AddResiliencePipelines(myRegistry)

[UseResiliencePipelineAttributeAsync(3, Constants.RetryPipelineName)]
public override Task<string> ExecuteAsync(GetFoo query, CancellationToken ct = default) { ... }

OpenTelemetry tracing and metrics

Each query now produces a query span. The span records an event for each step in the pipeline and records any exceptions. Handlers can attach their own database spans to it. Metrics are worked out from the traces: duration histograms, plus counts and failures by error.type. You choose how much query detail goes into the spans with InstrumentationOptions. The core package has no OpenTelemetry SDK dependency; the wiring is in Paramore.Darker.Extensions.Diagnostics.

services.AddDarker(o => o.InstrumentationOptions = InstrumentationOptions.QueryInformation);

services.AddOpenTelemetry()
    .WithTracing(t => t.AddDarkerInstrumentation())
    .WithMetrics(m => m.AddDarkerInstrumentation());

Agreement dispatch

This works like Brighter's Agreement Dispatcher. You can route a query to a handler based on the query's content and its context, not only its type. A typical use is switching to a new way of calculating a metric after a cut-over date.

services.AddDarker()
    .AddAsyncHandlers(r => r.Register<GetRevenue, decimal>(
        (query, context) => query.Date < CutOver ? typeof(LegacyRevenueHandler) : typeof(RevenueHandler),
        typeof(LegacyRevenueHandler), typeof(RevenueHandler)));

Query validation

[ValidateQuery] is a validation decorator that doesn't depend on any one validation library. Two provider packages plug into it, one for FluentValidation and one for DataAnnotations.

services.AddDarker()
    .AddHandlersFromAssemblies(...)
    .UseFluentValidation();   // or .UseDataAnnotations()

[ValidateQueryAttributeAsync(4)]
public override Task<Person> ExecuteAsync(GetPerson query, CancellationToken ct = default) { ... }

Result caching

[CacheableQuery] caches query results using Microsoft's HybridCache, and you can plug in FusionCache through DI. On a cache hit the rest of the pipeline is skipped. Each cached entry needs an expiry. You can replace how cache keys are built with your own ICacheKeyGenerator. To evict entries yourself, put a tag in the context bag under CacheableQueryAttribute.CacheTag. Hits and misses show up in traces and metrics. This package needs net8.0 or later.

services.AddHybridCache();
services.AddDarker().AddHandlersFromAssemblies(...).AddCaching();

[CacheableQueryAttributeAsync(step: 5, expirationSeconds: 60)]
public override Task<IReadOnlyList<Person>> ExecuteAsync(GetPeople query, CancellationToken ct = default) { ... }

Sharing the ASP.NET Core request scope (and your DbContext)

Darker query handlers can now use the same Scoped services as your controllers and Brighter command handlers in one request, such as an EF Core DbContext. This comes from the new Paramore.Darker.Extensions.AspNetCore package.

services.AddDarkerRequestScope();
services.AddDarker(o => o.HandlerLifetime = ServiceLifetime.Scoped)
    .AddHandlersFromAssemblies(typeof(MyHandler).Assembly);

Startup validation of pipelines

Calling ValidatePipelines() checks every registered handler and its decorators when the host starts, and reports every problem in one go. That means you no longer find mistakes one at a time on the first query. It looks for:

• missing, non-public or unregistered handlers
• handlers on the wrong sync/async interface
• decorators that are on the wrong path or not registered
• two decorators with the same step number
• a fallback placed inside a retry
• lifetime problems such as a captive dependency

If you want to run the same checks on demand, for example in a test or a health check, use provider.ValidateAll().

services.AddDarker()
    .AddHandlersFromAssemblies(...)
    .AddDefaultResiliencePipelines()
    .ValidatePipelines();   // call it last

Lifetime-aware factories and safer teardown

Handler and decorator factories now follow the lifetime you configure (Singleton, Scoped or Transient). Each query gets its own scope.

Teardown is also safer. If releasing one component fails, the failure is logged and the rest are still released. Teardown never throws, so it can't hide the handler's own exception.

This fixes two old bugs:

• A Singleton handler was being disposed after its first query.
• Scoped dependencies were resolved from the root provider instead of the request's scope.

Smaller things

• Pass your own context. Execute and ExecuteAsync now accept an IQueryContext.
• Built-in test doubles. SimpleHandlerFactory, SimpleHandlerDecoratorFactory and the InMemory registries are now public in core, so you can run Darker in tests or without a DI container.
• AOT-friendly logging. Query logging uses System.Text.Json.

Changes to be aware of

The full list of breaking changes, with a migration step for each, is in release_notes.md. The main ones:

• Packages consolidated.
  • The Policies and QueryLogging side packages are now part of Paramore.Darker.
  • Paramore.Darker.AspNetCore has been renamed to Paramore.Darker.Extensions.DependencyInjection.
  • The SimpleInjector and LightInject packages have been removed. Microsoft.Extensions.DependencyInjection is the only DI integration Darker supports.
• Sync and async are fully separate. Handlers, decorators, attributes and factories now come in separate sync and async types, for example IQueryHandler and IQueryHandlerAsync. No single type serves both paths any more, so if you implemented IQueryHandler<,> directly and relied on both paths, you'll need to choose one.
• Newtonsoft.Json is gone. Logging uses System.Text.Json now. The AddJsonQueryLogging callback takes JsonSerializerOptions instead of JsonSerializerSettings. If you were getting Newtonsoft.Json through Darker, add your own reference to it.
• [RetryableQuery] is obsolete. It still works in V5, but you'll get compiler warnings, and it will be removed in V6. Move to [UseResiliencePipeline] and a ResiliencePipelineRegistry. The new defaults are not the same as the old ones, so review your retry and circuit-breaker settings.
• contextBagData has been removed. Pass an IQueryContext instead.
• Custom factories need updating.
  • On the async factories, Release is now ValueTask ReleaseAsync.
  • IAmALifetime now extends IAsyncDisposable.
  • Handler factories must implement CreatePipelineScope().
  • IAmALifetime.Add has been removed.
  • Container-backed decorator factories must resolve from lifetime.PipelineScope.
• Teardown no longer throws. A failing release is logged at Error level instead of being thrown, so watch your logs rather than catching these exceptions.
• IAsyncDisposable is honoured. On the async and stream paths, the Simple factories now await DisposeAsync. A Scoped service that implements only IAsyncDisposable won't be disposed on the sync Execute path.
• Decorators are Transient under a Scoped or Transient handler lifetime, so don't count on one decorator instance being shared across a scope.
• A Scoped QueryProcessor was never the fix for EF Core. It gets its own scope next to the request's, not the request's scope itself. Use Scoped handlers with AddDarkerRequestScope() instead. Note also that concurrent queries within one request need ScopeAffinity.AlwaysNew.
• New dependency. The DI package now references Microsoft.Extensions.Hosting.Abstractions, so check for version conflicts with your hosting packages.
• Validation is strict about visibility. An internal handler that you register explicitly still runs, but it fails ValidatePipelines().
• Framework floors. The caching and AspNetCore packages need net8.0 or later. The other packages also support netstandard2.0.

Try it

5.0.0-preview1 is on NuGet now. Please try it and tell us how you get on by opening an issue or joining discussion #273.

Publicat la 5 decembrie 2017

Până la capătul lumii și dincolo de el… Cam așa suna o destinație… Ah, nu, nu All Inclusive, piesa de teatru cu Medeea Marinescu și Marius Manole, ci una indicată în Pirații din Caraibe. Și nu, nu vreau să povestesc nici despre piesă, nici despre film. Cu toate astea, le recomand. Piesa, pentru câteva situații și lecții de viață, iar filmul, pentru aventură.

De aici, textul urma să ia o anumită turnură, dar se făcu cum se făcu, că ora mi se arătă trei și douăzeci. Oh, da, iarăși ne iei cu Călăreții Apocalipsei… Oh, nu! Nici vorbă! Și de-mi place, și de nu-mi place, am ajuns să fiu, în general, treaz la miezul nopții sau aproape până la miezul nopții.

Sun is the same in a relative way…

Time – Pink Floyd


Se face cumva că „până la capătul lumii și dincolo de el” te duce cu gândul la vremuri în care Pământul era considerat centrul Universului (îmi place formularea din zilele noastre: Universul cunoscut). Nu trebuie însă să ne imaginăm că oamenii acelor vremuri credeau cu toții că Pământul este plat. Forma sferică era cunoscută încă din Antichitate. Aristotel aducea deja, în secolul al IV-lea î.Hr., argumente în sprijinul acestei idei.

Eppur si muove! Cel puțin, așa spune legenda despre Galileo Galilei. Nu există dovezi că ar fi rostit aceste cuvinte după ce a fost obligat să abjure doctrina heliocentrică. Dar Pământul chiar se mișcă, iar Galilei avea dreptate să susțină acest lucru. Autoritățile ecleziastice ale vremii nu erau deloc încântate de ideile lui!

Despre forma Pământului se vorbea cu mult înaintea lui Galilei. Pliniu cel Bătrân, în secolul I d.Hr., descria în Naturalis Historia un fenomen interesant: uscatul care nu mai poate fi văzut de pe puntea unei corăbii poate fi încă zărit de pe catarg. Tot el observa că un obiect luminos fixat în vârful catargului unei nave care se îndepărtează pare să coboare treptat, până dispare din vedere.

O observație simplă, dar grăitoare: o corabie nu dispare pur și simplu în depărtare, ci pare să se piardă treptat sub orizont.

A mai fost o vreme în care unor ținuturi li s-a spus „sfârșitul lumii”, deoarece dincolo de țărm nu mai era decât marea întinsă, iar în ea se culca soarele…


În acele timpuri, marinarii aveau tot felul de superstiții (dar cine nu are?!). Le aveau. Le primiseră drept moștenire, trăiau cu ele, apoi le transmiteau din tată în fiu.

În Finistère (nume evident pentru pământul de la capătul lumii) sau Penn-ar-Bed, denumirea celtă (nume mai puțin evident pentru același pământ), se spune că rostirea numelor a două creaturi aparent nevinovate și fără vreo putere miraculoasă va duce cu siguranță la naufragiul sau la scufundarea corabiei la bordul căreia vreun nefericit de marinar a pronunțat iepure sau melc.


Probabil natura le-o fi dat motive întemeiate să creadă asta. Eu aș zice că imaginea este sugestivă! Nu este vreun truc, ci o realitate din Pointe du Morgat (Beg ar Gador).


Cu iepurele (în stânga) cred că este destul de clar, dar cu melcul… Ei bine, cu melcul cred că este discutabil. Dacă aș zice că este o balenă, nu aș putea fi contrazis prea lesne în privința formei; poate doar a dimensiunii relative față de iepurilă de alături. Dar aceeași problemă ar fi și cu dimensiunea melcului…

Sun is the same in a relative way…

M-am agățat din nou de poze, din nou de Pink Floyd. Turnura asta nu trebuia să aibă loc. Intenționasem să spun că, pentru a ajunge până dincolo de capătul lumii, este nevoie de curaj și determinare, de sprijin și de încredere, de devotament și de loialitate. Mai e nevoie și de tărie fizică, psihică și de caracter.

Oare câte dintre acestea pot duce? Câte dintre ele mă caracterizează? Câte aș vrea să mă caracterizeze?! Toate! Dar le pot duce? E corpul meu atât de puternic? Cu siguranță că nu! E mintea mea suficient de isteață pentru asta? Întreab-o! Dar sufletul? Dacă nu l-oi fi vândut deja, poate că mai are o șansă! Aș vrea cât mai multe dintre cele de mai sus?! Mai întrebi?! Sigur! Le merit? Întrebarea asta au pus-o și într-una dintre ultimele reclame la un model al unei cunoscute mărci auto (tatăl ei avea prenumele Henry).

Oamenii puternici pot ajunge până dincolo! Dar ce înseamnă, de fapt, să fii puternic? Poate că nu este vorba despre forță fizică, despre inteligență sau despre curajul de a înfrunta necunoscutul. Poate că adevărata putere înseamnă să ai suficientă încredere în tine încât să-ți permiți să încerci, să greșești, să nu fii cel mai bun. Să nu te lași împiedicat de gândul că nu ești suficient de bun sau că altcineva ar fi mai îndreptățit decât tine să ajungă acolo. Să-ți acorzi, pur și simplu, permisiunea de a încerca.

Să sper că voi ajunge vreodată acolo e doar o copilărie… Poate doar dacă… doar dacă voi lupta pentru asta. Și pentru asta îmi trebuie ce am scris mai sus.

Deocamdată scriu. Ce va urma, voi vedea…

Picked up at Badlands records during my recent excursion to Cheltenham, two jazz albums on CD: Future Present Past by Irreversible Entanglements and Omni by the James Brandon Lewis Quartet. On the former, the quintet continue in a similar vein to their previous record Protect Your Light: a little more groove-based and a tad less free-form than on their earlier productions. Lyrically too the emphasis has shifted somewhat, away from the righteously angry and toward the positive & encouraging, as reflected here by track titles such as ‘Don’t Lose Your Head’, ‘Hold On’, ‘Keep Going’ & ‘We Overcome’. Meanwhile, there’s been no reduction in quality, though I do wonder how many of their albums I’ll feel the need to keep on my shelves in the long term: this one is my fourth. An example track: ‘The Spirit Moves’.

Omni is the first record I’ve acquired featuring James Brandon Lewis. I’d seen a few clips of him on YouTube and wondered whether I’d be equal to the challenge of his music. Some of the booklet notes for Omni likewise gave me pause, with their mention of the concept of “molecular systematic music” and the occasional use of 12-tone scales as a starting point. At the same time they spoke of a spiritual dimension to the music, with gospel influences at play. I had no idea what to expect from “12-tone gospel”. What I got was sporadically thorny but often fascinating music, outstandingly well-played. Aside from Lewis himself, I was particularly impressed by drummer Chad Taylor. ‘The Sermon’ seems to be the only track from the album readily available on-line.

---

At Broadleaf Books in Abergavenny on Saturday morning I picked out a slender volume by Max Frisch called Man in the Holocene (translated from the German by Geoffrey Skelton), which had the following as part of its back-cover blurb: “Frisch charts the crumbling landscape of an old man’s consciousness as he slips away from himself toward death.” They don’t often write them like that any more. Naturally, I bought it: £3.50 paid. I read the book in two sittings that afternoon. The blurb was quite accurate. Summer storms bring flooding and landslides to an out-of-the-way valley in southern Switzerland, where Geiser, the elderly protagonist, lives alone, his memory and judgement beginning to fail him. Though first published in 1979, before climate change became a pressing concern, it’s a book which feels very much like it belongs to the present moment, with its evocation of an episode of extreme, unseasonable weather; the effects of which mirror Geiser’s decline. There’s something of the collage-novel about the book too, with its interpolation of snippets cut from books ostensibly on the protagonist’s shelves: Bible verses; paragraphs of local geology and history; extracts from an encyclopaedia. This is my first exposure to Frisch’s work and, favourably impressed by it, I hope not the last.

---

The strangest book I’ve acquired in some time came from Troutmark Books in Cardiff the other week. I’d been looking at a hardback copy of Christian Bök’s Eunoia when my eye was drawn to the blue-spined paperback next to it. This was Return to Leptis Magna, a title self-published in 2010 in an edition of 500 copies by London-based artist Anna Barham. I was intrigued enough to hand over a tenner for it. It’s a text entirely composed of anagrams of the book’s title. These are ‘artistically’ arranged in a monospaced font over its ninety or so pages like free verse, surrounded by ample white space. I’m not sure though if it is really quite poetry. At the edges of many pages are numbered ‘pointers’, references to other parts of the text, as though each page were just a small window on a very large sheet of paper containing the whole work. The evidently obsessive impetus behind it makes for a peculiarly compelling read. Here’s a brief extract:

               PARROT TANGLES MINUET
               PARROTING LAMEST TUNE
          TUNE PARROT LIGAMENTS
MINUTEST ANGEL PARROT
           TEN PARROTS EMULATING
               PARROTING METAL TUNES
               PARROTING EMU TALENT

I visited Mrs. S. at the nursing home today. She seemed in good spirits. Mercedes, her aide, had returned her radio from the repair shop.

I told her that we’d had a good lesson, that she must have slept well the previous because she’d been extremely alert, and I was saying my good-byes when explained that she’d slept well because the nurses now gave her sleeping aids. I sat back down in my chair.

Why?

Mrs. S is incredibly accomplished, well-traveled, and well-educated. But now she can barely see and she moves little and only thanks to a walker. Her main connection to keep abreast of the outside world and beating back the loneliness and boredom of the nursing home is her radio.

Her radio is tuned to the national radio station which has been covering of late protests in the street. They’ve been especially attuned to the more violent and destructive elements that have helped turn some of the protests and strikes into riots. In fact, it’s likely they’ve probably been giving these events more coverage relative to the more peaceful elements of the protests.

Mrs. S has been glued to the radio and to reports of riots, looting, and mayhem in the streets. And she’s anxious. And so, she takes pills to sleep.

Publicat la 2 decembrie 2017

Dinu se simțea prins între cele două talere ale unei balanțe: a vorbi mai mult și a tăcea mai mult. Lumea voia să afle de la el cât mai multe, dar felul lui de a vorbi îi făcea pe unii să-l privească altfel. Nu-i pica deloc bine, iar după ce termina discuțiile pe marginea câte unei teme ajungea să se simtă prost din pricina acelor priviri.

Oare nu le plăcea expunerea? Sau stilul său rapid, entuziast, plin de încântare? Oricare ar fi fost motivul, era clar că ceva îi deranja pe unii dintre cei din jurul său. Îl deranja și faptul că nu-i spuneau ce nu le plăcea sau ce nu le convenea; mereu negau, mereu îi spuneau că i s-a părut. Dar, de tot atâtea ori, el nu se simțea în apele lui.


Luase o hotărâre, dar știa că nu va reuși să facă acel jurământ parțial al tăcerii. De vorbit era nevoit să vorbească, societatea presupunând exercitarea acestui atribut. Dacă ar fi fost un pustnic, i-ar fi fost foarte ușor. Dar nu era. În plus, pe lângă familie și societate, locul său de muncă presupunea interacțiune zilnică și utilizarea tuturor mijloacelor de comunicare. Dacă ar fi fost… dar ce mai contează ce ar fi fost? Nu era.

Așa că trebuia să-și vadă mai departe de viață și de îndatoririle de tot felul. Își propusese totuși să scrie mai mult, ocupându-și astfel timpul în care ar fi fost tentat să sune pe cineva, să se intereseze de câte un proiect sau de soarta unuia ori a altuia, să invite vreun prieten sau vreo prietenă la o cafea. Îi plăcea să spună asta, dar unele dintre prietenele sale preferau ceaiul; ba chiar nu orice ceai și nu servit oricum.

Observase tabieturile unora dintre ele, în mare parte asemănătoare, dar care difereau pe ici, pe colo. Încercase în câteva rânduri și el ceaiul în locul cafelei, dar îi fusese clar încă de la început că ceaiul nu fusese pentru el sau că el nu fusese „construit” pentru a bea ceai. Exista și o excepție: ceaiul de iarnă. Prietena lui cea mai bună îi observase firea și plăcerea din copilărie pentru anumite „dulcegării” condimentate cu scorțișoară.

Fiind o fină cunoscătoare a feluritelor arome, îi recomandase ceaiul Anotimpurile. Era sezonul rece, așa că Iarna era ceaiul perfect pentru el: cu scorțișoară! Cum se apropia sezonul rece, cum începea căutarea acelui sortiment, cu o coloristică a cutiei potrivită sărbătorilor de iarnă. Producătorii diversificau combinațiile de arome și încercau să atragă noi clienți. Dinu rămase fidel aromei. La serviciu își prepara ceaiul, pe care îl îndulcea cu zahărul de care multă lume îl îndemna să se îndepărteze.

Mierea ar fi fost mult mai potrivită, însă Dinu era de părere că apa fiartă alterează proprietățile deosebite ale produsului auriu. Deși cafeaua o prefera neagră, limonada și ceaiurile le prefera îndulcite un pic peste medie.


Considera că media era, cel puțin în cazul limonadei, cantitatea de zahăr folosită de cei care o preparau la terasele pe care le frecventa în zilele toride de vară. Apăreau mereu discuții în jurul zahărului alb, al celui brun, al proprietăților sale și al faptului că zahărul schimbă aroma naturală a ceaiului neîndulcit. Era de acord cu acest din urmă aspect, pentru că așa descoperise gustul „adevărat” al cafelei, renunțând la zahăr.

Citise în adolescență un roman, o cronică de familie (probabil The Forsyte Saga – chiar dacă nu era acesta, tot ar trebui să-l recitească cândva), în care urmărea în special cum trebuie să se comporte un gentleman, cum să acționeze, cum și cât să vorbească. În tinerețe realizase că nu avea nici cea mai mică șansă de a deveni un gentleman autentic, în ciuda eforturilor sale.

Se mișca, respira, trăia, studiase, lucra, locuia într-o societate opusă uneia în care predomina bunul-simț și în care civilizația era la ea acasă. Ce, cum și cât să vorbească putea fi controlat prin exercițiu, dar sângele său, un amestec latino-balcanico-slav, îi fierbea de multe ori în vene, iar asta lăsa logica în urmă. Se mustra mereu după câte un astfel de episod, dar era conștient că sângele apă nu se face. Nici măcar donările frecvente de sânge nu aveau vreun efect de schimbare.

Deși încercase, deși concluzionase că nu are sorți de izbândă, voința sa fiind invers proporțională cu clocotul fluidului roșu, reușise totuși ceva; ceva ce avea să-i încânte simțurile mulți, foarte mulți ani după aceea. Își adusese aminte la un moment dat că citise că un gentleman își bea cafeaua fără zahăr.


Poate că memoria îi juca feste (știa că nu se poate baza pe ea), dar putea să jure că așa citise. Rețeta de cafea, pe care o prepara acasă la ibric, presupunea, pentru fiecare ceașcă de cafea, o linguriță rasă de zahăr la o linguriță cu vârf de cafea. Cafeaua dulce astfel preparată era un deliciu, o savoare, dar totuși diferea de gustul lăsat de boabele de cafea prăjită pe care, copil fiind, le spărgea între măsele și pe care apoi le ronțăia cu poftă.

Știa că excesul dăuna, așa că nu abuza de bunăvoința bunicului, care se îndeletnicea cu măcinatul cafelei cu acea râșniță manuală din alamă, făcută probabil pe Insula Ada-Kaleh cam pe vremea când bunicul său avea vârsta lui fragedă…


Hotărî să reducă treptat zahărul din cafea. Se obișnui relativ repede cu gustul amar al cafelei preparate după aceeași rețetă, la nisip, pe foc mic, dar neîndulcită. În curând avea să se bucure de aroma cafelei perfecte. O astfel de senzație e greu de descris; o astfel de senzație se savurează sorbitură cu sorbitură, la o discuție amicală sau cu o carte bună în mână.


Încercase același lucru cu ceaiul. Devenise conștient de răul pe care îl poate provoca zahărul. Redusese mult mai rapid cele patru lingurițe pe care obișnuia să le adauge la o ceașcă de ceai. Reușise să se împace și cu gustul plantelor, rădăcinilor, fructelor sau frunzelor fierte ori infuzate, însă nu simțea aceeași plăcere ca în cazul cafelei. Era o excepție: ceaiul cu scorțișoară. În cazul lui, plăcerea era dublată de recomandarea primită din partea prietenei sale.

Îi era clar: ceaiul se bea îndulcit.


My Tuesday's Game of Choice.

... finds the (2-0) Michigan St. Spartans, ranked #5 nationally, playing the (2-0) Duke Blue Devils, ranked #2 nationally, at Chicago's United Center in the State Farm Champions Classic. The game's early start time of 6:00 PM CT, increases the odds that I may be able to listen to the whole game before sleep sends me to bed.

And the adventure continues.

Inbetweeners 46- Mammon

First, let's do a little background from official 5e lore before we delve into Mammon's role in my campaign: Mammon is the Archduke of Minauros, the third layer of the Nine Hells, and the embodiment of greed and avarice. He appears as an enormous serpent with a muscular humanoid torso, horns, and vicious fangs. Obsessively greedy, calculating, and selfish, Mammon is among the wealthiest beings in the multiverse and oversees much of Hell's commerce and soul trade. He rules from a vast city slowly sinking into a filthy swamp, refusing to spend the money necessary to maintain it. Unlike most archdevils, Mammon willingly trades supernatural favors for gold rather than souls. He serves Asmodeus but values wealth above nearly everything, including his own dignity and political ambitions.

I maintained most of this canon for the Inbetweeners. He is the richest known entity in the multiverse (Mechanus and Sigil have far more collective capital and wealth, but none of it is ascribed to a single individual. The Lady of Pain has no need for “wealth” as her power vastly eclipses the need for traditional commerce). I particularly focused on his link to the soul trade, which was a major underlying theme in the early to mid parts of the campaign. Mammon is loath to part with any wealth, and favors souls he can use to further increase his wealth. However, sometimes his greed actually hurts him in this regard, as the Nameless One would later point out, his propensity to hoard would leave many valuable assets, souls in particular, underutilized.

Mammon had no idea of the players' existence or motives before they freed Lurian. However, Lurian took out his chief captain, the Bronze General, Bael. Bael had approached the Interloper on behalf of Mammon about purchasing some of the Far Realm weaponry that had made Zariel's forces so effective on the battlefield. Mammon had hoped to eventually supplant Zariel and hoard the Interloper's gifts for himself. Surely he could pay better. Bael was an exceptional battlefield commander and decorated general of the Blood War, but he wasn't the most skilled at political intrigue. Lurian was able to quickly set up a meeting, posing as a fallen angel looking to broker a deal with Mammon. He had borrowed Far Realm energy and items from the Interloper to sell the bit. He then defeated Bael in single combat, captured him and brought him to be executed as a galvanizing event for the newly reorganized Judgement of Torm. Lurian never would have been able to pull this off if he had not been freed by the players and empowered by the Interloper. So this put the Interloper and the players on Mammon's radar.

What Mammon failed to realize is the priorities of who he was trying to negotiate with. Gold, wealth, etc meant nothing to the Interloper. Souls were of some interest, but what he really wanted was field testing. The multiverse was just a series of experiments to him, and Zariel would provide more data than Mammon ever could. So losing Bael put Lurian, the Interloper and the Inbetweeners high up on his list of mortal enemies. Since Mammon wasn't even sure what the Interloper was or how he could be reached, he focused on his more tangible targets. Lurian's use of Far Realm energy to execute Bael compounded this issue. Normally an archdevil slain on the material could be resurrected in Hell. Lurian snuffed him out of existence entirely. Incidentally, Lurian also tortured Bael extensively to gain information about other targets, but Mammon didn't really care much about that. Torture is kind of par for the course in the Lower Planes.

If Bael's destruction was the fire of Mammon's hatred, Arkanos' defeat was gasoline. Many decades, perhaps centuries ago, a young man named Arkanos was enslaved and condemned to die in gladiator pits. He made one wish to anyone who would listen- to win. Mammon saw potential in Arkanos, and from there the seed of an idea germinated. He would twist the webs of fate so Arkanos could not lose. And so long as Arkanos did not lose, Mammon had dominion over his soul and fate. Everyone he slew would go to the soul coffers of Mammon, and since he couldn't lose this would be an endless revenue stream of souls. Better yet, the more Arkanos won, the more powerful his oppoonets, and therefore the more potent and lucrative the souls. He became one of Mammon's biggest cash cows, not to mention Mammon could always bet on Arkanos and win. However, once the odds because incredibly lopsided, the gambling stream dried up.

The players, untethered by causality, somehow beat Arkanos, freeing him from a curse that he should not have been able to be freed from. This incensed Mammon. He briefly held Bruce and Uzo's souls in his domain before Arkanos brought them back. Two souls might seem like a trifle, but Mammon could not abide by losing even a single soul he believed was his. He was penny rich pound foolish when it came to souls.

So, the combination of losing Bael and Arkanos put the players to the top of his list. He set to finding a way to destroy them. The first obstacle was Sigil. Mammon had little power there. He could send assassins, but if the Inbetweeners defeated Arkanos, what hope could an assassin have, no matter how expensive? So, he sought to draw the players out of Sigil. That is when Zane came with a proposal. They shared a mutual interest, and Mammon had the resources and moral flexibility to pull it off.

They studied everything known about the Inbetweeners. Paid off those in the Protectors they could for their research. They quickly identified the Beeple Hive as important to the players. That would be how they would draw the players out. The Beeple Hive was on the lonely mountain top, not in Sigil, and could be struck. Zane proposed a hostage situation, and using the Torment, which the players knew intimately as a location for the showdown. Mammon loved it. Furthermore they'd hit on Lurian's allies who were guarding the Beeple Hive, including Elythos, Lurian's lover.

Meanwhile, unbeknownst to the players, The Man (still Asmodeus) and the Nameless One were observing all of this. The Man long thought Mammon was weak and inefficient. He wanted to put all his wealth to better use. He did not openly move against him, he didn't want to spook the other Lords of the Nine until he was ready to make his grand play in the lower planes. However, if the Inbetweeners struck down Mammon, that wasn't on him. In fact, it would demonstrate that Mammon is weak and needed to be put down. So he dispatched the Nameless One to get close to the players and set things into motion. They did, however, withhold information from the players about Zane and Mammon's plot. They needed the Inbetweeners to have reason enough to seek revenge. So they waited, bided their time, and the Nameless One made sure the players would be ready to act. However... there was one piece of the puzzle they'd need- the Interloper. Only he could grant the players the power necessary to bring down a Lord of Hell.

My kid's dance teacher was very bothered by the whole thing. We'd just had the first days of real cold of the season and the central heating was broken in the dance studio. The dance teacher had called the technician as a matter of course. The technician had diagnosed the problem, gone to the parts store, come back, and realized that he'd misdiagnosed the problem. He was going to have to order the part. And, of course, until he installed the part, the dance studio would go without central heating. She'd arranged an ad hoc solution, but was unhappy with it.

So, with an exaggerated frown on her face, she dragged me by the elbow into one of the studios. I took off my shoes and entered. She pointed to this big contraption: a movable heater powered by a big butane tank. The three burners shone a bright orange and the room smelled of what I suppose was the burning gas.

I couldn't immediately place it, but the smell of the burning gas, the sight of the burners and the big butane cylinder, made me smile. I breathed in deeply, exhaled, and told the teacher everything was going to be alright. These things always happen with the first cold. If it isn't the heater, it's the hot water heater. And the technician will be able to fix it all up soon enough. The kids will just have to wear an extra layer of clothing. I smiled at her, let her get on with her class, and walked out.

The cold air hit me on the way out of the door, and I remembered.

I first visited Rabat in January 2013. I was there only for a very short while for some preliminary research. It was cold, but it was the rain that was especially impressive. I imagine being so close to the Atlantic impacts rainfall, and that winter was especially wet, as I remember it. I'd come back to the place I'd rented soaked. My jeans, shirt, sweater, coat, socks, shoes, everything except for my waxed canvas messenger bag was just absolutely sopping wet. It was a miserable time walking to and from the tram to the research site or to the airbnb, and I was quite tired by the end of the day.

Naima, the host's mom, made everything OK, though. She's a brilliant cook and there was always a warm meal waiting for me shortly after I'd walk through the doors. But I'm most grateful for the butane gas heater she'd had her husband bring up.

Homes in the Middle East and North Africa, and in India too, for that matter, are often big cement boxes that are then beautifully decorated. You'll find plumbing, but sometimes gas isn't piped in, and people often use gas cylinders for heat and cooking.

The gas cylinder was old and so was the heater, and my privileged ass was extremely skeptical of the apparatus. Would I die of gas poisoning? Or would the fucking thing just blow up? Naima showed me how to work it: push the dial in, twist, and hit the ignition. Twist again if you need a bit more warmth. Twist again if you want it on full blast.

It took me a few days to become comfortable with it. I'd come home, undress, hang my things on the backs of chairs, and place them at a reasonable distance from the heater. The heat was never quite right: I was either a little uncomfortable because I was too cold or too hot. But soon that mattered little. The heater was a good friend. I'd move my chair closer or further depending on whether I was feeling the chill or crisping up. I'd sit further away from it as I digested one of Naima's wonderful tajines, or closer after coming back from finishing a cigarette in the chilled air late in the evening.

I was diligent about turning if off.

I'd slip into the cold bed as the rain poured outside. The muezzin called believers to prayer. I'd fall asleep.