How often does the average person "grab and wiggle" the mechanical linkages on their accelerator and brakes and evaluate whether they're likely to fail soon? A drive-by-wire system going into failsafe will let you know and will, as the name says, "fail safe" (the lower of two acceleration values or the higher of two braking values). A broken or stuck mechanical linkage will just suddenly and instantaneously be broken or stuck, and not inherently in a failsafe position. Stuck accelerators are a real and terrifying situation that does sometimes occur.
S4.2 In the case of vehicles powered by electric motors, the words throttle and idle refer to the motor speed controller and motor shutdown, respectively.
So I'll substitute that in the following text.
S5.1 There shall be at least two sources of energy capable of returning the motor speed controller to motor shutdown within the time limit specified by S5.3 from any accelerator position or speed whenever the driver removes the opposing actuating force. In the event of failure of one source of energy by a single severance or disconnection, the motor speed controller shall return to motor shutdown within the time limits specified by S5.3, from any accelerator position or speed whenever the driver removes the opposing actuating force.
S5.2 The motor speed controller shall return to motor shutdown from any accelerator position or any speed of which the engine is capable whenever any one component of the accelerator control system is disconnected or severed at a single point. The return to motor shutdown shall occur within the time limit specified by S5.3, measured either from the time of severance or disconnection or from the first removal of the opposing actuating force by the driver.
The text was clearly written with old-school gas vehicles in mind ("source of energy" and such to pull on mechanical linkages), but they're certainly not going to let drive-by-wire vehicles get by with a more lax reading than traditional vehicles.
Given that multiple sensors is standard for drive by wire systems, you're the one asserting something out of the ordinary, so the burden falls upon you to prove that Tesla is doing something unusually lax. Heck, is it even legal to have single-sensor drive-by-wire systems? The NHTSA regulates bloody everything about safety-critical parts of cars. Have you ever looked at their regulations? It's insane the level of detail they go into.
I know, right? It's like when Miley Cyrus gets naked and licks a sledgehammer they call it "art" and she's an "artist", but when I do it, they're all like "We're going to have to ask you to leave the hardware store" and stuff. I just don't get some people.
Three sensors is not necessary; two (plus fault logging) is fine.
Accelerator: chose the lower value of the two, log an error if they differ by more than a given margin. Braking: chose the higher value of the two, log an error if they differ by more than a given margin.
The worst case for the former is that your car doesn't accelerate. The worst case for the latter is that your car slams on the brakes. In neither case would you be at fault in an accident even if there wasn't a hardware error, as the person behind you is always supposed to maintain sufficient distance to avoid an accident regardless of what the person in front of them does.
Also, I find it kind of strange how people treat drive-by-wire as if it's some inherently erroneous system, yet think driving by mechanical linkages is somehow foolproof.
They did say "abruptly", which is exactly the word one would use if it went straight to 100% from one reading to the next
It's also exactly the word one would use for a person slamming on the accelerator with their foot.
Nobody says anything about any sort of unnatural transition between non-depressed and fully depressed pedal states; you're writing that into their statements.
Indeed. Accelerators and brakes are very heavily regulated parts of a car, as they're safety critical systems, and each must be designed to have its default failure mode be in a "least likely to cause an accident" manner. With accelerators, that means a failure should always be interpreted as "no throttle".
If that's the case, they are logging the wrong thing.
This is a car, not a computer. There are dozens of separate processing units in a modern car. They're not all built into the system that does the logging, as if it could grab whatever data it wants from any of them. Each processing unit is compartmentalized to a specific task. And Tesla, like any other manufacture, does not design all of them.
It's actually rather inefficient from a systems approach, but it's the way things are done in the auto industry, and it's not going to be easy to change that. Each independent unit is made by some OEM or another, who are heavily invested in the current "cluster of independent boxes" approach to car design. And government testing regulations on many components strongly complicate any attempt to combine them with others. Drive-by-wire units (including throttle position sensors), like all safety-critical systems, fall into a very heavily regulated/tested category. And they generally *don't* want unnecessary data transmitted on the network, because everything you send represents a new possible source of problems (unintended data floods, incorrect responses in handling it, etc)
What you're asking for is akin to saying, "My computer should be logging the intensity of the reflected laser light on my mouse and calculating on its own how the mouse is moving". Except far less realistic than even that request.
I don't know about Tesla's design, but drive-by-wire cars often have, in addition to one or more throttle position sensors, a "closed throttle position sensor" and a "wide open throttle" sensor, each corresponding to precisely 0% and 100% respectively.
Even if Tesla didn't use these, one would expect that the DSP driving the throttle sensor(s) would be calibrated to run from 0 to 100% and truncate any values over that, rather than feeding out-of-spec data onwards into the system.
Furthermore, there is nothing that says that there were no intermediary throttle positions logged.
Oh, that's right, I forgot for a moment that the US still has that weird "individuals or employers bear most of the costs of their health insurance" thing. Well, in the context of the US, you'd either have to also include money for basic coverage, or join the rest of the world in terms of public health insurance.
Exactly - companies have to pay a competitive wage, no more, no less. Minimum wage laws are just a form of welfare for low-end working people, so that they don't end up starving in the streets. Versus another portion of the patchwork, unemployment insurance, for those newly fired. Versus another portion of the patchwork, welfare, for those long-term without work. Versus disability (of various sorts) for those who can't work because they're unable. And on and on it goes.
IMHO, they should just get rid of the patchwork of welfare programs, install a basic minimal income, and get it over with.
Different individuals would of course disagree on what's the appropriate minimum, making that the only real debate.
For me, I'd try to set it as enough to pay for:
1) Renting of a single bedroom for one person, or a shared one-bedroom apartment for two people. 2) Basic groceries. Not enough to go out to eat, not enough for fancier home-cooked meals, just enough for the person to get their calories and basic nutritional needs. 3) Enough to pay for fuel + maintenance on an efficient, old (~15yo) low-end car, OR bus/train/subway/etc fare, for typical workday commuting needs. 4) About 30% more on top of #1-3 for "everything else combined" (clothes, medical copays, utilities, etc)
Basically, "poverty, but not starving and homeless". If you want more than poverty, you need to work for it. Which is pretty much the goal of most of today's welfare systems as-is. I'd also heavily subsidize higher education / job training, but not make them free (to avoid overuse). These things pay for themselves in terms of future earnings.
But that's my personal sense of what would be an ideal balance. Reasonable people can differ.
We'd be totally into a common nordic region. You may have heard about the on-again/off-again EU/Euro struggle here. We're such a tiny market and have such a tiny currency that we end up paying a big premium for everything we do - for example, interest rates on home loans are always several percent higher than on the mainland. But the EU and euro don't always have the most solid of reputations. The US dollar would be a strong currency, but nobody here wants that. There was some looking into the Canadian dollar but it never really went anywhere. A closer political and monitary union with the other nordics, however, would be very popular. Heck, there's even a small movement here to outright be annexed by Norway;)
Haha, you remembered Estonia!;) I feel bad for them, so wanting to be looked on as another Nordic but never getting any attention... they even named their national airline "Nordica";) But they need to fix that flag first....
I want damn services. Instead of giving me money for my basic subsistence, provide me free food, shelter, education and health services
Just a heads up.... but money is, by definition, something that gets exchanged for goods and services.
Where something is more efficiently run en-masse (education for example), sure, no problem keeping it as a service. But otherwise, and where individuals may differ about the ideal form it should take (food, shelter, etc), money is the optimal distribution means.
Right, because corporations who already don't pay their fair share of taxes will gladly kick in a few extra $Trillion
You think corporations don't want to get rid of minimum wages and numerous individual worker tax mandates? The service industry in particular would be hugely into the concept, being able to ditch the economically distorting influence of these costs without penalizing their workers.
Of course with any change there are winners and losers. But the net result for society is a very large win. Greater efficiency, less distortion of the market, removal of work disincentives, and no cracks to fall through.
And again, to reiterate the point: while of course it costs money, it also frees up the costs of the current vast patchwork of welfare programs, at every level of government, which are designed to (inefficiently) simulate the net effects of universal basic income.
You really are a moron.
And you really aren't burdened with an abundance of social skills.
1. Some programs, like the social security you mentioned, are not government handouts, but something people pay in as in insurance. They have already worked for it, and reducing it wrt. UBI would not only be unfair, but also cause potential backlash.
Reducing it by the amount that they get in basic income. Aka, no change to their net finances. If the final target figure for basic income is lower than typical SS payouts (the ideal basic income target being a figure that people of different ideologies will differ on), then this would only affect future SS recipients, not present ones.
2. Unfortunately you cannot just hand out cash to everyone.
You absolutely can. And it's a much more efficient method than a patchwork of welfare programs.
You just need to spend more time in transport of the four-wheeled variety rather than the two-wheeled variety;) Seriously, is there any other country in the world, with the possible exception of the Netherlands, as bicycle-obsessed as Denmark?
Out of curiosity, what do Danes generally think of Icelanders? Here the views of Danes are mixed. Most views are positive, sometimes very positive with a certain population, but you also find some people who really dislike Danes due to the country having been treated like a colony for so long and a view that many Danes still are of the same mindset (for example, those who come to Iceland and insist on speaking Danish). Former Reykjavík mayor Jón Gnarr's standup routine about Denmark is a more extreme case of that perspective, but it's not rare to see a lower-key version of it. But, most Icelanders aren't like that, I wouldn't say... as you may notice, you usually get lots of votes from Iceland in Eurovision, even though we rarely get as many back;) And lots of of Icelanders go to Denmark for school or whatnot, or just for several weeks to get wasted and go to parties (among the latter group, I find that they often come back injured for one reason or another;) )
Just a small point, but Denmark is losing money on supporting Greenland. Indeed the deal between them is that Denmark pays some fixed stipend, then receives half the income from resources, as long as the latter is smaller than the former.
You've got it backwards. The mineral law stipulates that Greenland gets 100% of the royalties on mineral extraction up to 500m krónur without reduction in the block grant, then everything after that is shared depending on a contract that both parties have to approve - aka Denmark won't approve unless there's something in it for them. Greenlanders were quite unhappy with the arrangement, but it's the way it is. As "Denmark-Greenland in the Twentieth Century" observed, "This arrangement shows a considerable Danish political and economic interest. Not only would the activity be under close observation, but also the Greenlanders would not be allowed to have the entire surplus if there really was something to earn." And with Greenland being one of the world's great untapped mining frontiers with vast deposits of many valuable minerals, yet only having a tiny population, you don't see how that is just a weeeeeee bit advantageous to Denmark?
If you think they're a burden, let them go. They want to leave, overwhelmingly. Over 3/4ths voted for independence in the last referendum. If you think they're a burden, then let them be free like they clearly want to be.
Money doesn't just appear from nowhere in Basic Income. It's not like God comes down and showers gold coins on everyone. It comes from a 1) reduction (and eventual elimination) of the vast patchwork of other government benefits, 2) the loss of overhead costs of said benefits, 3) new taxes on corporations, with the pain reduced (and sometimes reversed) by the reduction (and eventual elimination) of government-required corporate benefits like minimum wages. Any net benefits or costs to corporations in #3 ultimately pass on to the economy as a whole.
Overall, you do have a bit more real-value in the system. Labour that previously would have gone towards employing people for meaningless overhead positions in welfare programs, as well as labour that people previously spent trying to qualify / stay qualified for welfare programs, etc can instead be allocated toward more economically-useful endeavours. And anti-work disincentives often created by existing welfare programs go away. But in general, it's not like you're magically creating a new $1k per person per month or whatnot. You're just making a simpler, seamless system to replace what you currently have.
Also, your stated scenario doesn't work regardless. If a dollar in your scenario still buys the same thing outside the city that it bought previously, then there really has been an improvement in individual buying power within the town. If there's insufficient housing leading to a housing bubble, more construction will set off. They have more money to spend on building materials. If there's insufficient labour, they'll pay for lower-cost out-of-town labour to do tasks that can be done remotely or to come in and do things for them. It's not theoretical, this is exactly what we see in the real world at the national level when a country's wealth rises relative to that of others. But to reiterate: this is not the scenario at hand when discussing universal basic income.
IMHO it has nothing to do with robots or anything like that. Barring a full-fledged singularity where robots become better than humans at everything, humans will always end up moving into whatever fields robots are worse at. It's happened with every wave of automation throughout history.
Universal basic income is simply about efficiency. Human societies have by and large, for right or for wrong, decided that they don't like the idea of people starving and dying in the streets. And so have built these mishmash patchworks of programs all with the goal of preventing one or more aspects of this for one or more specified groups of people. Often with disincentives to people bettering themselves because then they could end up off one system or another, and almost always with huge bureaucratic overhead costs.
It's much simpler just to accept the basic premise, pay for it, and be done with it. That premise being "Okay, we don't want people starving and dying on the streets, but we don't want people freeloading either, so we're going to give some minimal support to everyone - but if you want a better life than that, you have to work for it." The patchwork of programs dies, the government shrinks, the disincentives to work go away, there are no gaps for unfortunate people to fall through... everybody wins.
You probably don't want a single, fixed payment for every adult - you probably want something extra for each dependent a family has, maybe more for people who are disabled and can't work to better their lives, maybe some variation based on local costs of living, etc. But overall you end up with a vastly simpler system. And you simplify the political debates vastly, down to conservatives saying that the minimal standard of life is too generous vs. liberals saying that it's too austere - just a simple fight over the numbers.
It shouldn't even be that terribly difficult to implement. You can start rolling it in without cutting anyone's benefits, but at the same time make any benefits they receive from Basic Income automatically be deducted from their potential aid from all existing welfare programs, at all levels of government. They get their basic income payment, but all of their other payment are automatically reduced or eliminated by a net corresponding amount. Including big-ticket items like national pension programs (Social Security, etc). So many smaller programs quickly end up in a situation where the vast majority of their enrollees no longer collect anything - and with scaleup, the big-ticket ones as well. With the right policies in place, anyone who doesn't collect anything for several years gets automatically booted from the rolls. As the rolls shrink, the overhead costs drop. When a welfare program gets small enough, it gets killed altogether, with the eventual goal of only Basic Income remaining.
The extra costs for the universal basic income program (aka, the new people who are getting support, which wouldn't be fully paid for by the reduction in welfare-program overheads) are paid for by new corporate taxes. In turn, however, in addition to corporations not having to separately pay for pensions/social security and the like (since it's now rolled into universal basic income), minimum wages would also classified a government-required benefit (because they are), and what minimum a company has to pay a person is reduced by the individual's basic income. Wages would get to reflect the actual supply/demand for a given field. Just like all other welfare programs, minimum wages would eventually be eliminated altogether. Bookkeeping for companies would become simpler as well.
As far as the Nordics go, Norwegians are the "nouveau riche". They weren't very wealthy, then happened to come into a lot of money and aren't always clear on what they should do with it. The sort of people who would break from lunch in a boardroom to go cross-country skiing. I live in Iceland and it seems everyone here has some sort of story about how they or a friend or a company or NGO or whatever were just given things by Norway for some reason or another - ambulences, a helicopter, boots, you name it.It seems everyone, except some Swedes, likes the Norwegians.
For the others:
Sweden has the reputation of being trendy, extremely liberal to the point of social experimentation, and a bit metrosexual. The sort of place where even if you got mugged by a Hell's Ångel, it'd be by someone named Sven who makes his own scented beard oil, wielding a designer knife and riding on a Husqvarna because it's better for the environment than a Harley and, you know, they make the best sewing machines....
Danes tend to fit German stereotypes better than the Germans do. They also have a reputation for cheap beer (by Nordic standards - although it tends to be the Nordic equivalent of Budweiser) and casual (if sometimes unintended) racism.
The Finnish stereotype is often of someone who's depressed, tough, and loves vodka and saunas. But not knowing any Finns, I have no clue as to the accuracy of the stereotype.
Icelanders tend to be like your laid back cousin who is always coming up with these crazy schemes to make money and dismissing any criticism of them as needless pessimism, constantly getting in trouble, but picking himself up and trying again. Icelanders throughout history have wavered between "We're proud and independent, don't even think of trying to control us!" and "Um, hey, could someone, um, come and help us fix this giant mess we've made for ourselves?" The whole country was founded based on the concept of achieving independence from Norwegian rule, then a couple hundred years later basically invited Norway in to stop them from killing each other.
The Faroes... everyone seems to forget that they exist, even Danes (they're a country in the Danish realm). When Danes remember that they exist, it's usually in the context of debt. To Icelanders, the Faroe Islands are that place where a family would put their trampoline on the roof because it's the only land flat enough for it, and where the signs are so hilarious that it seems that the language was intentionally designed as a prank. For example, read as Icelandic, this sign tells people it's permissible for them to utilize vaginas after October 15th and, while it might be tempting to use them earlier, not to; this one asks if you're a penis; while this one offers cultural "fucking tours" led by "Skúli the Fucker".
Greenland often fits in lists of Nordics because it's in the Danish realm, but it has little in common culturally. Greenland seems to want little to do with Denmark, while Denmark seems to have the primary goal of dragging out any independence movement as long as possible so it can profit as much from Greenland's resources in the interrim.
Anyway, that's your stereotype guide to the Nordics.
Daesh really hasn't gotten that much external funding from big donors, from what it known. It's a fair bit of small donor external funding, but most of its funding has been from oil revenues and, to a lesser extent, taxes (as well as side streams from selling antiquities, slaves, etc). It really has been running what is effectively a state. A state that has always been against Saudi Arabia (they consider themselves the rightful rulers of Mecca and Medina).
It's true that the tensions have ratcheted up in the past year, though. While Daesh's first attacks within Saudi Arabia were in 2014, they didn't start suicide bombings there until last year. And at first Shia were the only target, it was only in the past year that they switched to hitting Sunni targets as well.
Slashdot Mirror
How often does the average person "grab and wiggle" the mechanical linkages on their accelerator and brakes and evaluate whether they're likely to fail soon? A drive-by-wire system going into failsafe will let you know and will, as the name says, "fail safe" (the lower of two acceleration values or the higher of two braking values). A broken or stuck mechanical linkage will just suddenly and instantaneously be broken or stuck, and not inherently in a failsafe position. Stuck accelerators are a real and terrifying situation that does sometimes occur.
No, a single sensor wouldn't meet the reqs:
So I'll substitute that in the following text.
The text was clearly written with old-school gas vehicles in mind ("source of energy" and such to pull on mechanical linkages), but they're certainly not going to let drive-by-wire vehicles get by with a more lax reading than traditional vehicles.
Given that multiple sensors is standard for drive by wire systems, you're the one asserting something out of the ordinary, so the burden falls upon you to prove that Tesla is doing something unusually lax. Heck, is it even legal to have single-sensor drive-by-wire systems? The NHTSA regulates bloody everything about safety-critical parts of cars. Have you ever looked at their regulations? It's insane the level of detail they go into.
I know, right? It's like when Miley Cyrus gets naked and licks a sledgehammer they call it "art" and she's an "artist", but when I do it, they're all like "We're going to have to ask you to leave the hardware store" and stuff. I just don't get some people.
Would you explain what lies you're thinking of for the rest of us?
Why are you assuming that this is based on a single sensor?
Not in America, where most cars are automatics.
Three sensors is not necessary; two (plus fault logging) is fine.
Accelerator: chose the lower value of the two, log an error if they differ by more than a given margin.
Braking: chose the higher value of the two, log an error if they differ by more than a given margin.
The worst case for the former is that your car doesn't accelerate. The worst case for the latter is that your car slams on the brakes. In neither case would you be at fault in an accident even if there wasn't a hardware error, as the person behind you is always supposed to maintain sufficient distance to avoid an accident regardless of what the person in front of them does.
Also, I find it kind of strange how people treat drive-by-wire as if it's some inherently erroneous system, yet think driving by mechanical linkages is somehow foolproof.
It's also exactly the word one would use for a person slamming on the accelerator with their foot.
Nobody says anything about any sort of unnatural transition between non-depressed and fully depressed pedal states; you're writing that into their statements.
Indeed. Accelerators and brakes are very heavily regulated parts of a car, as they're safety critical systems, and each must be designed to have its default failure mode be in a "least likely to cause an accident" manner. With accelerators, that means a failure should always be interpreted as "no throttle".
This is a car, not a computer. There are dozens of separate processing units in a modern car. They're not all built into the system that does the logging, as if it could grab whatever data it wants from any of them. Each processing unit is compartmentalized to a specific task. And Tesla, like any other manufacture, does not design all of them.
It's actually rather inefficient from a systems approach, but it's the way things are done in the auto industry, and it's not going to be easy to change that. Each independent unit is made by some OEM or another, who are heavily invested in the current "cluster of independent boxes" approach to car design. And government testing regulations on many components strongly complicate any attempt to combine them with others. Drive-by-wire units (including throttle position sensors), like all safety-critical systems, fall into a very heavily regulated/tested category. And they generally *don't* want unnecessary data transmitted on the network, because everything you send represents a new possible source of problems (unintended data floods, incorrect responses in handling it, etc)
What you're asking for is akin to saying, "My computer should be logging the intensity of the reflected laser light on my mouse and calculating on its own how the mouse is moving". Except far less realistic than even that request.
I don't know about Tesla's design, but drive-by-wire cars often have, in addition to one or more throttle position sensors, a "closed throttle position sensor" and a "wide open throttle" sensor, each corresponding to precisely 0% and 100% respectively.
Even if Tesla didn't use these, one would expect that the DSP driving the throttle sensor(s) would be calibrated to run from 0 to 100% and truncate any values over that, rather than feeding out-of-spec data onwards into the system.
Furthermore, there is nothing that says that there were no intermediary throttle positions logged.
So over three quarters of them voted for independence because... what, a prank?
The self-justifications for empire know no bounds.
Oh, that's right, I forgot for a moment that the US still has that weird "individuals or employers bear most of the costs of their health insurance" thing. Well, in the context of the US, you'd either have to also include money for basic coverage, or join the rest of the world in terms of public health insurance.
Exactly - companies have to pay a competitive wage, no more, no less. Minimum wage laws are just a form of welfare for low-end working people, so that they don't end up starving in the streets. Versus another portion of the patchwork, unemployment insurance, for those newly fired. Versus another portion of the patchwork, welfare, for those long-term without work. Versus disability (of various sorts) for those who can't work because they're unable. And on and on it goes.
IMHO, they should just get rid of the patchwork of welfare programs, install a basic minimal income, and get it over with.
Different individuals would of course disagree on what's the appropriate minimum, making that the only real debate.
For me, I'd try to set it as enough to pay for:
1) Renting of a single bedroom for one person, or a shared one-bedroom apartment for two people.
2) Basic groceries. Not enough to go out to eat, not enough for fancier home-cooked meals, just enough for the person to get their calories and basic nutritional needs.
3) Enough to pay for fuel + maintenance on an efficient, old (~15yo) low-end car, OR bus/train/subway/etc fare, for typical workday commuting needs.
4) About 30% more on top of #1-3 for "everything else combined" (clothes, medical copays, utilities, etc)
Basically, "poverty, but not starving and homeless". If you want more than poverty, you need to work for it. Which is pretty much the goal of most of today's welfare systems as-is. I'd also heavily subsidize higher education / job training, but not make them free (to avoid overuse). These things pay for themselves in terms of future earnings.
But that's my personal sense of what would be an ideal balance. Reasonable people can differ.
We'd be totally into a common nordic region. You may have heard about the on-again/off-again EU/Euro struggle here. We're such a tiny market and have such a tiny currency that we end up paying a big premium for everything we do - for example, interest rates on home loans are always several percent higher than on the mainland. But the EU and euro don't always have the most solid of reputations. The US dollar would be a strong currency, but nobody here wants that. There was some looking into the Canadian dollar but it never really went anywhere. A closer political and monitary union with the other nordics, however, would be very popular. Heck, there's even a small movement here to outright be annexed by Norway ;)
Haha, you remembered Estonia! ;) I feel bad for them, so wanting to be looked on as another Nordic but never getting any attention... they even named their national airline "Nordica" ;) But they need to fix that flag first....
Just a heads up.... but money is, by definition, something that gets exchanged for goods and services.
Where something is more efficiently run en-masse (education for example), sure, no problem keeping it as a service. But otherwise, and where individuals may differ about the ideal form it should take (food, shelter, etc), money is the optimal distribution means.
You think corporations don't want to get rid of minimum wages and numerous individual worker tax mandates? The service industry in particular would be hugely into the concept, being able to ditch the economically distorting influence of these costs without penalizing their workers.
Of course with any change there are winners and losers. But the net result for society is a very large win. Greater efficiency, less distortion of the market, removal of work disincentives, and no cracks to fall through.
And again, to reiterate the point: while of course it costs money, it also frees up the costs of the current vast patchwork of welfare programs, at every level of government, which are designed to (inefficiently) simulate the net effects of universal basic income.
And you really aren't burdened with an abundance of social skills.
Reducing it by the amount that they get in basic income. Aka, no change to their net finances. If the final target figure for basic income is lower than typical SS payouts (the ideal basic income target being a figure that people of different ideologies will differ on), then this would only affect future SS recipients, not present ones.
You absolutely can. And it's a much more efficient method than a patchwork of welfare programs.
You just need to spend more time in transport of the four-wheeled variety rather than the two-wheeled variety ;) Seriously, is there any other country in the world, with the possible exception of the Netherlands, as bicycle-obsessed as Denmark?
Out of curiosity, what do Danes generally think of Icelanders? Here the views of Danes are mixed. Most views are positive, sometimes very positive with a certain population, but you also find some people who really dislike Danes due to the country having been treated like a colony for so long and a view that many Danes still are of the same mindset (for example, those who come to Iceland and insist on speaking Danish). Former Reykjavík mayor Jón Gnarr's standup routine about Denmark is a more extreme case of that perspective, but it's not rare to see a lower-key version of it. But, most Icelanders aren't like that, I wouldn't say... as you may notice, you usually get lots of votes from Iceland in Eurovision, even though we rarely get as many back ;) And lots of of Icelanders go to Denmark for school or whatnot, or just for several weeks to get wasted and go to parties (among the latter group, I find that they often come back injured for one reason or another ;) )
You've got it backwards. The mineral law stipulates that Greenland gets 100% of the royalties on mineral extraction up to 500m krónur without reduction in the block grant, then everything after that is shared depending on a contract that both parties have to approve - aka Denmark won't approve unless there's something in it for them. Greenlanders were quite unhappy with the arrangement, but it's the way it is. As "Denmark-Greenland in the Twentieth Century" observed, "This arrangement shows a considerable Danish political and economic interest. Not only would the activity be under close observation, but also the Greenlanders would not be allowed to have the entire surplus if there really was something to earn." And with Greenland being one of the world's great untapped mining frontiers with vast deposits of many valuable minerals, yet only having a tiny population, you don't see how that is just a weeeeeee bit advantageous to Denmark?
If you think they're a burden, let them go. They want to leave, overwhelmingly. Over 3/4ths voted for independence in the last referendum. If you think they're a burden, then let them be free like they clearly want to be.
Money doesn't just appear from nowhere in Basic Income. It's not like God comes down and showers gold coins on everyone. It comes from a 1) reduction (and eventual elimination) of the vast patchwork of other government benefits, 2) the loss of overhead costs of said benefits, 3) new taxes on corporations, with the pain reduced (and sometimes reversed) by the reduction (and eventual elimination) of government-required corporate benefits like minimum wages. Any net benefits or costs to corporations in #3 ultimately pass on to the economy as a whole.
Overall, you do have a bit more real-value in the system. Labour that previously would have gone towards employing people for meaningless overhead positions in welfare programs, as well as labour that people previously spent trying to qualify / stay qualified for welfare programs, etc can instead be allocated toward more economically-useful endeavours. And anti-work disincentives often created by existing welfare programs go away. But in general, it's not like you're magically creating a new $1k per person per month or whatnot. You're just making a simpler, seamless system to replace what you currently have.
Also, your stated scenario doesn't work regardless. If a dollar in your scenario still buys the same thing outside the city that it bought previously, then there really has been an improvement in individual buying power within the town. If there's insufficient housing leading to a housing bubble, more construction will set off. They have more money to spend on building materials. If there's insufficient labour, they'll pay for lower-cost out-of-town labour to do tasks that can be done remotely or to come in and do things for them. It's not theoretical, this is exactly what we see in the real world at the national level when a country's wealth rises relative to that of others. But to reiterate: this is not the scenario at hand when discussing universal basic income.
IMHO it has nothing to do with robots or anything like that. Barring a full-fledged singularity where robots become better than humans at everything, humans will always end up moving into whatever fields robots are worse at. It's happened with every wave of automation throughout history.
Universal basic income is simply about efficiency. Human societies have by and large, for right or for wrong, decided that they don't like the idea of people starving and dying in the streets. And so have built these mishmash patchworks of programs all with the goal of preventing one or more aspects of this for one or more specified groups of people. Often with disincentives to people bettering themselves because then they could end up off one system or another, and almost always with huge bureaucratic overhead costs.
It's much simpler just to accept the basic premise, pay for it, and be done with it. That premise being "Okay, we don't want people starving and dying on the streets, but we don't want people freeloading either, so we're going to give some minimal support to everyone - but if you want a better life than that, you have to work for it." The patchwork of programs dies, the government shrinks, the disincentives to work go away, there are no gaps for unfortunate people to fall through... everybody wins.
You probably don't want a single, fixed payment for every adult - you probably want something extra for each dependent a family has, maybe more for people who are disabled and can't work to better their lives, maybe some variation based on local costs of living, etc. But overall you end up with a vastly simpler system. And you simplify the political debates vastly, down to conservatives saying that the minimal standard of life is too generous vs. liberals saying that it's too austere - just a simple fight over the numbers.
It shouldn't even be that terribly difficult to implement. You can start rolling it in without cutting anyone's benefits, but at the same time make any benefits they receive from Basic Income automatically be deducted from their potential aid from all existing welfare programs, at all levels of government. They get their basic income payment, but all of their other payment are automatically reduced or eliminated by a net corresponding amount. Including big-ticket items like national pension programs (Social Security, etc). So many smaller programs quickly end up in a situation where the vast majority of their enrollees no longer collect anything - and with scaleup, the big-ticket ones as well. With the right policies in place, anyone who doesn't collect anything for several years gets automatically booted from the rolls. As the rolls shrink, the overhead costs drop. When a welfare program gets small enough, it gets killed altogether, with the eventual goal of only Basic Income remaining.
The extra costs for the universal basic income program (aka, the new people who are getting support, which wouldn't be fully paid for by the reduction in welfare-program overheads) are paid for by new corporate taxes. In turn, however, in addition to corporations not having to separately pay for pensions/social security and the like (since it's now rolled into universal basic income), minimum wages would also classified a government-required benefit (because they are), and what minimum a company has to pay a person is reduced by the individual's basic income. Wages would get to reflect the actual supply/demand for a given field. Just like all other welfare programs, minimum wages would eventually be eliminated altogether. Bookkeeping for companies would become simpler as well.
You're thinking of the Sami ;)
As far as the Nordics go, Norwegians are the "nouveau riche". They weren't very wealthy, then happened to come into a lot of money and aren't always clear on what they should do with it. The sort of people who would break from lunch in a boardroom to go cross-country skiing. I live in Iceland and it seems everyone here has some sort of story about how they or a friend or a company or NGO or whatever were just given things by Norway for some reason or another - ambulences, a helicopter, boots, you name it.It seems everyone, except some Swedes, likes the Norwegians.
For the others:
Sweden has the reputation of being trendy, extremely liberal to the point of social experimentation, and a bit metrosexual. The sort of place where even if you got mugged by a Hell's Ångel, it'd be by someone named Sven who makes his own scented beard oil, wielding a designer knife and riding on a Husqvarna because it's better for the environment than a Harley and, you know, they make the best sewing machines....
Danes tend to fit German stereotypes better than the Germans do. They also have a reputation for cheap beer (by Nordic standards - although it tends to be the Nordic equivalent of Budweiser) and casual (if sometimes unintended) racism.
The Finnish stereotype is often of someone who's depressed, tough, and loves vodka and saunas. But not knowing any Finns, I have no clue as to the accuracy of the stereotype.
Icelanders tend to be like your laid back cousin who is always coming up with these crazy schemes to make money and dismissing any criticism of them as needless pessimism, constantly getting in trouble, but picking himself up and trying again. Icelanders throughout history have wavered between "We're proud and independent, don't even think of trying to control us!" and "Um, hey, could someone, um, come and help us fix this giant mess we've made for ourselves?" The whole country was founded based on the concept of achieving independence from Norwegian rule, then a couple hundred years later basically invited Norway in to stop them from killing each other.
The Faroes... everyone seems to forget that they exist, even Danes (they're a country in the Danish realm). When Danes remember that they exist, it's usually in the context of debt. To Icelanders, the Faroe Islands are that place where a family would put their trampoline on the roof because it's the only land flat enough for it, and where the signs are so hilarious that it seems that the language was intentionally designed as a prank. For example, read as Icelandic, this sign tells people it's permissible for them to utilize vaginas after October 15th and, while it might be tempting to use them earlier, not to; this one asks if you're a penis; while this one offers cultural "fucking tours" led by "Skúli the Fucker".
Greenland often fits in lists of Nordics because it's in the Danish realm, but it has little in common culturally. Greenland seems to want little to do with Denmark, while Denmark seems to have the primary goal of dragging out any independence movement as long as possible so it can profit as much from Greenland's resources in the interrim.
Anyway, that's your stereotype guide to the Nordics.
Daesh really hasn't gotten that much external funding from big donors, from what it known. It's a fair bit of small donor external funding, but most of its funding has been from oil revenues and, to a lesser extent, taxes (as well as side streams from selling antiquities, slaves, etc). It really has been running what is effectively a state. A state that has always been against Saudi Arabia (they consider themselves the rightful rulers of Mecca and Medina).
It's true that the tensions have ratcheted up in the past year, though. While Daesh's first attacks within Saudi Arabia were in 2014, they didn't start suicide bombings there until last year. And at first Shia were the only target, it was only in the past year that they switched to hitting Sunni targets as well.