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The Liberal premier of Ontario announced details of the Ontario Basic Income Pilot. The provincial government issued a press release saying
Three regions will take part in the study. Pilots will start in late spring in Hamilton, including Brantford and Brant County; and in Thunder Bay and the surrounding area. The third pilot will start by this fall [autumn] in Lindsay.
The Basic Income model Ontario has developed will ensure that eligible participants receive:
Up to $16,989 per year for a single person, less 50 per cent of any earned income
Up to $24,027 per year for a couple, less 50 per cent of any earned income
Up to an additional $6,000 per year for a person with a disability.
[...] The three test regions will host 4,000 participants eligible to receive a basic income payment, between the ages of 18 to 64. By late spring, people in these areas will begin receiving information about the pilot and how to participate. The province is partnering with these communities and other experts to make sure that the Ontario Basic Income Pilot is fair, effective, and scientifically valid.
additional coverage:
- Canoe (editorial)
- The Globe and Mail
- globalnews.ca
- The Guardian
- Business Insider
- BBC News
- Canadian Press via City News
- Reuters via NASDAQ
- Toronto Star
- CHCH-TV
- CBC
- CNN Money
related story:
Ontario is Starting a Universal Basic Income Pilot
(Score: 4, Interesting) by VLM on Tuesday April 25 2017, @09:57PM (5 children)
I basically agree with you on the ownership thing. Commodities (like money) naturally accumulate at the top. Everything does. Seriously the top 1% of unix sysadmins do more admin work than the entire bottom 99% put together. Ditto software dev. Or fine art. Or cooking. Or singing. Or pro athletes. So let people who want to collect tokens collect ALL the tokens. You want to collect "all" the diamonds in minecraft? Have fun! No problemo!
The problem is "we" are arguing two things at once and the other thing argued is how to make a living in a world still pretending that those useless tokens are somehow a currency in an economy thats really not functioning for most of us anymore.
If for the sake of example we were on a space station, we'd need to procure our oxygen somehow, and as a 25% completed education chemical engineer I assume unless theres a better chemist on station (SN does have some excellent chemists that I know of) then I will own 100% of the productive capacity of oxygen. Naturally tokens always flow to the best owner; all of them. None of you will have any oxygen tokens. This would be mildly amusing if we were discussing the means of production of medium spicy taco sauce but unfortunately oxy is a required element for life so there will be much butthurt about my keeping it all. This is very interesting but it pragmatically does not work. Our system suxs.
In the long run "we" pretty much have to have socialism for the minimum required for life. Which has nothing to do with who collected ALL the tokens and has a lot to do with everyone needs air, water, some place to sleep, food, defense dept, public roads, fire dept, public library, last but not least fully socialized medical care. Everything else can be wild barely regulated capitalism. Hands off my designers edition copy of Ogre. Keep the government out of my video game collection. etc.
This is all at least semi consistent with my national socialist political belief system which is always universally supported by all SN readers especially the antifa. Socialism to keep the volk alive and part of the social contract is service in the nationalism half of proud capitalism and proud imperialism.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Tuesday April 25 2017, @11:00PM (1 child)
Right there. That is your problem. You assume that wealth and earning is a zero-sum game. Nothing could be further from the truth. Wealth is created from the void every time a human being puts forth effort that either they or someone else desires, or makes the effort necessary to accomplish a desired task easier.
If you have issue with how much wealth remains in your hands when you are implementing the ideas of someone else, bargain better. Hell, bargain collectively. Just make sure you don't cut your own throat while doing so. If labor is too pricy a commodity to continue doing business, they won't.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday April 26 2017, @02:30PM
I think we agree on more than we disagree about, and your analysis skills are great, but we don't have a common language or set of definitions because here you go on a THIRD orthogonal topic, this being wealth as a social status signal and the attainment thereof as a lifestyle and all that.
So my point of view is there's about three orthogonal topics and are getting incorrectly mixed leading to problems.
1) There's the social contract thing. I'll be a member of your economic system and culture if you keep me alive better than the alternatives. Otherwise its armed rebellion, refugee time, join a motorcycle gang or commune and drop out time. Its hard to rally people around a system that involves their kids dying while another system lets them live. You can't collect anything cool this way like #2, what is the cool collection of "has great police protection" or "hasn't died of poor/no drinking water yet"? You probably can't get rich or cool off the same commodity as everyone gets see #3, nobody cares about my drinking water other than its there and doesn't make you sick.
2) There's the ancient capitalist game of cornering a monopoly commodity market. Harmless if limited to non-basic living issues. Someone collects all the non-meaningful tokens? Good for them, completionism is a perfectly good compulsion. Got all the MtG cards? Cool! Seen all the pr0n on the internet? Cool!. I'm the go to guy at $employer for ETL and system integration I've cornered that market, Cool! Just don't corner the market for drinkable water like #1 or you get the guillotine as you very rightly should. And don't turn it into a rich guys playing field like #3 or people will be unhappy (real estate, collectible cars, maybe)
3) Finally there's social status points, someone wealthy won't stay wealthy for long when playing game #2 if they're collecting black velvet Dale Earnhardt paintings or elvis memorobilia. Maybe it works well if they collect real estate and ETF shares. They won't be wealthy for long if their profit maximization strategy along the lines of #1 above involves killing the villagers children, because the villagers will put the wealthy dude in a guillotine right where he belongs. But if he got social status for good investments or being a really good rock star singer, well, cool!
Its best for a culture and society and economic system to keep those three systems as separate as possible, more important even than separation of church and state. Virtually any cross mixture eventually ends up F-ed up. Needless to say almost anything functional about western civ in 2017 involves those being separate and most things Fed up involve mixtures.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by mhajicek on Tuesday April 25 2017, @11:11PM (2 children)
Survival is optional. In the old days it was even kind of a luxury. Now we've had a brief stint where, at least in the first world, most people could be pretty well guaranteed to earn a living (people are still starving to death in the third world). Going into the future however, we'll see a dramatic increase in the rolls of the unemployable, as the bar for employment rises. You are not entitled to a certain wage just for being there and putting in effort; you have to generate enough value to be profitable for your employer. Fail to generate enough value to cover your minimum wage plus overhead costs (or fail to out-compete automation) and you're out of a job.
This will result in the majority of people being essentially pets, or zoo animals, if those above the bar deign to support them, and dead if not.
So the discussion is really whether or not the productive should support the unproductive, and how many of them, and to what extent; there's obviously a limit.
I hope Neuralink and the like make rapid progress; once memories and skills can be transferred like data and software it will be much easier for people to stay above the bar.
All that said however, I think the worst thing for our economy is the financial "industry". People gathering (not making or earning) huge sums of money simply by moving paper around, being gatekeepers, and skimming off the top of everyone else's production, without generating a bit of value themselves. This include the insurance "industry" and a significant portion of government.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 26 2017, @10:16AM (1 child)
Given current trends and increasing automation, pretty soon that "generate enough value" term is going to be "the boss not getting his fucking head on a spike".
Why do people think Trump, Brexit, and now France, happened? Racism? stupidity? insanity? - that's bullshit. People are pissed off. Really, really pissed off.
The EIGHT richest people in the world own as much as the poorest THREE AND A HALF BILLION people. Do you think that is sustainable?
And the trend is getting worse, a few years ago it was 65 people. Now down to eight.
Do you think those eight got that much richer, or are the poor getting poorer?
The ruling class can wake up and smell the coffee, or pretty soon it's going to be wake up and smell the smoke.
(Score: 2) by mhajicek on Wednesday April 26 2017, @07:55PM
The ruling class are fully aware of that, and that's why they're tracking our every communication. You start rallying people for a revolution and you'll find a drone deployed munition in your lap.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek