Universal Basic Income

It seems Ontario has now begun a Basic Income program in Hamilton, Lindsay & Thunder Bay.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/hamilton/wynne-announcement-hamilton-1.4082476

The program will pay $17K for singles, $24K for families.  That's definitely a modest amount but probably reasonable for a pilot program.  Seems it will last 3 years of data gathering, then I suppose they will use that to either scrap it all together or I what I hope is to make it better.

Here's a good write up of this fascinating and ever more relevant topic...at the end of my "lecture" I point out some highlights from the link below, it's a bit long so you may prefer just to check that

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income

One of the most common complaints critics have is that UBI will create a disincentive to work, to some degree this is true (and there is data on this -- check the Wiki) what most people who are not in High Tech or at least very plugged into the scene (such as your humble correspondent ;-) don't realize is that this question will be moot in as little as 10 years!  Sometime in the 2020's we will reach a true AI (as I've discussed in numerous posts!) at that point pretty much any job could be replaced by said AI.  Now, this is a complex subject which I don't want to go off on too big a tangent but these AI should have rights and hence they may not want to do all those jobs etc.  So how that will all shake out is hard to say.  But don't get too hopeful, Nanotech and 3D printing are also on the rise, so between these 3 amazing technologies the future of most jobs, not just manufacturing jobs but also most types of Lawyers, Doctors and Quants (such as myself)...etc will all be taken!

The point I'm trying to make is that  disincentive for work is irrelevant when there's no work!  So it's really with good foresight that many countries are seriously testing out what form of this program (likely will require a multi-variable approach in the sense that we change/adapt the form every 5 years or so to adapt to the changes technology is making to society) works best now!

Also, related to this are the people who don't believe in UBI, they usually advocate "jobs for everyone"...I find this to be a very antiquated mode of thinking!  It's like going back to the 1800's and outlawing textile looms because it put seamstresses out of a job (which incidentally what began the group called Luddites!).  For people who understand where technology is going they can see this is not the answer, there's been a long trend of automation, going back to the very first types of work, agrarian in nature...look how many people it now takes to run a farm, just a few!  As everything becomes more automated, we all have more free time (though parents to young children such as myself have trouble seeing that sometimes!) and will continue to do so as tech progresses.  Simple example would be a Nanotech based Replicator, like in Star Trek, this actually isn't that hard compared to many of the other future tech on that show.  No more shopping, no more cooking, cleaning up dishes etc.  Think how much more free-time we'd have!  My point is, if we force companies to keep human labor we will stifle this tech evolution, for instance we may not get to the stage where we have Replicators :-(  If you think about it, do you really want to work or is the more basic thing you want...money?  I know it's the latter for me so I certainly do not want to halt technology by handcuffing companies...UBI is the answer (what form is best?...that requires much research and experimentation!).  I do want to point out that companies will pay a significant portion of UBI, not sure how the optimal details will work out but take for instance a company akin to Microsoft that may gain a monopoly on AI labor, and another on Nanotech...these 2 companies would make Apple look like a Ma N Pa operation!  They would be ridiculously rich and so should pay their fair share to UBI!  If they don't...they lose anyway as nobody would have any money to buy their products!

Some people also question...what would you even do if you didn't work?  I think this is the ultimate 1st world problem! haha  I personally could list dozens of things!  But for those who lack imagination I'm sure we could run a variety of suggestions by you and at least a few of those would interest you!  Also the size of the UBI would limit what you could do but that's just a transitional phase, as Nanotech leads to buildings for example being created for a few $, money will go the way of the DoDo haha.  Even today with a modest UBI, you could study free online courses at great institutions like MIT on say M-Theory (potentially a Grand Unified Theory of Physics) or the collected works of Shakespeare or Mandarin...etc!  You could take up painting, carpentry...any number of activities!

Finally, there's many more interesting tangents to explore in this topic, but I have to do more research myself so let's save it for a future post!  I'll finish with a few highlights from the Wiki on UBI:

• Administrative Efficiency - The lack of means test or similar administration would allow for some saving on social welfare, which could be put towards the grant. The Basic Income Earth Network (BIEN) describes one of the benefits of a basic income as having a lower overall cost than that of the current means-tested social welfare benefits,[9] and they have put forth proposals for implementation that they claim to be financially viable.[10]
• First, although most basic income supporters tend to be politically left, right-leaning supporters, at least since the 1970s, have argued that policies like basic income free welfare recipients from the paternalistic oversight of conditional welfare-state policies. Second, Philippe Van Parijs has argued that basic income at the highest sustainable level is needed to support real freedom, or the freedom to do whatever one "might want to do."
• Fox Piven holds the view that an income guarantee would benefit all workers by liberating them from the anxiety that results from the "tyranny of wage slavery" and provide opportunities for people to pursue different occupations and develop untapped potentials for creativity

Update:  A story about San Fran mulling a proposal to tax robots that take people's jobs...the money can be used to retrain those workers etc.

https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/17/05/02/1958221/san-francisco-politician-jane-kim-is-exploring-a-tax-on-robots

Science News: Event Horizon Telescope & a big step towards true AI

The cool idea I introduced a few blog posts ago, a virtual telescope (from Hawaii to Antartica to Spain) with a combined diameter of the Earth (10,000K!) built to observe the Event Horizon of Black Holes has been turned on and taken it's first series of pictures.  The story below provides details, alas the data goes to supercomputers and it will take months to create a "picture" from the data.

https://phys.org/news/2017-04-astronomers-piece-image-black-hole.html

Just saw this, new TED Talk about the EVT
https://www.ted.com/talks/katie_bouman_what_does_a_black_hole_look_like

In other news, a great piece (from MIT's Technology Review zine) on a more mysterious but almost surely more powerful form of AI which has begun to come to fruition!  The article isn't short but well worth the read, touches on many tangentially interesting topics as well.  This form of AI is more biological in nature, it's an extreme in a way, you give the program the power to observe and experience then it develops it's own algorithms (genetic algorithm's I presume) to try and achieve a task.  NVIDIA used this approach with an autonomous car and got some promising but somewhat scary results, the car certainly was driving but by the very nature of the approach, a black box is essentially created that neither the programmers or engineers can tell you much about...it's akin to the AI created a brain and now we need to study it to figure out how it works!

https://www.technologyreview.com/s/604087/the-dark-secret-at-the-heart-of-ai/

I highly recommend this story to even my readers who aren't super interested in science, AI has become almost a regular dinner table topic of conversation these days.  A far cry from the small corner of science it held back when I began to follow it in High School (long time ago!).  It will affect more and more of your life as it becomes intertwined in all aspects of society, so probably not a bad topic to at least casually keep up on!

Baby Gender Swaying

I first heard a legitimate scientific method for increasing the probability of having a baby of a certain gender >10 years ago, I didn't believe it at first so I googled it (ya you could google things >10y ago :-)  From what I could see it seemed legit. As I was going to pass this advice onto a friend recently (who may become a parent in the near future) I thought since 10 years have passed I should try to make sure nobody tweaked or overturned these results...good thing I did because that's exactly what happened!

Turns out this is eponymously named The Shettles Method.  Seems the evidence against it really started piling up in 2006, I checked this maybe 2004 or so...explains why I had no chance to find it! Now, I do want to point out that even if this or some other method worked well it could be an issue if predominantly a country were say to want all boys etc. but the way we wanted to use it is to have a girl first then a boy, which is balanced so I don't see any issue with that.  Clearly since we have 2 wonderful daughters we saw it didn't work the second time, but of course we knew it was only probabilistic (and if it were true, girls would be a higher probability target than boys) so after thinking about it I thought I figured out something that didn't allow us to reach that higher probability.  Of course now I realize that it wasn't going to make a difference anyway.

So if Shettles doesn't work...are there any factors that can influence whether you end up with an XX or an XY?  Most scientist believe there are!  The next question is, OK how can I make use of this fact for gender swaying?  The current answer to that is...it's far from clear :-(

I'm going to point you to some links for further reading, the 1st is a good place to start if you are going to dive deeper into this topic.  I was a bit concerned about the source (I mentioned this before but before you trust anything, especially if you don't have say a scientific background, need to make sure it's a top quality source!) as it's a msg board but they provide legit links to scientific papers to back up their facts.  This will bust or confirm some myths about differences between X & Y sperm, which is ultimately what decides on XX or XY (as eggs are always X).

http://genderdreaming.com/forum/swaying-studies-and-scientific-research/1562-what-real-differences-between-x-sperm-y-sperm.html

Second, this slightly academic article examines different mechanisms (mostly errors either in DNA or in the meiosis process in males) that can cause a higher probability of ending up with an XX or XY baby.

http://sciencequestionswithsurprisinganswers.org/2015/05/05/is-it-completely-random-whether-a-baby-is-a-boy-or-a-girl/

And finally, last but not least a whole group of myths about gender swaying debunked from a top quality source, The Cleveland Clinic!  I want to point out, in fairness to Dr. Shettles that this article should have mentioned his work was from the 1960's!  It was amazing work for that time with the limited technology available to him...of course in 2006 and beyond, tech has come a long way and they can accurately differentiate X & Y sperm...etc so it's easy to see where Shettles went wrong!

https://health.clevelandclinic.org/2014/10/boy-or-girl-can-you-choose-your-babys-gender/

If after all this you are still interested in this topic and want to dig even deeper then I suggest reading more about Capacitation and how it could alter the gender ratio, or this recent theory that is gaining supporters...all these years Doctors said it was the Father who decided whether it's XX or XY but perhaps it's actually the Mother!  The mechanism that could allow this is if a woman's body could somehow differentiate between X or Y sperm...and depending on various factors, decide to favor one over the other!  It sounds a bit crazy but that's what so cool about Science!  Here's the paper showing some evidence of this! How can you make use of this?  You'll have to wait awhile for that as this is bleeding edge research, it's in early stages still...

https://bmcgenomics.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1471-2164-15-293

PS  I nearly forgot, a very interesting tangent here is that with the advances of Biotech, we're getting quite close to same-sex couples being able to have a child that has genetic contribution from both parents.  I'm still learning more about this but I believe it would be easier for 2 Men to have either a boy or a girl since they have both X & Y chromosomes.  What's much trickier is for 2 Women to have a boy (a girl is not that hard as that's just XX, one from each mother...easy peasy ;-) but to have a boy you will need to make a Y sperm from the genetic material of two Mom's.  I have heard this is theoretically possible (I'll need to do more research to understand how) but it's going to take 20 years or so to get that sorted out.

Here's a good link on it, has links inside to less technical News stories on this
https://ipscell.com/2015/03/babysamesexcouple/