Currently, we take, say, $12,000 from someone making $70,000, and use it to fund welfare; in my model, we take $5,500 from them and use it to fund more-efficient welfare.
Seventeen percent of $70,000 is $11,900, not $5,500. You say there will be a 17% income tax, but use numbers off by a factor of two.
I'm changing that so that we pay people to do something actually worthwhile.
UBI (and your system) is money with no requirement to work or do ANYTHING in exchange. Unless you think "spending free money" is in itself a worthwhile occupation, then no, you will not be paying people to do something actually worthwhile.
My initial numbers were $547/month. In 2015, that's $583/month. That's 17% of all taxable income, divided across all adults.
Thank you for proving my point once again that all of your numbers depend on a zero-sum economy. You're using today's taxable income numbers in future payout calculations. You don't think taxable income will change when you start handing out free money to every adult, both working and non-working?
For a lot of policy issues, if you establish it works,
You are a LONG way from establishing that UBI works.
I hardly think you can find a god damned thing to substantiate someone needing a whole fucking hell of a lot more food, shelter, utilities, soap, tooth paste, or clothing than anyone else-
Once you understand that people are not just caged rodents who deserve rodent chow, it is pretty easy to find ways that they differ. One trivial example? I live in a city with two large major employers. Most of the employees live outside the city simply because there is no housing available inside. If they are going to work they need to commute. For many people, if they are going to buy food they need to commute. Big city dwellers may have bodegas and food carts on every corner; small city and rural dwellers do not.
Now, you could propose we solve this problem by building cages for them somewhere (not sure where you'd find the land unless you confiscate it from the current owners and then do away with the city planning process) and feeding them rat chow. It might mean forcing people out of the homes they own and have lived in for twenty years, but so what?
But these people are all going to become "stable income" and profit centers for the rich and want to buy low cost apartments! That's the solution! Sorry, these people already have a stable income (HP and government workers) and they can't get low-cost housing here. The landlords you think are going to jump up and start building like mad to create lots of cheap housing aren't doing it today when there is a demand, so why would they do it tomorrow?
And you've pretty much identified one of the problems of creating all this low cost housing. Caged rodents create environments like Cabrini-Green.
... well, you lost the genetic lottery.
Your humanity is just... amazing. You do no favor to the UBI movement when you throw your unparalleled intellect and economic skills behind it. I don't think there is any purpose in trying to point out the problems because you simply don't care if those problems exist. Some people just "lost the genetic lottery".
I'll save the time of replying to your repeated asinine assumptions point by amazingly ignorant point by saying this: UPS carries packages when people pay them to. Sometimes it's the sender who is paying. Sometimes the sender doesn't have the recipient's email address. Sometimes the sender wants the package to be a surprise.
You assume I've never ordered anything from any "mail order" (thanks for the lecture on what that phrase means, by the way) because I've never gotten advance notice for anything shipped to my house. Perhaps you are unaware of the generosity of some employers in allowing personal packages through the work receiving department -- which is how I ALWAYS have things delivered when I order them. (It would take a special kind of ignorance to not know about such an option since it has been mentioned in this thread many times already, however.)
So, I'll repeat what I said -- your claim that you can go to a website and have things held at the sorting facility only works if you have the tracking number before the first delivery attempt is made. That emphasized bit is not always true. It is amazingly difficult to have UPS hold a package at their facility (10 miles away) AFTER they have already broken open my front screen door and hidden it there, for example.
So, I'm glad that in your little bit of the world you never get anything you haven't paid someone else to send to you, and that they always send you the tracking info ahead of time, but your little bit of the world isn't how it works everywhere else. Your instructions on how to solve the problem of UPS simply dropping things on your front step or sidewalk doesn't solve the problem for everyone else.
Why do people always insist everything must not work?
Why do some people always think that anyone who points out problems with handing out free money is saying everything must not work? Are you confused by thinking that your plan is "everything", or just that the fact that history has shown that handing out free money does not work means that it must not work? Or is it that you don't feel you can support the plan as you have proposed it and you must resort to hyperbole?
So, you're telling me people's #1 desire is to live in a CAFO, caged, being fed the lowest-quality rodent feed?
Thank you for proving my point. Of course you know I said no such thing. It is interesting that you see a statement that some people will live on UBI alone as a claim that they will "live in a CAFO, caged, being fed... rodent feed." That's all your UBI buys them?
I note that you ignored my question about how you deal with unemployable people who have needs that UBI won't be enough to meet, instead regaling me with how much cheaper UBI will be overall, and that you designed it to cover their costs of living. It must be their problem to solve, then, if it won't.
The economy is not zero-sum.
That's what I said to you. Yet, projections of the cost of UBI rely on it being so. Things like saving a trillion dollars by getting rid of welfare, calculating the cost by simply multiplying the number of people by the amount of money, etc, are all zero-sum assumptions.
I also kept a welfare system for children of low-income families, although it's small--about 1.4% of AGI, or some $150 billion.
Or one could say the point of the electoral college is that sometimes the popular vote is a bad choice.
No, the point of the electoral college is that the President is president of the united states and needs to have the interests of ALL the states in mind, not just the few most populous ones. "Bad choice" is highly subjective; the result of the election is a quantitative measure.
Can you imagine the outcry if China had hacked the RNC and tipped the election so that HCR won?
You mean after the sitting Republican president had already claimed there was no evidence of any such influence?
But yes, I can imagine the outcry. It would be a larger version of the rioting and looting and burnings and shootings every time the Daley machine rigged the elections in Chicago. Oh, wait, the Republicans didn't riot or loot when that happened...
I think they call your "argument" projection. You know what you'd do, and you assume that others would do the same thing. Or you just want to insult others and spread fear.
If we just went with a straight popular vote, it'd be more fair...
For whom? People who live in the smaller states that have different interests than those of the more populous ones? I know it's hard to remember, but the US is the United States, a union of states.
and it'd require appealing to a wider voter base.
Oh, please. It would result in appealing to the people in the most populous states and ignoring those in smaller states, which is not "a wider voter base".
It might be for the best if defectors were simply not allowed.
It might be for the best if the electors were not harassed and threatened by members of the loser's party to try to get them to ignore their pledge and promise and vote for the loser.
Nobody, because there is no "popular vote" for President of the US.
"Popular vote" is a fiction invented by those who are unhappy that their candidate lost the election, or by those who won and want to claim some "huge mandate from the public" to do something.
The rest of us know what it takes to win.
It is ridiculous to assume that the "popular vote" would be the same were it the actual system in use to elect the President, and that's why it is ridiculous to assume it means anything when it is not. If the voters (and candidates) operated under a "popular vote" system, the results could be, and probably would be, very much different. There are too many instances of people who don't bother voting because they know their state will go to the "other person". For example, if you live in California why bother voting for a Republican president when you know that the Democrat is going to win anyway? Many of those non-votes would have voted had "popular vote" been the rule of the day, and it is unlikely that the California statewide vote total would have been as lopsided as it was. Or maybe it would be. That's the point -- you can't know until it happens, and it didn't happen.
Once the tracking ID is valid and they have the package in their system, then you can change the delivery to local pickup.
Assuming you know the tracking number ahead of time. I have yet to be informed of the tracking number for any UPS package that was delivered to my house in the last 20 years prior to reading it off the package itself or the non-delivery notice. By then it's on the truck, and if you don't call before the local warehouse closes today it will be on the truck tomorrow, too.
Suddenly, you have 39,000 new consumers who can afford and want to buy your product. What happens?
Well, you might start planning on building 39,000 new low-cost housing units. Ballpark 20 units per floor, that's 2000 floors. Fifty floors per building, that's 40 buildings. At 1000 sq ft per apartment that's 20,000 surface sq ft per building, and 1 million sq ft total sq ft. At just 5$/sqft, that's $5 million per building, $200 million total.
Finding space to build those buildings within the urban growth boundary, including parking (1000 units will require 500 parking spaces, at least in this city), tack on how many more millions in real estate costs? Let's say $20 million. That may be a gross overestimation, but that's ok because I think $200 million to build the units is a gross underestimate.
Two years for the planning commission, two years to build a few of them. Maybe in ten years your $220 million investment might start returning 5%, but you have to reach full occupancy to get there.
What will happen in the real world is that your demand for the trades will drive those prices up, as will the realization from many people making minimum wage that they can do just as well on UBI and not work. The 39,000 "new consumers" will actually be 30,000 or less as the rest simply drink or smoke up the UBI payments. And then you wind up with another Cabrini-Green.
It's nice making projections based on a zero-sum economy. In reality, there are too many interactions to have any simplistic predictions come true. This is almost always true for those predictions that say giving people stuff for free will only cost X dollars times Y current recipients. Projections that depend on getting rid of welfare are highly suspect, since there will always be unemployable people for whom UBI simply won't cover the costs of surviving. How do you deal with them? No welfare, just UBI. Sorry Charlie. Or do you keep welfare for them?
This Finnish experiment is amazing, but it will really prove nothing. Two thousand people getting UBI while still operating in the same taxation and economy as the regular people isn't reality.
With UPS I can go to the website and have deliveries held at the local service center.
That's only if they haven't already just left the package unattended unsecured. Once it's dropped on your front step they aren't going to come back and pick it up and hold it somewhere for you.
The last time I checked, they wanted extra $ if you got the note and wanted them to deliver the package to a different place.
Why do companies think it is OK to leave packages out on urban doorsteps without express per-package permission from the recipient? Why are the delivery companies not 100% responsible for those losses?
You answered your first question in the second. AKA "because they can".
pick it up from the nearest warehouse? Why is that such a rare service to get? It saves them money!
It costs them warehouse space and people to man the front counter.
USPS, FedEX and UPS all drop my package, ring the bell and leave. I don't see what waiting for me to answer is going to do for me.
What if you aren't home? If they don't wait and just dump, then your package is sitting unattended for... hours? If they do wait and you don't answer, they can leave a note and take it with them. This "does for you" a bit more security on the package before you get it. And if you happen to be away for a few days, it "does for you" a bit of security for your home since thieves won't see the same package on your front step for three days and know you aren't home.
Also, don't you get a notification you package has been delivered as soon as they mark that in the handheld they carry?
Their handheld is connected to the carrier's computer system, not mine. No, I don't get a notification of delivery.
I used to drive for UPS... the rule here is that the package needed to be delivered to the back door, garage, breezeway or somewhere out of sight from the street.
My pager company sent me a letter saying they were changing out the paging system and they were sending me a new one. After a couple of months went by I remembered that letter and called them. They said it has been sent a couple of months earlier. I had seen nothing. They sent another one, and that's when I found the first one. I came home a few days later and saw my front screen door ajar. Sure enough, in between the screen door and the main door I found two packages from the pager company. The UPS driver a few months prior had pried open a locked screen door and hidden the first pager there. Then he stuffed the second pager in with the first and they didn't both fit. That's the only reason I found either package. Thanks, UPS.
Another UPS driver left a package hidden around a corner with no note that he had done so. During the next week or so it rained, so when I found the box of red peppers I actually found a box of fuzzy green peppers. Thanks, UPS.
I did the paperwork for the lost first pager, and included the fact that the driver had broken into my house, and ever since they've not left anything unattended. Unfortunately, the closest UPS facility is ten miles away, so I got the pleasure of making a 20 mile round trip for an Amazon gift card that Amazon chose to ship via UPS instead of USPS. Thanks, Amazon.
The problem is that with the rise of online shopping, people always want the driver to release the package without a signature.
I want the driver to deliver the package, not just leave it somewhere convenient to him but completely hidden from me. That includes not leaving it sitting unattended and unsecured on my front step, because I don't consider that "delivery".
Before you lecture me that I should have my packages delivered somewhere else, I do. It's the unanticipated packages (like the pager) that show up and cause problems.
The only logical legal stance is that you can't make up new territory by building artificial islands.
That leaves the illogical legal stance that you can have territory that has no waters at all. International water all the way to... MHHW? MSL? MLLW? Someone can ground a boat on the shore while the tide is in and be in international waters, and then where are they legally when the tide goes out? Is it logical that someone can become an immigrant once or twice a day without moving an inch?
I think a more logical legal stance is not that you don't get any territorial waters, but that the rules for determining territorial waters are different for artificially-produced land masses. Perhaps a 3 mile limit? And then, at some point, any country that has built 30 artificial islands trying to usurp someone's international water will be building it in someone else's water. Long before that point, it will go before Den Hague to be adjudicated.
Drones are primarily intelligence gathering platforms after all, not science research vessels.
"Drones" are what the public has learned to refer to "umanned aerial vehicles" by. The term is no longer limited to military remotely operated aircraft. That DJI Phantom 3 you just bought; the $100 FPV quad; both are "drones" to the public. That cat is long out of the bag, a fight long lost.
As such, it is much easier for the press to refer to "an underwater drone" than to try teaching the public what "autonomous underwater vehicle" means. That's what they did here.
So no, "drones" are no longer primarily "intelligence gathering", they are used alot for scientific research. Especially the underwater glider drones that make salinity, temperature and depth measurements like the one that got stolen.
people in other regions could watch our team play but the local fans could not because the local team owners didn't care if you couldn't watch the game because you didn't buy a ticket, and if you could watch it on TV for free you'd probably choose that over paying for parking and $10 hot dogs and having beer poured on you by another fan after you bought a ticket.
Before the government can steal something and give it to you,
You mean like how the government paid for networking research that lead to the internet?
Do you remember the Internet before it was commercialized? I do. The government certainly did NOT give us "The Internet". The internet the "government gave us" was highly restricted to educational institutions and people who had lots of money to pay for connections. "Us" did not get to play in the fancy new sandbox.
If you could get a UUCP connection from someone on the internet, (or, as I had to, paid for one from PSI) you got the fun of using things like BITFTP to get stuff from the net. But "The Internet"? I WORKED at a University and didn't get internet access. That's how magnanimous the "government" was in "giving" us the internet.
Said the person commenting on a SOCIAL website where people congregate under a SOCIAL contract
Talk is cheap. Making things takes money. And there's some chatter about something called "Dice" every so often that seems intimately attached to the continued operation of this site.
all the shit that vendors load that spy on you all the time?
Vendors? You mean like Google?
Right now I see "GoogleLocationManager", "ContextManagerService", GoogleLocationService", and "GcmService" all running on my tablet. This is with "Location Service" turned off and after I've explicitly stopped the Google Play Services app, on a device that is in airplane mode and not been used for any app that needs location. (Any my phone, which is a later version of Android, doesn't let me stop Google Play Services at all.)
That ignores the google analytics service that shows up when the device actually is connected to the net, so that google can monitor web accesses for me.
And by the definition of malware as "used to show ads and install unwanted apps on the devices of unsuspecting users" there are NO phones that don't contain malware. Google Chrome, which used to be bundled with Java updates (as I recall, it might have been something else) is malware under that definition.
It's cute that you think that the existence of a law means that more than 50% of the people actively support it.
Consider all the laws that cover tax deductions for contributions to charity and you might realize that it isn't really the government's job to provide for everyone. The clause "promote the general welfare" does not actually mean "provide welfare for everyone". The word "welfare" has two different meanings in the two phrases.
I can remember when cable systems were nothing more than community antennas. And the local broadcasters begged to get on them because otherwise in hilly areas not many people could receive them.
They didn't have to beg very hard. "Must carry" rules said they had to be carried for free.
Then they got greedy and had congress enact a law that required cable operators to pay them to carry their content.
Uhhh, what? Any broadcaster that wants to be paid for their content does not get to invoke "must carry", so the cable operator is not required to carry them. Broadcasters do not get to demand carriage and payment at the same time.
So now Comcast is being honest and recovering these costs from their customers.
The issue at hand is not that Comcast is justified in recovering these fees, it is that they are listing them as line items outside the normal service fee. The latter is what they advertise.
Make the local broadcast package optional and see how many people will just drop it.
Not a lot. It is really inconvenient to deal with two sources (cable and OTA), especially when DVRs are included in the system. And for some people, myself included, OTA signals are really poor and limited. I get PBS perfectly. If I want to change from ABC (intermittent at best) to FOX/MY/CW I have to physically rotate the antenna, and there is no signal strength meter in my fancy TV to tell me when I'm pointing it the right way. NBC is even more fiddly to get, and I've never gotten an OTA CBS signal. The downside to the whole system is that the TVs don't allow you to simply specify the channel you want to tune to, they have to go through a scanning process to figure out where the channels are and what they are called. ("Channel 8-1" is usually not where "Channel 8" used to be; it can be anywhere in the allocated spectrum.)
Back in the 1980s and 1990s when cable companies started rolling out services municipalities granted exclusive rights for lengthy periods of time.
Not all municipalities granted exclusive franchises. All of the ones I've dealt with have been non-exclusive from the beginning. Federal law has now prohibited exclusive franchises, and has for such a long time that any existing ones would have long ago been renewed as non-exclusive. The only reason there are defacto monopolies today are due to economic, not legislative reasons.
The cable co is giving them more eyeballs to sell to their advertisers, the broadcasters need their access as much as the cable cos need their content.
Back when this was the working theory, there was something called "must carry". A broadcast station would demand that the local cable company carry their signal instead of having to pay them to do so. The cable company could find another source for the content and ignore the local station if they wanted, otherwise.
Now that broadcast stations know they can get the cable companies to actually pay them, must-carry is a less-used option. If a station invokes "must carry", then they cannot demand money for the retransmission rights.
Why can't the cable just claim they are retransmitting stuff from over the air? Two reasons. In many cases, the most usable source for the content is a direct feed (not OTA), and in the remaining ones it is because the OTA content is licensed for non-commercial use. Cable companies just retransmitting it without a contract would be infringement.
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Currently, we take, say, $12,000 from someone making $70,000, and use it to fund welfare; in my model, we take $5,500 from them and use it to fund more-efficient welfare.
Seventeen percent of $70,000 is $11,900, not $5,500. You say there will be a 17% income tax, but use numbers off by a factor of two.
I'm changing that so that we pay people to do something actually worthwhile.
UBI (and your system) is money with no requirement to work or do ANYTHING in exchange. Unless you think "spending free money" is in itself a worthwhile occupation, then no, you will not be paying people to do something actually worthwhile.
My initial numbers were $547/month. In 2015, that's $583/month. That's 17% of all taxable income, divided across all adults.
Thank you for proving my point once again that all of your numbers depend on a zero-sum economy. You're using today's taxable income numbers in future payout calculations. You don't think taxable income will change when you start handing out free money to every adult, both working and non-working?
For a lot of policy issues, if you establish it works,
You are a LONG way from establishing that UBI works.
I hardly think you can find a god damned thing to substantiate someone needing a whole fucking hell of a lot more food, shelter, utilities, soap, tooth paste, or clothing than anyone else-
Once you understand that people are not just caged rodents who deserve rodent chow, it is pretty easy to find ways that they differ. One trivial example? I live in a city with two large major employers. Most of the employees live outside the city simply because there is no housing available inside. If they are going to work they need to commute. For many people, if they are going to buy food they need to commute. Big city dwellers may have bodegas and food carts on every corner; small city and rural dwellers do not.
Now, you could propose we solve this problem by building cages for them somewhere (not sure where you'd find the land unless you confiscate it from the current owners and then do away with the city planning process) and feeding them rat chow. It might mean forcing people out of the homes they own and have lived in for twenty years, but so what?
But these people are all going to become "stable income" and profit centers for the rich and want to buy low cost apartments! That's the solution! Sorry, these people already have a stable income (HP and government workers) and they can't get low-cost housing here. The landlords you think are going to jump up and start building like mad to create lots of cheap housing aren't doing it today when there is a demand, so why would they do it tomorrow?
And you've pretty much identified one of the problems of creating all this low cost housing. Caged rodents create environments like Cabrini-Green.
Your humanity is just ... amazing. You do no favor to the UBI movement when you throw your unparalleled intellect and economic skills behind it. I don't think there is any purpose in trying to point out the problems because you simply don't care if those problems exist. Some people just "lost the genetic lottery".
lol it comes in the email from the sender.
I'll save the time of replying to your repeated asinine assumptions point by amazingly ignorant point by saying this: UPS carries packages when people pay them to. Sometimes it's the sender who is paying. Sometimes the sender doesn't have the recipient's email address. Sometimes the sender wants the package to be a surprise.
You assume I've never ordered anything from any "mail order" (thanks for the lecture on what that phrase means, by the way) because I've never gotten advance notice for anything shipped to my house. Perhaps you are unaware of the generosity of some employers in allowing personal packages through the work receiving department -- which is how I ALWAYS have things delivered when I order them. (It would take a special kind of ignorance to not know about such an option since it has been mentioned in this thread many times already, however.)
So, I'll repeat what I said -- your claim that you can go to a website and have things held at the sorting facility only works if you have the tracking number before the first delivery attempt is made. That emphasized bit is not always true. It is amazingly difficult to have UPS hold a package at their facility (10 miles away) AFTER they have already broken open my front screen door and hidden it there, for example.
So, I'm glad that in your little bit of the world you never get anything you haven't paid someone else to send to you, and that they always send you the tracking info ahead of time, but your little bit of the world isn't how it works everywhere else. Your instructions on how to solve the problem of UPS simply dropping things on your front step or sidewalk doesn't solve the problem for everyone else.
Why do people always insist everything must not work?
Why do some people always think that anyone who points out problems with handing out free money is saying everything must not work? Are you confused by thinking that your plan is "everything", or just that the fact that history has shown that handing out free money does not work means that it must not work? Or is it that you don't feel you can support the plan as you have proposed it and you must resort to hyperbole?
So, you're telling me people's #1 desire is to live in a CAFO, caged, being fed the lowest-quality rodent feed?
Thank you for proving my point. Of course you know I said no such thing. It is interesting that you see a statement that some people will live on UBI alone as a claim that they will "live in a CAFO, caged, being fed ... rodent feed." That's all your UBI buys them?
I note that you ignored my question about how you deal with unemployable people who have needs that UBI won't be enough to meet, instead regaling me with how much cheaper UBI will be overall, and that you designed it to cover their costs of living. It must be their problem to solve, then, if it won't.
The economy is not zero-sum.
That's what I said to you. Yet, projections of the cost of UBI rely on it being so. Things like saving a trillion dollars by getting rid of welfare, calculating the cost by simply multiplying the number of people by the amount of money, etc, are all zero-sum assumptions.
I also kept a welfare system for children of low-income families, although it's small--about 1.4% of AGI, or some $150 billion.
Thanks for once again proving my point.
First they came for the homeless, but I didn't say anything because I wasn't homeless...
Or one could say the point of the electoral college is that sometimes the popular vote is a bad choice.
No, the point of the electoral college is that the President is president of the united states and needs to have the interests of ALL the states in mind, not just the few most populous ones. "Bad choice" is highly subjective; the result of the election is a quantitative measure.
Can you imagine the outcry if China had hacked the RNC and tipped the election so that HCR won?
You mean after the sitting Republican president had already claimed there was no evidence of any such influence?
But yes, I can imagine the outcry. It would be a larger version of the rioting and looting and burnings and shootings every time the Daley machine rigged the elections in Chicago. Oh, wait, the Republicans didn't riot or loot when that happened ...
I think they call your "argument" projection. You know what you'd do, and you assume that others would do the same thing. Or you just want to insult others and spread fear.
If we just went with a straight popular vote, it'd be more fair...
For whom? People who live in the smaller states that have different interests than those of the more populous ones? I know it's hard to remember, but the US is the United States, a union of states.
and it'd require appealing to a wider voter base.
Oh, please. It would result in appealing to the people in the most populous states and ignoring those in smaller states, which is not "a wider voter base".
It might be for the best if defectors were simply not allowed.
It might be for the best if the electors were not harassed and threatened by members of the loser's party to try to get them to ignore their pledge and promise and vote for the loser.
Um, who do you think won the popular vote?
Nobody, because there is no "popular vote" for President of the US.
"Popular vote" is a fiction invented by those who are unhappy that their candidate lost the election, or by those who won and want to claim some "huge mandate from the public" to do something. The rest of us know what it takes to win.
It is ridiculous to assume that the "popular vote" would be the same were it the actual system in use to elect the President, and that's why it is ridiculous to assume it means anything when it is not. If the voters (and candidates) operated under a "popular vote" system, the results could be, and probably would be, very much different. There are too many instances of people who don't bother voting because they know their state will go to the "other person". For example, if you live in California why bother voting for a Republican president when you know that the Democrat is going to win anyway? Many of those non-votes would have voted had "popular vote" been the rule of the day, and it is unlikely that the California statewide vote total would have been as lopsided as it was. Or maybe it would be. That's the point -- you can't know until it happens, and it didn't happen.
I can think of guerrillas in Colombia and Favelas in Rio, as counter-examples
No, you can't, because those aren't armed societies, those are societies where gangs and criminals are well armed and the society AS A WHOLE is not.
Once the tracking ID is valid and they have the package in their system, then you can change the delivery to local pickup.
Assuming you know the tracking number ahead of time. I have yet to be informed of the tracking number for any UPS package that was delivered to my house in the last 20 years prior to reading it off the package itself or the non-delivery notice. By then it's on the truck, and if you don't call before the local warehouse closes today it will be on the truck tomorrow, too.
Suddenly, you have 39,000 new consumers who can afford and want to buy your product. What happens?
Well, you might start planning on building 39,000 new low-cost housing units. Ballpark 20 units per floor, that's 2000 floors. Fifty floors per building, that's 40 buildings. At 1000 sq ft per apartment that's 20,000 surface sq ft per building, and 1 million sq ft total sq ft. At just 5$/sqft, that's $5 million per building, $200 million total.
Finding space to build those buildings within the urban growth boundary, including parking (1000 units will require 500 parking spaces, at least in this city), tack on how many more millions in real estate costs? Let's say $20 million. That may be a gross overestimation, but that's ok because I think $200 million to build the units is a gross underestimate.
Two years for the planning commission, two years to build a few of them. Maybe in ten years your $220 million investment might start returning 5%, but you have to reach full occupancy to get there.
What will happen in the real world is that your demand for the trades will drive those prices up, as will the realization from many people making minimum wage that they can do just as well on UBI and not work. The 39,000 "new consumers" will actually be 30,000 or less as the rest simply drink or smoke up the UBI payments. And then you wind up with another Cabrini-Green.
It's nice making projections based on a zero-sum economy. In reality, there are too many interactions to have any simplistic predictions come true. This is almost always true for those predictions that say giving people stuff for free will only cost X dollars times Y current recipients. Projections that depend on getting rid of welfare are highly suspect, since there will always be unemployable people for whom UBI simply won't cover the costs of surviving. How do you deal with them? No welfare, just UBI. Sorry Charlie. Or do you keep welfare for them?
This Finnish experiment is amazing, but it will really prove nothing. Two thousand people getting UBI while still operating in the same taxation and economy as the regular people isn't reality.
With UPS I can go to the website and have deliveries held at the local service center.
That's only if they haven't already just left the package unattended unsecured. Once it's dropped on your front step they aren't going to come back and pick it up and hold it somewhere for you.
The last time I checked, they wanted extra $ if you got the note and wanted them to deliver the package to a different place.
Why do companies think it is OK to leave packages out on urban doorsteps without express per-package permission from the recipient? Why are the delivery companies not 100% responsible for those losses?
You answered your first question in the second. AKA "because they can".
pick it up from the nearest warehouse? Why is that such a rare service to get? It saves them money!
It costs them warehouse space and people to man the front counter.
USPS, FedEX and UPS all drop my package, ring the bell and leave. I don't see what waiting for me to answer is going to do for me.
What if you aren't home? If they don't wait and just dump, then your package is sitting unattended for ... hours? If they do wait and you don't answer, they can leave a note and take it with them. This "does for you" a bit more security on the package before you get it. And if you happen to be away for a few days, it "does for you" a bit of security for your home since thieves won't see the same package on your front step for three days and know you aren't home.
Also, don't you get a notification you package has been delivered as soon as they mark that in the handheld they carry?
Their handheld is connected to the carrier's computer system, not mine. No, I don't get a notification of delivery.
I used to drive for UPS ... the rule here is that the package needed to be delivered to the back door, garage, breezeway or somewhere out of sight from the street.
My pager company sent me a letter saying they were changing out the paging system and they were sending me a new one. After a couple of months went by I remembered that letter and called them. They said it has been sent a couple of months earlier. I had seen nothing. They sent another one, and that's when I found the first one. I came home a few days later and saw my front screen door ajar. Sure enough, in between the screen door and the main door I found two packages from the pager company. The UPS driver a few months prior had pried open a locked screen door and hidden the first pager there. Then he stuffed the second pager in with the first and they didn't both fit. That's the only reason I found either package. Thanks, UPS.
Another UPS driver left a package hidden around a corner with no note that he had done so. During the next week or so it rained, so when I found the box of red peppers I actually found a box of fuzzy green peppers. Thanks, UPS.
I did the paperwork for the lost first pager, and included the fact that the driver had broken into my house, and ever since they've not left anything unattended. Unfortunately, the closest UPS facility is ten miles away, so I got the pleasure of making a 20 mile round trip for an Amazon gift card that Amazon chose to ship via UPS instead of USPS. Thanks, Amazon.
The problem is that with the rise of online shopping, people always want the driver to release the package without a signature.
I want the driver to deliver the package, not just leave it somewhere convenient to him but completely hidden from me. That includes not leaving it sitting unattended and unsecured on my front step, because I don't consider that "delivery".
Before you lecture me that I should have my packages delivered somewhere else, I do. It's the unanticipated packages (like the pager) that show up and cause problems.
The only logical legal stance is that you can't make up new territory by building artificial islands.
That leaves the illogical legal stance that you can have territory that has no waters at all. International water all the way to ... MHHW? MSL? MLLW? Someone can ground a boat on the shore while the tide is in and be in international waters, and then where are they legally when the tide goes out? Is it logical that someone can become an immigrant once or twice a day without moving an inch?
I think a more logical legal stance is not that you don't get any territorial waters, but that the rules for determining territorial waters are different for artificially-produced land masses. Perhaps a 3 mile limit? And then, at some point, any country that has built 30 artificial islands trying to usurp someone's international water will be building it in someone else's water. Long before that point, it will go before Den Hague to be adjudicated.
Drones are primarily intelligence gathering platforms after all, not science research vessels.
"Drones" are what the public has learned to refer to "umanned aerial vehicles" by. The term is no longer limited to military remotely operated aircraft. That DJI Phantom 3 you just bought; the $100 FPV quad; both are "drones" to the public. That cat is long out of the bag, a fight long lost.
As such, it is much easier for the press to refer to "an underwater drone" than to try teaching the public what "autonomous underwater vehicle" means. That's what they did here.
So no, "drones" are no longer primarily "intelligence gathering", they are used alot for scientific research. Especially the underwater glider drones that make salinity, temperature and depth measurements like the one that got stolen.
people in other regions could watch our team play but the local fans could not because the local team owners didn't care if you couldn't watch the game because you didn't buy a ticket, and if you could watch it on TV for free you'd probably choose that over paying for parking and $10 hot dogs and having beer poured on you by another fan after you bought a ticket.
FTFY.
Before the government can steal something and give it to you,
You mean like how the government paid for networking research that lead to the internet?
Do you remember the Internet before it was commercialized? I do. The government certainly did NOT give us "The Internet". The internet the "government gave us" was highly restricted to educational institutions and people who had lots of money to pay for connections. "Us" did not get to play in the fancy new sandbox.
If you could get a UUCP connection from someone on the internet, (or, as I had to, paid for one from PSI) you got the fun of using things like BITFTP to get stuff from the net. But "The Internet"? I WORKED at a University and didn't get internet access. That's how magnanimous the "government" was in "giving" us the internet.
Said the person commenting on a SOCIAL website where people congregate under a SOCIAL contract
Talk is cheap. Making things takes money. And there's some chatter about something called "Dice" every so often that seems intimately attached to the continued operation of this site.
all the shit that vendors load that spy on you all the time?
Vendors? You mean like Google?
Right now I see "GoogleLocationManager", "ContextManagerService", GoogleLocationService", and "GcmService" all running on my tablet. This is with "Location Service" turned off and after I've explicitly stopped the Google Play Services app, on a device that is in airplane mode and not been used for any app that needs location. (Any my phone, which is a later version of Android, doesn't let me stop Google Play Services at all.)
That ignores the google analytics service that shows up when the device actually is connected to the net, so that google can monitor web accesses for me.
And by the definition of malware as "used to show ads and install unwanted apps on the devices of unsuspecting users" there are NO phones that don't contain malware. Google Chrome, which used to be bundled with Java updates (as I recall, it might have been something else) is malware under that definition.
Consider all the laws that cover tax deductions for contributions to charity and you might realize that it isn't really the government's job to provide for everyone. The clause "promote the general welfare" does not actually mean "provide welfare for everyone". The word "welfare" has two different meanings in the two phrases.
I can remember when cable systems were nothing more than community antennas. And the local broadcasters begged to get on them because otherwise in hilly areas not many people could receive them.
They didn't have to beg very hard. "Must carry" rules said they had to be carried for free.
Then they got greedy and had congress enact a law that required cable operators to pay them to carry their content.
Uhhh, what? Any broadcaster that wants to be paid for their content does not get to invoke "must carry", so the cable operator is not required to carry them. Broadcasters do not get to demand carriage and payment at the same time.
So now Comcast is being honest and recovering these costs from their customers.
The issue at hand is not that Comcast is justified in recovering these fees, it is that they are listing them as line items outside the normal service fee. The latter is what they advertise.
Make the local broadcast package optional and see how many people will just drop it.
Not a lot. It is really inconvenient to deal with two sources (cable and OTA), especially when DVRs are included in the system. And for some people, myself included, OTA signals are really poor and limited. I get PBS perfectly. If I want to change from ABC (intermittent at best) to FOX/MY/CW I have to physically rotate the antenna, and there is no signal strength meter in my fancy TV to tell me when I'm pointing it the right way. NBC is even more fiddly to get, and I've never gotten an OTA CBS signal. The downside to the whole system is that the TVs don't allow you to simply specify the channel you want to tune to, they have to go through a scanning process to figure out where the channels are and what they are called. ("Channel 8-1" is usually not where "Channel 8" used to be; it can be anywhere in the allocated spectrum.)
Back in the 1980s and 1990s when cable companies started rolling out services municipalities granted exclusive rights for lengthy periods of time.
Not all municipalities granted exclusive franchises. All of the ones I've dealt with have been non-exclusive from the beginning. Federal law has now prohibited exclusive franchises, and has for such a long time that any existing ones would have long ago been renewed as non-exclusive. The only reason there are defacto monopolies today are due to economic, not legislative reasons.
The cable co is giving them more eyeballs to sell to their advertisers, the broadcasters need their access as much as the cable cos need their content.
Back when this was the working theory, there was something called "must carry". A broadcast station would demand that the local cable company carry their signal instead of having to pay them to do so. The cable company could find another source for the content and ignore the local station if they wanted, otherwise.
Now that broadcast stations know they can get the cable companies to actually pay them, must-carry is a less-used option. If a station invokes "must carry", then they cannot demand money for the retransmission rights.
Why can't the cable just claim they are retransmitting stuff from over the air? Two reasons. In many cases, the most usable source for the content is a direct feed (not OTA), and in the remaining ones it is because the OTA content is licensed for non-commercial use. Cable companies just retransmitting it without a contract would be infringement.