I’ve written three nodes on everything2 in the last week or so. My initial goal was to write only fiction, but it’s equally helpful just to be able to write.
I would like to write a cron job that replicates my writeup links from everything2, so I can have a list here of what I’ve written. I’ll put that on the “to do” list; with Perl’s E2::Interface, it should be easy.
Slashdot had a story about Marshall Brain’s Robotic Freedom article. In the article, the author first makes the case for a robotic future (that most things will be automated, replacing millions of jobs–which I tend to buy). He then says that a good solution would be for each citizen to receive a check for $25,000 every year.
He doesn’t call this check “welfare,” but I have a feeling it would come from the government. He suggests we could sell signage on the highway and the back of dollar bills.
The only problem is that we would need a net income of $7.5 quadrillion dollars (at just 300 million people), which would mean that our GDP would have to be at least that high. But I’m guessing it’s not, because we are concerned about a $500 MILLION (that’s 7 orders of magnitude less) deficit. Not to mention that this is going from like a 25% income tax to like a -50% income tax. Maybe he figures on $25,000 nominal 2050 dollars to be worth $25 real dollars.
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