So because there are unsolvable problems, one should not solve the solvable ones? What kind of defeatist crap is that?
Those are problems the city council could make incremental progress on. And the benefit of that incremental progress would be, in my estimation, vastly greater any benefit from ink cartridges. Plus they're problems squarely in the purview of city councils.
TL;DR: City council: stick to your knitting. Don't get distracted.
That doesn't track. By that logic, a UBI would provide disincentive for ANYONE to work.
Right, it definitely will do that. By raising all incomes, UBI reduces the marginal value (you value the first dollar you earn much more than the 100,000th) of all dollars earned. Some number of people will decide that they value their time more than low income jobs and will reduce their hours. I don't remember exactly but I think the UBI experiments we've tried showed this does happen but don't remember the details.
What the Universal part also does is avoid depressing the marginal value of work. Today, you work and extra hour, get and extra $X in income, but reduce that income by $Y in reduced benefits. In pathological cases, $Y is greater than $X, and that's the poverty trap. But even if $X > $Y, ($X - $Y) might not be enough to make the extra hour worth it. With UBI, $Y is $0 so it doesn't have this effect. I'm sure someone who actually took Econ 101 (read: "not me") could put this into math using supply, demand, floors, and rates.
How large these effects are is the trillion dollar question.
What I like about this proposal is (a) it's converting a bad welfare system to a less bad one and (b) isn't trying to be Lake Wobegon, with everyone's income above average. I find that much more reasonable than most proposals.
They ban everything.
Having solved the city budget, homelessness, pollution, traffic congestion, water availability and quality, and the public education system, now is a fine time to deal with a trivial waste disposal problem.
Sheesh. Well, I suppose at least it keeps them from causing more trouble elsewhere. Maybe it's the least harmful thing the city council can work on.
Good.
The fact that they make you buy a whole new cartridge just because you ran out of toner, or out of ink, is nothing but a money grab by the manufacturers.
The rationale I heard when I worked at HP was the print head wears out as you print. Spitting out ink erodes the very tiny channels. If you use a print head for long enough, print quality suffers. Anyway, that's why HP went with integrated cartridges and print heads, because when the ink ran out, the print head was worn out too.
It's the same argument Apple uses for a closed ecosystem: "we're ensuring a good customer experience."
Other vendors did not merge the cartridge and print head. I have no idea what vendors do now and have no idea whether that argument still (or ever) holds water.
In with another.
I was in a DevOps position at my previous employer. We were running around like maniacs getting ready to comply with the old rules.
It's been a few years. I wonder if they ever got it squared away...
$500/month (well, $600 now). Get a job if you want to live in an expensive area or not have roommates.
Eliminate most other forms of welfare. This actually funds the lion's share of it. Biggest exemption would be medical, because that's too uneven of an expense.
Flatten the tax brackets to tax most of the UBI back from people actually working or otherwise earning money. IE no 10% or 12% brackets. Remember, everybody is $6-7.2k ahead of the game income wise, before we start adding wage income....
This is a quite reasonable proposal. I could nit-pick every plank but in general, not a bad start.
Given the level of US debt, I don't think we're in the position to create an investment trust fund. I wouldn't trust politicians to (a) not raid it and (b) invest it for return rather than political gain. That was the stated intent of the SS trust fund and we're about to see the wheels fall off that plan.
Your biggest sticking point will be $600/month. That's $28k/year for a family of four, which is below the official poverty line (about $32k). I think that's fine, that means with even the least paying job, you're technically out of poverty and that's all I would want a UBI to shoot for.
Mind you, I do not support this idea. I just think what you've outlined is the best of a lot of bad ideas.
And I have yet to see anyone verifiably fired because of "AI" - that is - fired and their job replaced by the LLM.
Anyone having specific examples?
A bunch of people I know (including me) got laid off so my ex-employer could shift jobs to producing AI gear. Does that count?
It doesn't need to be that direct. I'd also expect to see job growth and hiring to slow. It's tough getting a job as an entry level software engineer right now and most people think that's related: an AI is a pretty good replacement for a new college grad.
But I don't think you're going to be correct permanently. Unless we do the Amish thing we are going to see large numbers of people without any useful or more specifically profitable work for them to do.
That's the thing. There are any number of other technological changes which occurred in the past for which you could make the same prediction. You could have quite reasonably predicted that the advent of tractors and mechanized farming would put millions of farmers out of work. In fact, it did. And yet we don't have bands of roving unemployed farmers ravaging the hills.
Same thing with computers. One would have predicted armies of unemployable secretaries, typists, and office clerks and yet we do not. Explain to me why we think AI is different.
Julian Simon was correct to say humans are the ultimate resource. We're also the ultimate consumers. I'm quite confident we'll find new things to want and new jobs to satisfy those wants.
Any idiot can type into ChatGPT "write me code to do X". Most idiots wouldn't be able to debug the resulting mess particularly if its a non toy language such as C++.
True. The skill is being to articulate what X is.
I was musing on this yesterday. I can write assembly code. I don't now, I use a compiler. I used to double check the assembly on occasion too, now I trust the tooling.
I'm at the point where I'm reasonably confident that if I carefully construct a prompt, I'll get code which is pretty close to what I want. Yes, I still review it. I also trust the AI to do things like "Verify the HOST_IP setting is being carried through from the CLI through these services to this piece of embedded code over here". Yes, I could do that by hand but it's much, much faster and comprehensive having the AI do it.
I haven't dared trying "refactor this code base to separate the GUI, CLI, and logic into a layered set of reusable components", which this code base desperately needs. A hardware engineer (who I greatly respect) didn't do such a great job when writing this.
The theory behind UBI that I've heard is that it saves on administrative procedures.
The other big advantage of a truly universal UBI, universal meaning literally everyone gets paid, is it avoids disincentives to find work. If you lose your unemployment by getting a job, that's a big disincentive, particularly if the new wage is close to the unemployment benefit.
IIRC, there was research showing that a large number of people found jobs right as their unemployment was ending. I would be surprised if this wasn't the case.
...and robots and the Internet and personal computers and the Green revolution and shipping containers and mechanization of agriculture and internal combustion engines and railroads and canals and horse collars and on and on and on.
You could use any revolutionary productivity improvement as justification for UBI. But we've been over this ground uncountable times in
They originally thought she was 25 to 35, and she's 58.
Maybe she was just well preserved or had some work done.
They originally thought it was an accident, and now think it is murder...
Well, I'm glad they sorted it out. Jack Klugman would be proud. Falls off cliffs do happen so that wasn't a crazy conclusion.
I'm curious though: what exactly did they find to indicate homicide? I wonder what evidence was.
I'm confused - what are local businesses entitled to?
If I open a coffee shop in an up and coming neighborhood, the neighborhood was ascending before my shop opened...if you want to profit from increasing property values, you have to OWN property, not rent it.
Well, if I understand the argument, the property values are going up because the coffee shop opened. They may have been going up beforehand but the growth continued because of the added flair of having hip coffee joints in walking distance.
I can see their point: I put in the work to open a coffee bar and can only make so much from it (because competition from other coffee stores prevents me from charging over $X for a latte). OTOH, the homeowners and landlords don't have the same constraint so they make much more money out of the deal.
While I'm somewhat sympathetic with the issue, I'm not sure what to do about it. Rising property tax rates in certain hip neighborhoods and giving the extra revenue to shop owners doesn't seem like a great long term plan. I think it's just the nature of operating a business. You'll create a lot of value you can't capture. You have to instead go into the enterprise understanding you can only capture what you can capture and if that's not good enough, don't start.
Businesses are always trying to capture more of the value they create. Problem is, successful businesses virtually always capture only a tiny fraction of it.
There are some studies, for which I do not have citations, which estimate that entrepreneurs capture something in the low single digits of the value they create. Steve Jobs was a zillionaire but a billion people got phones which are way more valuable to them than what they paid. Jobs and Apple only skimmed of a tiny portion of that value.
We often grouse about negative externalities in economies, things like pollution and crowding. We rarely talk about the positive externalities. Raising neighborhood property values is one of them.
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