Edge is shit for anything other than its dev tools or its rendering engine, though (and the latter still needs work, as TFA notes). No support for many of the things that any modern browser is expected to have, like:
* No ad or tracking blocking (something IE has had, built in, since version 9)
* No way to block Flash (built into IE in two different ways, ActiveX filter and site whitelisting for ActiveX), much less to block JavaScript
* No extension support of any kind
* Barely any cookie filtering (all, none, or no-third-party are the only options)
* No "restore last session" (only possible if you set it to *always* restore the last session)
* No RSS support
* No useful context options (aside from Inspect Element) like "search this" or "translate this"
* No user control over features like TLS versions image placeholders, etc.
* No support for tab thumbnails (was in IE as "Quick Tabs" from v7 to v10, and on taskbar starting with Win7)
* No tab grouping or ability to set Ctrl+Tab to switch in last-used order
*...
It's an overgrown phone browser. It's not even close to suitable for PC usage.
Now, with that said, you can get IE to run with Edge's engine (EdgeHtml), at least on Win10 Enterprise. That combo works pretty well. A few minor bugs, but you get the better rendering engine combined with the features of an actual PC web browser.
Since when does "programmer" imply "vocation"? Serious question, in case I wasn't clear. What do you base this claim on?
Was Linux not a programmer when he wrote the early versions of the Linux kernel? Was Stallman not a programmer when he re-implemented the commercial version of Emacs as an open-source program? Am I not a programmer because, despite having written thousands of lines of C++ in the last week, I did it on my own time and for reasons only mildly related to my day job (which involves computers, but not software development specifically)?
Programming can be a vocation, but "programmer" does not imply "professional programmer". Lots of people program without being paid to do it. Hell, students are usually paying, rather than being paid. Open source developers are rarely paid. Hobbyists who never publish anything are, almost by definition, not paid.
As I understand it, the definitions are very simple. To program, as a verb, to write programs (implication here of computer programs). A programmer is a person who programs. Vocations, pay, and so forth don't enter into it at all. You seem to have a very different view of the term from what almost everybody else uses...
The thing you talk about - Android and iOS apps on Windows phones - already exists (in preview form, at least). Originally called "Project Astoria", Microsoft seems to have decided to call it Windows Bridges, and is only for Windows 10 Mobile (not out yet, but the previews have been publicly available for months). Android and iOS apps can be recompiled for Windows with minimal effort. There's also a feature of Project Astoria that lets you run Android APKs directly, unmodified, on W10M... but that one seems to be in limbo, and may or may not see official release (the Android permissions system is different enough from the Windows Phone one that it apparently causes some problems).
It would be interesting to see what that graph looks like if you include the USA's response to the September 11 attacks. As in, we got an awful lot of our own people killed trying to "spread freedom" in the Middle East, in response to an attack that killed about as many people as die in car crashes every day.
You're flat-out wrong. but go on "suspecting" that. Out here in the real world, actual economists have done quite a few studies on the impact immigration has on the US economy, and it's tremendously positive. Each immigrant produces, on average, more than one new job, so the net effect is positive. It's not instantaneous - there's always a delay as the market adjusts to the increased labor supply - but the effect is reliable.
In fact, economists believe that open borders would double the size of the US economy in twenty years compared to what it would be under current policies. The problem is that a lot of people who are already in the US would find themselves needing to actually *compete* for jobs. The short-term disruption would suck, especially for those who have been living at or beyond their means on the expectation that they'll always make more money next year than this year instead of living modestly and saving up. Those people, and especially their children, would still have a better life in the end... but short-term thinking is the S.O.P. in this country.
Also general availability information. Not just scheduled stuff like meetings, but knowing when somebody is available or not. Lync (now Skype for Business) ties deeply into Exchange.
Does this actually have anything to do with T-Mobile? From the sounds of it, it's Experian that was breached, and the attackers mostly (though not exclusively) took TMo subscriber info. TMo's own security wasn't compromised.
I suppose you could argue that TMo should have gone with somebody more responsible / secure than Experian, but is there actually any such entity that provides the necessary services? As low as Experian sets the "not complete shit" bar, are the other credit agencies actually any better? They all suck.
It would be nice to have a not-shit option here, of course. Naively, one would expect the free market to take care of it, but in practice there seems to only be the three agencies, all in a race to the bottom, with nobody actually interested in providing good service instead.
Your math is off by about an order of magnitude. 30000 days is about 1 lifetime (82.2 years); at two patents per day it would take half as long. Still a damn long time, though.
There are decent post-paid plans, if you look for them. No contract, month-to-month, unlimited data (yes, really!), unlimited talk, unlimited messages. It's from a little-known operator - only the third-biggest in the country - called T-Mobile USA.
There's not even a risk of throttling on my data, though I do pay a bit extra to avoid that. They'll try to limit tethering, but you can bypass that easily enough by running a proxy app on the phone. Bring your own phone or finance one with a clearly-defined loan that is a separate line item on the bill and goes away when the phone is paid off.
TMoUS isn't perfect, but they're a hell of a lot better than what people in the US seem to expect of a mobile operator. I also get great data speeds (over 30Mbps download at nearly all times, peaking well higher than that) and have good coverage (even on mountain hikes and ski trips), though it may help that I live near their corporate headquarters
I'm pretty sure T-Mobile would text me to let me know if I ever hit 75% of my cap, too. Fortunately, I've never even hit 1%, despite the fact that I stream music all day long. Turns out it's mathematically impossible to hit 1% of infinite (and I don't even mean infinite-but-we-throttle-you-past-X-gigs, though I do pay slightly more to avoid the throttling threat).
As for rapists and such, a bullet is good enough for them, once guilt is established beyond a shadow of a doubt. I feel the same way about anybody who permits or engages in the use of torture, whatever side they're on, by the way.
I know the AnCaps hate to hear it, but you do actually need a government even to have a chance of making capitalism work. It's all very noble to talk about how using force is unethical, but the violent will laugh in your stupid face while they rob you blind. Without an official government - authorized, equipped, and publicly funded to commit violence - all that you'll get is an unofficial one built by the best warlord to rise up to pluck all you idiots busily making economic value that you can't protect. At that point you'll have a choice: produce for the warlord (keeping a fraction, if any, of the profit), fight for the warlord's army, or a shallow grave courtesy of that army. Your option to pay off the warlord will last until the amount you pay + the cost of just rolling over you becomes less than could be squeezed out of you at gunpoint. Don't bother pretending you can hire you own armed protection agency to protect you; that's just setting up your own warlord whose guns point at your back instead of at your face.
That's not even considering external threats, which of course do exist. You can't overhaul humanity as a whole. An invader doesn't care that they'll wreck your pretty little fairy-tale economy; they want your land, your natural resources, your skilled laborers who will work for them if the only other alternative is a taking a bullet, and your technology. You know what the easiest way to get somebody's trade secrets is? Point a gun at them and ask.
Any way you cut it, if you don't publicly set up a government to enforce the will of the populace and fund it through social contract that says it's OK to coerce payment (and you'll still have defectors even then), you're just going to get a tyrannical government run by whoever has the biggest / best-trained guns and/or the best ability to convince others to fight on their behalf (and believe me, people are always willing to do that). The odds are very strongly in favor of you being nearer the bottom of the new government - possibly a couple feet underground - than being anywhere near the top.
I mean, I agree with you... but given how good politicians are at keeping promises, maybe we *should* want one "who PROMISES to do the very thing I don't want them to"! I mean, which do you think is more likely: a politician keeping a promise to do something that is in the public good, or a politician lying *regardless* of reason?
The concept of Hard Sci-Fi is over 60 years old. Not all SF needs to be hard SF, but any near-future SF worth its salt will be pretty hard, simply because people will recognize stuff that is bullshit. Occasionally, writers go the extra mile. Besides, without at least *some* degree of scientific accuracy, science fiction just becomes... fiction.
I'm not sure which is stupider, what you said (in the context of a movie like this), or that it got modded up.
Or, having just spent forever showing how you'll keep going in a straight line (ignoring curvature from gravity, here) until something pulls you, they get to the station, manage to catch on... and have this whole painfully cliché "I'm slipping! I can't hold on!" "Don't let go! I'll never let you go!" "Fine, if you won't, I will!" [Unclips and flies away] scene. Um, what the fuck? You were, more or less, at rest relative to the station (and each other). What was pulling you? How was it strong enough that it was going to pull *both* of you away? Why, if his jetpack was empty, didn't he detach it and throw it away to gain some momentum in the opposite direction (or at least to reduce his mass, since apparently something is tugging on him)?
I damn near walked out at that scene. The whole idiocy of an explosion in low-earth orbit taking out communication satellites up in geosynch was blatantly moronic to anybody who knows jack shit about orbital mechanics - GEO is at 22 *thousand* miles above the surface, compared to the 250 miles for the ISS; you're talking about the equivalent of debris from an ordinary bomb dropped on Iraq managing to derail every train in America (in seconds!) - but at least they didn't *show* why that was so bloody stupid with a long, hammer-it-into-your-head. scene showing that the relevant satellites are tens of thousands of miles apart. Of course, then there's the absurd thing where she can't contact anybody on earth, despite the fact that even HAM radio (which uses no satellites) has the range and sensitivity easily, and that in a disaster like that every HAM would be at their set helping people communicate (it's what we do); the radio waves would have been *full* of people's voices, and she'd have been patched in to NASA immediately even if they somehow didn't have any radios that could reach directly.
Or there's the thing with the "debris cloud" that somehow repeatedly intersects the ISS' orbit despite not happening anywhere near the ISS. If the debris is moving fast enough to *catch* the ISS, it would move into a higher orbit. If it was moving *slower* than the ISS (the ISS sweeps into it), then it would de-orbit almost immediately (never mind the blatant bullshit of how quickly the Chinese station de-orbits). Or the completely invalid way she aims her capsule's flight to the other station. Or... so many things.
I might have been able to enjoy the movie if it had been billed as a Hollywood suspense/drama flick with no more realistic of science than Armageddon. But no, they had to be *insulting* about it!
That... that is actually a really good point. For all the talk about NSA backdoors, the tech giants of the US have, for the most part, resisted government backdoors. They are probably even less happy with allowing foreign government backdoors, which means having India-based workers would become very difficult. That's a *lot* of money (taxes, for the government) lost, and a lot of ill will from the populace.
Daaaamn, that is a train wreck of an app. There's nothing at all that excuses such a complete disaster security-wise. Those issues are the kind that should have been caught by even a completely cursory security review of the app, though anybody doing their job here damn well should have insisted on a lot more than a cursory review.
So... what was the approval process for these apps like? Who approved this app? How nice is their new yacht?
Yep. It's a lot easier to start your own business when you don't have to worry about paying your people a living wage, and having enough left over to keep your lights on at home. It's a lot easier to take the risk of leaving a steady but soul-sucking job to join an interesting startup when you know you can keep making the mortgage even if the startup folds in three months. It's a lot easier to quit your day job to focus on your big project that probably will (but may not) pay off in a few years when your kids won't go hungry because the paychecks stopped. I'd expect entrepreneurs to be massively in favor of this idea.
I'm less worried about the subjectiveness than I am about the simple regional differences in cost of living. People talk about factoring those in when considering job offers in separate cities, but what about when considering what constitutes a living wage? "Barely getting by" money in San Francisco would be fairly comfortably middle-class in some parts of the country.
Housing is one of the most obvious ones; I'm continually astonished by how much cheaper it is to live just a few miles outside of the city (read: in the need-a-car range from most jobs) despite the fact that I have spent significant time living in houses with thatch roofs and no running water (not in the US, but still... the people there lived on the equivalent of a few hundred USD per *year* though). I spend about $10k/year on my housing, and that's splitting an apartment well outside of downtown with a roommate. I can afford that, but I know plenty of people who couldn't. Most parts of the US, that would be a mortgage on a pretty nice house, not my half of the rent on an apartment priced for students at a public university. The house I grew up in has 2.5x as many bedrooms as this apartment, and costs 2/3 as much in rent, and at that it is *still* in a relatively expensive area.
There are other costs that vary by region, of course. Electricity is cheap here in WA, but expensive 700 miles south in CA. Hawaii is crazy expensive for pretty much everything. Cities without a good public transit system require either an expensive car and expensive parking, or living very close to work.
That would be the people who want to live above the poverty line, as opposed to merely at it... in other words, almost everybody, once they can finally quit their abusive shithole of a job and go finish school without winding up on the street in the process!
Well yeah, that's approximately half the point. Throw out minimum wage and unemployment while you're at it.
Medica[re|id] is a bit of a tricky one, because a basic income does *not* provide enough to cover medical expenses (not because there isn't enough money, but because medical expenses often come in large and unexpected amounts without a corresponding short-term bump in basic income). Realistically, you'd need to have something that provides for that eventuality. It *could* be something like the for-profit insurance system that we have in the US today, but it would make more sense to just make that whole system public. Medicare and Medicaid today directly benefit something like 1/3 of the US population, but at a per recipient cost that is nearly three times what the national healthcare systems in western Europe cost. In other words, just taking the current government-provided healthcare scheme and making it universal would barely cost more than the healthcare in, say, Sweden... assuming the government could use its massive bargaining power to trim the fat out of the healthcare process (which is currently outrageously expensive in the US, partially because hospitals must overcharge paying patients for their care so they can also cover those whose only option is the emergency room).
I'm in the 90th percentile, or thereabouts, for income in the US. My taxes would probably go up a bit from this (by more than I would earn from the basic income itself) and/or my government-provided retirement money would decrease (since there wouldn't be anything like the current social security system based on past income). I'm in support of it. I live well below my means, despite living in one of the most expensive cities in the USA.
Slashdot Mirror
links -g supports images just fine. :-)
Edge is shit for anything other than its dev tools or its rendering engine, though (and the latter still needs work, as TFA notes). No support for many of the things that any modern browser is expected to have, like: ...
* No ad or tracking blocking (something IE has had, built in, since version 9)
* No way to block Flash (built into IE in two different ways, ActiveX filter and site whitelisting for ActiveX), much less to block JavaScript
* No extension support of any kind
* Barely any cookie filtering (all, none, or no-third-party are the only options)
* No "restore last session" (only possible if you set it to *always* restore the last session)
* No RSS support
* No useful context options (aside from Inspect Element) like "search this" or "translate this"
* No user control over features like TLS versions image placeholders, etc.
* No support for tab thumbnails (was in IE as "Quick Tabs" from v7 to v10, and on taskbar starting with Win7)
* No tab grouping or ability to set Ctrl+Tab to switch in last-used order
*
It's an overgrown phone browser. It's not even close to suitable for PC usage.
Now, with that said, you can get IE to run with Edge's engine (EdgeHtml), at least on Win10 Enterprise. That combo works pretty well. A few minor bugs, but you get the better rendering engine combined with the features of an actual PC web browser.
Since when does "programmer" imply "vocation"? Serious question, in case I wasn't clear. What do you base this claim on?
Was Linux not a programmer when he wrote the early versions of the Linux kernel?
Was Stallman not a programmer when he re-implemented the commercial version of Emacs as an open-source program?
Am I not a programmer because, despite having written thousands of lines of C++ in the last week, I did it on my own time and for reasons only mildly related to my day job (which involves computers, but not software development specifically)?
Programming can be a vocation, but "programmer" does not imply "professional programmer". Lots of people program without being paid to do it. Hell, students are usually paying, rather than being paid. Open source developers are rarely paid. Hobbyists who never publish anything are, almost by definition, not paid.
As I understand it, the definitions are very simple. To program, as a verb, to write programs (implication here of computer programs). A programmer is a person who programs. Vocations, pay, and so forth don't enter into it at all. You seem to have a very different view of the term from what almost everybody else uses...
The thing you talk about - Android and iOS apps on Windows phones - already exists (in preview form, at least). Originally called "Project Astoria", Microsoft seems to have decided to call it Windows Bridges, and is only for Windows 10 Mobile (not out yet, but the previews have been publicly available for months). Android and iOS apps can be recompiled for Windows with minimal effort. There's also a feature of Project Astoria that lets you run Android APKs directly, unmodified, on W10M... but that one seems to be in limbo, and may or may not see official release (the Android permissions system is different enough from the Windows Phone one that it apparently causes some problems).
It would be interesting to see what that graph looks like if you include the USA's response to the September 11 attacks. As in, we got an awful lot of our own people killed trying to "spread freedom" in the Middle East, in response to an attack that killed about as many people as die in car crashes every day.
You're flat-out wrong. but go on "suspecting" that. Out here in the real world, actual economists have done quite a few studies on the impact immigration has on the US economy, and it's tremendously positive. Each immigrant produces, on average, more than one new job, so the net effect is positive. It's not instantaneous - there's always a delay as the market adjusts to the increased labor supply - but the effect is reliable.
In fact, economists believe that open borders would double the size of the US economy in twenty years compared to what it would be under current policies. The problem is that a lot of people who are already in the US would find themselves needing to actually *compete* for jobs. The short-term disruption would suck, especially for those who have been living at or beyond their means on the expectation that they'll always make more money next year than this year instead of living modestly and saving up. Those people, and especially their children, would still have a better life in the end... but short-term thinking is the S.O.P. in this country.
Pretty sure the word "fuckwad" is over the line for practically all people. That's not "any sort of criticism" at all; it's just a personal insult.
Terse, yes. Contains the word "fuckwad", no. Personal insults are neither professional nor efficient.
Also general availability information. Not just scheduled stuff like meetings, but knowing when somebody is available or not. Lync (now Skype for Business) ties deeply into Exchange.
Does this actually have anything to do with T-Mobile? From the sounds of it, it's Experian that was breached, and the attackers mostly (though not exclusively) took TMo subscriber info. TMo's own security wasn't compromised.
I suppose you could argue that TMo should have gone with somebody more responsible / secure than Experian, but is there actually any such entity that provides the necessary services? As low as Experian sets the "not complete shit" bar, are the other credit agencies actually any better? They all suck.
It would be nice to have a not-shit option here, of course. Naively, one would expect the free market to take care of it, but in practice there seems to only be the three agencies, all in a race to the bottom, with nobody actually interested in providing good service instead.
Your math is off by about an order of magnitude. 30000 days is about 1 lifetime (82.2 years); at two patents per day it would take half as long. Still a damn long time, though.
There are decent post-paid plans, if you look for them. No contract, month-to-month, unlimited data (yes, really!), unlimited talk, unlimited messages. It's from a little-known operator - only the third-biggest in the country - called T-Mobile USA.
There's not even a risk of throttling on my data, though I do pay a bit extra to avoid that. They'll try to limit tethering, but you can bypass that easily enough by running a proxy app on the phone. Bring your own phone or finance one with a clearly-defined loan that is a separate line item on the bill and goes away when the phone is paid off.
TMoUS isn't perfect, but they're a hell of a lot better than what people in the US seem to expect of a mobile operator. I also get great data speeds (over 30Mbps download at nearly all times, peaking well higher than that) and have good coverage (even on mountain hikes and ski trips), though it may help that I live near their corporate headquarters
I'm pretty sure T-Mobile would text me to let me know if I ever hit 75% of my cap, too. Fortunately, I've never even hit 1%, despite the fact that I stream music all day long. Turns out it's mathematically impossible to hit 1% of infinite (and I don't even mean infinite-but-we-throttle-you-past-X-gigs, though I do pay slightly more to avoid the throttling threat).
Do you work at the Pentagon? Because that is some weapons-grade bullshit right there!
Torture will produce *some* answer, sure, but if you think it's true I've got an "enhanced interrogation" technique to sell you. The FBI knows it doesn't work. The army knew that too, and in fact still does (pages 97 and 351, or just search for "unreliable").
As for rapists and such, a bullet is good enough for them, once guilt is established beyond a shadow of a doubt. I feel the same way about anybody who permits or engages in the use of torture, whatever side they're on, by the way.
I know the AnCaps hate to hear it, but you do actually need a government even to have a chance of making capitalism work. It's all very noble to talk about how using force is unethical, but the violent will laugh in your stupid face while they rob you blind. Without an official government - authorized, equipped, and publicly funded to commit violence - all that you'll get is an unofficial one built by the best warlord to rise up to pluck all you idiots busily making economic value that you can't protect. At that point you'll have a choice: produce for the warlord (keeping a fraction, if any, of the profit), fight for the warlord's army, or a shallow grave courtesy of that army. Your option to pay off the warlord will last until the amount you pay + the cost of just rolling over you becomes less than could be squeezed out of you at gunpoint. Don't bother pretending you can hire you own armed protection agency to protect you; that's just setting up your own warlord whose guns point at your back instead of at your face.
That's not even considering external threats, which of course do exist. You can't overhaul humanity as a whole. An invader doesn't care that they'll wreck your pretty little fairy-tale economy; they want your land, your natural resources, your skilled laborers who will work for them if the only other alternative is a taking a bullet, and your technology. You know what the easiest way to get somebody's trade secrets is? Point a gun at them and ask.
Any way you cut it, if you don't publicly set up a government to enforce the will of the populace and fund it through social contract that says it's OK to coerce payment (and you'll still have defectors even then), you're just going to get a tyrannical government run by whoever has the biggest / best-trained guns and/or the best ability to convince others to fight on their behalf (and believe me, people are always willing to do that). The odds are very strongly in favor of you being nearer the bottom of the new government - possibly a couple feet underground - than being anywhere near the top.
I mean, I agree with you... but given how good politicians are at keeping promises, maybe we *should* want one "who PROMISES to do the very thing I don't want them to"! I mean, which do you think is more likely: a politician keeping a promise to do something that is in the public good, or a politician lying *regardless* of reason?
I'm joking. I hope...
The concept of Hard Sci-Fi is over 60 years old. Not all SF needs to be hard SF, but any near-future SF worth its salt will be pretty hard, simply because people will recognize stuff that is bullshit. Occasionally, writers go the extra mile. Besides, without at least *some* degree of scientific accuracy, science fiction just becomes... fiction.
I'm not sure which is stupider, what you said (in the context of a movie like this), or that it got modded up.
Or, having just spent forever showing how you'll keep going in a straight line (ignoring curvature from gravity, here) until something pulls you, they get to the station, manage to catch on... and have this whole painfully cliché "I'm slipping! I can't hold on!" "Don't let go! I'll never let you go!" "Fine, if you won't, I will!" [Unclips and flies away] scene. Um, what the fuck? You were, more or less, at rest relative to the station (and each other). What was pulling you? How was it strong enough that it was going to pull *both* of you away? Why, if his jetpack was empty, didn't he detach it and throw it away to gain some momentum in the opposite direction (or at least to reduce his mass, since apparently something is tugging on him)?
I damn near walked out at that scene. The whole idiocy of an explosion in low-earth orbit taking out communication satellites up in geosynch was blatantly moronic to anybody who knows jack shit about orbital mechanics - GEO is at 22 *thousand* miles above the surface, compared to the 250 miles for the ISS; you're talking about the equivalent of debris from an ordinary bomb dropped on Iraq managing to derail every train in America (in seconds!) - but at least they didn't *show* why that was so bloody stupid with a long, hammer-it-into-your-head. scene showing that the relevant satellites are tens of thousands of miles apart. Of course, then there's the absurd thing where she can't contact anybody on earth, despite the fact that even HAM radio (which uses no satellites) has the range and sensitivity easily, and that in a disaster like that every HAM would be at their set helping people communicate (it's what we do); the radio waves would have been *full* of people's voices, and she'd have been patched in to NASA immediately even if they somehow didn't have any radios that could reach directly.
Or there's the thing with the "debris cloud" that somehow repeatedly intersects the ISS' orbit despite not happening anywhere near the ISS. If the debris is moving fast enough to *catch* the ISS, it would move into a higher orbit. If it was moving *slower* than the ISS (the ISS sweeps into it), then it would de-orbit almost immediately (never mind the blatant bullshit of how quickly the Chinese station de-orbits). Or the completely invalid way she aims her capsule's flight to the other station. Or... so many things.
I might have been able to enjoy the movie if it had been billed as a Hollywood suspense/drama flick with no more realistic of science than Armageddon. But no, they had to be *insulting* about it!
That... that is actually a really good point. For all the talk about NSA backdoors, the tech giants of the US have, for the most part, resisted government backdoors. They are probably even less happy with allowing foreign government backdoors, which means having India-based workers would become very difficult. That's a *lot* of money (taxes, for the government) lost, and a lot of ill will from the populace.
Daaaamn, that is a train wreck of an app. There's nothing at all that excuses such a complete disaster security-wise. Those issues are the kind that should have been caught by even a completely cursory security review of the app, though anybody doing their job here damn well should have insisted on a lot more than a cursory review.
So... what was the approval process for these apps like? Who approved this app? How nice is their new yacht?
Yep.
It's a lot easier to start your own business when you don't have to worry about paying your people a living wage, and having enough left over to keep your lights on at home.
It's a lot easier to take the risk of leaving a steady but soul-sucking job to join an interesting startup when you know you can keep making the mortgage even if the startup folds in three months.
It's a lot easier to quit your day job to focus on your big project that probably will (but may not) pay off in a few years when your kids won't go hungry because the paychecks stopped.
I'd expect entrepreneurs to be massively in favor of this idea.
I'm less worried about the subjectiveness than I am about the simple regional differences in cost of living. People talk about factoring those in when considering job offers in separate cities, but what about when considering what constitutes a living wage? "Barely getting by" money in San Francisco would be fairly comfortably middle-class in some parts of the country.
Housing is one of the most obvious ones; I'm continually astonished by how much cheaper it is to live just a few miles outside of the city (read: in the need-a-car range from most jobs) despite the fact that I have spent significant time living in houses with thatch roofs and no running water (not in the US, but still... the people there lived on the equivalent of a few hundred USD per *year* though). I spend about $10k/year on my housing, and that's splitting an apartment well outside of downtown with a roommate. I can afford that, but I know plenty of people who couldn't. Most parts of the US, that would be a mortgage on a pretty nice house, not my half of the rent on an apartment priced for students at a public university. The house I grew up in has 2.5x as many bedrooms as this apartment, and costs 2/3 as much in rent, and at that it is *still* in a relatively expensive area.
There are other costs that vary by region, of course. Electricity is cheap here in WA, but expensive 700 miles south in CA. Hawaii is crazy expensive for pretty much everything. Cities without a good public transit system require either an expensive car and expensive parking, or living very close to work.
That would be the people who want to live above the poverty line, as opposed to merely at it... in other words, almost everybody, once they can finally quit their abusive shithole of a job and go finish school without winding up on the street in the process!
Well yeah, that's approximately half the point. Throw out minimum wage and unemployment while you're at it.
Medica[re|id] is a bit of a tricky one, because a basic income does *not* provide enough to cover medical expenses (not because there isn't enough money, but because medical expenses often come in large and unexpected amounts without a corresponding short-term bump in basic income). Realistically, you'd need to have something that provides for that eventuality. It *could* be something like the for-profit insurance system that we have in the US today, but it would make more sense to just make that whole system public. Medicare and Medicaid today directly benefit something like 1/3 of the US population, but at a per recipient cost that is nearly three times what the national healthcare systems in western Europe cost. In other words, just taking the current government-provided healthcare scheme and making it universal would barely cost more than the healthcare in, say, Sweden... assuming the government could use its massive bargaining power to trim the fat out of the healthcare process (which is currently outrageously expensive in the US, partially because hospitals must overcharge paying patients for their care so they can also cover those whose only option is the emergency room).
I'm in the 90th percentile, or thereabouts, for income in the US. My taxes would probably go up a bit from this (by more than I would earn from the basic income itself) and/or my government-provided retirement money would decrease (since there wouldn't be anything like the current social security system based on past income). I'm in support of it. I live well below my means, despite living in one of the most expensive cities in the USA.