I think both Slate and Telos will be failures. They will be too expensive to make economic sense for people, as opposed to businesses, to buy over a more conventional full-size half ton pickup.
In some ways the massive online interest is proof, because most people outside of pickup truck forums who would talk it up have neither experience nor use for pickups. They are simply never going to buy any pickup truck-shaped vehicle and so are irrelevant to commercial success.
All the participants in those pilot programs *know* they are in a time-limited pilot programs and that in a handful of years the money will dry up. This is a major flaw in all UBI studies which make them all but useless.
It will take 15 or 20 years before any UBI could be considered permanent enough for a majority of people to change their work habits.
People’s habits are not usually driven by such long term thinking, but I think there’s a more fundamental thing you’re missing: People will continue to work as long as there is an advantage to working. In any well designed UBI system, those who are on UBI and continue to work will make more money than those on UBI alone, so most people will continue to work.
Not to mention that most people enjoy working as it gives them a sense of purpose.
I agree and disagree with you. These studies should be done with guaranteed payments for life. Otherwise it is just not representative.
I do believe that people would still work though. Personally I would like to do a useful job with real benefit to society, but the low pay makes it not feasible. I would still want to work part time at least instead of not at all.
In most cases every residential system is getting payment rates at least that good.
The problem is that wH-for-wH doesn't take into account distribution costs, which is most of the residential cost of electricity, and that a wH at noon in July doesn't cost the same to generate as a wH at 2am in February.
For most jurisdictions you can look up the large industrial rates to find the wholesale energy rates. Residential solar is worth about half of that 'reliable' electricity rate.
Even beyond mutual exhaustion is housework. When both partners works outside the home, they still have to do the housework when they get home or on the weekend. Previously that would have been the job of the one staying at home.
The 20-ish hours a week needed for domestic chores has to come from somewhere.
Linux kernel drivers often end up being GPL'd, but out of tree. This is because Linux releases many very useful (and sometimes critical to the use-case!) functions behind a GPL-license API restriction. This is EXPORT_SYMBOL_GPL.
Are you sure this is exactly what it means? You're basically saying that if I start hacking on a driver that consumes such an API tonight, I must release it as GPL somewhere publicly the moment I start consuming the API? I can't even work on it for a bit privately?
I'm surprised if so, because usually these sorts of licenses only apply if you're redistributing the code, not if you're just using it privately.
In my experience in corporate environments, that ability to forward to new participants with most of the context is really useful. If few people are going to read the history anyways, then in my opinion this edge case is valuable enough to tip in the scales.
I agree the difficulty quoting sucks, but that's mostly because of the switch from top posting to bottom posting. When people copy-and-paste the bit they are replying to and stay in the top posting paradigm things aren't so bad.
According to this article, a rather weak argument about people not liking to wake up before sunrise based on questionable correlation of commute times to sunrise times, ignoring factors such as average commute lengths, dominant (historical) industries, effective natural light at different times in modern housing.
From that it makes an (incorrect) assumption about the value of AM sunlight over PM sunlight and declares that all-year DST is pointless.
In my opinion the only argument against all-year DST which holds any water at all, and even then not much, is the concern about kids going to school in the dark. However, since many places don't have enough winter daylight to go around, trade-offs need to be made and kids are probably better off on-net having daylight time during their free time instead of while eating their toast inside and commuting to school.
Kids being forced to start school in basically the middle of the night is another especially American phenomenon that requires a separate solution, I feel.
I think the hypothesis was more true in the past, but mostly because both the necessary dependencies it is based on are less true today than in the past, and the products and services are more complex today.
Back when anybody could start building furniture the cost of entry was low and competition high. Switching costs were also low.
The cost of entry for a smartphone which is truly different are astronomical, many previously unregulated products are now strictly regulated, so costs of entry is no longer low and therefore competition is also low. For many services like software switching costs are very high. Firms need to be large to produce the complex products which introduces internal inefficiencies which are hard to avoid.
I think the author is missing the forest for the trees when they try to construct a taxonomy of 'elites'.
Firstly, there is little reason to believe that per-capita is the correct way to think about surplus elites. It's just as plausible that there is an absolute threshold above which the surplus meet together in, for example, the student union building and start causing problems.
Secondly,
> First, virtually all of the people who fail to attain their dream jobs can secure perfectly decent employment in some other line of work.
It's easy to say there's no surplus in any particular sub-group because they can always go to some other sub-group. But if most acceptable sub-groups are 'full', then it's not possible in general. Further, as a first approximation the 30% getting college degrees are the top 30% generally so it's not surprising that they could find _a_ job. That job being in some other line of work might be a problem, especially if it's several steps down from what they've believed they were owed all their life.
To use the article's example, a PhD in History may never have been likely to result in becoming a working historian, but it may have led to managing a factory or branch office. It's pretty obvious that is no longer true and it's likely that the wider job prospects of a History PhD holder has declined.
Further, the article foolishly equates becoming an actor or poet with academic achievement or business success. That entirely ignores that it's been well known forever that life success as an actor or poet is rare. The same cannot be said about getting a PhD.
Harberger taxes seem like a spherical cow solution.
It works in abstract economic theory, but encounters serious problems when you introduce pragmatic complications like cash-flow, malicious actors, non-rational actors, asymmetric value, transaction costs, lumpy probability distributions, and other things. Fixes to those various problems can be bolted on, but the end result loses much of the theoretical advantages which made Harberger taxes appealing in the first place.
In some ways the massive online interest is proof, because most people outside of pickup truck forums who would talk it up have neither experience nor use for pickups. They are simply never going to buy any pickup truck-shaped vehicle and so are irrelevant to commercial success.