Your comment has officially won the interwebs for the next 15.75 hours. Congratulations Sir. Your prize is a lovely ingestible diagnostic device.

Yet, that's not always true. My admittedly anecdotal evidence -- me not being dead now.

Now you're just being Pontius.

I do. For a lot of money.

And another thing it does is remove the disincentives to work that exist in the current system. $10,000 may keep you off the streets, but it is definitely not enough to actually live on, so you want more money, so you find work. And you still get to keep the $10,000.

You're not making it up -- you and the Swiss seem to just be getting it wrong. Of course, paying each person to have a heartbeat will increase the money supply and devalue a currency by increasing is quantity and velocity of movement, but a stipend, as free as possible from bureaucratic constraints, will not cause a society not to work. Welfare INSTEAD of work does.

No. To each of your points, quantitatively, no. Perhaps not yet, but at some point, a basic income is likely to become the norm. If you are worried about low wage earners quitting jobs you are just mistaken, a worker gets the free money IN ADDITION to his/her job. Having and working at a job just gets you more, simply and without bureaucracy, which is the point. Work still has its benefits pecuniary and otherwise, though there might no longer be a minimum wage for it. Incentivization does not go away. Economists as conservative as Hayek and Freidman espoused this idea (both of whom taught at Chicago, where I graduated in Economics.) This is an idea which may fail now, for many reasons. But it a concept that will eventually succeed. Or we won't

They've repeatedly tried to popularize Squirrel's Law, but it always gets off to a Rocky start.

So, umm.. where did you all learn sarcasm?

Considering how much you say MOOOO, perhaps it's you that is the cow.

Umm.. you do realize that by far the greatest amount of energy available to us on the planet at our current level of technology does, quite literally, fall out of the sky in the form of EMR. The cost of using it, which I think is what you were getting at, is another matter.

I think you mean "atomic clock", not "nuclear clock", since the standards rely on the electronic transition frequency of atoms in standardized environmental conditions (e.g., temperature.)

FUCK THEM! Take you're juiced up car and run them down if you see them crossing the street, and send the company a bill for any damages their mangled bodies cause to your car when you hit them. Streisand effect anyone?

Good point, and possibly a correct one (until I get my time machine's glitches fixed I can't offer a firm answer.) But the Earth (and by that I mean us) was a bit bit lucky. Too many collisions, life can't take hold. Too few, and likely the same result, but for different reasons, And we're "lucky" that one relatively recent collision did happen, perhaps some intelligent descendants of velociraptors might be having this discussion instead of us fragile mammals.

And if the gravitational force of accreting Jupiter did not pul other bodies out of collisive orbits, in which case we wouldn't exist to talk about this, or anything else.