I always thought Amtrak should sort out carrying personal automobiles on their passenger trains, although I think riding in your car on the train is a bad idea for more than an hour.
I would suspect that the civil defense system if its computerized is weak on the computer side. I've worked with engineers recently on plant process control and they do a great job on the controls side, but their IT infrastructure and security is poor and they really resent being told what to do by non-"engineers".
So if its computerized, its setup screwy and not easy to fix unless you have a good working idea of the control setup, which nobody with an IT background will know how to control. I've dealt with systems like that and you basically treat them as black boxes because NOBODY but the installers/designers understand them, especially not the people you deal with.
Managing it over time seems like way more than $800, too. Regular firewall updates, OS updates, etc, basically somebody has to manage it like any other network.
After some Googling, the AppleCat was doing Bell 202 signalling to make 1200 baud and it could do it with anything else capable of it, but it was a one-directional standard and required some kind of timing to make tx/rx work, so basically you needed to be running software aware of this on both ends to make it work.
I don't remember Bell 202 supported by any other product, they usually were Bell 212 if they supported 1200 baud.
The other thing that made the AppleCat kind of attractive at the time was that it was kind of binary programmable, and I think could be made to make its own touchtones and listen to the line. I remember a fast dialer that I used on busy BBS numbers -- you could dial and redial about as fast as the central office could complete the circuit. I think it was also effective as a war dialing system, able to map out vast phone number spaces pretty quickly.
IIRC, all of these were big advantages over Hayes modems that used AT command sets and had limits on how fast you could dial or detect a non-modem far end.
I remember when 1200 baud was unobtainium expensive and many dial up services didn't even have 1200 modems at all. 300 was decent, but you had to put up with 110 once in a blue moon if the modem pool got full.
For the longest time I had an AppleCat that would only do some weird half-duplex 1200 baud that was unusable with normal 1200 baud. Somebody figured out a simple handshake system and made it possible to send whole floppies at 1200 baud.
I challenge the assumption they are *solely* a data driven company. Any company their size and with their growth and revenue will attract a diverse sample of greedy, scheming assholes. The "data" just serves as a basis for being greedy assholes, it doesn't mean that there are rules that say the data should guide them in being just or fair.
My wife is the corporate rock star in our family and she does very well in an industry where she's often the only woman in the room, but its an old, established industry with good but not Google levels of growth. In management they value her relentless organizing ability (something that's always on the edge of conflict in our marriage).
Not an option for the Russians. No direct engagement against American warplanes outside of Russian airspace has an outcome to their advantage.
I don't even think it's much of a tactical edge for them, either, as we have at least partial jamming effectiveness against them in addition to the ability to identify launch sites from the sky, risking counter-strikes by cruise missles and warplanes.
Whatever Putin has invested in re-arming really hasn't been that impressive -- the roll-out of Russian power in Syria has been almost a joke, like a museum displays at an air show. Their aircraft carrier which is very nearly a towed barge to a fragile handful of strategic bombers.
The last thing the Russians want is to be humiliated by American military technology.
African lions have been known to prey on humans as a primary food source.
Game warden and former professional elephant hunter George Rushby killed off the pride in the late 1940s. His autobiography "No More The Tusker" details this and there is a BBC documentary on the the man-eating lions of Njombe.
I think for the lions, the explanation was kind of simple -- a pride of lions basically started preying on humans often and long enough that their offspring learned it to be an easy food source to the point that it became an ingrained behavior.
The book is long out of print (I had to get it from an inter-library loan from a local University's Africa collection) but is a fascinating first-person account of colonial Africa in the Early 20th century. Rushby's elephant hunts were pretty amazing, basically heading off into the bush for months at a time and living off the land.
As senseless and cruel as elephant hunting is now, Rushby has a lot of stories about just how dangerous elephants are to hunt. Many of his peers were killed by elephants. Intelligent and social animals capable of coordinating and tricking human hunters and capable of easily killing them. Rushby has stories of fellow hunters picked up and bashed against trees and rocks or simply crushed under foot. The extremely large rifle rounds required to put them down meant single shot rifles, double-barreled if you were lucky and only effective at very short ranges.
I don't even care about the cost, it's getting the goddamned ride to show up when I want it. Taxi service in Minneapolis always sucked -- the ONLY time it was reliable was airport to home because the cabs were lined up and waiting.
At least when I get an uber ride I've never waited more than 10 minutes and its seemed really reliable. I've had fucking cabs not even show up at all when I booked AM rides to the airport. Where I used to work we had an account with a Town Car-type limo company because the cabs were so unreliable.
Our house is two levels, a main and a walkout/basement level.
My sense is the lower level wasn't really designed to be a full-time living space as the floor is concrete slab and the ceiling height really isn't tall enough for a meaningfully insulated subfloor, which is why we had carpet in there to begin with. Without it it would be like skating rink cold.
We toyed with the idea of tile or polishing the concrete, both could have allowed us to put in electrical in-floor heat but it got to be kind of a big job doing either. Concrete would have looked cool in a modern/industrial kind of way but would have required a pretty substantial skimcoat for cosmetics and to level the floor. Tile would have been nearly as bad from a leveling perspective. In-floor electric heat would have just added more cost, and we didn't want to blow $10k+ when decent carpet would be half.
Our entire upstairs is red oak with except the bathroom which is tile. I agree its a superior flooring surface to carpet. The only thing carpet really has going for it is warmth and it absorbs sound, so it's quieter. Other than that its a PITA.
She was living proof that race is as much (if not more) of a social construct than gender, yet the same people who insist that having a functioning penis and testicles isn't a barrier to claiming to be female wanted to lynch her. I don't understand why racial identity can't be as or more plastic than gender.
I suspect she could have kept up her self-identification as black forever if she hadn't faked the hate mail and some other sketchy behavior. It's an open question as to whether assuming black identity is part of a larger pattern of neurotic behavior that includes the faked hate crimes or whether they are distinct.
What was so funny and ironic is that the constant refrain is how horrible it is to be black and how many privileges white people have, yet when someone white wants to essentially forfeit those privileges for a lower status they're accused of "appropriating" something from blacks. I don't get it -- if it's so shitty to be black, what's wrong with someone not black who wants to be black? Does it dilute the shitty nature of blackness? Or are they just pissed off that someone would waste perfectly good whiteness, like pouring a nice craft beer out of the bottle so you could fill it with Bud Lite?
What if all the complaining about money in politics is actually working against liberal ideas instead of for them? It kind of sounds like preaching for chastity to prevent pregnancy.
What if legislative seats really were auctioned off to the highest bidder? Could ordinary people pool their resources in collectives to buy seats? Maybe national, issue-oriented groups would buy some, regional ones would be some, etc.
Maybe rather than whining about money in politics we need to actually just embrace it.
In my experience, the "4 x 7" programmable thermostat (4 cycles per day, wake, leave. arrive, sleep) is more than adequate and I just can't see where remote control would be useful.
I live in Minnesota and even on a very cold day, 20 minutes or so is more than adequate to take the chill off the house with forced air. When I moved into my house in '99 I thought a setback during the day for A/C would be useful, but my experience has been that it's not -- recovering cooling takes too long. I think home A/Cs are sized pretty closely to what's necessary so that compressors will not short cycle, so recovery cycles are LONG.
I also have grown to kind of hate the dependence on the computer stuff I have. We have to have new carpet put in and I've been crying about the tear-out and removal to get some of the carpet replaced, plus there's all the usual upgrades and security issues like any other job.
I'm glad I never bothered going full-on smart home (besides pulling ethernet when we remodeled) -- I hate to think of how obsolete a system installed in 2003 during the remodeling would be, or even one installed just 5 or 6 years ago.
From what I've read in the marine world, there's no cure for clogging, just ways to minimize it. Multi-stage sea strainers cheaply and/or easily replaced and cleaned to get the water as de-gunked as possible before it hits the really good membrane. And enough water storage that you don't have to run your water maker in poor quality harbor or shallows water.
It seems like Amazon is making Company A do the work of finding out what sells and then swooping in and selling them.
I'm willing to buy into the underdog when greedy corporations are involved, but let's re-think "making company A do the work". I'm pretty sure Bezos didn't emerge from the shadows at put a gun to someone's head and say "you're gonna sell shit on our site or else".
I think being an Amazon marketplace seller is like being a real estate agent in 2005. People think they have some kind of genius business sense until it turns out they don't, they're just cogs in someone else's machine.
At a certain amount of net worth I would kind of expect that to happen without getting AIG involved. Dad talks to his lawyer who then calls some ex-cop who does work on the side. The ex-cop leans on the principal and gets Tommy suspended from school and kicked off the team.
It sounds very "Sopranos" but at the same time very plausible when money starts sloshing around.
I think racism might be slightly too strong, but I will say there is definitely cultural clashes.
1) Rude and sexist behavior towards women, especially women managers. The story I heard was that with one Indian, the female manager finally broke him with relentless pager duty backed by 8 AM meetings and 2-3 unplanned office moves where his stuff was dumped in boxes and moved to progressively smaller cubes.
2) Appalling personal hygiene habits -- not bathing, not changing clothes. A friend seated next to an Indian filed a formal complaint with HR (he worked for a hospital system!) and the Indian had to basically meet with some kind of social worker to explain how hygiene worked in the US.
3) Clannish behavior among groups of Indians where they won't interact with American colleagues and setup conflicts
Mostly its Indians who don't assimilate, which is pretty much everyone's complaint about immigrants.
It's not even as much about quality as perception of quality.
I work for a SMB consultancy we've had success with exactly one Asian guy who is Korean by his parents, but in general is whiter than I am in every cultural respect.
The other non-whites have bombed because the clients hated them for mostly made-up reasons, but it kind of boils down to what do you do when your client wants a white male on the job.
If this is the new "golden age" of television and there's so many new shows, I'm kind of confused as to how the math works on the writers not making enough money, exclusivity clauses and the new content getting written.
At the peak of broadcast television sometime in the late 1970s you had three networks and we'll assume for arguments' sake they had about 14 hours per day of programming, 7 days a week -- and I don't think it was even quite that much, there were big holes affiliates filled with reruns, local news, local chat shows, etc. Anyway, that's roughly 300 hours a week that needs "writing" of some kind, although some of it was journalism and not creative fiction, but we'll ignore that distinction, too.
Now there's far more networks with original programming -- AMC, USA, SciFi, FX, Fox, HBO, Showtime, WB, plus the networks, plus Netflix and Amazon originals -- how can there be so much content AND the writers are getting less work at the same time?
It doesn't make sense unless there really is less content, and the new "Golden Age" really is a fraud, and the entire industry is actually producing a lot less content. It doesn't feel that way. Antenna TV had a lot of crap content, movie-of-the-week (Hollywood theater movie, just broadcast on TV) and then there was live sports, news was actually journalism writing often written by the reporter who read it, etc, and even though series were 20-odd episodes then there was a long rerun season and TV also loved variety & talk shows with little scripted content.
Part of me thinks the writers just smell more money from actual growth in the medium and don't think they're getting enough of it, which is fine, everyone in creative filmed content management is a cunt and deserves to get bled a little.
A better candidate or a cheaper candidate? I'm not willing to live with 6 people in a two bedroom apartment while working 60 hours a week.
Be honest, H1Bs are not about quality, they are about applying minimal talent on a mass scale. For the kind of results one would naturally expect when quantity is a quality all it's own.
Yes, the best UBIs operate kind of like a negative income tax, ultimately getting cancelled out above a certain income level.
But AFAIK, there's really only spreadsheet models and estimates of whether its increased costs would be payed back by the elimination of benefit administration bureaucracies.
I mostly agree with the absurdity of UBI "pilot' programs, the premise of them is based on their universality and the lack of concern with how people spend their individual UBI payments.
So once you eliminate the universal part, what's left? It almost seems like they want to evaluate how the recipients spend their UBI payments, and of course, to reach the conclusion that the money wasn't spent well, and thus UBI would be a failure.
Part of the problem with UBI, IMHO, though, is that some of the advantages are predicated on pretty extreme changes. Eliminate most social welfare spending and its means testing bureaucracy will make it balance out economically -- not an easy thing to accomplish and even if you did and UBI failed for some reason, going back to the old system is hard.
I suspect that this is kind of a hidden intent in the Federalist system -- if a policy or business behavior is noxious enough to get specifically banned by a group of states such that it becomes difficult for a multi-state organization to choose between "safe" behavior permitted nation-wide vs. the extra work of engaging in the banned behavior and managing the overhead of where it's allowed then organizations will more than likely choose to drop the noxious behavior everywhere.
I'm only speculating, but if I was a manufacturer of a desirable brand of widgets and Wal Mart came to me and demanded some price below which I couldn't make money, I would be inclined to come up with some new sub-brand or SKU that was deliberately cheaper to make and then offer THAT to Wal Mart instead of my "good" brand.
Or maybe some subversive version of this, where I moved the good product to a new "platinum" SKU and just junked the quality on the old one.
That way I can preserve my product quality, which presumably has something to do with my brand's success, and keep selling that to other vendors willing to buy it.
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Why not incorporate living spaces into this concept, a kind of dorm?
Basic living spaces, shared bathrooms, a cafeteria (with discounted prepaid meal plans) to go along with the shared office work spaces.
I always thought Amtrak should sort out carrying personal automobiles on their passenger trains, although I think riding in your car on the train is a bad idea for more than an hour.
I would suspect that the civil defense system if its computerized is weak on the computer side. I've worked with engineers recently on plant process control and they do a great job on the controls side, but their IT infrastructure and security is poor and they really resent being told what to do by non-"engineers".
So if its computerized, its setup screwy and not easy to fix unless you have a good working idea of the control setup, which nobody with an IT background will know how to control. I've dealt with systems like that and you basically treat them as black boxes because NOBODY but the installers/designers understand them, especially not the people you deal with.
Managing it over time seems like way more than $800, too. Regular firewall updates, OS updates, etc, basically somebody has to manage it like any other network.
After some Googling, the AppleCat was doing Bell 202 signalling to make 1200 baud and it could do it with anything else capable of it, but it was a one-directional standard and required some kind of timing to make tx/rx work, so basically you needed to be running software aware of this on both ends to make it work.
I don't remember Bell 202 supported by any other product, they usually were Bell 212 if they supported 1200 baud.
The other thing that made the AppleCat kind of attractive at the time was that it was kind of binary programmable, and I think could be made to make its own touchtones and listen to the line. I remember a fast dialer that I used on busy BBS numbers -- you could dial and redial about as fast as the central office could complete the circuit. I think it was also effective as a war dialing system, able to map out vast phone number spaces pretty quickly.
IIRC, all of these were big advantages over Hayes modems that used AT command sets and had limits on how fast you could dial or detect a non-modem far end.
I remember when 1200 baud was unobtainium expensive and many dial up services didn't even have 1200 modems at all. 300 was decent, but you had to put up with 110 once in a blue moon if the modem pool got full.
For the longest time I had an AppleCat that would only do some weird half-duplex 1200 baud that was unusable with normal 1200 baud. Somebody figured out a simple handshake system and made it possible to send whole floppies at 1200 baud.
...and saw a cousin lounging on the couch and they want in on that.
I challenge the assumption they are *solely* a data driven company. Any company their size and with their growth and revenue will attract a diverse sample of greedy, scheming assholes. The "data" just serves as a basis for being greedy assholes, it doesn't mean that there are rules that say the data should guide them in being just or fair.
My wife is the corporate rock star in our family and she does very well in an industry where she's often the only woman in the room, but its an old, established industry with good but not Google levels of growth. In management they value her relentless organizing ability (something that's always on the edge of conflict in our marriage).
Not an option for the Russians. No direct engagement against American warplanes outside of Russian airspace has an outcome to their advantage.
I don't even think it's much of a tactical edge for them, either, as we have at least partial jamming effectiveness against them in addition to the ability to identify launch sites from the sky, risking counter-strikes by cruise missles and warplanes.
Whatever Putin has invested in re-arming really hasn't been that impressive -- the roll-out of Russian power in Syria has been almost a joke, like a museum displays at an air show. Their aircraft carrier which is very nearly a towed barge to a fragile handful of strategic bombers.
The last thing the Russians want is to be humiliated by American military technology.
African lions have been known to prey on humans as a primary food source.
Game warden and former professional elephant hunter George Rushby killed off the pride in the late 1940s. His autobiography "No More The Tusker" details this and there is a BBC documentary on the the man-eating lions of Njombe.
I think for the lions, the explanation was kind of simple -- a pride of lions basically started preying on humans often and long enough that their offspring learned it to be an easy food source to the point that it became an ingrained behavior.
The book is long out of print (I had to get it from an inter-library loan from a local University's Africa collection) but is a fascinating first-person account of colonial Africa in the Early 20th century. Rushby's elephant hunts were pretty amazing, basically heading off into the bush for months at a time and living off the land.
As senseless and cruel as elephant hunting is now, Rushby has a lot of stories about just how dangerous elephants are to hunt. Many of his peers were killed by elephants. Intelligent and social animals capable of coordinating and tricking human hunters and capable of easily killing them. Rushby has stories of fellow hunters picked up and bashed against trees and rocks or simply crushed under foot. The extremely large rifle rounds required to put them down meant single shot rifles, double-barreled if you were lucky and only effective at very short ranges.
I don't even care about the cost, it's getting the goddamned ride to show up when I want it. Taxi service in Minneapolis always sucked -- the ONLY time it was reliable was airport to home because the cabs were lined up and waiting.
At least when I get an uber ride I've never waited more than 10 minutes and its seemed really reliable. I've had fucking cabs not even show up at all when I booked AM rides to the airport. Where I used to work we had an account with a Town Car-type limo company because the cabs were so unreliable.
Our house is two levels, a main and a walkout/basement level.
My sense is the lower level wasn't really designed to be a full-time living space as the floor is concrete slab and the ceiling height really isn't tall enough for a meaningfully insulated subfloor, which is why we had carpet in there to begin with. Without it it would be like skating rink cold.
We toyed with the idea of tile or polishing the concrete, both could have allowed us to put in electrical in-floor heat but it got to be kind of a big job doing either. Concrete would have looked cool in a modern/industrial kind of way but would have required a pretty substantial skimcoat for cosmetics and to level the floor. Tile would have been nearly as bad from a leveling perspective. In-floor electric heat would have just added more cost, and we didn't want to blow $10k+ when decent carpet would be half.
Our entire upstairs is red oak with except the bathroom which is tile. I agree its a superior flooring surface to carpet. The only thing carpet really has going for it is warmth and it absorbs sound, so it's quieter. Other than that its a PITA.
She was living proof that race is as much (if not more) of a social construct than gender, yet the same people who insist that having a functioning penis and testicles isn't a barrier to claiming to be female wanted to lynch her. I don't understand why racial identity can't be as or more plastic than gender.
I suspect she could have kept up her self-identification as black forever if she hadn't faked the hate mail and some other sketchy behavior. It's an open question as to whether assuming black identity is part of a larger pattern of neurotic behavior that includes the faked hate crimes or whether they are distinct.
What was so funny and ironic is that the constant refrain is how horrible it is to be black and how many privileges white people have, yet when someone white wants to essentially forfeit those privileges for a lower status they're accused of "appropriating" something from blacks. I don't get it -- if it's so shitty to be black, what's wrong with someone not black who wants to be black? Does it dilute the shitty nature of blackness? Or are they just pissed off that someone would waste perfectly good whiteness, like pouring a nice craft beer out of the bottle so you could fill it with Bud Lite?
I had kind of the same epiphany reading this.
What if all the complaining about money in politics is actually working against liberal ideas instead of for them? It kind of sounds like preaching for chastity to prevent pregnancy.
What if legislative seats really were auctioned off to the highest bidder? Could ordinary people pool their resources in collectives to buy seats? Maybe national, issue-oriented groups would buy some, regional ones would be some, etc.
Maybe rather than whining about money in politics we need to actually just embrace it.
In my experience, the "4 x 7" programmable thermostat (4 cycles per day, wake, leave. arrive, sleep) is more than adequate and I just can't see where remote control would be useful.
I live in Minnesota and even on a very cold day, 20 minutes or so is more than adequate to take the chill off the house with forced air. When I moved into my house in '99 I thought a setback during the day for A/C would be useful, but my experience has been that it's not -- recovering cooling takes too long. I think home A/Cs are sized pretty closely to what's necessary so that compressors will not short cycle, so recovery cycles are LONG.
I also have grown to kind of hate the dependence on the computer stuff I have. We have to have new carpet put in and I've been crying about the tear-out and removal to get some of the carpet replaced, plus there's all the usual upgrades and security issues like any other job.
I'm glad I never bothered going full-on smart home (besides pulling ethernet when we remodeled) -- I hate to think of how obsolete a system installed in 2003 during the remodeling would be, or even one installed just 5 or 6 years ago.
From what I've read in the marine world, there's no cure for clogging, just ways to minimize it. Multi-stage sea strainers cheaply and/or easily replaced and cleaned to get the water as de-gunked as possible before it hits the really good membrane. And enough water storage that you don't have to run your water maker in poor quality harbor or shallows water.
It seems like Amazon is making Company A do the work of finding out what sells and then swooping in and selling them.
I'm willing to buy into the underdog when greedy corporations are involved, but let's re-think "making company A do the work". I'm pretty sure Bezos didn't emerge from the shadows at put a gun to someone's head and say "you're gonna sell shit on our site or else".
I think being an Amazon marketplace seller is like being a real estate agent in 2005. People think they have some kind of genius business sense until it turns out they don't, they're just cogs in someone else's machine.
At a certain amount of net worth I would kind of expect that to happen without getting AIG involved. Dad talks to his lawyer who then calls some ex-cop who does work on the side. The ex-cop leans on the principal and gets Tommy suspended from school and kicked off the team.
It sounds very "Sopranos" but at the same time very plausible when money starts sloshing around.
I think racism might be slightly too strong, but I will say there is definitely cultural clashes.
1) Rude and sexist behavior towards women, especially women managers. The story I heard was that with one Indian, the female manager finally broke him with relentless pager duty backed by 8 AM meetings and 2-3 unplanned office moves where his stuff was dumped in boxes and moved to progressively smaller cubes.
2) Appalling personal hygiene habits -- not bathing, not changing clothes. A friend seated next to an Indian filed a formal complaint with HR (he worked for a hospital system!) and the Indian had to basically meet with some kind of social worker to explain how hygiene worked in the US.
3) Clannish behavior among groups of Indians where they won't interact with American colleagues and setup conflicts
Mostly its Indians who don't assimilate, which is pretty much everyone's complaint about immigrants.
It's not even as much about quality as perception of quality.
I work for a SMB consultancy we've had success with exactly one Asian guy who is Korean by his parents, but in general is whiter than I am in every cultural respect.
The other non-whites have bombed because the clients hated them for mostly made-up reasons, but it kind of boils down to what do you do when your client wants a white male on the job.
If this is the new "golden age" of television and there's so many new shows, I'm kind of confused as to how the math works on the writers not making enough money, exclusivity clauses and the new content getting written.
At the peak of broadcast television sometime in the late 1970s you had three networks and we'll assume for arguments' sake they had about 14 hours per day of programming, 7 days a week -- and I don't think it was even quite that much, there were big holes affiliates filled with reruns, local news, local chat shows, etc. Anyway, that's roughly 300 hours a week that needs "writing" of some kind, although some of it was journalism and not creative fiction, but we'll ignore that distinction, too.
Now there's far more networks with original programming -- AMC, USA, SciFi, FX, Fox, HBO, Showtime, WB, plus the networks, plus Netflix and Amazon originals -- how can there be so much content AND the writers are getting less work at the same time?
It doesn't make sense unless there really is less content, and the new "Golden Age" really is a fraud, and the entire industry is actually producing a lot less content. It doesn't feel that way. Antenna TV had a lot of crap content, movie-of-the-week (Hollywood theater movie, just broadcast on TV) and then there was live sports, news was actually journalism writing often written by the reporter who read it, etc, and even though series were 20-odd episodes then there was a long rerun season and TV also loved variety & talk shows with little scripted content.
Part of me thinks the writers just smell more money from actual growth in the medium and don't think they're getting enough of it, which is fine, everyone in creative filmed content management is a cunt and deserves to get bled a little.
A better candidate or a cheaper candidate? I'm not willing to live with 6 people in a two bedroom apartment while working 60 hours a week.
Be honest, H1Bs are not about quality, they are about applying minimal talent on a mass scale. For the kind of results one would naturally expect when quantity is a quality all it's own.
Yes, the best UBIs operate kind of like a negative income tax, ultimately getting cancelled out above a certain income level.
But AFAIK, there's really only spreadsheet models and estimates of whether its increased costs would be payed back by the elimination of benefit administration bureaucracies.
I mostly agree with the absurdity of UBI "pilot' programs, the premise of them is based on their universality and the lack of concern with how people spend their individual UBI payments.
So once you eliminate the universal part, what's left? It almost seems like they want to evaluate how the recipients spend their UBI payments, and of course, to reach the conclusion that the money wasn't spent well, and thus UBI would be a failure.
Part of the problem with UBI, IMHO, though, is that some of the advantages are predicated on pretty extreme changes. Eliminate most social welfare spending and its means testing bureaucracy will make it balance out economically -- not an easy thing to accomplish and even if you did and UBI failed for some reason, going back to the old system is hard.
I suspect that this is kind of a hidden intent in the Federalist system -- if a policy or business behavior is noxious enough to get specifically banned by a group of states such that it becomes difficult for a multi-state organization to choose between "safe" behavior permitted nation-wide vs. the extra work of engaging in the banned behavior and managing the overhead of where it's allowed then organizations will more than likely choose to drop the noxious behavior everywhere.
I'm only speculating, but if I was a manufacturer of a desirable brand of widgets and Wal Mart came to me and demanded some price below which I couldn't make money, I would be inclined to come up with some new sub-brand or SKU that was deliberately cheaper to make and then offer THAT to Wal Mart instead of my "good" brand.
Or maybe some subversive version of this, where I moved the good product to a new "platinum" SKU and just junked the quality on the old one.
That way I can preserve my product quality, which presumably has something to do with my brand's success, and keep selling that to other vendors willing to buy it.