371–380 of 1001 posts
Gamify budgeting. I'm on a low income (UK sort-of disability benefits) and I've got a budget set up, but I don't set aside anything. I should, and I should be able to.
I'm more than happy to describe my experiences of claiming "employment and support allowance (work related activity group)" (and the transition from Incapacity benefit to ESA-WRAG; and the difficulties of working while on this benefit.) AMAA.
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Why not have startups have their employees work from home? Much simpler and easier to implement solution. I don't have the obsession of wanting to live in a city but I'm aware most people I know who don't have that obsession either still have to because their bosses does not let them work from home. If you only have to come in once a month or less you can live in a region where housing is affordable; I could buy a li…
Better remote work technologies would certainly help. For now, most tech companies have found that working face to face is really vital.
I do have a few very specific, big concern though:
>We're open to doing this in either one geographic area, or nationally distributed.
In order for this research to having meaning, we would need to see how the costs of things, especially real estate prices are impacted. One argument against basic income is that it would inflate the prices of basic goods and provide no real benefit. It would be worth spending a lot to figure that out.
Also...
> 50 years from now, I think it will seem ridiculous that we used fear of not being able to eat as a way to motivate people.
I love this statement, but the need to eat has been driving human beings for a very long time. It would be a truly profound statement if we could prove this.
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This is a great list! I will, selfishly, riff on you 6th point to add: * Modern logistics-driven solutions for inexpensive high-quality elder care. If working this sort of thing sounds interesting to anyone then check out hometeamcare.com and ping me. We're hiring for basically every role in the company. It's a very interesting business!
Both child and elder care are very labor intensive (assuming you don't want to just warehouse bodies). Perhaps robotics with fantastic AI will improve things in the future, but I'm skeptical.
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I wonder if we are thinking about the housing cost problem properly. I live in NYC and there are a lot of affordable options. That's certainly not the case about the most desirable locations. But ipso facto those locations will continue going up in price. Perhaps the problem is not so much about housing cost but transportation and access to services (eg uber, doordash), which seem to be advancing and making a lot of…
I think it's absurd that there are millions of kitchens in NYC. There is a project in my old town - Syracuse - that I think has a lot of benefits: http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/11/coliving... It's kind of a modern take on boarding houses. Actually, I think that the optimal situation is much closer to a boarding house. Take 10-15 units, remove the kitchen and laundry entirely. Use the savings to pay…
In many apartment buildings in southeast asia (especially those that cater to foreigners/wealthy immigrants) there'll frequently be a shop and a small restaurant at the first level that mostly caters to the people who live in the building. No reason we couldn't have something like that here, though admittedly the cost of running both those types of services are probably pretty high given regulations. Expect a lot of politicking at the condo boards though.
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Why would there be a gap in your resume? Just because you receive a basic income doesn't mean you won't work. I suppose there will be some who would minimize their lifestyle to live off of the basic income but I suspect many will continue to earn far more.
If it's only 5 years you will feel pressured to find a conventional job that would look good to whoever would be reading your resume if/when you apply for a new job after the experiment is over. If it was guaranteed for life you might do other stuff, not necessarily non-income-producing, but how it would look to HR would be irrelevant.
Five years is a long enough time to let you do whatever you're going to decide to do with the first part, and then work on recovering employability/resume credibility/whatever with the last part. An interesting question would be how peoples' behavior changes through the five years, though...
* Various industries (TV, Print, Social Media) have effectively offered a product with complex infrastructure to the public for low or no cost by using advertisers to subsidize it. Could this be done with food or housing? Would a farm running on self-driving tractors and drones be able to feed people w/ ad-subsidized food for free?
* Lots of food gets thrown away because it's cheaper to ship it to the dump than to ship it safely to starving people. A startup could develop automation and logistics to make the costs competitive.
* Divorce rates would seem to indicate that the traditional family is not the most economically or emotionally optimum method of living/raising children. This may simply be a side-effect of increasing lifespans (i.e. 100 years ago, the average marriage lasted 15 years before a spouse died). A legal startup that offers tools for building new types of non-conventional families to optimize things like economic standing, academic performance of children, or changing employment environments.
* Micro-businesses in a box. Many businesses couple some talent or skill (e.g. software engineering, music, plumbing, creative writing) with administration (i.e. legal, marketing, accounting, invoicing, etc). Lots of startups offer to automate portions of administration, but a truly turn-key solution would allow a customer to simply input their skill, and the administration would happen automatically.
* Crowd-funding life.
----An apartment building with 20 units costs $1mm to build. An affluent person goes to the bank and puts $300k down to build it, and leverages the other $800k. Why can't 20 families each invest $15k and pay a group mortgage instead of rent?
----A single banana costs $.40. At scale, a banana is $.10. Why can't a thousand families buy all their bananas for the year through an intermediary handling the cash flow? Could they buy all their food this way and drive prices down?
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I wonder if we are thinking about the housing cost problem properly. I live in NYC and there are a lot of affordable options. That's certainly not the case about the most desirable locations. But ipso facto those locations will continue going up in price. Perhaps the problem is not so much about housing cost but transportation and access to services (eg uber, doordash), which seem to be advancing and making a lot of…
I think it's absurd that there are millions of kitchens in NYC. There is a project in my old town - Syracuse - that I think has a lot of benefits: http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/11/coliving... It's kind of a modern take on boarding houses. Actually, I think that the optimal situation is much closer to a boarding house. Take 10-15 units, remove the kitchen and laundry entirely. Use the savings to pay…
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There's a more trivial alternative to "equally credible alternatives to university" - just ban education based discrimination. Same way US so nicely enforces regarding race or martial status. Make it illegal to ask. Simple change with 100% guaranteed positive outcome.
just ban education based discrimination I am not sure I understand this. If you are going to a doctor, you would want to make sure she is qualified, isn't it? And the only way (currently at least) to make sure is that degree that proves she knows what she is doing. Of course this doesn't apply to all professions.
In terms of education there are two options. Ban mentioning degrees only credentials, or ban mentioning school names which deflates the ivy name recognition. In both cases schools would need to focus on education not name recognition.