40 hours work each week to add 20-30% to your purchasing power isn't worth the loss of time.
If paying your rent while still eating requires 20% more money than you have, then you're going to work however many hours it takes to earn that extra 20%. Some people will choose to move away to less expensive areas, but most would prefer not to, and working 40 hours/week to maintain their standard of living is obviously something they currently accept.
Running an equation which shows each hour of work isn't worth as much cash as it used-to be, doesn't actually change much of anything.
UBI inevitable? It may be, but only if automation and AI have become so dominant that there simple aren't any jobs left that a human would do better.
No. You only need about 25% unemployment. If we can continue to automate things well enough that 25% of the working-age population can't find a job that will support them, there will either be some form of comprehensive and sufficient welfare, or there will be a peasant revolve which overthrows the government.
A lot of the turmoil in Africa and the middle east is due to stalled economies, and you only have to go back to the Great Depression to see the western world facing such difficulties and on the brink of collapse.
Now, that comprehensive and sufficient welfare doesn't have to be a UBI, and a UBI won't work if it's set too low or not reliably increased with inflation, but it can easily fit the bill, and UBI's conservative proponents make a good case that eliminating the overhead of existing welfare programs will make it possible to pay for a more generous UBI that leaves everyone better off.
this means a giant increase in wellfare-spending. Scuze me, in UBI-spending. Where is that money going to come from?
Less overhead from administrating and policing those welfare programs will make up a big chunk of the difference. More consumer spending (e.g. sales tax) will help to make up some of it, too.
It should be pretty easy to phase it in... You just cut back welfare programs by $10, then start with a UBI of $10 for everyone. Once the world doesn't end, you increase the UBI in lock-step with decreases in welfare programs. If anything unexpected starts going wrong you can stop the increase until things get sorted out, and the program gets phased in slowly enough that there's no major disruption to prices of anything.
A tenfold increase in taxes? In that case, the UBI will become next to worthless in covering your expenses.
Quite the opposite... the higher the taxes, the more purchasing power your tax-free UBI will have. Look at highly-taxed Scandinavian countries... Sure they only take-home 60% of what they earn, but they don't have college loans to pay off, and don't need to save up a rainy-day fund for themselves or their family.
The same goes for your contention that 'some people want more than that'. Very well. But a very large part won't.
Complete nonsense. Set the UBI to be enough for living in a low rent area, but not covering nearly all expenses in a high rent area. Your contention is the majority of people will stream out of New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, etc.? Of course they will NOT. They might choose to work less than full-time, but most people will NOT want to massively disrupt their lives, or settle for a vastly reduced quality of life to avoid working... They'll just have a backup, in the event something goes wrong.
the superrich and the big companies won't silently abide and stay in your country when you are going to tax them heavily. No, they're just going to move to another country.
That only works with smaller countries. No companies are going to cut themselves off from the huge business and consumer market of the US, to avoid a marginal increase in taxes. Look at WWII era taxes on the wealthiest, and they're pretty close to the 90% figure you claim can't possibly work... It did work just fine. A less extreme version does currently work in several of the highest quality-of-life countries.
I see the whole concept as unrealistic.
You've made enough fundamental mistakes in your comment that it's clear your opinion on the matter is not relevant.
What happens if someone spends their money poorly, such as blowing it on drugs or gambling, and then they have nothing left at the end of the month to eat or pay their rent. As a society what do we do then?
Haven't you ever heard of credit, advances, or liens?
I have no doubt non-profits that house the homeless will work out a system to accommodate a UBI... When you check-in you sign papers giving them authority to cash your monthly checks, and deduct a certain amount to cover their expenses, before handing you a check for the rest.
Let's assume the rent in a city is at a specific level. Now suddenly everyone in in this city gets +$1000, so people can 'afford' more.
Then people can also suddenly afford to leave the damn expensive-as-hell city, which they CAN'T do right now, as they are one paycheck away from homelessness. So rents increase, and an exodus of people leaves, to areas where their UBI check easily covers cost of living.
This same 'UBI' system is just a rebranding of what didn't work for the Soviet Union, didn't work for China and North Korea and is now causing oil-rich Venezuela to starve.
And it's a rebranding of the welfare, social security, medicare, and similar systems, which have worked incredibly well. The systems which, after centuries of ad-hoc charitable giving, finally showed positive results in reducing poverty.
Why shouldn't be exactly the same case for the population in general?
Because the overhead for doing the nanny-state part is VERY expensive on a large scale. And NGOs have found that it destroys the local economy and leaves everyone worse off and endlessly dependent on the assistance.
How does mentoring help new college graduates turn themselves into robots?
reduce social programs for those in their prime working years and not disabled,
I'm sure that'll work GREAT for single mothers... particularly in cases where childcare is more expensive than any salaries she could hope to earn with her limited skills.
As long as government has a deficit, no one gets a dime.
So billions of dollars in lobbying will go into creative accounting for the Fed, to ensure they keep cutting taxes (on corporations and the ridiculously weathly) more than sustainable, and NEVER run a surplus.
Retro may be a bit more costly, but you're ignoring the astronomical cost of upgrading big systems like these. We're not talking about someone's desktop PC being overdue for an upgrade.
Estimates are that "it would cost $352 billion over the next decade to modernize the facilities." Obviously you can keep 8" floppies in production for FAR, FAR less than that! What's more, even if you spent the hundreds of billions of dollars to upgrade the systems, you're ONLY moving the baseline forward a bit, not PERMANENTLY solving the problem.
In other words, whatever media they upgrade to (e.g. CD-R, SD card, etc.), is likely to be obsolete and unavailable in a decade or so, as well. Whatever systems they certify for use, will be hard to find in just a few years. This is a problem, in general, for any life-critical system that needs to be end-to-end certified... You can't just swap in a newer system that should be compatible, you have to exhaustively test every edge case works EXACTLY like the old one did.
The only problem is one of perception... If the system was built of custom circuit boards, with lots of transistors and Z80 or 6509s, nobody would bat an eyelash that it was expensive to maintain, custom replacement parts needed to be ordered, and nobody would expect drop-in upgrades. But since it involves non-embedded computers, and accessories familiar to home PC users, there's a knee-jerk negative perception around all of the above, even if it's much cheaper and more reliable than the alternatives, because people can't perceive just how different the industrial needs are than their home usage pattern.
You're doing this manually but noticed three price adjustments in a two week period? Are you unemployed? I buy something on Amazon because I don't have the time to go to the store and pick it up. The last thing I am going to do is keep my eye out for price adjustments.
Some items you only buy one in a great while, and then proceed to forget about them. Other items are consumable and you need to resupply on a fairly regular basis, so checking on the price every week or so is a good way to stock-up when the item is cheaper, and the routine isn't all that time consuming.
In addition, Amazon has a healthy review and discussion system, so a decent number of users go back to write-up their thoughts, or look through the reviews, comments, and product questions of others. In the process, anyone would of course notice the prominently noted current price...
If Fuck You is why, then why did the previous policy exist? Either Amazon suddenly got a little eviller, or some other condition changed.
Amazon is getting eviler. All that talk of excellent customer service is a thing of the past. Anybody notice that free shipping suddenly increased from $35 to $49 without warning or notice, and at the same time a significant number of products were suddenly changed to only available for Prime customers? Among their other problems, Amazon desperately wants to become Costco and force everyone to join their club to be able to buy anything...
Refunds for defective or misrepresented products used to be trivial. But now when you have to return an item to Amazon, even when it is utterly DEFECTIVE, you'll be notified of a refund, but you have to look close to notice they only returned about 90% of the price you paid. If you complain, you can get the difference refunded, but even then, I've occasionally seen the second refund still come up a bit short! And this is my experience as a frequent customer for years, which they presumably want to keep happy. Others might not get as much traction when they complain.
This is even worse of a problem when compounded with Amazon Warehouse deals, where they resell returned products for a small discount. They very frequently resell defective items, and blatantly upgrade the condition a step or two... "Like New" items should NEVER be dented and cracked, but Warehouse Deals pulls that con all the damn time, and people who want to save $2 apparently fall for it.
These issues can all combine to make a perfect shit-storm... Place a $50 order from Amazon with one item from Warehouse deals. Used item is not in condition described, and quite defective. Amazon will NOT let you EXCHANGE a Warehouse item, so refund is you ONLY option. Refund just for the item will come up several dollars short, AND the removal of your item from the order will drop you below the free shipping threshold, giving them another excuse to deduct a big chunk of money from your item refund.
Amazon is happy to hammer the 3rd party sellers that use their website... If they aren't absolutely perfect, they get heavily penalized. But Amazon itself is very quickly becoming shady as hell.
doled out to make Canadian movies and television shows (most of which nobody actually watches, of course.)
Actually what happens is US content producers take the money as a tax-break to film some scenes in Canada. Set in the US, but using Canadian cities for the exterior shots, and/or sometimes interiors done on a Canadian sound-stage. No sweat. Suddenly its a Canadian film/TV show.
The worst part of the Canadian rules is the delivery of that content... Canadians aren't allowed to get Dish/DirecTV. Instead they have to pay much more for a local satellite TV service, which has fewer channels they want, but at least lots of local Canada content.... gah
Cutting down the rain forest is not necessary. Massive fertilization is not necessary.
It's clearly necessary, as that's how most biodiesel is produced, today.
Biofuel can be generated by bacteria.
They've been trying for decades and decades, and can't get it to work outside of a lab. It doesn't scale up to even the tiniest production quantities. Bacterial growth and biofuel films are apparently mutually incompatible.
It's one thing to back-peddle, or just refuse to accept that you're wrong (which I see a lot of here)... It's quite another to repeatedly double-down on your own ignorance.
Jet fuel doesn't just turn into propulsion on its own. You need to account for the weight of all those fuel tanks, pumps, the heavy turbofans, monitoring and balancing equipment, fire suppression systems, and much, much more.
More than that, it's pretty obvious you didn't bother to actually read more than a line or two into my comment.
increase storage capacity and reduce recharge time by 2 to 3 orders of magnitude,
I must assume you don't know what an order of magnitude is. a Tesla Model S has a range of 300 miles, and charges up to 170 miles of range in 30 minutes.
3 orders of magnitude would be a 300,000 mile range, and when charging would get 170,000 miles of extra range every 30 minutes. Safe to say they'd be practical vehicles long before that point.
Nonsense. Power generation by coal is quickly going away. Natural gas is far cleaner than gasoline, kerosene, or bio equivalents. Solar (thermal or PV) and wind are being installed at a quick and increasing pace, far faster than demand is growing.
A decade isn't far enough out... Jets take more lead-time than that even when just based on conventional and established tech, while electric is still only a concept.
There is nothing wrong with internal combustion and jets,
Combustion has horrid conversion efficiency, explosive fuel adds ample expense and dangers, requires tons of extra equipment weight, etc.
the problem is only their current petroleum based fuels. Switch to bio fuels that are carbon neutral and we have no problem.
Bio fuels will have the same lousy efficiency. They won't reduce the environmental effects of contrails, won't eliminate smog and small particulate emissions, or otherwise improve air quality at all.
Existing bio fuels are every bit as dirty as fossil fuels... requiring clearing (by burning down) big sections of rain forest, or extensive use of petroleum based fertilizers, and more. The EU was on a big biofuel kick until they saw the damage caused by their feel-good policy.
Liquid fuels have incredible energy density.
And yet electric cars are on their way to overtaking internal combustion cars in the next decade.
Slashdot Mirror
The western world gains wealth the more it puts sane restrictions on the Free Market.
"If you have a job in this country, (thereâ(TM)s a) 97 percent chance that you're not going to be in poverty."
http://www.politifact.com/trut...
And that doesn't even start to address the question of whether the "poverty" line is set unrealistically low.
If paying your rent while still eating requires 20% more money than you have, then you're going to work however many hours it takes to earn that extra 20%. Some people will choose to move away to less expensive areas, but most would prefer not to, and working 40 hours/week to maintain their standard of living is obviously something they currently accept.
Running an equation which shows each hour of work isn't worth as much cash as it used-to be, doesn't actually change much of anything.
No. You only need about 25% unemployment. If we can continue to automate things well enough that 25% of the working-age population can't find a job that will support them, there will either be some form of comprehensive and sufficient welfare, or there will be a peasant revolve which overthrows the government.
A lot of the turmoil in Africa and the middle east is due to stalled economies, and you only have to go back to the Great Depression to see the western world facing such difficulties and on the brink of collapse.
Now, that comprehensive and sufficient welfare doesn't have to be a UBI, and a UBI won't work if it's set too low or not reliably increased with inflation, but it can easily fit the bill, and UBI's conservative proponents make a good case that eliminating the overhead of existing welfare programs will make it possible to pay for a more generous UBI that leaves everyone better off.
Less overhead from administrating and policing those welfare programs will make up a big chunk of the difference. More consumer spending (e.g. sales tax) will help to make up some of it, too.
It should be pretty easy to phase it in... You just cut back welfare programs by $10, then start with a UBI of $10 for everyone. Once the world doesn't end, you increase the UBI in lock-step with decreases in welfare programs. If anything unexpected starts going wrong you can stop the increase until things get sorted out, and the program gets phased in slowly enough that there's no major disruption to prices of anything.
Quite the opposite... the higher the taxes, the more purchasing power your tax-free UBI will have. Look at highly-taxed Scandinavian countries... Sure they only take-home 60% of what they earn, but they don't have college loans to pay off, and don't need to save up a rainy-day fund for themselves or their family.
Complete nonsense. Set the UBI to be enough for living in a low rent area, but not covering nearly all expenses in a high rent area. Your contention is the majority of people will stream out of New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, etc.? Of course they will NOT. They might choose to work less than full-time, but most people will NOT want to massively disrupt their lives, or settle for a vastly reduced quality of life to avoid working... They'll just have a backup, in the event something goes wrong.
That only works with smaller countries. No companies are going to cut themselves off from the huge business and consumer market of the US, to avoid a marginal increase in taxes. Look at WWII era taxes on the wealthiest, and they're pretty close to the 90% figure you claim can't possibly work... It did work just fine. A less extreme version does currently work in several of the highest quality-of-life countries.
You've made enough fundamental mistakes in your comment that it's clear your opinion on the matter is not relevant.
Haven't you ever heard of credit, advances, or liens?
I have no doubt non-profits that house the homeless will work out a system to accommodate a UBI... When you check-in you sign papers giving them authority to cash your monthly checks, and deduct a certain amount to cover their expenses, before handing you a check for the rest.
Then people can also suddenly afford to leave the damn expensive-as-hell city, which they CAN'T do right now, as they are one paycheck away from homelessness. So rents increase, and an exodus of people leaves, to areas where their UBI check easily covers cost of living.
And it's a rebranding of the welfare, social security, medicare, and similar systems, which have worked incredibly well. The systems which, after centuries of ad-hoc charitable giving, finally showed positive results in reducing poverty.
Yep, it's just a rebranding of those.
Because the overhead for doing the nanny-state part is VERY expensive on a large scale. And NGOs have found that it destroys the local economy and leaves everyone worse off and endlessly dependent on the assistance.
How does mentoring help new college graduates turn themselves into robots?
I'm sure that'll work GREAT for single mothers... particularly in cases where childcare is more expensive than any salaries she could hope to earn with her limited skills.
So billions of dollars in lobbying will go into creative accounting for the Fed, to ensure they keep cutting taxes (on corporations and the ridiculously weathly) more than sustainable, and
NEVER run a surplus.
A good starting point for finding answers to those questions:
http://www.consumerreports.org...
Retro may be a bit more costly, but you're ignoring the astronomical cost of upgrading big systems like these. We're not talking about someone's desktop PC being overdue for an upgrade.
Estimates are that "it would cost $352 billion over the next decade to modernize the facilities." Obviously you can keep 8" floppies in production for FAR, FAR less than that! What's more, even if you spent the hundreds of billions of dollars to upgrade the systems, you're ONLY moving the baseline forward a bit, not PERMANENTLY solving the problem.
In other words, whatever media they upgrade to (e.g. CD-R, SD card, etc.), is likely to be obsolete and unavailable in a decade or so, as well. Whatever systems they certify for use, will be hard to find in just a few years. This is a problem, in general, for any life-critical system that needs to be end-to-end certified... You can't just swap in a newer system that should be compatible, you have to exhaustively test every edge case works EXACTLY like the old one did.
The only problem is one of perception... If the system was built of custom circuit boards, with lots of transistors and Z80 or 6509s, nobody would bat an eyelash that it was expensive to maintain, custom replacement parts needed to be ordered, and nobody would expect drop-in upgrades. But since it involves non-embedded computers, and accessories familiar to home PC users, there's a knee-jerk negative perception around all of the above, even if it's much cheaper and more reliable than the alternatives, because people can't perceive just how different the industrial needs are than their home usage pattern.
Yes, aired April 27, 2014.
And discussed on Pipedot months ago:
http://pipedot.org/story/2015-...
Some items you only buy one in a great while, and then proceed to forget about them. Other items are consumable and you need to resupply on a fairly regular basis, so checking on the price every week or so is a good way to stock-up when the item is cheaper, and the routine isn't all that time consuming.
In addition, Amazon has a healthy review and discussion system, so a decent number of users go back to write-up their thoughts, or look through the reviews, comments, and product questions of others. In the process, anyone would of course notice the prominently noted current price...
Amazon is getting eviler. All that talk of excellent customer service is a thing of the past. Anybody notice that free shipping suddenly increased from $35 to $49 without warning or notice, and at the same time a significant number of products were suddenly changed to only available for Prime customers? Among their other problems, Amazon desperately wants to become Costco and force everyone to join their club to be able to buy anything...
Refunds for defective or misrepresented products used to be trivial. But now when you have to return an item to Amazon, even when it is utterly DEFECTIVE, you'll be notified of a refund, but you have to look close to notice they only returned about 90% of the price you paid. If you complain, you can get the difference refunded, but even then, I've occasionally seen the second refund still come up a bit short! And this is my experience as a frequent customer for years, which they presumably want to keep happy. Others might not get as much traction when they complain.
This is even worse of a problem when compounded with Amazon Warehouse deals, where they resell returned products for a small discount. They very frequently resell defective items, and blatantly upgrade the condition a step or two... "Like New" items should NEVER be dented and cracked, but Warehouse Deals pulls that con all the damn time, and people who want to save $2 apparently fall for it.
These issues can all combine to make a perfect shit-storm... Place a $50 order from Amazon with one item from Warehouse deals. Used item is not in condition described, and quite defective. Amazon will NOT let you EXCHANGE a Warehouse item, so refund is you ONLY option. Refund just for the item will come up several dollars short, AND the removal of your item from the order will drop you below the free shipping threshold, giving them another excuse to deduct a big chunk of money from your item refund.
Amazon is happy to hammer the 3rd party sellers that use their website... If they aren't absolutely perfect, they get heavily penalized. But Amazon itself is very quickly becoming shady as hell.
Actually what happens is US content producers take the money as a tax-break to film some scenes in Canada. Set in the US, but using Canadian cities for the exterior shots, and/or sometimes interiors done on a Canadian sound-stage. No sweat. Suddenly its a Canadian film/TV show.
The worst part of the Canadian rules is the delivery of that content... Canadians aren't allowed to get Dish/DirecTV. Instead they have to pay much more for a local satellite TV service, which has fewer channels they want, but at least lots of local Canada content.... gah
The WP article has dozens and dozens of authoritative citations you can follow. As I said before... doubling down on your ignorance is a mistake.
It's not my fault you can't comprehend the sources I provided.
You feel the need to lie to yourself?
It's clearly necessary, as that's how most biodiesel is produced, today.
They've been trying for decades and decades, and can't get it to work outside of a lab. It doesn't scale up to even the tiniest production quantities. Bacterial growth and biofuel films are apparently mutually incompatible.
It's one thing to back-peddle, or just refuse to accept that you're wrong (which I see a lot of here)... It's quite another to repeatedly double-down on your own ignorance.
Jet fuel doesn't just turn into propulsion on its own. You need to account for the weight of all those fuel tanks, pumps, the heavy turbofans, monitoring and balancing equipment, fire suppression systems, and much, much more.
More than that, it's pretty obvious you didn't bother to actually read more than a line or two into my comment.
I must assume you don't know what an order of magnitude is. a Tesla Model S has a range of 300 miles, and charges up to 170 miles of range in 30 minutes.
3 orders of magnitude would be a 300,000 mile range, and when charging would get 170,000 miles of extra range every 30 minutes. Safe to say they'd be practical vehicles long before that point.
Nonsense. Power generation by coal is quickly going away. Natural gas is far cleaner than gasoline, kerosene, or bio equivalents. Solar (thermal or PV) and wind are being installed at a quick and increasing pace, far faster than demand is growing.
A decade isn't far enough out... Jets take more lead-time than that even when just based on conventional and established tech, while electric is still only a concept.
Combustion has horrid conversion efficiency, explosive fuel adds ample expense and dangers, requires tons of extra equipment weight, etc.
Bio fuels will have the same lousy efficiency. They won't reduce the environmental effects of contrails, won't eliminate smog and small particulate emissions, or otherwise improve air quality at all.
Existing bio fuels are every bit as dirty as fossil fuels... requiring clearing (by burning down) big sections of rain forest, or extensive use of petroleum based fertilizers, and more. The EU was on a big biofuel kick until they saw the damage caused by their feel-good policy.
And yet electric cars are on their way to overtaking internal combustion cars in the next decade.