Slashdot Mirror
Finland Is Killing Its Basic Income Experiment (businessinsider.com)
tomhath shares a report: Since the beginning of last year, 2000 Finns are getting money from the government each month -- and they are not expected to do anything in return. The participants, aged 25-58, are all unemployed, and were selected at random by Kela, Finland's social-security institution. Instead of unemployment benefits, the participants now receive $690 per month, tax free. Should they find a job during the two-year trial, they still get to keep the money. While the project is praised internationally for being at the cutting edge of social welfare, back in Finland, decision makers are quietly pulling the brakes, making a U-turn that is taking the project in a whole new direction. "Right now, the government is making changes that are taking the system further away from a basic income," Kela researcher Miska Simanainen told the Swedish daily Svenska Dagbladet.
TFA is misleading.
It was never a universal basic income, because it was never universal. Only unemployed people got it.
And it was less generous than the previous unemployment benefits, the idea being to "encourage" people into work.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
This is /., so no one RTFA, but itâ(TM)s the Finnish parliament that stopped it for political reasons in December, only one year into the two year experiment, not because it failed. We wonâ(TM)t know what happened in the study until 2019.
How many % of the population are actually waiters and lawyers and doctors and trash collectors?
Sales cashiers are being automated away through self-checkout. McDonalds staff are being automated away through ordering booths and robotic burger flippers. Drivers are forseeably going to be automated away through self-drvinf vehicles. Call centers have voice-recognition AI, web pages have customer query chat bots, trash collection can be easily roboticised once self driving vehicles happen. Factories are already automated. The numbers of available jobs in industries which require either manual labor or scriptable interations is falling and will continue to do so.
What type of magical "automation" is coming that is going to massively replace jobs? People keep talking about "automation", but is there some magic technology coming that is going to automate out waiters and lawyers and doctors and trash collectors?
Not paying attention, are you? Waiters and trash collectors are already losing jobs to automation. It's not a 100% replacement, but automation is cutting the numbers of workers in those (and many other) industries down.
Just look at checkout lines at stores - most of the ones around here have less manned lanes open because they're pushing the "self checkout" lanes - which are automated with video and weight sensors - which let a single employee run 4-12 "lanes" at a time. Even your examples of waiters and trash collectors suffer from this: Several national restaurant chains are moving to have a tablet-like device on the tables from which you can place orders and pay your bill. Doing this reduces the time waiters need to spend at your table, and results in more tables served with less employees. In the last 20 years, most garbage trucks have moved to a system where a driver uses a robotic arm to pick up and dump trash cans. Compare this to how it used to be, with 3-4 workers riding the truck with the driver to do the job that one robot arm does now.
What are you talking about? There was not a single socialist or communist country with UBI ever.
In socialism and communism people were forced into labour, unemployment figures were neglectable and everybody was "dragged along" at the work place, whether they were drunk and incapable or not. It was the worst case scenario for the productivity and for those who weren't willing or capable of doing the work they had chosen or were chosen for. The people who didn't meet expectations were constantly cautioned and 'educated', and it was hard and took serious efforts to change workplace, especially if you weren't in line with the party.
UBI is the opposite of that concept. The only similarity is that less people had to live on the street and people were less afraid of their future, after that the similarities end. UBI has never tried in any country so far.