Paul Niehaus founder of GiveDirectly will be doing an AMA on reddit regarding the UBI trial they are launching and all things UBI May 31st at 12pm EDT. You can sign up through the groups facebook page.

There's also a referendum in Switzerland June 5th. The subject is getting some traction

The UBI should be simple to pay out. The median rent of the city. Thus if apartments average $3200 a month, the city owes you as a fine $38400 a year due to the violence and damages they are doing on you. They owe you, not the other way around. If the city allows you to live on a tent, then they only owe you the cost to rent the equal land space for the tent.

Most liberal cities have building permits and even limit the size of homes to prevent people from living cheaply. They collect the most money that way to feed the drivers of the mayor.

I exist, therefore the government and its people owe me money. Every month. All the time. Regardless. **rolls eyes**

You know as well as anyone that people being too psychologically devastated to understand what's causing them stress and anxiety doesn't mean it's impact is any less real.


If you don't think that a couple of traumatic events in your early developmental years couldn't have left you in such a compromised state where you would need this kind of assistance just to maintain the will to live you're even dumber than the rest of your posts have made you look.

Oh Im sorry, is that a shock to you?
That there're droves of white collar workers who're plundering society who've been given an air of legitimacy by crap government with crap policies?

People should have NO RESERVATIONS WHATSOEVER about taking advantage of every piece of government assistance that they qualify for, and then some.

+1

Might be a good spot to note that the government currently spends 15-20k a year per person and people are born with 70k in debt to the government.

That, and the fact that all the technology and infrastructure we take for granted came from the blood, sweat and tears of generations of people doing back breaking labor for long hours and little pay.

But I guess they weren't as intelligent as him so they must have deserved it.

FYP

I think the idea deserves greater consideration and I'm glad it's going to run in a pilot in Finland next year.

Also, despite it being slated here as a purely Socialist invention it has also had significant support from parts of the Right - it seems to be the centrists who have trouble imagining alternatives to the current expensive, unfair and broken welfare model.

OH **** WADDUP

http://winnipeg2016.liberal.ca/polic...inimum-income/

What in the world makes you think that people would do any job for $5 an hour if they had a free $15k a year? The value of unskilled labor would be much higher than that under that system.

It will likely become a real issue after self driving cars eviscerate the work force. Beyond that, it's basically just a matter of time until machines eliminate enough jobs that this is the only real option.

I felt this way for about 43 years. Hard ass capitalist conservative. The last few years though? There is just less and less to do in America. What happens when the paradigm breaks down?

It is not just the ****ty jobs either. I was at the Chicago Board of Trade for many years. There were hundreds of high six figure earners, each with a pretty well paid clerk, a couple of clerks manning the phones and calling in orders, and runners to get the paper from the phone to the pit making minimum wage and learning the business. After work the whole circus would spill out onto the street and stream into the bars and restaurants to eat and drink off the day's stress. The waiters and bar girls would go home with pockets full of cash. The hookers would ply their trade and go shopping the next afternoon. On Tuesday, the bookies would settle up from the weekend, and the poker games would get started.

It's all gone. Just the whirr of huge computers as they match orders in the book, and money spinning throughout the world, all sticking in the pockets of the chosen few.

I am not naive. The money has always gone to the chosen "few" in every human endeavor. The problem is that the "few" get "fewer" every year.

No, people futures can be used for speculation but it can also save oil companies. They can sell oil at higher future prices and possibly save their firm. The whirr of computers saves them costs, it saves them thousands. The money they save is passed on to lower fuel prices. Your job as a trader was a B.S. job. it skimmed money out of real world capitalists and was used to support drug, hooker, and other illegal activities. In the mean time poker grew, it got a new client the oil workers.

The whole idea of Ayn Rand, is that the individual is a noble being. Someone important. Someone with ingenuity and reason to get by in the world on their own. If given land, water, trade, and tools in a free society they can make wealth, art, and knowledge on their own.

Liberals deny people land, water, trade, and tools for the sole reason they do not want to work. There goal is to use Attila to take and hurt people into submission. They believe the poor are too dumb to work on their own and need government to keep poor people alive or they will remain poor forever because they have no skills.

Why can't the ghetto kid get a job or farm the fields? The reason is always liberals democrats and fake conservative republicans. The republicans on Fox are mostly fake sons-of-bitches. They believe public schools are good and vouchers are bad. Basically they are the top middle class and just don't want to pay taxes. They don't give a sheeet about anything except keeping their land and power. Same with most of Ayn Rand followers.

Most California liberals don't even want to think schools are B.s., government is b.s., Calpers is b.s., they just want to get their government pension and move to Florida or Nevada to avoid taxes.

SqredII:

What you have described happening in your [former?] profession is not an isolated case - it's going to increasingly happen in more and more businesses and industries. Ginni Rometty, the CEO of IBM, is quoted in the current issue of Fortune magazine stating that all businesses are now in the "cognitive intelligence" era where intelligent machines will help "increase efficiencies" - presumably by decreasing the need for manual [human] labor. (Ms. Rometty specifically cited the healthcare industry as a prime example of where these "efficiencies" can be realized.) Don't think you're safe from being automated out of work just because you went to college and got a degree. If your job involves any type of repetitive task that you do on a daily basis, especially "thinking", you're in danger of being redundant. Forty or fifty years ago chess masters and poker players laughed at the prospect of a machine ever "playing" chess (or poker) as well as the best human players. Nobody's laughing now.

This is why Bill Gross is advocating for a UBI. He clearly sees what is going to happen once enough people have lost their jobs. Machines may "save" labor costs, but how many of these robots are going to buy new cars or new houses? What happens to the economy when large segments of the population can no longer afford to buy what these machines are making? I have a feeling even "the few" will eventually come around to seeing the benefits of a universal basic income. They'll come to view the UBI the same way Wal Mart views food stamps and the WIC program - it's good for business.

Even Bill Gates, the founder of Microsoft and the world's richest or second richest man, (definitely one of "the few"), says that AI is going to change the world.

https://news.slashdot.org/story/16/0...the-holy-grail

While Mr. Gates doesn't go into great detail as to what will be done with all the people who are automated out of their jobs, he does acknowledge that this is a problem that needs to be studied, so even the world's richest man understands what Bill Gross is talking about.

This is spot on. I used the financial markets as a microcosm of the problem, because it spot lights that even, and perhaps especially, highly skilled and essential activities are currently threatened by technology and innovation. It is impossible to stop the tide of lower cost, more effective ways of getting things done. However, the current rapidity of these advances is changing the debate.

To respond to a previous poster who called my job B.S. and basically corrupt, it did provide a valuable service. Our markets were used by any major corporation or bank you care to name to minimize price risk, provide market stability, increase lending by making interest rate changes less threatening.....I could go on and on. Basically we did the same thing that the computer matching systems and algorithms do now, just at a slower pace and at a higher cost. No doubt, people have a more liquid, cheaper to access, and way more transparent market to transact in since automation. That is the way progress works, just like the Combine and Tractor put a lot of field hands out of work. You can't stop it.

Industries have always died out and its workers had to transition into something else. My point, and Gross's and Gates', is that there are going to be less and less fields to transition into. As a nation we will need to address these issues a lot more seriously than we have until now. UBI and mandatory sterilization are going to be on the table relatively soon, now matter how much the offend our "work ethic" and traditional values mentality

Because that guy called my old industry just a den of drug dealers, pimps, and gamblers I am feeling a little defensive. To counter that I'll make an outrageous claim, if the CDS, CDO, and mortgage backed securities were traded and cleared at the CBOT and MERC there probably wouldn't have been a financial crisis in 2008. We mark to market every day at the end of our shift. Whatever final traded price was printed, accounts were settled in real time, and funds were exchanged reflecting the market price IN CASH. If you couldn't meet your cash obligation at the end of the day, your account was liquidated, and you were out of business. PERIOD. None of this, hey, I sold you something, you carry it on your books at X in the back office, even though it is worth only Y. Then we can figure out what reality is later. Do people realize how many banks, hedge funds, and corporations carried assets on their books that they positively knew there was no real market for at the 'stated' price? We played for and settled in CASH, all day and every day.

Comparing the big banks and unregulated swap market to the CBOT is like comparing Full Tilt to Stars (weak analogy but kind of accurate). Like Tilt, the banks just kept a game going that wasn't based on market reality until the music stopped. Our music stopped every day at 4:00, and if you didn't have real cash or asset equivalent, you didn't get to dance tomorrow.

Swiss vote on it today. It's looking like a NO according to the polls.

the Swiss proposal is for hilarious €2,000/month

I just did a Google search on "2008 Financial Crisis: Winners and Losers" and wasn't surprised to learn that the biggest winners from all that chaos were the small handful of prescient "investors" who had the foresight (and guts) to short firms that bet big on the subprime mortgage market. A few of those hearty individuals (literally) made billions by betting against the crowd. (I need to read Michael Lewis's book "The Big Short" for a more comprehensive picture of how these savants saw what was coming.)

It occurs to me that if Bill Gross is correct in his prediction that the relentless advance of technology and automation will inevitably lead to massive job loss, at some point this "trend" will begin adversely affecting the overall economy. As more jobs disappear, probably forever, there should be an inevitable slowing of growth and GDP due to a drop in demand. (If increasing numbers of people are losing their jobs, they'll be cutting back on spending - at a minimum.)

There are already signs and indications that this is starting to happen. Last week the census bureau announced that, for the first time in history, more young people are choosing to stay at home - continuing to live with their parents - rather than taking out a mortgage and buying their own homes. I suppose one might argue that this trend is temporary and millennials will resume home buying as soon as the economy recovers. The thing though is that the economy has been "recovering" for eight years. New homes will not become more affordable once the Government resumes raising interest rates. So when does a "trend" become the new normal? (Japan has been experiencing a "lost decade" ever since the late 1980's when their real estate and stock market bubble burst. I remember reading stories in magazines like Fortune and Newsweek, circa mid-1980's, predicting that Japan was on its way to becoming the world's dominant economic power. A prominent Japanese politician even wrote a book predicting that Japan would surpass the USA in terms of GDP - and then the bottom fell out ... Sound familiar?)

The discussion of a UBI won't get serious, especially here in the United States, until unemployment in the professions, (i.e. lawyers, accountants, financial advisors, health care workers, truck drivers - put out of work thanks to "autonomous" [driverless] vehicles), all begin losing their jobs. (I forgot to mention the approximately 3.9 million restaurant workers Wendy's, McDonald's, and all the major restaurant chains want to replace with $35,000.00 robots.) The job losses are going to occur - the only question is how many and which industries will be devastated?

Could a permanent unemployment rate of 10-20 percent be the reality in another 5-10 years - if not sooner? If you're an investor trying to profit from this gloomy scenario, how do you place your [financial] bets? Who profits in the absence of a UBI?

Does not get you much in Switzerland.

Place is ridic expensive.

Think its possible to hypothesise that its hurting it now as we speak.

The global economy is having a massive problem stimulating aggregate demand, IRs are at record lows and even negative yet consumers are not spending and consuming at anything like the levels which one would assume would accompany such IRs given historical trends.

Maybe automation pressure on wages has something to do with this.

Looks like it got CRUSHED

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-36454060

Hey look, the vast majority don't want people to get something for nothing. News at 11.

They already have generous benefits.