Interestingly Apple spells out their overall revenue (88.3 billions) but not their profits (they only mention profits per share). This is obviously not a coincidence. I wonder why...
Their beef grounds are quite convincing and good, IMO though their extreme leanness gives them away. I have tried the chicken strips product as well and was not impressed. The burgers did well in the toaster oven but when I tried on a grill, possibly due to my mistakenly overcooking them, they were not good. All in all, their products have been the best substitutes that I have tried so far and I like that they are soy-free and contain the ingredients to form a fairly complete protein.
Of course you could just check 'Default to full-screen' next to the little trash can on the bottom right of every new Gmail message (no plugin required)...
As mentioned, you can set wallpaper for cooler interface. Another differentiator is the smart icon. Try input text like "lunch" and you'll see the magic :) ultimately, the app focuses only in basic needs and try not to confuse users
It costs more on a nominal basis but if implemented right nobody will have less money in their pocket even after taxes.
If you didn't earn any money before you will get what was spend on you before + the saved overhead (+ a lot of wasted time and hassle). If you made a lot of money before you will still get a free handout but you also have to pay higher taxes so in the end you should have about the same amount. Obviously it will not be exactly the same for everybody but that doesn't mean it will be less fair.
Besides the saved overhead another major advantage of a bi would be to streamline incentive. Currently it can happen that if you start earning money you will lose a lot of benefits. This can lead to an implicit tax rate of > 50% for very poor people and therefore disincentives work.
I'm completely open to the idea of basic incomes but it seems that if it is possible, it should be easy enough to demonstrate the basic outline. This isn't something that can be discussed without arithmetic.
Excluding dynamic effects (more/fewer people will work), political necessities (program X must be excluded from the chopping block) is OK for a start. Picking and choosing countries is OK for a start.
The first question I would like to see answered is how much it would cost to bring every net recipient's income up to par with the biggest recipients'. Presumably the basic income needs to be set somewhere near this line or we'll have a situation where many current recipients are worse off.
In this Canadian experiment [1], initial results indicated some disincentives, but a lot of data was not analyzed, until many years later. Some of the surprising results include a reduction in medical costs.
Exactly how is it a plus? The goal isn't to make a nominal "unemployment" statistic go down; it's to create valuable things. Your comment makes me think "a receding tide lifts all boats".
People will create what they want to create. For some people growing a nice garden and working on cool stuff around their cheap house will mean more than creating something "more valuable" to society at large. Creation of value or productivity should not be the standard we measure societies by, but instead equity and happiness.
The market doesn't capture and represent all value created by labor. When I call a tow truck to jump start my car, that transaction is captured by the market, but when I call my friend with cables to do the same thing, it is not represented in the GDP. The same thing goes for a lot of "work" that is not done for compensation but adds a great deal of value to community. Basic income recognizes this fact that merely existing as part of a community you are providing some basic value even if you're not paid for that work. I think the critics are right that there are potential cultural problems around entitlement and an unwillingness to contribute in any form, but I'm more optimistic about human nature.
Are you planning to open source some or all of the code of your site etc.? Was thinking about a similar service in my country (Germany) and that would obviously help a lot.
Hey BvS, Rey from One Degree here. We definitely are thinking about open-sourcing the code so that it can be available anywhere/everywhere. We don't have the capacity to do that right now, but stay tuned in the future! Or maybe we should just expand to somewhere in Germany for our next site?? That'd be sweet.
I agree. It's the content and community that makes what we do worthwhile, not the code. We've got an API that anyone can build on: data.1deg.org (that documentation is not fully up to date, but when I catch my breath after YC I'll update it).
We're getting some good ones together - a lot of content is confidential, so we cannot share the befores often. If you look on our splash page you can see some of the sketches in the background - we'll get a better examples page soon :)
But don't just take my word for it. I'd encourage anyone interested in what microfinance borrowers themselves say about their loans to check out our universal member comment feed. This is simply an uncensored feed of the latest 100 comments posted on Zidisha loan profile pages by our members worldwide. It gives some insight into the wide variety of loan uses and results, and how the borrowers themselves describe the impact of microloans in their lives: https://www.zidisha.org/microfinance/testimonials.html
