Japan doesn't have UBI, but it's welfare system is extremely expansive as Article 25 of the Constitution guarantees a minimum standard of living through livelihood, housing, education, and medical assistance.
Additonally, Japan has spent decades thinking about this eventuality (at least since the 1970s), which is why Japan worked on the "Flying Geese" paradigm where Japanese public-private ventures would end up become major capital stake holders across Asia, the US, and Europe.
Taiwan (1960s onwards), South Korea (1970s onwards), and China (1980s onwards), and investments by what are now Master Trust Bank, Trust & Custody Services Bank, JTSB, and SoftBank.
The problem with UBI is not that people would stop working, it's that the value of whatever amount is given as UBI will drop very quickly due to inflation.
UBI is basically the same as saying "everyone should earn above average".
This is why the Australian 1907 Harvester Decision didn't merely settle on an amount (42 shillings a week) but also included a needs based indexing (support a wife and three children, to feed, house, and clothe them).
This short-term thinking makes me pessimistic about UBI. Everyone's addicted to work despite automation and AI creating less need for work. And thinking we live in a zero-sum game where if someone else is benefiting, it must be hurting them somehow so they must block it. If someone's getting a "handout", they're a lazy bum.
Why would you have to work harder when employers of jobs no one wants to do (for a given wage) have to either increase wages or embrace automation research and development (thereby likely speeding up its systemic adoption and reducing the necessity for manual work even more)?
Where developing countries have vendors on the streets, industrialized nations have vending machines instead, by pure economic and demographic necessity. The existence of an automation tool doesn't imply a human having to work harder somewhere else.
And why do you assume people would sit around doing nothing? I don't think that's a natural thing for most people to do.
How financial and social systems are set up seems to be very much a societal choice, unless it goes against some physical, basic economic or global trade limitation.
I measured my office too, with an Adafruit SCD-30 sensor, it also got to 1500ppm faster than I expected. And it took a long time (12+ minutes with fully open windows) to get it down to an acceptable level again. Certainly compelled me to do that more often.
Surprisingly, i couldn't find any calculator or theoretical approach for estimating this (given room of a certain size, how long does gas need to equilibriate with outside atmospheric composition to within some tolerance, through a hole of certain size)
I wonder if there is a way to integrate this woth home assistant for historical data collection, then use it with other sensors to build a prediction model or some usedul analysis. A bit less principled approach but voild be interesting!
The Gnome desktop environment usability degradation in recent releases (stuff like drag and dropping files and folders between the desktop and the file explorer not working anymore, or not being able to create new empty files with a right click by default without having to create custom templates, being unable to pin apps to the launcher without messing with files, and more) was so horrendous that it felt like actual sabotage was being committed. Who in their right mind would decide to make the UI actively worse?!
I wonder if/when DeepMind will try to tackle the problem of finding potential room temperature, ambient pressure superconductors (and if it can be approached similarly to protein folding)
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