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Comment Re:Basic income (Score 1) 726

Personally I think *most* humans are basically good, and I question whether the outliers are worth the energy expended on managing them.
It's popular to assume that anyone living in the streets is there of their own poor choices. Why not make that more likely?
Why do we have to control what they do with it? That's kind of the thing about a UBI, it gives the freedom back to the individual. Let's be real, as we have a more automated society, some people are not a positive net value to society. We either let them starve in the street, in which case they will resort to crime to survive, or we pay them to stay out of the way and play video games and do drugs. Some people will do nothing, but others will go to school, or write books, or start a lawn car service that provides income in the summer and
I agree the children issue is complicated. I would say a good solution is not provide any allowance to a child under 18, or 16, or whatever arbitrary limit you set, but make school lunches free for all (if we have UBI already, why not?). UBI wouldn't disregard social services.
Again I say ignore their behavior. I'm all about giving people opportunity, not controlling what they do with it. The problem I see now is so many people never have that opportunity, because they never get to build up the safety net to gamble on a job change or school. Even a change in jobs can sometimes result in such a large gap between last and first paycheck some people can't do it.

Comment Re:Basic income (Score 1) 726

Sure, if it offered you a ridiculous income. I would too. But if it was just at the poverty level, maybe enough to have a cheap studio apartment and meals of peanut butter jelly and ramen, I would definitely keep my job. You probably would too. The catch is you have to find that line where it's a good safety net but still desirable and possible to benefit from additional work.

Comment Re:Basic income (Score 5, Insightful) 726

It's pretty simple. You can't make the UBI be comfortable for the 99%. It should be "enough to survive", not $5000/month. Switzerland tried that with a $75K year minimum and it was shot down at the polls in overwhelming numbers. That is way too much money, and the fact that until you find a job that exceeds that you get no benefit means very few people would have incentive to work. Even if I do make more than that, why would I work 40 hour weeks for 48+ weeks a year for a mere few thousand dollars extra? I sure wouldn't.

But let's adjust that, lets give everyone the poverty level. Sure, maybe you can afford rent in a studio, or have a room mate. Maybe you can eat cheap, but you can't buy anything of luxury. Yeah, some people will take that one bedroom studio, ramen, and a bag of pot and an World of Warcraft subscription. Fine, they're out of the way and not committing crime, they weren't motivated to start with and arguably provide little value to society, and now they're out of the way and not resorting to crime for 'easy money'.

But single mom Jane can now afford to go to school and just work part time. Poor orphan kid can go to school when he turns 18, instead of just being dumped on the streets to figure out life on his own because he aged out of the social care for children. Abused uber driver can afford to quit and get a better job. Incredibly smart but poor entreprenuer can afford to take time to build out his idea and make a million dollar business. Yes, these are all hypotheticals, but Finland is testing that right now. (http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/universal-basic-income-finland-ubi-test-scheme-experiment-a7211241.html)

The thing is, a family father trying to provide for his family needs to see benefit from going to work as a janitor. Not everyone can be an engineer, and lets face it at some point even that job will be replaced by automation. Now he gets that UBI, but when he goes to work he still makes his family's life better. Sure, maybe he's taxed at 50%, but he still benefits, so he does a job that nobody else wants to do.

Let's face it, all minimum wage is is a UBI that is only applied to people lucky enough to get jobs, and it encourages companies to not offer some jobs in the first place, or try to automate them away as fast as possible. And then by requiring benefits ONLY to people working over so many hours just ensures they don't let people work over that many hours, and hire 2 people instead of 1. Is it bad to spread the wealth over 2 people instead of 1? Probably not, for the executives of the world. 10 people making $100K is arguably much better than 1 person making $1 million and 9 people starving.

In order to get to a UBI, the first thing we have to accept is that UBI doesn't mean you get everything taken care of. It means you can survive while you try to better yourself, or you can stay out of the way. We already do this with various food stamp, rent assistance, child care credits, and scholarships, but the problem is the beurocratic overhead, stigma, and it's hard to get everything to line up to where you can actually get out of the dependency loop. Yes people do it, but can we make things better? UBI might be a bad answer. Finland will tell us soon. Right now we're stuck in a loop of doing things the way we do them because that's the way we've always done them, and that may not be the right mindset.

Comment Re:Almost called it as an advert (Score 1) 55

I have a OnePlus 3, and I agree, the only reason I upgraded was because I broke my OnePlus One. I truly can't speak to any significant upgrades. The fingerprint sensor is nice. Oxygen OS is a fine alternative to Cyanogen. But the One is still a good enough phone even almost 2 years later. Maybe bad for their business, but great for their customers and they don't explode!

Comment Re:A news? (Score 1) 190

It is true they don't require Google Play Services, that is just an option. They are based on AOSP (Android Open Source Project), which is completely "Google free" (accepting the fact that Android itself is an open sourced Google project). Cyanogen has been commercially released on the OnePlus One with full Google Play Services and has started promoting Microsoft Bing services and Cortana, but nothing tries to prevent you from using the ecosystem of your choice whether that's Bing, Google, Amazon, or pure open source/free.

Comment Re:A news? (Score 2) 190

How is Cyanogen hostile to the Google ecosystem? It's not bundled in due to legal restrictions placed by Google, but it does absolutely nothing to block or inhibit use of it, and in fact nearly all of the guides on Cyanogen's own website includes the steps needed to load the Google ecosystem. Amazon, on the other hand, does make it difficult to add Google Apps, including restrictions on sideloading.

Comment Re:whatever (Score 1) 534

I'm in 2 clubs and 2 volunteer organizations. Guess how 3 of them communicate? Run a business? You probably want to be on Facebook, especially if it's any kind of recreation business. E-mail groups? Most people don't read their e-mail, and it's HORRIBLE for conversation. A forum on a website? Great, have that, but now I have to fight spam bots and nobody EVER remembers their damn username or password. Using a third party hosted forum that deals with a lot of that for me? Still ads. Even on a private server, I use facebook and google authentication. It fights most of the spam and deals with password issues for me.

And you're right, a lot of my friends aren't friends that would come bail me out of jail or help me move, but a lot of them would offer me a couch if I was traveling through their area, and have when I posted my travels. I wound up in another country and get a message from an old "friend" as you would say that he is also there that same week. Haven't seen each other in 10 years, probably never would have met again in our lives but because of Facebook we ended up meeting for dinner and having a great time.

I know it's not popular to like Facebook, but it doesn't have to be just political BS and farmville. Facebook actually offers pretty good tools to tune it to what you want it to be, so just like in life you can either whine and moan about what's dealt to you, or you can put in a little effort and make it more to your liking.

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