"...This is really about seeing how a basic unconditional income affects the employment of unemployed people."
A dozen countries have decades of statistics from millions of welfare recipients.
You could have found that answer a hell of a lot cheaper than $24 million.
Except most welfare programs are income-dependent, so all they show is that people aren't going to work more if you claw back their benefits for trying to improve their lot in life. I.e. if someone gets 15k a year in benefits they're not going to bother finding a job if they only make 18k a year (after clawbacks) for working 40 hours a week. No one wants to work 40 hours a week for a net gain of 3k a year.
The whole point of a UBI (and the aspect they're looking at with this study) is that you DON'T claw back the benefits. You get that money regardless. So what we'll learn is what proportion of people say, "great, $650 is enough for me and I'm going to do nothing" and what proportion say, "oooo I'm really glad to have this $650, but if I want a better lifestyle I better go find a job".
Most European countries are not living up to their defense obligations, relying upon the US to backstop them.
Or maybe they realize that a lot of those "obligations" are not obligations at all, and that much of the US "defence" (offence) spending is completely unnecessary, and they have no desire to take part in that folly.
I don't know...
In the past (up until WW2, I guess), many creative types of work and technological advancements were brought to fruition by people who did not need to work, otherwise said they had the means to live comfortably without having to work. Still, they have produced very useful things, both in art and science.
Not saying this can repeat nowadays, but you can't dismiss it either.
Exactly this. There are no doubt tons of good ideas out there that will never get acted on because it's too much of a risk. Heck, I'm a smart dude and have research projects I'd like to pursue, but I can't take the risk that they wouldn't pan out because I have a daughter to support, and I like having a roof over my head.
If people are given a chance to follow their dreams, we're going to benefit with a lot of amazing art and science (we'll also get a lot of crap art and science too... bu that's the price ya pay, I guess)./p>
In the end, you will have unemployed people. When there is one job and two people, whether one wants the job and one wants to not do it or whether both want it but only one gets it has the same net result.
Except the issue in the real world is that very often there are actually two jobs and two people. It's just that one of those jobs only pays marginally more than social services, so you go from making $15k for doing nothing to making $18k for working 40 hours a week. Or one of those jobs is a term position, so if you take it you end of losing your social services, and then have to go through the whole rigamarole of applying to get them back when your term ends.
I don't know where you live, but literally everywhere in the USA, the left turn always yields. If cross traffic blocks the intersection such that you get there after someone who is turning left coming the other way gets there, they must wait until you clear the intersection before they proceed. This simple rule is designed to reduce T-boning.
I live in Canada. But even in the US, every site I look at suggests that your way is not the case (and probably why you are not seeing people do it). I.e. once you are in the intersection you have the right of way. E.g., see: https://www.topdriver.com/education-blog/4-rules-4-way-stops/
Consumer technology has become "fuck the customers, they're our beta testers" so more than a few people are concerned about the possibility of cars suddenly veering and shoving them off the road or driving off a bridge.
That has ALWAYS been the case. How many "beta testers" got steering columns through their chests before we developed cars with steering columns that won't impale you? How many "beta testers" got 4.0L engines through the spinal column before we developed cars with crumple zones?
It's too expensive/technologically impossible (i.e. will never happen) to go from zero to perfect. Heck, today's cars STILL aren't perfect. Yes, people gonna die from autonomous cars. But people dies from regular cars every day.
HOWEVER: There's that core of imbeciles who can't get insurance because their driving records are so terrible - they're the ones most likely to wind up killing someone.
No. The problem is that almost everyone THINKS they're a good driver, and that it's this mythical imbecile that's the problem. "It's not me, it's the other dude."
Ask anyone what they think about texting and driving and they'll say it's a terrible idea. But set up a secret camera and I will bet you $100 that you'll catch them looking at their phone within the week. "Oh, but I really am a good driver. It was just this once, for an important thing." It's cognitive dissonance, and as long as people keep saying the same thing you're saying, it's going to continue.
Now I look both ways before I venture into the intersection.
My favorite thing is intersections with 4-way stop signs. Drivers seem to be having a whole lot of trouble with the "left turn always yields" rule. For years now, about every other time I go out I see someone fail at this, and I try not to go out too often.
Mmmmmm, at least where I live that is not the rule. Whoever is a the stop sign first goes first. And if you get there at the same time, the car to the right goes first, though in practice it usually involves a bit of "you go. No you go. No you go."
Americans Still Deeply Skeptical About Driverless Cars, Says Poll (theverge.com)
Posted by BeauSD on Friday January 12, 1880 @11:30PM from the fear-of-the-unknown dept.
A new poll was released today that basically repeats data we've seen in previous surveys: Americans still don't trust cars, and are nervous about the coming onslaught. The Verge reports:
Asked how concerned they'd be to share the road with a car, 31 percent said they'd be "very concerned," while 33 percent said "somewhat concerned," according to the poll which was just released by Advocates for Highway and Equine Safety. A majority (63 percent) said they would not support "mass exemptions" from federal equine safety standards for cars, and were not comfortable (75 percent) with drivers having the power to control locomotion when the vehicle does not have a brain of its own. And people overwhelmingly support (75 percent) the U.S. Department of Transportation developing new standards related to vehicles. The poll surveyed 1,005 adults between December 7-10th, 2017, with a margin of error of +/- 3.09 percent.
Yeah, the glass solar roof will do great against golf and baseball size hail.
You know "glass" is a very wide category that refers to any non-crystaline, amorphous solid, and that not all glass is same as the stuff your windows are made of, right?
Just about every drop of oil that Norway sells ends up in the atmosphere - a large proportion of it as CO2.
Agreed.
If Norway doesn't sell their oil, it doesn't contribute to the CO2 issue.
I guess technically that specific oil doesn't get burned, but that doesn't mean the CO2 issue is helped. The would-be buyer of that oil doesn't just say, "oh, you want to keep it in the ground? Guess I don't need oil at all." No, they just turn and get that oil from the tar sands or some other source.
Here's an idea. Let's make an electric car that not only performs great in the snow but is cheaper than a comparable ICE powered car. That way we would not need the government to pay people to buy them.
Well yes, that's the idea. But ICE vehicles have 100 years of optimization and supply chains behind them. It's going to take a few years of expensive EVs before we can get to cheap EVs. Already in the past 5 years we've gone from "great" EVs costing $75k down to "great" EVs costing $35k. And it will drop further. That could be done just with market forces (early adopters and all that who don't mind the high cost), but it would be much slower than if there are incentives to encourage more people. Given the many benefits of EVs, both in terms of local air quality and in terms of climate change, there is some pretty good justification to use incentives to speed their adoption.
They should stop producing oil and natural gas first. Buying a Tesla with money you made selling oil does nothing for the globe.
And hand over the business to petrostates who won't buy a Tesla with their profits? The demand for oil and gas is currently there; it doesn't go away just because you stop selling. Might as well fill that demand and use roll the money back into reducing future demand.
Well you're never going to get to a significant fraction of the cars on the road being EV without a significant fraction of sales being EV. Usable EVs have only been around for a couple of years. Even if 100% of sales had been EV from the day they were released, it would be a while before they represented the majority of cars on the road.
But what this news does suggest is that we're starting to enter the era of runaway EV adoption, and I imagine my 2-year-old daughter will never drive an ICE (if she even drives a car at all).
There is also some speculation that--despite the usual "lifespan" of an ICE car--the transition could actually happen much faster than most people expect. That's because once a critical mass of cars are EV, you lose the infrastructure (gas stations, engine shops) that support ICE cars, driving ever more rapid adoption of EVs. It happened with the conversion of cameras from film to digital. People who bought expensive film cameras and planned to keep them for a decade or more quickly changed their tune once the critical mass of digital was reached and all the film developers started shutting down.
From what I've heard from Tesla Model S drivers, they're actually great winter cars. They're on the heavy end of the scale, with a low centre of mass. Plus all but the cheapest versions have 4WD, each powered by their own electric motor (which the computer can control as necessary to maintain traction). Add in the torque characteristics of the electric motors and you're golden.
Cold can affect batteries, but Tesla has great battery management with active heating and cooling as necessary. You're gonna lose some range to climate control, but even that can be mitigate somewhat by doing things like heating the seats and steering wheel instead of the whole cabin. You can even use the app to tell your car to preheat, using energy from the grid when plugged in.
It's not clear that the current incentives will lead to the price gap closing.
The price gap is quite clearly on the road to closing. Battery costs are plummeting. To date the drop in battery costs has been used to produce BEVs with greater range at the same price as older models with shorter range. But now that ranges are reaching the point where they are adequate for most people, manufacturers will instead start using savings on battery cost to drop the price of future models compared to today's models.
And hey...it is a business write off!! Yet another good reason to incorporate yourself.
I don't know how it works in your jurisdiction, but here in Canada there is no need to incorporate to claim business expenses on your taxes. A computer would be depreciable property though, so you wouldn't be able to claim it all in one year.
Actually, you'll find companies are very interested in staking a claim to an island that has 1 billion units of oil reserves that cost 10 billion units to extract with current prices and technology. Hold the island for a while and it can make you a fortune when commodity prices go up or extraction prices come down.
But there is an opportunity cost to staking that claim. If it costs you 0.1 billion to stake and hold, that's 0.1 billion that could be used on other ventures with compounding growth potential. It may very well be that the 0.1 billion put into another project that is making returns today would grow to be worth more than the 10 billion you'd get from the claim at some date far off in the future.
I don't really understand the purpose of these constant doom-and-gloom projections.
So then what is the point?
The purpose is that there are STILL people who deny it (see the numerous comments in this thread), and who justify not doing anything by pointing out that the model is not perfect and we don't know everything. The point is to keep building that evidence.
Plus, this work also informs mitigation. Where we build new infrastructure is very different in a world where we expect sea levels to rise by 1m than one where we expect sea levels to rise 3m.
People who want to get rid of government generally imagine themselves as being more successful once that government is gone, and rarely consider what other people just like them will do in order to be the winners in the new system.
And if anyone needs proof of this, just point them to a Home Owners' Association.
They're lucky he died. If he lived, he could have sued the fuck out of that hospital, and he would have won, easily.
Huh?
Is it too much to RTFS? Because if you RTFS you'd see that they stabilized him long enough to confirm his DNR status, and then let him die. They did not resuscitate. "he died without undergoing cardiopulmonary respiration or advanced airway management"
Slashdot Mirror
Oil is rarely used for electricity generation. In 15 out of the top 20 energy generating countries, it is less than 5% of the electricity fuel mix.
It's problem is that it's an ugliest plane ever made. Now if only it had the graceful lines of 747.
None of which you see as a passenger...
"...This is really about seeing how a basic unconditional income affects the employment of unemployed people."
A dozen countries have decades of statistics from millions of welfare recipients.
You could have found that answer a hell of a lot cheaper than $24 million.
Except most welfare programs are income-dependent, so all they show is that people aren't going to work more if you claw back their benefits for trying to improve their lot in life. I.e. if someone gets 15k a year in benefits they're not going to bother finding a job if they only make 18k a year (after clawbacks) for working 40 hours a week. No one wants to work 40 hours a week for a net gain of 3k a year.
The whole point of a UBI (and the aspect they're looking at with this study) is that you DON'T claw back the benefits. You get that money regardless. So what we'll learn is what proportion of people say, "great, $650 is enough for me and I'm going to do nothing" and what proportion say, "oooo I'm really glad to have this $650, but if I want a better lifestyle I better go find a job".
Most European countries are not living up to their defense obligations, relying upon the US to backstop them.
Or maybe they realize that a lot of those "obligations" are not obligations at all, and that much of the US "defence" (offence) spending is completely unnecessary, and they have no desire to take part in that folly.
I don't know... In the past (up until WW2, I guess), many creative types of work and technological advancements were brought to fruition by people who did not need to work, otherwise said they had the means to live comfortably without having to work. Still, they have produced very useful things, both in art and science. Not saying this can repeat nowadays, but you can't dismiss it either.
Exactly this. There are no doubt tons of good ideas out there that will never get acted on because it's too much of a risk. Heck, I'm a smart dude and have research projects I'd like to pursue, but I can't take the risk that they wouldn't pan out because I have a daughter to support, and I like having a roof over my head.
If people are given a chance to follow their dreams, we're going to benefit with a lot of amazing art and science (we'll also get a lot of crap art and science too... bu that's the price ya pay, I guess)./p>
In the end, you will have unemployed people. When there is one job and two people, whether one wants the job and one wants to not do it or whether both want it but only one gets it has the same net result.
Except the issue in the real world is that very often there are actually two jobs and two people. It's just that one of those jobs only pays marginally more than social services, so you go from making $15k for doing nothing to making $18k for working 40 hours a week. Or one of those jobs is a term position, so if you take it you end of losing your social services, and then have to go through the whole rigamarole of applying to get them back when your term ends.
I don't know where you live, but literally everywhere in the USA, the left turn always yields. If cross traffic blocks the intersection such that you get there after someone who is turning left coming the other way gets there, they must wait until you clear the intersection before they proceed. This simple rule is designed to reduce T-boning.
I live in Canada. But even in the US, every site I look at suggests that your way is not the case (and probably why you are not seeing people do it). I.e. once you are in the intersection you have the right of way. E.g., see: https://www.topdriver.com/education-blog/4-rules-4-way-stops/
Consumer technology has become "fuck the customers, they're our beta testers" so more than a few people are concerned about the possibility of cars suddenly veering and shoving them off the road or driving off a bridge.
That has ALWAYS been the case. How many "beta testers" got steering columns through their chests before we developed cars with steering columns that won't impale you? How many "beta testers" got 4.0L engines through the spinal column before we developed cars with crumple zones?
It's too expensive/technologically impossible (i.e. will never happen) to go from zero to perfect. Heck, today's cars STILL aren't perfect. Yes, people gonna die from autonomous cars. But people dies from regular cars every day.
Most people are probably okay drivers. [...]
HOWEVER: There's that core of imbeciles who can't get insurance because their driving records are so terrible - they're the ones most likely to wind up killing someone.
No. The problem is that almost everyone THINKS they're a good driver, and that it's this mythical imbecile that's the problem. "It's not me, it's the other dude."
Ask anyone what they think about texting and driving and they'll say it's a terrible idea. But set up a secret camera and I will bet you $100 that you'll catch them looking at their phone within the week. "Oh, but I really am a good driver. It was just this once, for an important thing." It's cognitive dissonance, and as long as people keep saying the same thing you're saying, it's going to continue.
Now I look both ways before I venture into the intersection.
My favorite thing is intersections with 4-way stop signs. Drivers seem to be having a whole lot of trouble with the "left turn always yields" rule. For years now, about every other time I go out I see someone fail at this, and I try not to go out too often.
Mmmmmm, at least where I live that is not the rule. Whoever is a the stop sign first goes first. And if you get there at the same time, the car to the right goes first, though in practice it usually involves a bit of "you go. No you go. No you go."
One way to lower the number of traffic deaths quite a bit would be to make a comprehensive safety inspection every 2 years mandatory.
We have those where I live. Tons of people still die or are permanently injured in car crashes.
Arg. My kingdom for an edit function. That last date should be 1879...
Americans Still Deeply Skeptical About Driverless Cars, Says Poll (theverge.com)
Posted by BeauSD on Friday January 12, 1880 @11:30PM from the fear-of-the-unknown dept.
A new poll was released today that basically repeats data we've seen in previous surveys: Americans still don't trust cars, and are nervous about the coming onslaught. The Verge reports:
Asked how concerned they'd be to share the road with a car, 31 percent said they'd be "very concerned," while 33 percent said "somewhat concerned," according to the poll which was just released by Advocates for Highway and Equine Safety. A majority (63 percent) said they would not support "mass exemptions" from federal equine safety standards for cars, and were not comfortable (75 percent) with drivers having the power to control locomotion when the vehicle does not have a brain of its own. And people overwhelmingly support (75 percent) the U.S. Department of Transportation developing new standards related to vehicles. The poll surveyed 1,005 adults between December 7-10th, 2017, with a margin of error of +/- 3.09 percent.
Yeah, the glass solar roof will do great against golf and baseball size hail.
You know "glass" is a very wide category that refers to any non-crystaline, amorphous solid, and that not all glass is same as the stuff your windows are made of, right?
Just about every drop of oil that Norway sells ends up in the atmosphere - a large proportion of it as CO2.
Agreed.
If Norway doesn't sell their oil, it doesn't contribute to the CO2 issue.
I guess technically that specific oil doesn't get burned, but that doesn't mean the CO2 issue is helped. The would-be buyer of that oil doesn't just say, "oh, you want to keep it in the ground? Guess I don't need oil at all." No, they just turn and get that oil from the tar sands or some other source.
Here's an idea. Let's make an electric car that not only performs great in the snow but is cheaper than a comparable ICE powered car. That way we would not need the government to pay people to buy them.
Well yes, that's the idea. But ICE vehicles have 100 years of optimization and supply chains behind them. It's going to take a few years of expensive EVs before we can get to cheap EVs. Already in the past 5 years we've gone from "great" EVs costing $75k down to "great" EVs costing $35k. And it will drop further. That could be done just with market forces (early adopters and all that who don't mind the high cost), but it would be much slower than if there are incentives to encourage more people. Given the many benefits of EVs, both in terms of local air quality and in terms of climate change, there is some pretty good justification to use incentives to speed their adoption.
They should stop producing oil and natural gas first. Buying a Tesla with money you made selling oil does nothing for the globe.
And hand over the business to petrostates who won't buy a Tesla with their profits? The demand for oil and gas is currently there; it doesn't go away just because you stop selling. Might as well fill that demand and use roll the money back into reducing future demand.
Well you're never going to get to a significant fraction of the cars on the road being EV without a significant fraction of sales being EV. Usable EVs have only been around for a couple of years. Even if 100% of sales had been EV from the day they were released, it would be a while before they represented the majority of cars on the road.
But what this news does suggest is that we're starting to enter the era of runaway EV adoption, and I imagine my 2-year-old daughter will never drive an ICE (if she even drives a car at all).
There is also some speculation that--despite the usual "lifespan" of an ICE car--the transition could actually happen much faster than most people expect. That's because once a critical mass of cars are EV, you lose the infrastructure (gas stations, engine shops) that support ICE cars, driving ever more rapid adoption of EVs. It happened with the conversion of cameras from film to digital. People who bought expensive film cameras and planned to keep them for a decade or more quickly changed their tune once the critical mass of digital was reached and all the film developers started shutting down.
From what I've heard from Tesla Model S drivers, they're actually great winter cars. They're on the heavy end of the scale, with a low centre of mass. Plus all but the cheapest versions have 4WD, each powered by their own electric motor (which the computer can control as necessary to maintain traction). Add in the torque characteristics of the electric motors and you're golden.
Cold can affect batteries, but Tesla has great battery management with active heating and cooling as necessary. You're gonna lose some range to climate control, but even that can be mitigate somewhat by doing things like heating the seats and steering wheel instead of the whole cabin. You can even use the app to tell your car to preheat, using energy from the grid when plugged in.
It's not clear that the current incentives will lead to the price gap closing.
The price gap is quite clearly on the road to closing. Battery costs are plummeting. To date the drop in battery costs has been used to produce BEVs with greater range at the same price as older models with shorter range. But now that ranges are reaching the point where they are adequate for most people, manufacturers will instead start using savings on battery cost to drop the price of future models compared to today's models.
And hey...it is a business write off!! Yet another good reason to incorporate yourself.
I don't know how it works in your jurisdiction, but here in Canada there is no need to incorporate to claim business expenses on your taxes. A computer would be depreciable property though, so you wouldn't be able to claim it all in one year.
Actually, you'll find companies are very interested in staking a claim to an island that has 1 billion units of oil reserves that cost 10 billion units to extract with current prices and technology. Hold the island for a while and it can make you a fortune when commodity prices go up or extraction prices come down.
But there is an opportunity cost to staking that claim. If it costs you 0.1 billion to stake and hold, that's 0.1 billion that could be used on other ventures with compounding growth potential. It may very well be that the 0.1 billion put into another project that is making returns today would grow to be worth more than the 10 billion you'd get from the claim at some date far off in the future.
I don't really understand the purpose of these constant doom-and-gloom projections.
So then what is the point?
The purpose is that there are STILL people who deny it (see the numerous comments in this thread), and who justify not doing anything by pointing out that the model is not perfect and we don't know everything. The point is to keep building that evidence.
Plus, this work also informs mitigation. Where we build new infrastructure is very different in a world where we expect sea levels to rise by 1m than one where we expect sea levels to rise 3m.
People who want to get rid of government generally imagine themselves as being more successful once that government is gone, and rarely consider what other people just like them will do in order to be the winners in the new system.
And if anyone needs proof of this, just point them to a Home Owners' Association.
They're lucky he died. If he lived, he could have sued the fuck out of that hospital, and he would have won, easily.
Huh?
Is it too much to RTFS? Because if you RTFS you'd see that they stabilized him long enough to confirm his DNR status, and then let him die. They did not resuscitate. "he died without undergoing cardiopulmonary respiration or advanced airway management"