Well I think it needs to at least be high enough that other social spending can largely be cut (except for healthcare maybe), and that seemed like a reasonable value.
Unfortunately I can't read the link you posted since I don't have an account there.
Well, the thing in Germany is that (1) there is actually a decent amount of new housing being built in cities but (2) there are often strict limits around where you're allowed to build, what you're allowed to demolish, and how high you're allowed to build. And during the past 5 years, demand has vastly outpaced supply. Property prices and rents in cities are absolutely insane, and there is no indication that that is going to stop.
And the reaction to it from people is quite... shortsighted? From my perspective. Often the exact people who would benefit from a better housing market vote for parties who are more restrictive in terms of new buildings. There's this perception that new buildings are only being built for "rich" people, which is true, but it also means the rich people aren't competing for your shitty apartment anymore. But somehow, people don't really think about that.
I really, really like the idea of UBI. However, some napkin math:
In the US, with ~250 million people being eligible, a $1000 UBI would cost ~$3 trillion. That's almost the entire budget of the US. How is this even remotely realistic right now? Even if you can cut other spending in half due to it, you'd need an additional $1.5 trillion in "income" essentially. Is that something that would even be possible? How many rich people are there to tax?
Absolutely true, but they also tend to work in jobs where they have essentially full control over how much they work, when they work, etc.
And in some cases, that might still end up being much more lucrative than a "normal job". But I'm sure that in many cases, it doesn't - we just don't hear about it, because they're still rich, and nobody really knows what they're really doing anyway.
Coming from Germany (not Canada, but maybe closer to Canada than the US in terms of spending): Housing absolutely, health care probably not for most people.
But yeah, if you live on full time minimum wage here that's ~1200€ per month, of which probably 500-800 depending on where you live will go to rent. And if it's 800, it would probably be 1800 if everyone got 1000€ per month. So in that sense, he might be right.
On the other hand some people just might actually quit their job with 1000€ per month and live somewhere further away from cities, since they don't have to live there to work. And maybe that would incentivize employers to try to create more work outside cities. Seems almost impossible to really predict the large scale effects here.
>But there is no alternative service people want to use.
I guess I'm lucky that almost all my friends vastly prefer TS3. Being on servers that aren't self-hosted at the mercy of random bans etc. always makes me uncomfortable.
>The fetishization of developer time is one of the problems slowing the maturation of our industry. It ignores end-user time, it ignores management time; it often focuses solely on the initial development time of a project and ignores entirely the ongoing maintenance time for a project.
The problem is that in many projects, especially small web-dev or simple automation projects, you simply don't know if they're going to be profitable. The margins are huge, since the upfront development cost is almost constant, you might lose $50,000, or you might make $500,000, or anything in-between, but you just don't really know beforehand. So obviously in this situation you want to become at least somewhat profitable as fast as possible, and then think about "doing things right" later. Is this horrible practice? Sure. But it's also the most logical thing to do here, because "doing things right" at the start is simply a huge risk that only pays off if you're successful anyway. And people would rather minimize losses than maximize gains.
On the other hand more traditional engineering tasks tend to require big up-front investments anyway, and "failing is not an option". I mean it really kind of isn't, if you need more money and/or more time you'll get that much more often here because the initial investment was so big already. So doing things right from the start makes complete sense.
That company must have been in the middle of nowhere, because in every major city you can at least get a 100/40 connection for ~45 euros / month. Not super amazing, but decent at least.
Well I think it needs to at least be high enough that other social spending can largely be cut (except for healthcare maybe), and that seemed like a reasonable value.
Unfortunately I can't read the link you posted since I don't have an account there.