I think it should be somewhat comfortable, around $20k to start with, but only adults should receive it. That gives adults some incentive to limit how many kids they have (while paying to kids could have the opposite effect). Part of the point of mincome is to make it so that people aren't desperate to work just to survive, and can even work toward improving their education or starting their own businesses.
Setting aside some money just for housing and utilities might sound like a decent idea so that nobody can spend their rent and utility money on I Am Rich for the iPad, but that would advertise a floor of what the market could bear for those things, effectively driving up the prices by exactly that amount - becoming a mass subsidy. This also creates more administrative overhead, which mincome is intended to minimize.
I don't think it should vary by location. Location prices vary for good reasons, even if those reasons are things that only certain people appreciate. For example a lot of people like to live in NYC for some reason, so that's an expensive place to live, even if you hate living in NYC. Not many people like to live in BFE, so BFE is cheap, even if you might think it's the best place in the world to live.
Let's call a "sub-livable wage" X. Let's say the EITC or similar supplement to get to "livable" is Y. If Megacorp pays X, and the government pays Y, how exactly is that worse than having the government pay X + Y? What happens when all the people who only used to cost Y a year now cost X + Y, plus they're still spending their disposable income at Megacorp & Friends to improve their bottom line? You really think that's preferable?
Perhaps it is, I think it's worth a try. Worst-case scenario, it'll be similar to the status quo, except people won't be under the bootheel of poverty. The people who used to cost X+Y per year will still only cost approximately X+Y, except Y will be an accountable number. People spending disposable income they didn't have before will boost the economy leading to increased (or less-reduced) demand for jobs.
I'd love to hear the plausible explanation for this one. If you were only worth X before, you're not worth more now. The most likely outcome is that people drop out of the labor force en masse, figuring they'd rather sit at home and smoke weed than get up and work. After all, if you can't be denied a "livable wage" just for breathing in and out, and you're a low-skill worker, what's the point? Nobody's going to clock 40 hours a week for $1 an hour. Given the high tax rates needed to pay a mincome, employers aren't going to be able to pay you $15 an hour for flipping burgers.
You've pretty much got it all figured out - many people who would have worked those awful jobs before will decide they'd rather sit at home (or work toward getting a better job), reducing the supply and driving the price up. I think employers will be able to pay burger-flippers $15 per hour with the taxes required for mincome, which would be in the same ballpark they are now (especially if we close all the tax loopholes exploited by the rich).
This is like the arguments for higher minimum wages. Yeah, at the margins, you don't see widespread layoffs with modest increases. But if doubling it is fair, and there are no downsides, why not triple? Quadruple?
That's like asking why if having a thirsty person drink 2 liters of water is good and has no downsides, why not drink 200 liters? Sort of like a slippery slope fallacy. There's an optimal range for minimum wages and exceeding it would obviously bring downsides.
Bad news, the world's ownership class is made up of bitter curmudgeons just like him. Like housecats, even though they have nothing to want for, they're still cruel predators, and will prey on us out of gluttony, or just for sport if they feel we haven't been dominated sufficiently.
Look, the ancient tarted-up barter system we call capitalism just can't work for much longer, if you can even call what it's been doing at the best of times "working." Right now, there aren't enough jobs for everyone no matter how skilled they are or how much they want to work, and the supply of jobs is only getting smaller. If you would prefer to live in a dystopia full of impoverished wasteland survivors over your taxes going to people who don't work, the ungoverned regions of Somalia will be your paradise and you can stop reading this post now.
The human labor required to provide resources for the world population is less than 100% of what would be needed to employ the world population, and that fraction is shrinking more every day. If we require people to work to survive, then the remainder of that fraction will have to sit quietly in a corner and starve to death since capitalism has no need for them (although they'll probably band together and revolt first). The human population would have to decrease quite quickly to keep up with the decreasing number of people capitalism can support. And what happens when it hits zero? Will the last man alive receive a call from his AI-boss telling him he's been let go, left to sit quietly in a corner and starve to death?
The rich will be the only source of demand, and it won't be enough. They'll never want enough megayachts for everyone to work on building them. They won't need armies of Uber drivers and yoga instructors and Youtube stars. Will they run a sadistic charity in the form of paying the world population to build hundreds of millions of mighty pyramids in their names? Maybe that could work.
Or you could get over your fixation with people getting some of your money without working and continue to earn money similarly to how you do now, if you so choose. Your choice. If you'd rather not work in such a society, that's fine, someone with more drive/less irrational hangups would be happy to take your place.
The other problem is that there aren't that many jobs to go around - there will be less and less in the future in fact. Those telemarketers, help desk people and secretaries will be the next to be replaced by machines.
The bad things about mincome are that it's really expensive, and that people will oppose it as "corporate welfare" (really, just look at what is said against the Earned Income Tax Credit) for giving those greedy corporations workers at a very low price.
Ironically, it will solve a real, widespread corporate welfare problem - sub-livable wages. Right now when somebody makes a sub-livable wage, somebody else has to make up the shortfall, whether it's government or relatives. Mincome would mean that nobody needs to worry about whether a wage is livable, and as a bonus it would drive up the wages of these menial jobs that people used to take out of sheer desperation.
The cost of sub-livable wages is also really expensive although it's hard to measure, so the savings there will help pay for mincome.
Are you trying to justify racial/religious profiling, or suggest that doing so against Muslims would *not* be islamophobic? Or suggest that anyone who can recognize simple bigotry against Muslims is a terrorist sympathizer/appeaser? Because I don't think it's working outside of your own head.
It could work if all the water sticks to the sides and makes it to the bottom of the egg - water could be collected there. I'm sure at least some of the water will fall off the sides and hit the ground though. I'm thinking a more traditional camper-trailer shape with a sloped roof might've been better for collecting water, and of course would've given more interior space.
Because composting toilets don't really work. Not if they're used with any regularity. It does have one, and that's the only big flaw I can see in this design.
Consider that a healthy average Chinese guy is going to be a lot lighter than a healthy average Samoan guy. Wouldn't it effectively be a bit racist to charge by weight?
Women's tickets would also generally be cheaper. And kids would hurt the airlines badly, taking up a whole seat with a very low weight charge.
Yes of course, only the extreme crazies who have been labeled "SJWs" by the social injustice enthusiasts are legitimate, everyone else who has received the label was neither a "true SJW" nor a true Scotsman.
A very efficient statement, you've let me know that you're an aggressively socially backward idiot taking a seat firmly on the wrong side of history. In the future people are going to look back at the term "SJW" the way we look back at "nigger-lover" today.
Slashdot Mirror
I think it should be somewhat comfortable, around $20k to start with, but only adults should receive it. That gives adults some incentive to limit how many kids they have (while paying to kids could have the opposite effect). Part of the point of mincome is to make it so that people aren't desperate to work just to survive, and can even work toward improving their education or starting their own businesses.
Setting aside some money just for housing and utilities might sound like a decent idea so that nobody can spend their rent and utility money on I Am Rich for the iPad, but that would advertise a floor of what the market could bear for those things, effectively driving up the prices by exactly that amount - becoming a mass subsidy. This also creates more administrative overhead, which mincome is intended to minimize.
I don't think it should vary by location. Location prices vary for good reasons, even if those reasons are things that only certain people appreciate. For example a lot of people like to live in NYC for some reason, so that's an expensive place to live, even if you hate living in NYC. Not many people like to live in BFE, so BFE is cheap, even if you might think it's the best place in the world to live.
Let's call a "sub-livable wage" X. Let's say the EITC or similar supplement to get to "livable" is Y. If Megacorp pays X, and the government pays Y, how exactly is that worse than having the government pay X + Y? What happens when all the people who only used to cost Y a year now cost X + Y, plus they're still spending their disposable income at Megacorp & Friends to improve their bottom line? You really think that's preferable?
Perhaps it is, I think it's worth a try. Worst-case scenario, it'll be similar to the status quo, except people won't be under the bootheel of poverty. The people who used to cost X+Y per year will still only cost approximately X+Y, except Y will be an accountable number. People spending disposable income they didn't have before will boost the economy leading to increased (or less-reduced) demand for jobs.
I'd love to hear the plausible explanation for this one. If you were only worth X before, you're not worth more now. The most likely outcome is that people drop out of the labor force en masse, figuring they'd rather sit at home and smoke weed than get up and work. After all, if you can't be denied a "livable wage" just for breathing in and out, and you're a low-skill worker, what's the point? Nobody's going to clock 40 hours a week for $1 an hour. Given the high tax rates needed to pay a mincome, employers aren't going to be able to pay you $15 an hour for flipping burgers.
You've pretty much got it all figured out - many people who would have worked those awful jobs before will decide they'd rather sit at home (or work toward getting a better job), reducing the supply and driving the price up. I think employers will be able to pay burger-flippers $15 per hour with the taxes required for mincome, which would be in the same ballpark they are now (especially if we close all the tax loopholes exploited by the rich).
This is like the arguments for higher minimum wages. Yeah, at the margins, you don't see widespread layoffs with modest increases. But if doubling it is fair, and there are no downsides, why not triple? Quadruple?
That's like asking why if having a thirsty person drink 2 liters of water is good and has no downsides, why not drink 200 liters? Sort of like a slippery slope fallacy. There's an optimal range for minimum wages and exceeding it would obviously bring downsides.
Bad news, the world's ownership class is made up of bitter curmudgeons just like him. Like housecats, even though they have nothing to want for, they're still cruel predators, and will prey on us out of gluttony, or just for sport if they feel we haven't been dominated sufficiently.
Look, the ancient tarted-up barter system we call capitalism just can't work for much longer, if you can even call what it's been doing at the best of times "working." Right now, there aren't enough jobs for everyone no matter how skilled they are or how much they want to work, and the supply of jobs is only getting smaller. If you would prefer to live in a dystopia full of impoverished wasteland survivors over your taxes going to people who don't work, the ungoverned regions of Somalia will be your paradise and you can stop reading this post now.
The human labor required to provide resources for the world population is less than 100% of what would be needed to employ the world population, and that fraction is shrinking more every day. If we require people to work to survive, then the remainder of that fraction will have to sit quietly in a corner and starve to death since capitalism has no need for them (although they'll probably band together and revolt first). The human population would have to decrease quite quickly to keep up with the decreasing number of people capitalism can support. And what happens when it hits zero? Will the last man alive receive a call from his AI-boss telling him he's been let go, left to sit quietly in a corner and starve to death?
The rich will be the only source of demand, and it won't be enough. They'll never want enough megayachts for everyone to work on building them. They won't need armies of Uber drivers and yoga instructors and Youtube stars. Will they run a sadistic charity in the form of paying the world population to build hundreds of millions of mighty pyramids in their names? Maybe that could work.
Or you could get over your fixation with people getting some of your money without working and continue to earn money similarly to how you do now, if you so choose. Your choice. If you'd rather not work in such a society, that's fine, someone with more drive/less irrational hangups would be happy to take your place.
The other problem is that there aren't that many jobs to go around - there will be less and less in the future in fact. Those telemarketers, help desk people and secretaries will be the next to be replaced by machines.
The bad things about mincome are that it's really expensive, and that people will oppose it as "corporate welfare" (really, just look at what is said against the Earned Income Tax Credit) for giving those greedy corporations workers at a very low price.
Ironically, it will solve a real, widespread corporate welfare problem - sub-livable wages. Right now when somebody makes a sub-livable wage, somebody else has to make up the shortfall, whether it's government or relatives. Mincome would mean that nobody needs to worry about whether a wage is livable, and as a bonus it would drive up the wages of these menial jobs that people used to take out of sheer desperation.
The cost of sub-livable wages is also really expensive although it's hard to measure, so the savings there will help pay for mincome.
The annual fund manager convention must just be putting up pictures of regular people and laughing profusely.
No, actually they discuss safe-house locations for when they finally cause the shit to hit the fan.
Here you go:
https://thepiratebay.vg/torren...
Are you trying to justify racial/religious profiling, or suggest that doing so against Muslims would *not* be islamophobic? Or suggest that anyone who can recognize simple bigotry against Muslims is a terrorist sympathizer/appeaser? Because I don't think it's working outside of your own head.
The number of issues Donald Trump is right about has risen from 0 to 1!
HiveChucker. Because it's a lot like throwing a beehive at somebody. Without knowing any better, a swarm attacks an innocent target.
It could work if all the water sticks to the sides and makes it to the bottom of the egg - water could be collected there. I'm sure at least some of the water will fall off the sides and hit the ground though. I'm thinking a more traditional camper-trailer shape with a sloped roof might've been better for collecting water, and of course would've given more interior space.
Because composting toilets don't really work. Not if they're used with any regularity. It does have one, and that's the only big flaw I can see in this design.
Consider that a healthy average Chinese guy is going to be a lot lighter than a healthy average Samoan guy. Wouldn't it effectively be a bit racist to charge by weight?
Women's tickets would also generally be cheaper. And kids would hurt the airlines badly, taking up a whole seat with a very low weight charge.
Why would you say that!? Most cows know better than to use Oracle software and would find that statement quite offensive.
Yes of course, only the extreme crazies who have been labeled "SJWs" by the social injustice enthusiasts are legitimate, everyone else who has received the label was neither a "true SJW" nor a true Scotsman.
Same here.
A very efficient statement, you've let me know that you're an aggressively socially backward idiot taking a seat firmly on the wrong side of history. In the future people are going to look back at the term "SJW" the way we look back at "nigger-lover" today.
Atoms pump out very little heat, the ones I've seen in laptops just have passive cooling, and they're even installed in some tablets.
Oh, the fools! If only they'd built it with two layers of bootkit protection! When will they learn?!?
Automation alone will get you further from there. To get closer, first you need a more Star Trek-like economic system, and then automation.
Hand over even more of our civilization's resources to an even smaller handful of people?
I can't wait to feed this program some explicit body paint stuff...
I hope Bennett gets his million free air miles so that he'll spend more time traveling and less time writing Slashdot submissions!
Furthermore, France doesn't share a border with Russia, so a repeat of this kind of incident would be almost certain:
http://edition.cnn.com/2013/07...