Basic income

feel like you guys would hate this stuff cause it's a bit too tech-posi but i find this kind of speculative thinking up different welfare systems stuff interesting at the very least

choose yr own bossventure

something like a quarter of all impoverished people in this country are disabled and many other have other things that make it difficult for them to work like responsibilities caring for disabled relatives

not to mention that one of the really attractive things about basic income is its simplicity it removes the job of interacting with bureaucracy

lmao k

Using Paypal and an OPEN SOURCE MASHUP of Monster.com and eBay, the US govt. should block grant / waiver states (likely Texas first) to establish a Guaranteed Income, wage subsidy welfare system.

yeah you would still have to have disability

this is not even getting into the whole liberation from coercive capitalism aspect which is kinda the best part, instead its just the government guaranteeing everyone 7 dollar an hour jobs, i mean fine if youre just interested in dystopian fiction but this is a terrible terribly half assed plan

does the person who wrote this know that ppl who are able to work can generally get 7 dollar an hour jobs

except that theyre illegal in many place being below the minimum wage

Anyone who wants to work registers, receives a Paypal Debit Card, and each Friday at 5PM has their GI deposited.

still dying at the inscistance on PAYPAL

we shd go venmo imo

lol

i think the idea is there's a lot of desirable jobs that are priced out by min wage/not profitable enough for employer, so the govt subsidizes them and lets people choose. so instead of the only min wage/7$ per hour available being hellish jobs at walmart or scraping pool scum you get to do more enjoyable stuff that someone wouldn't actually pay you 7$ an hour for and the govt pays the difference

the really bad part abt $7 an hour jobs tho which btw is less than the federal minimum wage is that they pay $7 an hour, youre still gonna work yr 40 hours and have not enough to live on and have no time to say care for your child

i think a lot of ppl on various forms of welfare now make less than equiv of 7$/hr, and it goes up to 400/wk which is 10$/h

also i think the idea is by expanding the choices to low wage workers, who currently choose between mcdonalds harveyrs and burger king who all pay the same wage, you put more pressure on employers to raise wage or improve working standards etc

u cld raise the minimum wage or just give ppl money instead of giving the money to businesses

which is not even to mention that this whole scheme wld be an extremely obvious vector for fraud

u cld create an enforcement agency and pay $7 an hour

if this plan paid $15 it wld have more promise but u wld still be failing to help a lot of ppl who need it the most and failing to address the more profound underlying problems

Serious minimum wage increases ($15 and inflation indexing) are the thin end of the wedge imo, it's a pretty palatable populist message across demos that working full-time should pay you enough to survive. (Demonstrably so, it's passing in cities and by ballot initiative in lotsa places.) Get people on board with that and "not working at all should pay you and your family enough to thrive" starts seeming more attainable and attractive.

Uber for Welfare
Uber for Welfare
Uber for Welfare
Uber for Welfare
Uber for Welfare

also the idea that service jobs are less vulnerable to automation is demonstrably ludicrous, Uber is gonna be all robots within a decade and I don't know why every McDonald's isn't taking orders exclusively on iPads already.

Uber for Welfare
Uber for Welfare
Uber for Welfare
Uber for Welfare
Uber for Welfare

― karla jay vespers, Friday, March 4, 2016 12:06 PM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Uber for Welfare
Uber for Welfare
Uber for Welfare
Uber for Welfare
Uber for Welfare

Prob should post on the AI thread too...

https://medium.com/basic-income/deep-learning-is-going-to-teach-us-all-the-lesson-of-our-lives-jobs-are-for-machines-7c6442e37a49

Very simply, think of Go as Super Ultra Mega Chess.

computers still cant be poker haha idiots

This article was written on a crowdfunded monthly basic income. If you found value in this article, you can support it along with all my advocacy for basic income with a monthly patron pledge of $1+.

LOL

what do you guys think of the idea of making basic income a loan (albeit one that is never expected to be paid back, but if you hit the lotto or something, people will look at you weird if you don't)?

don't really see why that's necessary but if it helps it to happen sooner by being framed that way then sure whatever

if you hit the lotto you'll start net paying into BI fund with your taxes

i think framing it as a loan makes it easier for people with means to forego it -- thinking of it as a free money kind of makes you automatically a chump for not taking it.

idk about loans but all welfare can be framed as insurance for unborn babies

Anyone with sufficient means would pay the whole value of basic income back in taxes. Like a negative income tax is one bandied-about way of implementing a basic income.

Why not have them pay that whole value in taxes as a given, but not take the distribution if they don't need it?

Part of the strategic value in the Basic Income agenda is its universality. Anyone who works for a living could find themselves un- or under-employed any given year, or want to take unpaid leave, or whatever. Even if someone with a $250,000 annual income would pay the whole value of a $35,000 Basic Income in income tax, they should get their check on the 1st of each month like everyone else. Anyone who doesn't have to work for a living won't really care how it's structured.

Universality would help lessen the stigma as well

wouldn't universality be satisfied by it (the loan) being available to anyone and everyone? wouldn't there be less stigma as a loan (vs what would perceived to be a handout)?

no

i dunno, i always get a little twinge of anxiety when getting free samples at costco.

its extremely essential to the whole concept that everyone just get a check, these are the type of programs that succeed in the usa, im saying this as if this is something that has any chance of happening in the near future

There are several convincing arguments that a simple check cut to every citizen of the United States in the wake of the financial crisis would have been far far more effective than QE at stimulating the economy

I don't know about the US but in Germany you could start paying every adult EUR 1000 a month *right now*, without raising any taxes, by dismantling the evaluation bureaucracy for the unemployed (Hartz IV), which is broken anyway. But, everyone seems to believe that people would quit their job immediately if you gave them free money. And by "everyone" I mean bullheaded rural protestant fundamentalists.

oh u have those too?

somehow tying the arguments for UBI to the inevitable robot takeover of all work just seems to taint it with even extra fringiness. I may have to start distancing myself if the techno-utopians start seriously adopting basic income as a plank. it's like when frat boys started liking techno

no one tell tom abt edm

'robots/AIs taking our jobs' is a dumb or at least overhyped reason to be pro-UBI imo however some degree collective economic anxiety is a necessary condition for it being implemented politically. welfare is unpopular because people who pay into it don't see themselves as ever potentially being beneficiaries. the middle and upper middle classes who will pay for it need to feel that they may actually someday need it, so it becomes like insurance. or we lift the wreath of false consciousness and shed all individualism, whichever comes first

imo robots taking jobs is untrue in the sense that machines have been taking jobs for ~150 years and there have always been new jobs for people to do, but robots taking jobs is true in the sense that they disrupt stable jobs and toss ppl out mid career into an uncertain world where they are often poorer than they were before, if robots started taking jobs faster than ever before then it really cld add up to some sort of calamity even if its not the end of work

yeah like obviously the computer revolution and automation in manufacturing displaced a lot of people, but didn't create enough widespread economic anxiety for a mass popular movement for universal social insurance. the next automation wave would have to an order of magnitude larger, and technology-wise they are really far away from getting robots to do the stuff people in rich countries do now. also part of me wonders like, if they just hadn't named it Machine Learning, would people be so freaked out? it conjurs the image of a machine that actually learns stuff when it's just clever statistics

werent you arguing that the majority of 'the stuff ppl in rich countries do now' is economically unnecessary garbage? i mean theres a whole host of automation that hasnt happened not because its technologically impossible but because its not economically (or sometimes in the case of high-prestige white collar work culturally) practical. i mean i think the real fear for workers shouldnt be machines getting smarter, its machines getting cheaper

machines getting sexier imo

haha i read that post and remembered there was a spike jonze (?) movie about a guy that wanted to fuck his iphone and just started laughing out loud. the future man, crazy

they don't know how to make a robot that can fold a t-shirt in less than 36 hours or walk up a flight of stairs or cut hair and those problems are considered exponentially more complicated than getting a computer to add two numbers together or to repeatedly insert identical pieces of metal into each other. humans just come pre-programmed to know how to do these things (thx God!) but even our genius engineers don't know how to teach a robot how to do it