I have to agree. I have seen the Shoreditch triangle come a long way and having taken my skill set around Europe, there really is no place like home but we aren't exactly silicone valley.
I look forward to some home grown giants over the next few decades.
Spot on. All this will do for the person trying to erase their past is drag up old memories and re-syndicate whatever they are running away from. More eyeballs, more indexing of new pages, more edits to the Wikipedia page, more comments on social media.
> In Europe, laws generally aren't to be interpreted by the letter.
That's a very general statement and generally untrue (although you are in this case, partially correct). Acts and statutes are always interpreted by the letter, you are perhaps confusing this by making a comparison of these EU statutes with common law or jus commune as that is interpreted by "the spirit of the law" (usually informed by case-law, constitutions etc. depending on the country).
Acts and statutes are not common law (or natural law), and these EU measures are enabled by acts and statutes in each separate EU member state. So they are indeed interpreted to the letter as these acts must be implemented in states with codified constitutions (where one court has supreme interpretation of a constitution and must apply EU law with direct effect, although the big ones haven't done this till recently) and ones without (where there is an indirect effect of law). This is known as the Supremacy Doctrine[1]. The only exception is when the interpretation comes from the European Court of Justice.
The part you are absolutely right about, is that in this specific case, interpretation will not be up to each member state as this amendment was straight from the European Court of Justice. Generally, however, as far as "European law" goes, until we have an actual constitution or become an actual federation, your general statement is untrue most of the time (lets not forget the EU is enabled by treaties and if you don't think the letter matters in a treaty then I have come contracts I'd love you to sign...)
Well I think in this case the language does fit the task at hand, since the language choice is one of communication (communicating concepts), it's probably a wise choice to go with a ubiquitous one to achieve the goal of delivering a message to the widest possible audience with the least friction possible.
I don't know if English is better or worse than Lithuanian, but none of that probably factored into your decision to speak English here rather than your mother tongue. Like many of the other non-English speakers I see on HN, I don't assume you are saying English is a superior language, rather I assume it is that you see as English is the lingua-fanca of the world currently, you want to lower barriers to understanding your concepts and communicate to the widest audience possible. If that is why they chose JavaScript, then to me, that's a rational choice.
No, your other comment just mentioned the dole, which is NOT the same thing at all. Other countries have the dole, in fact, every country listed above in the comment that states they don't have guaranteed basic income, all have wide spread social protections including welfare (and often, quite a bit more wide spread than Australia, whether you see that as a good or a bad thing is up to you).
Sometimes definitions vary from place to place, for instance in Australia you have to vote, it isn't a right you choose to exorcize like the world right is used elsewhere, it is a government mandated obligation, well similarly, in other places, welfare is not considered unconditional income, because well, it isn't. There are barriers to qualification and there are certainly strings attached (some places like the UK, the ASBO system coupled with the welfare system is used like a carrot on a stick with a donkey).
TLDR: This is not about welfare, that exists even in 3rd world countries (although not always to the same degree) it is about unconditional basic income.
Its not because it is conditional -- both means-tested and conditioned on meeting specific other participation requirements (which are, apparently, both age-dependent and in many cases time-limited after which the participation requirements change.)
Its a pretty standard example of the kinds of conditional welfare programs in opposition to which UBI is offered.
UBI is neither:
1) means-tested: because this creates perverse incentives against work (reduces the marginal value of outside income) and increases administrative costs (because you need to take information on means, verify it, and determine benefits based on it, all of which changes over time.), nor
2) conditioned on participation requirements (for much the same administrative reasons as apply to means-testing).
In the unconditional part? Some implementations might have a mean test for who gets what (so a lot like welfare in Anglo and/or European countries) but there is an unconditional part that means in the UK, an ASBO isn't going to be used as a custom law against people needing help or in the US, instead of giving rules about what people can or can't buy with food stamps. For me, that is the interesting part. That is the game changer.
> If you don't earn enough money, it is unconditional.
No, its not, even per the official-source article you cited in your other post describing it [1]. In addition to "earning enough money" (income test), you must:
1) Also meet an "assets test", and
2) Be "looking for paid work", and
3) Be "prepared to meet the activity test while you are looking for work".
And that's just the short version: the linked "Eligibility Requirements" page [2] has a longer list.
Yep. If you have lots of assets, you don't get this money. I'll bet any Guaranteed basic income would work the same - i.e. you don't want to pay it to people that have a $300k house.
>2) Be "looking for paid work"
You fill in a form every 2 weeks that takes 5 minutes.
> 3) Be "prepared to meet the activity test while you are looking for work".
Again, it takes 5 minutes every two weeks.
It's hilarious to see so many people debate Minimum Basic Income as financially not viable or that it would destroy the economy because nobody would be motivated to work. Here I am pointing out that Australia already essentially has it, and those two problems are not real. And here you are nit-picking the fine details. Look at the big picture here. It works, Australia has it.
> ll bet any Guaranteed basic income would work the same - i.e. you don't want to pay it to people that have a $300k house.
An unconditional basic income would, by definition have neither an assets nor an income test.
A guaranteed minimum income would only actually be a guaranteed minimum income if it had an income test, but not asset test.
> You fill in a form every 2 weeks that takes 5 minutes.
The amount of time spent is not the issue. The fact is that you have to be looking for work, prove that you are looking for work, and not turn down work. Its essentially an program to protect against involuntary unemployment, not either a basic income or a guaranteed minimum income. Its essentially a guaranteed employment program with some other conditions.
> Here I am pointing out that Australia already essentially has it,
Australia has neither a guaranteed minimum income nor an unconditional basic income. It has a fairly generous means/asset/behavior-tested welfare program, which is not the same thing at all.
Lots of countries have that and I don't think Australia implemented any of those measures first. I think what is being discussed here is guaranteed unconditional income, not the dole.
Just because you say welfare is the same as an unconditional basic income system, doesn't mean it is. Did it ever occur to you this movement started in some of the safest welfare based nation states on earth?
The difference is this. It isn't completely different, just different in this one way, UNCONDITIONAL. Your dole is anything but. Unconditional income gives options that the dole does not. It gives extra safety the dole does not.
Here[1] are a couple reasons people are supporting these movements from an Anglo perspective, I assume you have more or less the same type of welfare and obviously we have shared culture, so perhaps some of these apply to Australia and how this differs from what we have now.
> The difference is this. It isn't completely different, just different in this one way, UNCONDITIONAL. Your dole is anything but. Unconditional income gives options that the dole does not. It gives extra safety the dole does not.
The dole in Australia is only conditional on one thing - how much money you earn. If you already earn more than the basic income, you don't get the dole, which is the definition of a basic income.
If you earn less than the basic income (~12k/yr) you do get it, to top you up to that amount.
It's cash deposited into your bank account, you can spend it on whatever you want.
> The dole in Australia is only conditional on one thing - how much money you earn.
Every article I can find about the Australian dole references other exclusion and participation requirements like a "mutual obligation requirement" that has various ways that it can be satisfied, one of which is "Work for the Dole", and indicates that if those requirements are not met, you don't get anything. [1]
> If you already earn more than the basic income, you don't get the dole, which is the definition of a basic income.
No, the definition of an unconditional basic income is that you get it -- with no direct reduction based on other income or wealth [2] -- no matter what your income level is, and without other participation requirements besides membership in the served population (usually defined by legal residency within the jurisdiction, but possibly by citizenship instead.)
For the intents and purposes for which UBI is offered -- e.g., eliminating the administrative overhead and inefficient central determinations of ideal behavior that come with means-testing and behavioral participation conditions that need to be monitored and enforced -- the dole and other means-tested, conditional welfare programs are not only "different" from UBI, but exactly what UBI is proposed as an alternative to.
THe GPIO is not going to help you build a custom H-bridge to drive motors forward and backward with variable speed. You can use the 2 relay switches to make one of those, but it will be noisy and you only get 1 H-bridge out of all that wiring. You can get an add-on board for the Pi but most designs (I have seen) seem to hijack all the GPIO pins, so any sensors you want to add onto your robot will likely have to use USB (which rules out a lot of the cool low power stuff).
There is a place for both systems, they do different things (even though there is some overlap) so for any moderate project (say a little hexapod robot) you are likely to use both. The Pi as a general purpose computer that can do all your nav/ANN/signalling stuff and an Arduino board to receive the signals and actually run your motors/servos (assuming you need more than 1 or 2).
Weren't modern license plates made the way they are to aid automatic (or human) detection? For instance, traffic cameras, automated scanning from traffic police to make sure your car is insured or even your elderly neighbour writing down a license plate late at night after seeing a car speed away from a possible hit-and-run.
I look forward to some home grown giants over the next few decades.