Interesting Links for 30-11-2015
Nov. 30th, 2015 12:00 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
andrewducker- How have I never heard of the Lac Manicouagan impact crater before? It's amazing!
- Chris Hadfield meets Randall Munroe
- Turns out what I needed this afternoon was Shake It Off: Disney Style
- Camerons Plan for Isis in Syria (answered in 43 key points in the FT)
- Had a prophecy about your child/kingdom? Here's how to cope with it well
- If you want to say "Thank you", don't say "Sorry".
- How Plastic Injection Molding works, and what makes LEGO design so awesome.
- Rimming: what does ass taste like? (A question I'd wondered since, well, Queer as Folk in 1999)
- Why hacker culture is changing (and why it must continue to do so)
- Telling managers to be meritocratic makes them pay men more than women
- Doctor Who writer Steven Moffat denies he has made show more misogynist
- Your Brain on Poverty: Why Poor People Seem to Make Bad Decisions
- Yet another argument for a guaranteed income to remove the stress.
- A Historic Day for the World of Competitive Rubik’s Cube Solving
- Monogamy reduces major social problems of polygamist cultures
- Toyota Unintended Acceleration and the Big Bowl of Spaghetti Code
- Hidden Gems of the Steam Sale 2015 (20 games worth checking out, for a dollar or less)
- The secret to a conflict-proof relationship? Feeling like your partner understands you
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no subject
Date: 2015-12-06 04:18 am (UTC)That's a good argument for a UBI. Knowing the basics of survival are taken care of would make long-term planning worth bothering with.
You mustn't see a UBI as just about the poor though - it'd be a major restructuring of an economy.
Consider an economy that has a minimum wage, but does away with it after introducing a UBI, the UBI being set at what the minimum wage was. Those with jobs at what the minimum wage was could have their pay halved and thus have an income (before tax) that's one and a half times what it was before. Meanwhile, their employers have just halved their wages bill.
Which makes it obvious that taxation is going to need a major overhaul.
Those kinds of effects are what makes a UBI so revolutionary and it's why we won't know how to make such an economy work other than by trial and error.
As changing to a UBI would be a good time to simplify taxation, moving to a flat-tax (if the economy's not already on it) would be sensible, with the UBI being set at x% of the last quarter's tax-take. Thus only two numbers to adjust to try and get things balanced to the voters' satisfaction. (And possibly do away with sales tax, if you have one. In the digital age, they screw things up when trying to compete with consumers buying direct from overseas, never mind that they're unduly hard on the poor as well.)
Oh, and none of that 'companies are people too' rubbish. In other words, no UBI for companies or corporations! :)
no subject
Date: 2015-12-06 11:33 am (UTC)Setting a guaranteed income at, say, 30% of median income, and setting a flat income tax around 45% would do a pretty good job (from some playing with Excel several years ago).
For a really good piece on how to make it work though, I recommend:
https://www.jrf.org.uk/report/could-citizens-income-work
Or waiting to see how Finland manages:
http://qz.com/566702/finland-plans-to-give-every-citizen-a-basic-income-of-800-euros-a-month/