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posted by cmn32480 on Thursday October 20 2016, @02:18PM   Printer-friendly
from the should-really-be-in-space-or-undersea dept.

When Apple finishes its new $5 billion headquarters in Cupertino, California, the technorati will ooh and ahh over its otherworldly architecture, patting themselves on the back for yet another example of "innovation." Countless employees, tech bloggers, and design fanatics are already lauding the "futuristic" building and its many "groundbreaking" features. But few are aware that Apple's monumental project is already outdated, mimicking a half-century of stagnant suburban corporate campuses that isolated themselves—by design—from the communities their products were supposed to impact.

In the 1940s and '50s, when American corporations first flirted with a move to the 'burbs, CEOs realized that horizontal architecture immersed in a park-like buffer lent big business a sheen of wholesome goodness. The exodus was triggered, in part, by inroads the labor movement was making among blue-collar employees in cities. At the same time, the increasing diversity of urban populations meant it was getting harder and harder to maintain an all-white workforce. One by one, major companies headed out of town for greener pastures, luring desired employees into their gilded cages with the types of office perks familiar to any Googler.

Rockstar coders don't do suburbs?


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  • (Score: 2) by Immerman on Friday October 21 2016, @03:57PM

    by Immerman (3985) on Friday October 21 2016, @03:57PM (#417293)

    Really, you probably want even the middle class to get a monthly check - one of the benefits to a UBI is that there's no bureaucratic overhead to continue receiving it when you lose your job. Simultaneously less stressful for the already stressed individual, and cheaper to administer.

    Fiscally, it works out pretty much the same - generally it's envisioned that you increase the tax burden on everyone, so that somewhere in the (usually lower-) middle class the increased tax burden neutralizes the UBI, and everyone above that point is paying into the system.

    No extra paperwork that way - every citizen receives a monthly UBI, and the existing tax system handles the rest. Plus you get to eliminate all the bureaucracies around food stamps, unemployment insurance, social security, etc. Medicare/Medicaid is a separate question, there's a strong argument to be made for non-profit socialized medicine, or at least medical insurance. But if everyone has a UBI you could at least eliminate the need-based qualification and simply make Medicaid into a fixed-rate buy-in "public option" for insurance.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 22 2016, @12:40AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 22 2016, @12:40AM (#417478)

    Taking the parent and grandparent together:

    If you don't cover children in UBI, then your UBI needs to be a lot higher to cover costs of parenting. It actually makes more sense to give kids a UBI, a proportion of which goes to guardians to defray the costs of upbringing over and above things like the school system (such as, say, a roof over their heads). Similarly, putting the balance of the cash aside to help them get on their feet when they turn 18 seems reasonable. I mean, you could totally cut them out of UBI but then you suddenly need a lot more subsidies to provide for them, which then reintroduces a lot of the complexity UBI was supposed to avoid.

    There's no real reason to believe that prisoners would be replaced, as covered elsewhere. Maybe a couple of percent ... maybe? Unlikely. But what the hell, let's put on our happy faces and pretend. Congratulations, you moved the needle a couple of percent on your massively unaffordable programme.

    Trying to paint this as a stimulus programme does not work, because all you're doing is displacing current forms of spending. It's not as if those people aren't eating now, and will suddenly start eating when they get a UBI.

    If your UBI doesn't replace a lot of the current social safety net, then it's a net cost of staggering magnitude. If it does replace the whole enchilada (or a substantial proportion thereof) then it's massively underfunded at a terabuck per year. Even a terabuck going to the lowest 60 million people in the country, in income terms (and being extracted from the highest 240 million) is around $16K/year, which in the absence of any other sort of income or social safety net will not cover all the subsidies and systemic benefits being currently delivered.

    So the short answer is: a pure cash social safety net is not supportable with the current system, as an equivalent to current benefits.

    If you then go ahead and juice everyone's income (which is the usual idea, and kudos to the parent for pointing out the major benefit, besides increased political palatability) you still need the mean member of the top 240 million to dish out an extra $4K in taxes over and above the face value of the UBI - a very, very tough sell. Unless you can find some way to guarantee that you're making up for it by increasing the efficiency of government by doing away with huge bureaucracies - in which case you have hundreds of thousands of newly unemployed.

    Oh no, wait. Public servants don't get laid off, unless they get huge, fat, chunky packages. And their masters prefer to redeploy them because headcount is a status marker in those circles. So we probably would not see that efficiency from the government. So chances are the benefits would not materialise. Or am I being too cynical?

    As for non-profit socialised medicine, we already kind of have that. Trouble is, it's slowly failing because of major systemic problems. For example, it's price controlled - to the point that it's actively uneconomical for health care professionals to tend to people on it. Unless you have a scheme to start paying a viable amount (hah!) you're going to see an extension and acceleration of things like the broken, incompletely funded not-a-fix to the doc fix, and more doctors continuing to leave the profession, increasing the already high pressure to get more nurse practitioners, physicians' assistants and other stopgaps because the AMA continues its rentseeking behaviour in terms of how it allows doctors to be trained, with the expected extra high costs of training doctors being borne by a much smaller student body than would be maintained if the AMA weren't putting its thumb on the scale.

    What would make a lot more sense if you really wanted to tackle health care costs would be to require absolute equity in prices required, and those prices to be based on actual services and goods rendered. For example, if they want to charge you for a whole roll of surgical tape? They MUST provide you with the remainder of the tape. And so on. Essentially, prevent the back door subsidies that currently allow the broken system to persist, at the expense of people who are not in the system - basically, a shadow tax. Moreover, this would prevent sweetheart deals with big insurers that leave upstart health care cooperatives in the cold. More broken aspects such as forcing people to have more insurance than they want (Thanks, Nancy!) would also have to go, to let people on UBI stretch those thin dollars a little further.

    The whole system is pretty comprehensively broken, but the fix relies upon so many moving parts, and so much selflessness on the part of bureaucrats, that I just don't see it happening without a substantial shift in how government is run in the USA.