Skip to main content

Universal Basic Income

"Universal Basic Income" - Heard about this only recently via an Elon Musk interview in November 2016 since then been reading about it. Understood it being discussed for many decades now and certainly not a new idea.



What does it mean?

A government would guarantee citizens a regular fixed sum of enough money to cover a basic standard of living, they can spend however they want, no questions asked.

Majorly critics where saying something on this lines:

1. If we give money for free people will become more lazier
2. People would use it only for drinking / drugs / unhealthy things!
etc.,

"Maybe 90 % of people will go smoke pot and play video games. But if 10 percent of the people go create new products and services and new wealth, that’s still a huge net win." - Sam Altman, President of Y Combinator, California

Experiments:

1. Finland this week started it on a 2-year trial basis (2000 randomly picked unemployed citizens to get Euro 560 per month)

2. Canada has tried it as early as between 1973 - 1979 @ Dauphin, Manitoba

3. India:

a. It was tested out in West Delhi's Raghubir Nagar Slum from January to December 2011. A household receives Rs. 1000 per month (In the name of the woman of the family). An adult receives Rs. 200 per month and each child receive Rs. 100 per month.

b. Also experimented since 2013 at Panthbadodiya, Indore, Madhya Pradesh.

Being an Indian I was really surprised to know this for the first time (or) rather ashamed I wasn't aware of it all these days. By the way, is this a news to you (or) Are you already aware of this being tested in India?

Universal Basic Income pilot program around the world - http://infozaps.com/images/UBI_Pilots_2017_a.jpg

As the IT is enabling companies to move towards (more) AI / Automation / Robots / Selfdrivingvehicles (ex: cars, trucks etc.,) / removing humans from stores (ex: Amazon Go) / unemployment etc., I believe it makes more sense to explore this option.

For further reading:

1. Finland - Mashable 
2. Canada - Huffingtonpost 
3. India - An experiment in Panthbadodiya (Indore - Madhya Pradesh), Two income pilot projects in India @ 2011, Basic Income Earth Network (BIEN)
4. Kenya - BIEN (Kenya)
5. Netherlands - BIEN (Netherlands)
6. Is the World Ready for a Guaranteed Basic Income? - Podcast with Sam Altman (President of Y Combinator) & Evelyn Forget ( An economist at the University of Manitoba)
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Script table as - ALTER TO is greyed out - SQL SERVER

One of my office colleague recently asked me why we are not able to generate ALTER Table script from SSMS. If we right click on the table and choose "Script Table As"  ALTER To option would be disabled or Greyed out. Is it a bug? No it isn't a bug. ALTER To is there to be used for generating modified script of Stored Procedure, Functions, Views, Triggers etc., and NOT for Tables. For generating ALTER Table script there is an work around. Right click on the table, choose "Modify" and enter into the design mode. Make what ever changes you want to make and WITHOUT saving it right click anywhere on the top half of the window (above Column properties) and choose "Generate Change Script". Please be advised that SQL Server would drop actually create a new table with modifications, move the data from the old table into it and then drop the old table. Sounds simple but assume you have a very large table for which you want to do this! Then it woul...
2 comments
Read more

AWS fatal error: An error occurred (400) when calling the HeadObject operation: Bad Request

While using AWS and trying to copy a file from a S3 bucket to my EC2 instance ended up with this error message. Command Used: aws s3 cp s3://mybucketname/myfilename.html /var/www/html/ Error: fatal error: An error occurred (400) when calling the HeadObject operation: Bad Request The error goes off if we add the region information to the command statement. I am using Asia Pacific (Mumbai) so used ap-south-1 as the region name. Modified Command: aws s3 cp s3://mybucketname/myfilename.html /var/www/html/ --region ap-south-1
Post a Comment
Read more

[Non Tech] Want to know the recipe for Omelette :)

Fed up with Bread - Jam and Curd Rice, today i wanted to eat Omelette. Interesting part is I wanted to cook it myself :) So in the first picture you see all the items which are needed for preparing an Omelette. When I had a closer look at the eggs I see that almost all the eggs are broken. But believe me when I bought it couple of days back it was in perfect condition! I was wondering whether the eggs have become rotten or pretty old to consume! I tried taking an egg and break it but couldn't break it at all :) Since I have kept in the freezer all the eggs have frozen and looked like a iron ball :) After trying for few minutes of trying i removed the shell of the egg and then kept that iron ball :) into a bowl and placed it within Oven. I heated it for 1 minute and checked. It melted only to a limit. So i just set it for another 2 minutes and checked it later. It has melted but the part of the egg white has become a Omelette :( I didn't leave it there. I took the bowl out of ...
8 comments
Read more