adventures in human capitalism

What If We Just Gave Poor People a Basic Income for Life? That’s What We’re About to Test.

Link ~ ~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

{{Title link: http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2016/04/14/universal_basic_income_this_nonprofit_is_about_to_test_it_in_a_big_way.html }}

theunitofcaring:

GiveDirectly’s launching a test of universal basic income!!!!!!!!! They’re doing it properly, giving money to everyone in the selected communities and committing to do that for 10-15 years. And they’re good at rigorous data collection. And if this works, we can scale it up.

Tags:

#interesting #(I know I’m not being as effusive as most of the others reblogging this) #(mostly because it’s hard to wrap my head around) #(but I can manage ”interesting”) #((and I can manage a smile at the mention of the Canadian Liberal party)) #((my vote for them didn’t actually *affect* anything because of fucking first-past-the-post)) #((but the fact remains that I voted for them)) #universal basic income

Revolutionary Cooking Methods

~ Brin ~ 3 Comments

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sinesalvatorem:

ilzolende:

sinesalvatorem:

Mum: …And then you have to move all the stakes around in the sauce so that the flavour gets distributed evenly.

Me: What’s with this talk of “even distribution”? That’s Communism! Do you want us to get invaded again?

Mum: Yeah, yeah. Just keep turning them. Move the ones on the bottom to the top.

Me: For how long? How long must we indulge these revolutionaries?

Mum: For as long as possible. The ideal would be permanent revolution, but I think 10 minutes should suffice.

Me: *takes an icepick out of the draw and brandishes it* You take that back, you Trotskyite!

Mum: *rolls eyes*

Me: Ugh. Why do I even care if the flavour is evenly distributed?

Mum: Because you never know which piece of meat you’re going to get.

Me: ….That is the sanest argument for economic leftism I’ve heard all year.

Mum: Alison, it’s the second of January.

Me: Well, yeah. It’s just that the leftists were hung over yesterday from celebrating the long-awaited overthrow of 2015.

…one wonders why a resident of [Redacted] has an icepick, and in the event that a different object was used, what said object was.

….We have icepicks for breaking ice. Like, I know we’re poor, but did you think we didn’t have freezers?

Oh, is that how people with one freezer get rid of condensation buildup? In my family, we eat enough of the frozen food that the remainder fits into the freezer not being de-iced, turn the freezer being de-iced off, put a bunch of towels in front of the open door to catch the water, and let it melt.

(Mind you, only our secondary freezer gets significant ice buildup. The primary freezer seems immune. If we only owned the primary, freezer ice buildup wouldn’t even occur to me.)

(Owning multiple freezers is a big help for anyone aiming to be on the good end of Vimes Boot Theory (specifically the “buying food in bulk” manifestation), and I recommend it to anyone who can pull it off.)

Tags:

#reply via reblog #actually we own *three* freezers now #but we haven’t had Tertiary Freezer long enough to know if it gets ice buildup #(our friends’ new landlord foisted an old filthy freezer on them) #(and they were like ‘we’ll give it to you for free just please get rid of it it’s disgusting’) #((to be fair it *was* pretty disgusting)) #(my parents managed to clean it up and it’s pretty much fine now) #we’ve had very good fortune when it comes to freezers

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~ Brin ~ 2 Comments

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image sinesalvatorem replied to your photo: Home! *flop* hooooome

Welcome back! I’m afraid I didn’t notice when you left…

I didn’t say much about it because…well, first of all it’s very hard to talk about going to Disney World without sounding awkwardly frivolous. It sounded awkwardly frivolous to me when Mom first said we were going. On the other hand, that “first said we were going” was two years ago. There’s been a fair few obstacles in the family’s path over those two years, and I saw the way that the thought of a Disney trip at the end of the tunnel kept Mom going. It was probably worth it for that alone.

(Especially when she managed to convince them to give us a whole bunch of Disney restaurant credits: one “snack” (roughly what you’d think it means, though it had to have a symbol next to it on the menu indicating you could use a credit on it) and two fast-food “meals” (entree, beverage, dessert, though you could swap out any or all of those three for any available snack) per person per day. She got all this for the low, low price of researching Disney enough to hear about the free-food promotion (that bit wasn’t really a price, as she enjoyed it), staying up most of one night to get in as soon as the deal opened, spending an hour and a half on hold while trying not to fall asleep, and promising to stay in a Disney-owned hotel and schedule our trip for mid-September, which is apparently a relatively bad time for them profit-wise because most kids have just gone back to school. Joke’s on them: we were going to go then regardless, and I think we were going to be in a Disney hotel too.

The portions in Disney, for the record, are very big, and our appetites (especially mine) are not so big, so it was rather more credits than we could actually use on the trip itself. We ended up bringing back about a hundred chocolate bars to eat at home later, as they were the least perishable tasty thing available for a snack credit.)

Also, I was taught as a young child that the fact that one is leaving one’s house unoccupied is a vulnerability that should be kept secret as much as practical until after it is over. Intellectually, I’m not convinced this is reasonable advice, but on more visceral levels I’ve inherited much of the paranoia of my native culture, and perhaps added some of my own.

Tags:

#we drove to Ohio and flew domestic to minimise security issues #(and indeed security issues were minimised by American standards) #this was my first road trip since getting a smartphone and oh my god it is *so much easier* when you have a decent GPS handy #Mom brought the usual printed Google directions but they were frequently inadequate #and the phone was there to the rescue #no more getting lost for two hours trying and failing to follow a detour! #if you miss a turn the phone’s directions will compensate rather than becoming near-useless! #GPS navigation is so great you guys #replies #Brin owns *two* 2010’s computers now #food

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FREE PADS AND TAMPONS

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

graventum:

Hey all you lovely people who have periods, the world is starting to look a little bit brighter now that certain tampon/pad companies have started to allow people to receive small kits and samples of pads, maxi pads, liner, and tampons for free. And I mean 100% free and discreet. You just have to give them your address and name, and bam! You’ve got all the menstrual cycle products you could ever need for no cost. Links below!

U by Kotex

Always

Playtex

Poise

The “Always” and “Poise” links are actually for their bladder
incontinence pads, just so you know. I don’t know of any reason why they
wouldn’t work for menstrual blood, but that’s not what they were designed for.

Tags:

#menstruation #the more you know #my mother sent that Always link to her friends without realising what it was #and was rather embarrassed #I don’t want that to happen to anyone else #reblogged from a random person who didn’t have any guilt tripping in their reblog chain #this blog is a guilt-trip-free zone #no exceptions #(hat tip to justice-turtle) #(I love you and respect your stance on posts with guilt trips buried in their reblog chains)

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

justice-turtle:

*squee* My custom accent for Canyon is ordered and paid for! I DID PEOPLE INTERACTION THINGS. :D

I think my next “big” FR project is gonna be saving up all the treasure for my remaining expansions to Ancient Lair by Thundercrack. (The first-place dom discount isn’t huge, it’s only 5%, but that’s still gonna save me 143,750 treasure overall. ^_^ ‘Sides, I like the idea of celebrating Thundercrack by moving to the Tempest Spire.) Little under 2.75 million – I can farm that in a week or ten days if I push, I’m tired of pushing, so I’m gonna take it slow. Hardest part’ll be not spending it all on dragon hats. XD

God, I wish RL had something like that where you work hard and get a slow but steady guaranteed income. I would be so rich, y’all. ;S I got no problem with grinding, it’s the part where I can’t reliably grind enough RL money to feed myself the calories I expend while grinding that discourages me.

God, I wish RL had something like that where you work hard and get a slow but steady guaranteed income. I would be so rich, y’all. ;S I got no problem with grinding, it’s the part where I can’t reliably grind enough RL money to feed myself the calories I expend while grinding that discourages me.

Well, there’s Swagbucks. Nowhere near enough to live off of, and you have to take their “Special Offers” section with tons of salt (last I checked they don’t vet their third-party offer suppliers nearly well enough and pretty much all of the non-survey non-video ones look an awful lot like virusbait), but a reasonably diligent Canadian can get USD$25 a month in Paypal, which is $25 they wouldn’t have had otherwise. I hear it’s more if you’re American (they get earning options that other countries don’t), and much more if you either have more data in your Internet plan than you normally use or spend a lot of time in places with free Wi-Fi (so you can run their ad videos without spending more in overage fees than you get in payment). (My family routinely maxes out our Internet plan as it is, and I only spend maybe 10 – 30 minutes a week in public hotspots, so I’ve never been able to do those properly.)

(I used to be a reasonably diligent Canadian, but I haven’t really been on since November, after I paid for nearly half of this laptop ($130) using the Paypal balance I got from them. Maybe I should go back.)

(If you do give it a shot (and seriously, despite the Special Offers the rest of the place is really not very shady), let me know *before* you sign up and I’ll give you a referral link. It’s not under this name.)

Tags:

#reply via reblog

A Practical Guide to Being Homeless

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

lb-lee:

hyperdelirium:

So as many of you who’ve been following me for a while may know, I’ve been homeless for almost two years now, and spent 7 months of that on an actual sidewalk. Leading up to the start of those two years (and for many years prior; my life has a habit of being unstable), I tried desperately to find any information I could on how to survive if I did end up on the streets. The day came where the concrete was my only option and I still hadn’t found anything useful beyond “get a car and a gym membership” as most “guides” have been written by people who could afford a car. Now, I could just have high standards for lowlife, but if you can afford a car, a gym membership, and a night at a hotel every week, you probably don’t actually need a guide telling you how to use those things. 

Currently one of my close friends is looking at being on the streets, and since I’ve been asked about stuff like this before and genuine resources are so hard to find, I figured I’d put together the best guide I could, informed by and based on my personal experiences actually living through this.

Some of the things I experienced will not happen to everyone— many of them never will. My situation was an extremely lucky one, in one of the safest, richest, and friendliest cities in the entire United States. But much of what I’m going to be talking about should apply to everyone. 

This list assumes that you are not going to be spending your nights in a shelter, for whatever reason you may have. Mine was social anxiety and a lack of queer-friendly options that weren’t already overflowing, and I chose not to put up with the few options I did have. Someone else’s reasoning might be a lack of a choice at all. Maybe you have no local shelters, or don’t have any that you are eligible for. Either way, you’re looking at spending your nights on the actual cold hard sidewalk.

This also assumes that you have virtually no money. You may occasionally wake up with large bills tucked between you and your bag or in the side of your shoe (one of the perks of being in a richer area), but let’s assume you don’t have a job yet. If you do, then you have a huge step up. Don’t let go of it.

So, given all that, here we go!

Read More

This is a good guide.  Thankfully, we had our miserable hole to sleep in, so weren’t stuck on the street, but this is good solid advice.  Libraries are a bum’s best friend.

Tags:

#homelessness #the more you know #I find it slightly odd that this operates under the assumption that #’handheld gaming device’ #’cell phone’ #and ‘voip-capable computer’ #are three separate devices #(I mean they *can* be but we are firmly in the era of cheap smartphones) #(mine cost $89 brand-new including tax and a pair of earbuds) #but okay

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

justice-turtle:

Omg, Mass Effect 2 is on sale on Steam right now for $4.99 if anyone was looking to pick it up cheap. :D

I’m seeing $4.99 for ME1 and $5.49 for ME2, but those are in Canadian dollars.

Tags:

#Mass Effect #PSA #I already bought both of them during a previous $5 sale #but just in case anyone else is interested

Level Up Your Living Room: A Secondhand Furniture Guide For the Broke and Discerning

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

nonasuch:

When I first began living on my own, I didn’t really have any furniture. I started with an IKEA bed and a hand-me-down dresser; from there, I added wobbly particle-board bookshelves and lumpy couches left behind by previous housemates. By the time I was getting ready to move into my current house, a year and a half ago, most of my furniture was, frankly, kind of crappy.

So I started scouring Craigslist, and checking the furniture section at the thrift store, and called in favors from a few friends who owned vans or SUVs. When I moved into my new place, I had ditched most of the old stuff and replaced it with better-made, better-looking vintage pieces, almost none of which cost more than $200 individually (and that was for a midcentury modern dining table with eight teak chairs). Since then, I’ve also swapped out most of my particle-board bookshelves for hardwood replacements. I still pick up nice pieces when I see them and the price is right— most recently, a glass-fronted cabinet ($25), a velvet settee ($300, which is more than I’d usually pay), and a coffee table/console/end table set ($100).

image

Actual furniture & art currently in my house.

There are a lot of reasons I prefer my current furnishings to the old ones. Well-made vintage pieces are sturdier, last longer, can better survive dis- and re-assembly, and (in my opinion, anyway) generally look nicer. I do still have a couple of Billy bookcases and a Lillesand bed, but I am also a human person under the age of 40 and living within 50 miles of an IKEA, so that’s kind of inevitable.

There’s one other good reason for buying vintage that gets overlooked. The furniture and other housewares I’ve bought secondhand will not lose value; in fact, should I ever resell them they will probably go for more than I paid. 

Because here’s the thing: if I hit a rough patch, or an unexpected medical bill, or other major unplanned expense, I am probably not going to have to resort to hocking my laptop or my few pieces of good jewelry. I can sell my 1930s enamel-topped breakfast table (bought from Craigslist for $85; would resell for $200 easily), or my 1920s spool cabinet (bought from an estate sale for $25, would fetch $250+ at an antique store), or a few of the thrifted paintings off my walls. They are all lovely things that I enjoy owning very much, but I would be fine without them and I would find equivalent replacements eventually.

So: let’s say you want to start divesting yourself of particle board. How should you start? What should you look for? How much should you be willing to pay?

Read More

Tags:

#interesting