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Category: economics – Page 199

Ontario basic income pilot project to launch in Hamilton, Lindsay and Thunder Bay

Basic income pilot project in Ontario.

Premier Kathleen Wynne announced Monday a plan to study basic income in Ontario, in a three-year pilot project based in Hamilton, Lindsay and Thunder Bay.

The province will explore the effectiveness of providing a basic income — no matter what — to people who are currently living on low incomes, “whether they are working or not,” Wynne said.

Wynne said the pilot will provide the basic income to 4,000 households chosen from applicants invited “randomly” by the province in the coming weeks.

Billionaire Jack Ma says CEOs could be robots in 30 years, warns of decades of ‘pain’ from A.I., internet impact

Alibaba Chairman Jack Ma warned on Monday that society could see decades of pain thanks to disruption caused by the internet and new technologies to different areas of the economy.

In a speech at a China Entrepreneur Club event, the billionaire urged governments to bring in education reform and outlined how humans need to work with machines.

“In the coming 30 years, the world’s pain will be much more than happiness, because there are many more problems that we have come across,” Ma said in Chinese, speaking about potential job disruptions caused by technology.

Update: My Jacque Fresco interview and video on a Resource Based Economy via NowThis Future shared a few weeks ago now has 142,000 Facebook shares, 16,000 comments, 102,000 likes, and 12.3 million views

Wow! For context, that’s nearly 4x times the amount of daily views that Bill O’Reilly used to get on his #1 cable show on Fox before he was fired. smile Give the video a view: https://www.facebook.com/NowThisFuture/videos/1500983249942850/ #transhumanism

California Gov Candidate: Develop the Coastline to Fund Income for Everyone

My idea of leasing Federal lands to pay a basic income (coined #ZoltPay by some) has been catching on. People are asking for specifics, and here’s how I’d start getting all Californian’s money as a Governor my first year in Office without raising taxes. Naturally, to fully fund a state (as well as a national) basic income is an incremental process, in the same way automation is an incremental process. But there are methods to literally make all Californians wealthier almost overnight. The world is changing and we need bold transformative ideas to thrive. 40% of Californian’s live right around the poverty line. That’s simply unacceptable. The Dems and GOP have created this mess. Give someone else a shot now! Happy reading!

Zoltan Istvan, a Libertarian candidate for governor of California, wants to provide a universal basic income for all state residents — and lease out public lands to generate the revenues. Is it crazy talk?

Getting paid to do nothing: why the idea of China’s dibao is catching on

China’s minimum living standard guarantee, named dibao, is receiving fresh interest in the region as countries from Korea to India turn to universal basic income (UBI) to boost their economies and combat the coming automation-induced job crisis.

Asia-Pacific countries are beginning to consider their own form of universal basic income in the face of an automation-induced jobs crisis.

By David Green

Many more mineable asteroids

The two fundamental prerequisites for large-scale economic use of space resources are:

1. in-space manufacture of propellants from nonterrestrial bodies, and 2. in-space manufacture of heat shields for low-cost capture of materials into Earth orbit.

The former has been the subject of recent NIAC investigations. The latter would expand by a factor of 30 to 100 time the number of asteroids from which resources could be returned cost-effectively to Earth orbit. With vastly larger populations from which to choose, return opportunities will be much more frequent and targets can be selected where operations would be highly productive, not merely sufficient. The feedstocks for manufacture of life-support materials and propellants are found on C-type near-Earth asteroids, which have high concentrations of hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen, oxygen and sulfur. The total abundance of readily extractable (HCNOS) volatiles in the CI chondritic meteorite parent bodies (C asteroids) is roughly 40% of the total meteorite mass. Further, the residue from extraction of volatiles includes a mix of metallic iron (10% of total mass), iron oxide and iron sulphides (20% as Fe) plus 1% Ni and ~0.1% Co.

150 trillion dollars of mostly unused Federal land and resources divided by 300 million Americans is $500,000 each

Where’s my money, you’re asking? Me too! There shouldn’t be poverty in America or people that can’t reasonably afford health insurance—it’s that simple. Below I’m resharing my TechCrunch California Governor policy article on a Universal Basic Income. If you’re in California, you will be able to vote for me to try to see this become a reality: https://techcrunch.com/2017/04/10/is-monetizing-federal-land…ic-income/

Is monetizing federal land the way to pay for basic income?

Here’s a very important article to me—and a part of my platform moving forward. Automation is coming, but we don’t need to raise taxes to pay for a Basic Income. There are other ways to deal with our jobless future and poverty in America.

Like the Titanic, capitalism is sinking, but few passengers are wondering yet if there are enough lifeboats.

I recently declared my run as a Libertarian for California governor in 2018, and I gently support the idea of a state-funded basic income to offset the effects of ubiquitous automation. A basic income would give every Californian some money — and it makes sense to start such a dramatic program here in the Golden State, since this is where much of the human-job-replacing-tech is created.

My Libertarian friends are skeptical of my support for a basic income. They insist the only way to pay for such a program is via higher taxes. This is not true; other ways exist. California could potentially cut deals with the federal government to lease its empty land and natural resources to help pay for a basic income.

After all, state and federal resources belong to the people, and 45 percent of California (more than 45 million acres) is government-controlled land, leaving vast areas idle and mostly undeveloped.

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