To test UBI, you have to implement UBI. You don't necessarily have to do it everywhere, but you need a reasonably large geographic area (such that stores, services, and accomodation in the area are serving mostly people included in the trial) and you need to stop other government money to those people as well. (the same services you'd stop for a full rollout). and yes, you MUST avoid any sort of minimum wage or you aren't testing UBI at all.
It's really hard to tell if UBI is a great idea, or a horrible one, but the biggest issue is that it's impossible to trial in this manner.
To actually test UBI, several things need to happen: 1) you make it truly universal, no means testing, no targeting to certain demographics, everyone gets it, from the millionaires, to the homeless. 2) you cover everyone in a reasonably large geographic area, no exceptions. 3) You also need to turn off all the other services it's supposed to replace (welfare, employment insurance, disability amounts, etc)
This is important because without 1 and 2 you end up with a distorted system. You don't get to see if everyone having extra money simply drives all prices up by that amount making it useless (if the poverty line moves up by the exact amount of the UBI, have you really helped anyone?), or if it actually allows people to live. You end up with simply a lottery where some lucky people have more money, while everyone else has the same. While 3 also helps make sure you're looking at an undistorted system, it is also about being able to afford to do this at all. UBI can only be affordable if you use it to cut out massive amounts of government bureaucracy, if all the bureaucracy is left in place, you'll never find enough money to make it work.
These trials will be a success or a failure depending on what the agenda of the study really is, but neither outcome tells you anything at all about how the system would actually work if rolled out universally.
Where I live you simply can not buy overland flood insurance. It is not available at any price. So the wealthy don't have it either. Meaning they are just as eligible for government disaster relief as the poor, but far more likely to need it.
Exactly, we're discussing the report, not worshipping it. Part of the discussion is to talk about how reasonable the various factors cited actually are.
Unless your government disaster relief is means tested, it by default goes mostly to whomever lives closest to the rivers, in the case of my city, the richest people.
It's political suicide for a scientist to avoid blaming climate change for anything these days. That doesn't mean it's a credible reason for this particular issue. If a difference of a few inches will cause your city to flood or not, you already flooded any time there was a storm anyway. Keep in mind that on an average day (not a storm) the wave heights are more than that difference.
But again, the most expensive land is what you just called "less desirable". It seems in fact that the floodplain land in most cities is the most expensive, not the least. People WANT to live beside the water, even though it's a horrible idea. The most expensive properties in my city tend to have a river running through their backyard, they're also the first to flood. So every time they flood, the government pays out millions of dollars in disaster relief to the richest people in town.
You can hardly say that the risks weren't disclosed either, the river is *IN* their yard!
We see it over and over again, in many places the oldest parts of the city is fine but the newer parts are the problem, 150+ years ago the people settling areas often looked at the terrain before building and built on hills, but since then we gave up and decided that riverfront was a selling feature instead of a hazard.
A few years ago we had major flooding here, the original historic properties (first houses in a city founded at the junction of 2 rivers) were high and dry (of course now they're a park), but the modern skyscrapers had their basements full of water.
Interestingly enough, in rich countries riverfront, lakefront, and oceanfront properties are where the wealthiest people live, but in poorer countries the wealthy people live up on hills and the poor people live on the floodplains, maybe we could learn something? when you live right beside water, water may come to visit you!
Body armour is actually restricted in Canada. It's only available to emergency services personnel, owning it otherwise is illegal. (A policy I happen to disagree with, but I don't make the laws)
This gets to be a tough subject. Where I live you have 3 options for TV service: - Satellite (sucks once you get used to modern cable/iptv offerings) - Cable from the cable company - IPTV from the phone company
From an end user perspective, the Cable and IPTV offerings are identical, but behind the scenes they are very different, cable is it's own path and doesn't exist as an IP service on the customer's network, but IPTV does.
If you stop allowing zero rating of the IPTV service, you put the phone company at a major disadvantage to the cable company, and effectively kill that as a competitor in the marketplace. So right now the CRTC has taken the view that if a holder of a broadcast license is streaming that content on their own network they can consider it "equivalent" to the cable offering, and zero rate it, however if it's over someone else's network, or it's not content covered by the broadcast license, it can't be zero rated. (though interestingly enough the rulings so far have limited "their own network" to the wired network, zero rating it over a cell phone was deemed to violate net-neutrality, probably because that's not competing directly with cable on equal terms)
This is a reasonable compromise to keep IPTV as a competitor in the marketplace, while still enforcing net-neutrality.
Two issues. First of all, who determines "X"? If it's too low, businesses who need the workers are screwed, and if it's too high, those who exploit the system aren't hindered. Secondly the salary level doesn't necessarily equate to the job scarcity once you take skill level in to account. Imagine a job that normally pays $150,000, the company decides to get an H-1B to fill it and lay off the existing worker, post it at $100,000 to save money, they still get the foreign worker over the company that has a job that normally pays $50,000, but still can't find anyone to hire at $75,000 due to a lack of enough domestic workers with the right qualifications.
It's not that simple. There aren't "two classes" of H-1Bs, they're all the same, there are just honest companies, and dishonest ones. There is no way to kill one of those without harming the other. In fact, the more you try to crack down on the dishonest ones, the more you hurt the honest ones, while the cheaters just find new ways to cheat.
Now stepping up enforcement is probably warranted, but it's not as easy as it sounds, and changing the rules doesn't necessarily accomplish what you think it will.
As for the Canadian equivalent, that would be the TFW program, which has been equally abused, but equally essential to some companies' survival.
Crafting rules that allow companies to fill legitimate vacancies they can't fill otherwise, while not allowing companies to simply undercut the local labour market, is no easy task.
There are a few suggestions I've seen that would help though: - Mandate a certain % that you must pay over the going market rate for the job (still very hard to enforce as proving the market rate for any exact job is tough) - Allow the foreign worker control of their visa, if they leave the employ of one employer, they have a grace period to find similar work at another employer before they must leave the country. This would address the issue of companies bringing in people that won't rock the boat for fear of being shipped home, and give those workers similar power to domestic workers to stand up for themselves, removing an incentive to game the system to get them. A similar effect could be achieved by replacing temporary workers with permanent ones. If we really have a skills shortage in a specific area, what's wrong with looking for actual immigrants with those skills? (not temporary ones that can be sent home at a whim)
Of course it actually IS good news for Canada. We're already starting to see a surge of tech companies moving to Canada from the USA because of Trump's immigration policies.
The supporters of these sorts of initiatives don't realize that when it's uneconomical for a business to operate in the USA, they don't suddenly start hiring more people at higher wages, they close up shop and move somewhere that they can make money, and they take ALL the jobs with them, not just the H-1Bs
Generally no. In most cases break and enter requires you to actually break in. Simply walking in through an unlocked door would be trespass. Both illegal, but not the same crime.
You have a problem with someone who has a history of treating people the way they want to be treated. I think that it shows he's a considerate person. Unless you have evidence that he treats people in a way other than they wish to be treated, I'm not sure what negative affect you forsee in the workplace.
Just because you personally disagree with what those women wanted, doesn't mean you should be allowed to dictate it to them. Or do you think you're better than them in some way? I'm more worried that your attitude will affect the workplace than his.
Don't think that just because you happen to sit in the office that your job is not "setup to be remote" there isn't that much "setup" involved at most companies any more. If your company has some form of VPN solution, and has heard of teleconference, then it doesn't matter if you're in the office or at home, you're equally vulnerable.
I think the fallacy is in thinking that someone who is expendable and can do their work anywhere in the world suddenly becomes more expendable if they do that same work at home vs at the office. I don't think that's the case.
Either the work you do can be done from anywhere (in which case it doesn't matter where you actually do it, home, office, or anywhere else). Or the work you do requires you to sometimes be in a specific location, in which case it doesn't matter where you are the rest of the time.
If your job is at risk of being moved to a foreign country, simply doing the same work at the office instead of at home won't save you.
I work from home approximately 80% of the time, that 80% of the time accounts for about 95% of my work. It's so hard to get good work done at the office with all the distractions around.
You're somewhat right, but it's not quite that simple.
The Model S does not have the same level of fit and finish, or materials, or comfort of any of those vehicles. But none of those vehicles have the same level of tech in their vehicles either. Lane keeping and adaptive cruise control on those other vehicles is several years behind that of the Tesla (though Tesla is working hard to fix that by removing functionality from the Teslas... but that's another rant), and the app and internet integration aren't as good in any of those other vehicles either, and the raw power, and instantaneous application of it that you get from a Tesla can't be compared to any internal combustion vehicle.
I would never describe my Tesla as a luxury vehicle, it simply isn't, but you can't really compare it to lower end vehicles either as it does offer some amazing features that they don't. Tesla themselves don't call it a luxury vehicle either though, they call it a "premium" vehicle, and I have to say that's a better description. Beyond that, The Tesla is a very large sedan, apart from height it's probably a physically larger vehicle than any of the vehicles they're comparing to, and that's another factor often defined as part of the class.
I personally don't think they're in the same class, but not in the one is better than the other type of way, more in the apples to oranges kind of way. Just like a sports car and a pickup truck don't appeal to the same buyers, a Model S doesn't appeal to someone looking for a high end luxury car, just like those same cars don't really appeal to someone looking for the tech and the power train of the Tesla.
Luckily we still have choices, and not everyone needs to drive the same type of vehicle.
People love to compare things though, and it's not easy to find something to compare the Tesla too as it's quite simply not like anything else out there, that's not always a good thing, but nor is it always a bad thing either, it's simply what it is. As much as I wouldn't compare the vehicle to a luxury sedan, I think in this narrow use case (how well they hold resale value), it may actually be a decent place to start, simply because it's easiest to see how a $100,000 car depreciates when compared to other $100,000 cars.
But it's all about what you want. Sure I could continue to live frugally forever, and die with a veritable fortune in the bank. But what's the point? I can't take it with me!
Alternatively I could decide that there's a magic moment at some randomly picked age when I can feel free to spend my money and enjoy myself, but why pick a random age for a windfall instead of a more modest amount ongoing forever?
At a certain point you have to strike a balance. I've decided that for me, the best balance is to continue to save enough to retire relatively early (though not in my 30s), while enjoying some of my earnings in the meantime.
It doesn't have to be all or nothing, there's nothing wrong with spending on an expensive toy, or an expensive vacation once in a while, what makes it wrong is if it puts you in financial hardship. I have certain funds earmarked for retirement, as long as I don't touch those, or go in to debt, I don't see any reason I can't blow the rest on anything I like.
Now this all changes if you're in financial hardship, if you're spending beyond your means already, you don't really have a good choice here, and must do something to bring it back in line. If you don't have any retirement or emergency savings you equally have to do something about that or risk some pretty hard times down the road. But if you're not in either of those situations, you might as well live a little bit.
The alternative is that you pay taxi to and from the airport at both ends of the journey, or pay to park at the airport, none of these are good options either.
Slashdot Mirror
To test UBI, you have to implement UBI. You don't necessarily have to do it everywhere, but you need a reasonably large geographic area (such that stores, services, and accomodation in the area are serving mostly people included in the trial) and you need to stop other government money to those people as well. (the same services you'd stop for a full rollout). and yes, you MUST avoid any sort of minimum wage or you aren't testing UBI at all.
It's really hard to tell if UBI is a great idea, or a horrible one, but the biggest issue is that it's impossible to trial in this manner.
To actually test UBI, several things need to happen:
1) you make it truly universal, no means testing, no targeting to certain demographics, everyone gets it, from the millionaires, to the homeless.
2) you cover everyone in a reasonably large geographic area, no exceptions.
3) You also need to turn off all the other services it's supposed to replace (welfare, employment insurance, disability amounts, etc)
This is important because without 1 and 2 you end up with a distorted system. You don't get to see if everyone having extra money simply drives all prices up by that amount making it useless (if the poverty line moves up by the exact amount of the UBI, have you really helped anyone?), or if it actually allows people to live. You end up with simply a lottery where some lucky people have more money, while everyone else has the same.
While 3 also helps make sure you're looking at an undistorted system, it is also about being able to afford to do this at all. UBI can only be affordable if you use it to cut out massive amounts of government bureaucracy, if all the bureaucracy is left in place, you'll never find enough money to make it work.
These trials will be a success or a failure depending on what the agenda of the study really is, but neither outcome tells you anything at all about how the system would actually work if rolled out universally.
Except Ontario doesn't have control of the monetary supply so CAN'T print it.
As such, it DOES have to come from somewhere.
Where I live you simply can not buy overland flood insurance. It is not available at any price. So the wealthy don't have it either. Meaning they are just as eligible for government disaster relief as the poor, but far more likely to need it.
Exactly, we're discussing the report, not worshipping it. Part of the discussion is to talk about how reasonable the various factors cited actually are.
Unless your government disaster relief is means tested, it by default goes mostly to whomever lives closest to the rivers, in the case of my city, the richest people.
It's political suicide for a scientist to avoid blaming climate change for anything these days. That doesn't mean it's a credible reason for this particular issue. If a difference of a few inches will cause your city to flood or not, you already flooded any time there was a storm anyway. Keep in mind that on an average day (not a storm) the wave heights are more than that difference.
But again, the most expensive land is what you just called "less desirable". It seems in fact that the floodplain land in most cities is the most expensive, not the least. People WANT to live beside the water, even though it's a horrible idea. The most expensive properties in my city tend to have a river running through their backyard, they're also the first to flood. So every time they flood, the government pays out millions of dollars in disaster relief to the richest people in town.
You can hardly say that the risks weren't disclosed either, the river is *IN* their yard!
because the amount of sea level rise to date is minuscule by comparison to those other reasons and can't be taken seriously as a cause of this issue.
We have learned something since then.
I'd love to think you're right, but I just can't.
We see it over and over again, in many places the oldest parts of the city is fine but the newer parts are the problem, 150+ years ago the people settling areas often looked at the terrain before building and built on hills, but since then we gave up and decided that riverfront was a selling feature instead of a hazard.
A few years ago we had major flooding here, the original historic properties (first houses in a city founded at the junction of 2 rivers) were high and dry (of course now they're a park), but the modern skyscrapers had their basements full of water.
Interestingly enough, in rich countries riverfront, lakefront, and oceanfront properties are where the wealthiest people live, but in poorer countries the wealthy people live up on hills and the poor people live on the floodplains, maybe we could learn something? when you live right beside water, water may come to visit you!
Body armour is actually restricted in Canada. It's only available to emergency services personnel, owning it otherwise is illegal. (A policy I happen to disagree with, but I don't make the laws)
This gets to be a tough subject. Where I live you have 3 options for TV service:
- Satellite (sucks once you get used to modern cable/iptv offerings)
- Cable from the cable company
- IPTV from the phone company
From an end user perspective, the Cable and IPTV offerings are identical, but behind the scenes they are very different, cable is it's own path and doesn't exist as an IP service on the customer's network, but IPTV does.
If you stop allowing zero rating of the IPTV service, you put the phone company at a major disadvantage to the cable company, and effectively kill that as a competitor in the marketplace. So right now the CRTC has taken the view that if a holder of a broadcast license is streaming that content on their own network they can consider it "equivalent" to the cable offering, and zero rate it, however if it's over someone else's network, or it's not content covered by the broadcast license, it can't be zero rated. (though interestingly enough the rulings so far have limited "their own network" to the wired network, zero rating it over a cell phone was deemed to violate net-neutrality, probably because that's not competing directly with cable on equal terms)
This is a reasonable compromise to keep IPTV as a competitor in the marketplace, while still enforcing net-neutrality.
Two issues. First of all, who determines "X"? If it's too low, businesses who need the workers are screwed, and if it's too high, those who exploit the system aren't hindered. Secondly the salary level doesn't necessarily equate to the job scarcity once you take skill level in to account. Imagine a job that normally pays $150,000, the company decides to get an H-1B to fill it and lay off the existing worker, post it at $100,000 to save money, they still get the foreign worker over the company that has a job that normally pays $50,000, but still can't find anyone to hire at $75,000 due to a lack of enough domestic workers with the right qualifications.
It's not that simple. There aren't "two classes" of H-1Bs, they're all the same, there are just honest companies, and dishonest ones. There is no way to kill one of those without harming the other. In fact, the more you try to crack down on the dishonest ones, the more you hurt the honest ones, while the cheaters just find new ways to cheat.
Now stepping up enforcement is probably warranted, but it's not as easy as it sounds, and changing the rules doesn't necessarily accomplish what you think it will.
As for the Canadian equivalent, that would be the TFW program, which has been equally abused, but equally essential to some companies' survival.
Crafting rules that allow companies to fill legitimate vacancies they can't fill otherwise, while not allowing companies to simply undercut the local labour market, is no easy task.
There are a few suggestions I've seen that would help though:
- Mandate a certain % that you must pay over the going market rate for the job (still very hard to enforce as proving the market rate for any exact job is tough)
- Allow the foreign worker control of their visa, if they leave the employ of one employer, they have a grace period to find similar work at another employer before they must leave the country. This would address the issue of companies bringing in people that won't rock the boat for fear of being shipped home, and give those workers similar power to domestic workers to stand up for themselves, removing an incentive to game the system to get them. A similar effect could be achieved by replacing temporary workers with permanent ones. If we really have a skills shortage in a specific area, what's wrong with looking for actual immigrants with those skills? (not temporary ones that can be sent home at a whim)
You're assuming Trump knows geography....
Of course it actually IS good news for Canada. We're already starting to see a surge of tech companies moving to Canada from the USA because of Trump's immigration policies.
The supporters of these sorts of initiatives don't realize that when it's uneconomical for a business to operate in the USA, they don't suddenly start hiring more people at higher wages, they close up shop and move somewhere that they can make money, and they take ALL the jobs with them, not just the H-1Bs
Generally no. In most cases break and enter requires you to actually break in. Simply walking in through an unlocked door would be trespass. Both illegal, but not the same crime.
And some people love driver assistance features and would never buy a car without them.
Just because you personally don't want them doesn't mean you can ignore their value to others.
Different features appeal to different people, that's why not everyone drives the same make and model of car.
Because that would be very un-google of them. Google rarely fixes known bugs, but frequently retires platforms.
The key word the is consenting.
You have a problem with someone who has a history of treating people the way they want to be treated. I think that it shows he's a considerate person. Unless you have evidence that he treats people in a way other than they wish to be treated, I'm not sure what negative affect you forsee in the workplace.
Just because you personally disagree with what those women wanted, doesn't mean you should be allowed to dictate it to them. Or do you think you're better than them in some way? I'm more worried that your attitude will affect the workplace than his.
Don't think that just because you happen to sit in the office that your job is not "setup to be remote" there isn't that much "setup" involved at most companies any more. If your company has some form of VPN solution, and has heard of teleconference, then it doesn't matter if you're in the office or at home, you're equally vulnerable.
I think the fallacy is in thinking that someone who is expendable and can do their work anywhere in the world suddenly becomes more expendable if they do that same work at home vs at the office. I don't think that's the case.
Either the work you do can be done from anywhere (in which case it doesn't matter where you actually do it, home, office, or anywhere else). Or the work you do requires you to sometimes be in a specific location, in which case it doesn't matter where you are the rest of the time.
If your job is at risk of being moved to a foreign country, simply doing the same work at the office instead of at home won't save you.
I have to agree.
I work from home approximately 80% of the time, that 80% of the time accounts for about 95% of my work. It's so hard to get good work done at the office with all the distractions around.
You're somewhat right, but it's not quite that simple.
The Model S does not have the same level of fit and finish, or materials, or comfort of any of those vehicles. But none of those vehicles have the same level of tech in their vehicles either. Lane keeping and adaptive cruise control on those other vehicles is several years behind that of the Tesla (though Tesla is working hard to fix that by removing functionality from the Teslas... but that's another rant), and the app and internet integration aren't as good in any of those other vehicles either, and the raw power, and instantaneous application of it that you get from a Tesla can't be compared to any internal combustion vehicle.
I would never describe my Tesla as a luxury vehicle, it simply isn't, but you can't really compare it to lower end vehicles either as it does offer some amazing features that they don't. Tesla themselves don't call it a luxury vehicle either though, they call it a "premium" vehicle, and I have to say that's a better description. Beyond that, The Tesla is a very large sedan, apart from height it's probably a physically larger vehicle than any of the vehicles they're comparing to, and that's another factor often defined as part of the class.
I personally don't think they're in the same class, but not in the one is better than the other type of way, more in the apples to oranges kind of way. Just like a sports car and a pickup truck don't appeal to the same buyers, a Model S doesn't appeal to someone looking for a high end luxury car, just like those same cars don't really appeal to someone looking for the tech and the power train of the Tesla.
Luckily we still have choices, and not everyone needs to drive the same type of vehicle.
People love to compare things though, and it's not easy to find something to compare the Tesla too as it's quite simply not like anything else out there, that's not always a good thing, but nor is it always a bad thing either, it's simply what it is. As much as I wouldn't compare the vehicle to a luxury sedan, I think in this narrow use case (how well they hold resale value), it may actually be a decent place to start, simply because it's easiest to see how a $100,000 car depreciates when compared to other $100,000 cars.
But it's all about what you want.
Sure I could continue to live frugally forever, and die with a veritable fortune in the bank. But what's the point? I can't take it with me!
Alternatively I could decide that there's a magic moment at some randomly picked age when I can feel free to spend my money and enjoy myself, but why pick a random age for a windfall instead of a more modest amount ongoing forever?
At a certain point you have to strike a balance. I've decided that for me, the best balance is to continue to save enough to retire relatively early (though not in my 30s), while enjoying some of my earnings in the meantime.
It doesn't have to be all or nothing, there's nothing wrong with spending on an expensive toy, or an expensive vacation once in a while, what makes it wrong is if it puts you in financial hardship. I have certain funds earmarked for retirement, as long as I don't touch those, or go in to debt, I don't see any reason I can't blow the rest on anything I like.
Now this all changes if you're in financial hardship, if you're spending beyond your means already, you don't really have a good choice here, and must do something to bring it back in line. If you don't have any retirement or emergency savings you equally have to do something about that or risk some pretty hard times down the road. But if you're not in either of those situations, you might as well live a little bit.
The alternative is that you pay taxi to and from the airport at both ends of the journey, or pay to park at the airport, none of these are good options either.