...Does anyone actually buy phones based on their max LTE download speed? Most of us have quotas and are trying as hard as possible not to burn through them. I've got a 6GB plan, which is big for Canada (I know how sad it is in comparison to Europe's download caps, don't @ me) so I spend a lot of time making sure I do my downloads over wifi, and even then, LTE on my iPhone 7 is usually faster than whatever burdened wifi network I'm on.
I mean, definitely Intel's modems aren't as good, but I'd be really interested to see how many people rate this as a first-tier, dealbreaker feature. Honestly, if this is you, please speak up, I'm honestly curious as to what you're doing on your phone.
It's been said many times that the USA concentrates on price when litigating anti-trust cases—did prices go up because of monopoly pressure? If yes, then that constitutes damage to the consumer, and that warrants some sort of penalty or correction.
By contrast, the EU focuses on competition. Does it look like a dominant player is using their power to quash competitors and thereby harm the consumer on the much longer term by denying them access to services or products that might be better?
I think it's clear that this bundling represents a long-term disservice to customers. Maybe Google will have to charge a (small) licensing fee, but that makes it possible for manufacturers to take on other services and give the market some competition. It may change nothing at all, and Google will always be pre-installed because they're the one with the best search (and search is a virtuous cycle—even if Google and Bing started at exactly the same place, but Google started with 50.1% market share, Google would eventually pull ahead because delivering search results and seeing which ones are chosen is valuable data that leads to better searches in the future, which brings in more users, and so on).
Anyway, the EU has its own criteria, and their own laws, and they'll enforce them.
...But when I did, it was slackware. I moved onto FreeBSD and then MacOS X after that, and now I'm not sure I really need a desktop computer at all anymore.
Slackware was, counter-intuitively, the easiest Linux distro for me to use. I was already used to Unix systems from university, and slackware only gave you the stuff you asked for, not anything more than that. I always had trouble getting Redhat running, but Slackware did what I told it. I'm glad it's still around, just in case I ever decide I need a do-everything server-ish machine again.
Amazon is starting to (has already?) eclipsed the online sales of all other online retailers combined, which is making this old tactic potentially more relevant. You could certainly say that they've got a monopoly of online sales for online-only retailers, but possibly now that they're 50%+ of online sales including brick-and-mortar retailers like Walmart, you could make the argument that they're unfairly duping customers or wielding monopoly power in an unfair way. (That's not quite true, I'm just saying that someone could make that argument and not look entirely loony.)
Amazon is going to have to watch themselves now that they're so immense; governments are starting to take real notice. Who knows if that'll mean any action, though.
I think I might buy as much as once a month on average. However, this is a very specific time period for Amazon—their sale week—so the strike and boycott was timed to try to do as much damage as possible...if it's possible to slow the juggernaut at all.
Yes, we have those here too. Unfortunately, the lack of authentication is a big problem, and I know shops that are actively turning OFF the terminals I was just talking about because they're not willing to put up with the high traffic of stolen cards coming through their businesses. Even with the $100 limit per purchase, you could stand to lose a lot of money if you lose your card and don't realise it for a few hours.
I saw something on Twitter where workers in some countries were going on strike for better working conditions, asking consumers to boycott for the week, which I happily did. I use Amazon and appreciate that I can get some stuff there that I can't find for love or money locally, but the conditions their workers have to endure sound like they contravene a lot of labour laws, and boycotting during a mediocre barely-sale is literally the least I can do. I'm trying to find other sources for the things I want (B&H Photo, Best Buy) but for some things, it's literally impossible to get them anywhere else. Even for items that I CAN get other places, the buying experience is so bad for so many sites. It's really remarkable that almost nobody else has created a purchasing experience even half as good. (For example, I'm in the market for a new iPhone stand, and there's a nice $10 aluminum one on Amazon and I haven't seen it anywhere else yet.)
For #8, it's important for Americans to remember that they're not the only country in the world, and a great deal of why Apple Pay isn't accepted everywhere is because American payment infrastructure is woefully outdated and still apparently relies on signatures on pieces of paper in a great many instances.
Apple Pay is accepted anywhere that tap-to-pay works, so that means here in Canada that a huge and growing number of merchants accept it. Apple Pay isn't really specifically some sort of tech magic that needs Apple specific merchant hardware to work, it just needs run-of-the-mill tap-to-pay terminals.
It is an obnoxiously facile reply, explaining back to a developer something that basically everyone that has worked in the industry has thought about, let alone someone who works on a narrative team.
This smacks of exactly the same bullshit entitlement that people have when criticizing (often female, but sometimes male) athletes. Somehow predominantly male fans feel like they have a better grasp on the sport than the women that have made it their job. It happens to all of us in the games industry ("have you tried fixing the bugs before you ship the game?" YES, asshole, fuck off) but it happens far more to the women devs that are brave enough to be online. My authority as a male developer is rarely questioned, you see women with plenty of dev experience having the dumbest shit explained back to them.
I'm behind her, and her male colleague (who basically said something similar to me). The reality is that people with long-term industry experience are hard to find, and the hurt feelings of a handful of gamers would not have meaningfully impacted anything. Indeed, if she hadnâ(TM)t been fired, this all would have blown over already. But reddit is right, now the gates are open, and they know they can make a stink about anything and the studio will worry and change direction. And as someone else mentioned, this will have a big effect on team morale. Not just her firing, but the substantially more polite pushback of her male colleague. Who wants to work for a company that throws you under the bus for meaningless interactions on twitter?
No, you donâ(TM)t understand. When I say it had newly been proven that there was no catastrophic recursion in the grammar, I mean that until that point, nobody had proven it was even technically possible to implement the full spec. It was an open question as to whether the language was just fundamentally flawed in its definition.
Because the principle conceit of C++ is that you shouldnâ(TM)t pay for anything you donâ(TM)t use, you wind up with a language that has very little worth paying for.
So around 15 years ago, when I was starting my career in the games industry, there was a post here on slashdot about how someone had finally proven that the language did not have a bad recursion in it. In the comments was a programmer who I think may have been working at Microsoft talking about how every compiler programmer would go into writing a C++ compiler excited to be the first one that implemented the full language specification and having the Hope slowly beaten out of them, until they finally arrived on a sufficient compromise. And so compilers would all implement their own specific subset of the language and there was virtually no cross compatibility.
So the language started as an unimplementable mess of a spec, and unless someone has been doing some very hard work to make the language LESS complex, I greatly suspect that it has stayed that way, despite the smattering of quality of life upgrades that have been thrown to us.
In my mind, the greatest sin will always be template metaprogramming, a discoveredâ"not plannedâ"feature that was the consequence of a problem that should not have existed in the first place. They planned poorly in the beginning, threw some more bad planning on top, and ended up with a monumental clusterfuck that will be obfuscating codebases until the end of time.
Why would you think that is the phone people want when Apple has 3 of the top 10 selling phones and one of them literally has none of the things you mentioned?
You just described the phone you want, and somehow that counts as an expert opinion on what the market wants more broadly? Back up your claim.
It is trivial to find articles and peer reviewed studies that show that the VA is of equivalent quality to hospitals that are not under a single payer system. Single payer systems exist all over the world and consistently cost less and provide better care on average than the current US system.
That's a legitimate criticism, and I can see that point of view. I think the social benefit—and the social responsibility—alone are worth it, and frankly, the economics will work themselves out. I'm not really trying to find a ROI per se, but I think there happens to be one, and it's one leg of this stool. Social responsibility is, in the long run, fiscal responsibility. Healthy, happy people are the end in themselves, but healthy, happy people also do better work, raise better children, have more opportunities to be intellectual and creative and do all the things we associate with advancement and culture.
By that definition, viruses would count, and like I said, those are already up in the air. But maybe you fall on the side of 'viruses are life', which is a perfectly legit position to stake out, IMO.
The line between life and not-life is already indistinct here on Earth. Viruses? Not-life...quite. Kinda life?
And forget trying to figure out what counts as intelligent life. Trees communicate with an underground fungus network and through signals in the air, can probably feel pain, count and learn, but we're not quite at the point of calling them 'intelligent'. Birds turn out to be incredibly intelligent, but people are still reluctant to admit the level of intellect the birds have, and how deep it may actually go.
What hope do we have of classifying an indistinct gas-being that gets by just fine when we're not around, but immediately decoheres the moment a human passes through them waving their hand in front of their face? Or some sort of super-cooled snow creature with liquid nitrogen in its veins that reacts too slowly for us to even comprehend?
Because they're insufficiently rigorous. There are lots of places that MEAN well, but that doesn't always mean they DO well. Particularly in tech, where we're convinced of our own neutrality on such matters (i.e., that tech is a true meritocracy—if you've worked in tech for any length of time, you know politics is just as active here as anywhere else). Bias is subtle, and stuff like this slips through the cracks right up until the time where people start calling it out, and then it changes. Fortunately for AI training data, the solution is actually fairly simple in theory: find more pictures of people of different races. Try to make sure the pictures are fairly neutral in context, and just keep throwing that data at the algorithm until it gets it right.
Universities also talk a good game, but structural sexism and racism still exist. Very often, despite being against overt sexism and racism, they do little to actually combat the problems. Sometimes it's because old white men are defending the power structure that elevated them to where they are, but the problem with structural discrimination is that even members of the marginalized community participate in their own marginalization. See the studies where female professors are just as likely (sometimes MORE likely) to discriminate against female students.
So who's biasing the databases? All of us. But I suspect we'll get better at it if we're willing to try. And despite what I just said, I really think a lot of people are willing to TRY. If there's one thing about nerds, it's that we like being right. In this case, the easiest path to being right is not denying the problem, but doing better. So we'll do better.
For years, Gurman was the ONLY guy that got things consistently correct. Then came Ming-Chi Kuo, and he's been the gold standard for the last couple years now. But Gurman's track record is pretty solid; I'd largely give him the benefit of the doubt.
I've worked at companies where they don't prohibit these kinds of relationships per se, but it IS up to you to report to your boss or HR that you're in a relationship with someone else so they can make sure nothing untoward is happening.
Ironically, I think zero-tolerance policies like Intel's are exactly what cause problems. When you have no way to do things on the up-and-up, people will be exploited in secret, and won't report bad behaviour for fear of retribution. There's no real way to keep this kind of thing secret forever, so why not be a little more up front about it and just head things off at the pass?
You're right, it removes the incentive to work a shitty job that doesn't pay enough to live on. It has the benefit of lifting what employers are going to pay for garbage work that nobody wants to do. In the story, one of the people was effectively using the UBI so they could work a job they enjoyed at a museum, but wouldn't have been able to keep on the salary the museum was able to pay. In that case, we've got the UBI making an opportunity to serve the community possible. But if you've got hard, dirty labour paying minimum wage, maybe that company should be paying more for such an undesirable job. And if it really needs getting done, they should pay to have it done. The UBI will raise that wage floor, which everyone should agree is good—why should hard, bad work come cheap?
That's not true. Even if employment didn't increase, you did see social benefits that cost the government less money.
Young men finishing high school is a definite social benefit. More educated workers make more money in the long run. That's a net community benefit.
Health care usage (emergency room visits) went DOWN. Emergency rooms are the most expensive way to deliver health care, but the drop in need for health care in general is also a community benefit. The government saves money when the population is healthier.
Then when we look at this article here, we see obvious benefits just on the surface. Local businesses are seeing good days, so that means middle class prosperity is up. You also have a museum staying open because the UBI is making it possible for someone to work there that wouldn't have been previously. Even the case that I cited specifically in what you're responding to is an example of increased (partial) employment.
UBI makes jobs that are undervalued by capitalism (artistic endeavours, community cleanup, caring for the elderly or other neglected populations) possible in much greater numbers. There are plenty of people that want to spend time making their communities better but can't because they simply don't have the resources, whether that be time or money. We should encourage that sort of volunteerism, and UBI may be part of that.
The problem with social programs—of which we have many already—is that the cost of management and verification and validation eats up money that could actually just go to people that need help. That sort of bureaucracy is well intentioned but is exactly endemic of the kind of useless 'government waste' that conservatives work themselves up over. For instance, it turns out that just giving homeless people homes works better than trying a bunch of other schemes (Utah: https://www.npr.org/2015/12/10...) and ends up being cheaper because you know exactly where everyone is that needs help. The cost of tracking them down, etc. is real money that nobody contends with.
We clearly agree on the broader point, so I'll just point out that I'm awfully far left on the political spectrum. To me, this is exactly the kind of government intervention that government was intended for and the benefits both to individuals and society far outweigh the costs. (The ancillary costs of poverty and homelessness are sufficiently high that while this kind of program might not break even in the long run analysis, it's probably the case that the 'true' cost is much less than the value of the money paid out when you account for healthcare and bureaucratic savings. That doesn't even take into consideration that people with money spend it on goods and services and prop up a lot of businesses.)
"In 2015, two years before the basic-income trial, Bowman asked a case worker if she could get help paying for transportation to a Fleming campus that offers classes in social work. The official said that would lead to cuts in other benefits Bowman relied on. The message Bowman says she got was: “You’re unemployable. You’re not worth investing in."
A lot of people that are stuck in poverty actually want to work. (Indeed, many of them are working and just not making enough money to break out of poverty.)
The original Mincome experiment in Canada in the 70s found that the only people that worked less during the experiment were new mothers, and young men...who used the money to stay in high school and complete that stage of their education, rather than leave school early to get a job and make enough money to help out at home.
Context is certainly everything with experiments like this, which is why people keep trying them. I think for many parts of Canada, this could be a big win.
Slashdot Mirror
...Does anyone actually buy phones based on their max LTE download speed? Most of us have quotas and are trying as hard as possible not to burn through them. I've got a 6GB plan, which is big for Canada (I know how sad it is in comparison to Europe's download caps, don't @ me) so I spend a lot of time making sure I do my downloads over wifi, and even then, LTE on my iPhone 7 is usually faster than whatever burdened wifi network I'm on.
I mean, definitely Intel's modems aren't as good, but I'd be really interested to see how many people rate this as a first-tier, dealbreaker feature. Honestly, if this is you, please speak up, I'm honestly curious as to what you're doing on your phone.
It's been said many times that the USA concentrates on price when litigating anti-trust cases—did prices go up because of monopoly pressure? If yes, then that constitutes damage to the consumer, and that warrants some sort of penalty or correction.
By contrast, the EU focuses on competition. Does it look like a dominant player is using their power to quash competitors and thereby harm the consumer on the much longer term by denying them access to services or products that might be better?
I think it's clear that this bundling represents a long-term disservice to customers. Maybe Google will have to charge a (small) licensing fee, but that makes it possible for manufacturers to take on other services and give the market some competition. It may change nothing at all, and Google will always be pre-installed because they're the one with the best search (and search is a virtuous cycle—even if Google and Bing started at exactly the same place, but Google started with 50.1% market share, Google would eventually pull ahead because delivering search results and seeing which ones are chosen is valuable data that leads to better searches in the future, which brings in more users, and so on).
Anyway, the EU has its own criteria, and their own laws, and they'll enforce them.
...But when I did, it was slackware. I moved onto FreeBSD and then MacOS X after that, and now I'm not sure I really need a desktop computer at all anymore.
Slackware was, counter-intuitively, the easiest Linux distro for me to use. I was already used to Unix systems from university, and slackware only gave you the stuff you asked for, not anything more than that. I always had trouble getting Redhat running, but Slackware did what I told it. I'm glad it's still around, just in case I ever decide I need a do-everything server-ish machine again.
Amazon is starting to (has already?) eclipsed the online sales of all other online retailers combined, which is making this old tactic potentially more relevant. You could certainly say that they've got a monopoly of online sales for online-only retailers, but possibly now that they're 50%+ of online sales including brick-and-mortar retailers like Walmart, you could make the argument that they're unfairly duping customers or wielding monopoly power in an unfair way. (That's not quite true, I'm just saying that someone could make that argument and not look entirely loony.)
Amazon is going to have to watch themselves now that they're so immense; governments are starting to take real notice. Who knows if that'll mean any action, though.
I think I might buy as much as once a month on average. However, this is a very specific time period for Amazon—their sale week—so the strike and boycott was timed to try to do as much damage as possible...if it's possible to slow the juggernaut at all.
Yes, we have those here too. Unfortunately, the lack of authentication is a big problem, and I know shops that are actively turning OFF the terminals I was just talking about because they're not willing to put up with the high traffic of stolen cards coming through their businesses. Even with the $100 limit per purchase, you could stand to lose a lot of money if you lose your card and don't realise it for a few hours.
I saw something on Twitter where workers in some countries were going on strike for better working conditions, asking consumers to boycott for the week, which I happily did. I use Amazon and appreciate that I can get some stuff there that I can't find for love or money locally, but the conditions their workers have to endure sound like they contravene a lot of labour laws, and boycotting during a mediocre barely-sale is literally the least I can do. I'm trying to find other sources for the things I want (B&H Photo, Best Buy) but for some things, it's literally impossible to get them anywhere else. Even for items that I CAN get other places, the buying experience is so bad for so many sites. It's really remarkable that almost nobody else has created a purchasing experience even half as good. (For example, I'm in the market for a new iPhone stand, and there's a nice $10 aluminum one on Amazon and I haven't seen it anywhere else yet.)
For #8, it's important for Americans to remember that they're not the only country in the world, and a great deal of why Apple Pay isn't accepted everywhere is because American payment infrastructure is woefully outdated and still apparently relies on signatures on pieces of paper in a great many instances.
Apple Pay is accepted anywhere that tap-to-pay works, so that means here in Canada that a huge and growing number of merchants accept it. Apple Pay isn't really specifically some sort of tech magic that needs Apple specific merchant hardware to work, it just needs run-of-the-mill tap-to-pay terminals.
"Shut your fucking mouth until you achieve basic 17th century courtesy, 21st century child."
This is hilarious.
It is an obnoxiously facile reply, explaining back to a developer something that basically everyone that has worked in the industry has thought about, let alone someone who works on a narrative team.
This smacks of exactly the same bullshit entitlement that people have when criticizing (often female, but sometimes male) athletes. Somehow predominantly male fans feel like they have a better grasp on the sport than the women that have made it their job. It happens to all of us in the games industry ("have you tried fixing the bugs before you ship the game?" YES, asshole, fuck off) but it happens far more to the women devs that are brave enough to be online. My authority as a male developer is rarely questioned, you see women with plenty of dev experience having the dumbest shit explained back to them.
I'm behind her, and her male colleague (who basically said something similar to me). The reality is that people with long-term industry experience are hard to find, and the hurt feelings of a handful of gamers would not have meaningfully impacted anything. Indeed, if she hadnâ(TM)t been fired, this all would have blown over already. But reddit is right, now the gates are open, and they know they can make a stink about anything and the studio will worry and change direction. And as someone else mentioned, this will have a big effect on team morale. Not just her firing, but the substantially more polite pushback of her male colleague. Who wants to work for a company that throws you under the bus for meaningless interactions on twitter?
No, you donâ(TM)t understand. When I say it had newly been proven that there was no catastrophic recursion in the grammar, I mean that until that point, nobody had proven it was even technically possible to implement the full spec. It was an open question as to whether the language was just fundamentally flawed in its definition.
Because the principle conceit of C++ is that you shouldnâ(TM)t pay for anything you donâ(TM)t use, you wind up with a language that has very little worth paying for.
So around 15 years ago, when I was starting my career in the games industry, there was a post here on slashdot about how someone had finally proven that the language did not have a bad recursion in it. In the comments was a programmer who I think may have been working at Microsoft talking about how every compiler programmer would go into writing a C++ compiler excited to be the first one that implemented the full language specification and having the Hope slowly beaten out of them, until they finally arrived on a sufficient compromise. And so compilers would all implement their own specific subset of the language and there was virtually no cross compatibility.
So the language started as an unimplementable mess of a spec, and unless someone has been doing some very hard work to make the language LESS complex, I greatly suspect that it has stayed that way, despite the smattering of quality of life upgrades that have been thrown to us.
In my mind, the greatest sin will always be template metaprogramming, a discoveredâ"not plannedâ"feature that was the consequence of a problem that should not have existed in the first place. They planned poorly in the beginning, threw some more bad planning on top, and ended up with a monumental clusterfuck that will be obfuscating codebases until the end of time.
tl;dr Yes, goddamnit.
Why would you think that is the phone people want when Apple has 3 of the top 10 selling phones and one of them literally has none of the things you mentioned?
You just described the phone you want, and somehow that counts as an expert opinion on what the market wants more broadly? Back up your claim.
It is trivial to find articles and peer reviewed studies that show that the VA is of equivalent quality to hospitals that are not under a single payer system. Single payer systems exist all over the world and consistently cost less and provide better care on average than the current US system.
https://medicalxpress.com/news...
https://link.springer.com/arti...
That's a legitimate criticism, and I can see that point of view. I think the social benefit—and the social responsibility—alone are worth it, and frankly, the economics will work themselves out. I'm not really trying to find a ROI per se, but I think there happens to be one, and it's one leg of this stool. Social responsibility is, in the long run, fiscal responsibility. Healthy, happy people are the end in themselves, but healthy, happy people also do better work, raise better children, have more opportunities to be intellectual and creative and do all the things we associate with advancement and culture.
By that definition, viruses would count, and like I said, those are already up in the air. But maybe you fall on the side of 'viruses are life', which is a perfectly legit position to stake out, IMO.
The line between life and not-life is already indistinct here on Earth. Viruses? Not-life...quite. Kinda life?
And forget trying to figure out what counts as intelligent life. Trees communicate with an underground fungus network and through signals in the air, can probably feel pain, count and learn, but we're not quite at the point of calling them 'intelligent'. Birds turn out to be incredibly intelligent, but people are still reluctant to admit the level of intellect the birds have, and how deep it may actually go.
What hope do we have of classifying an indistinct gas-being that gets by just fine when we're not around, but immediately decoheres the moment a human passes through them waving their hand in front of their face? Or some sort of super-cooled snow creature with liquid nitrogen in its veins that reacts too slowly for us to even comprehend?
Because they're insufficiently rigorous. There are lots of places that MEAN well, but that doesn't always mean they DO well. Particularly in tech, where we're convinced of our own neutrality on such matters (i.e., that tech is a true meritocracy—if you've worked in tech for any length of time, you know politics is just as active here as anywhere else). Bias is subtle, and stuff like this slips through the cracks right up until the time where people start calling it out, and then it changes. Fortunately for AI training data, the solution is actually fairly simple in theory: find more pictures of people of different races. Try to make sure the pictures are fairly neutral in context, and just keep throwing that data at the algorithm until it gets it right.
Universities also talk a good game, but structural sexism and racism still exist. Very often, despite being against overt sexism and racism, they do little to actually combat the problems. Sometimes it's because old white men are defending the power structure that elevated them to where they are, but the problem with structural discrimination is that even members of the marginalized community participate in their own marginalization. See the studies where female professors are just as likely (sometimes MORE likely) to discriminate against female students.
So who's biasing the databases? All of us. But I suspect we'll get better at it if we're willing to try. And despite what I just said, I really think a lot of people are willing to TRY. If there's one thing about nerds, it's that we like being right. In this case, the easiest path to being right is not denying the problem, but doing better. So we'll do better.
For years, Gurman was the ONLY guy that got things consistently correct. Then came Ming-Chi Kuo, and he's been the gold standard for the last couple years now. But Gurman's track record is pretty solid; I'd largely give him the benefit of the doubt.
I've worked at companies where they don't prohibit these kinds of relationships per se, but it IS up to you to report to your boss or HR that you're in a relationship with someone else so they can make sure nothing untoward is happening.
Ironically, I think zero-tolerance policies like Intel's are exactly what cause problems. When you have no way to do things on the up-and-up, people will be exploited in secret, and won't report bad behaviour for fear of retribution. There's no real way to keep this kind of thing secret forever, so why not be a little more up front about it and just head things off at the pass?
You're right, it removes the incentive to work a shitty job that doesn't pay enough to live on. It has the benefit of lifting what employers are going to pay for garbage work that nobody wants to do. In the story, one of the people was effectively using the UBI so they could work a job they enjoyed at a museum, but wouldn't have been able to keep on the salary the museum was able to pay. In that case, we've got the UBI making an opportunity to serve the community possible. But if you've got hard, dirty labour paying minimum wage, maybe that company should be paying more for such an undesirable job. And if it really needs getting done, they should pay to have it done. The UBI will raise that wage floor, which everyone should agree is good—why should hard, bad work come cheap?
That's not true. Even if employment didn't increase, you did see social benefits that cost the government less money.
Young men finishing high school is a definite social benefit. More educated workers make more money in the long run. That's a net community benefit.
Health care usage (emergency room visits) went DOWN. Emergency rooms are the most expensive way to deliver health care, but the drop in need for health care in general is also a community benefit. The government saves money when the population is healthier.
Then when we look at this article here, we see obvious benefits just on the surface. Local businesses are seeing good days, so that means middle class prosperity is up. You also have a museum staying open because the UBI is making it possible for someone to work there that wouldn't have been previously. Even the case that I cited specifically in what you're responding to is an example of increased (partial) employment.
UBI makes jobs that are undervalued by capitalism (artistic endeavours, community cleanup, caring for the elderly or other neglected populations) possible in much greater numbers. There are plenty of people that want to spend time making their communities better but can't because they simply don't have the resources, whether that be time or money. We should encourage that sort of volunteerism, and UBI may be part of that.
The problem with social programs—of which we have many already—is that the cost of management and verification and validation eats up money that could actually just go to people that need help. That sort of bureaucracy is well intentioned but is exactly endemic of the kind of useless 'government waste' that conservatives work themselves up over. For instance, it turns out that just giving homeless people homes works better than trying a bunch of other schemes (Utah: https://www.npr.org/2015/12/10...) and ends up being cheaper because you know exactly where everyone is that needs help. The cost of tracking them down, etc. is real money that nobody contends with.
We clearly agree on the broader point, so I'll just point out that I'm awfully far left on the political spectrum. To me, this is exactly the kind of government intervention that government was intended for and the benefits both to individuals and society far outweigh the costs. (The ancillary costs of poverty and homelessness are sufficiently high that while this kind of program might not break even in the long run analysis, it's probably the case that the 'true' cost is much less than the value of the money paid out when you account for healthcare and bureaucratic savings. That doesn't even take into consideration that people with money spend it on goods and services and prop up a lot of businesses.)
Additional, somewhat related reading:
https://www.vice.com/en_us/art...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
I'm not convinced you read the article.
For instance, near the end, there was this:
"In 2015, two years before the basic-income trial, Bowman asked a case worker if she could get help paying for transportation to a Fleming campus that offers classes in social work. The official said that would lead to cuts in other benefits Bowman relied on. The message Bowman says she got was: “You’re unemployable. You’re not worth investing in."
A lot of people that are stuck in poverty actually want to work. (Indeed, many of them are working and just not making enough money to break out of poverty.)
The original Mincome experiment in Canada in the 70s found that the only people that worked less during the experiment were new mothers, and young men...who used the money to stay in high school and complete that stage of their education, rather than leave school early to get a job and make enough money to help out at home.
Context is certainly everything with experiments like this, which is why people keep trying them. I think for many parts of Canada, this could be a big win.