After writing about Amazon Fresh I can’t stop but think about my French services, how I can’t even compare to what I see in California. I try to see the hidden costs though because these amazing services have one.
People work really hard and barely make it. French took another way where we don’t work so hard but we’re not so happy in an ocean of mediocrity. It wears your happiness out, croissants or not.
Add the fact that anywhere, you can lose your income for any reason at anytime (we don’t need you anymore, you have to work half the time, for a smaller pay, this company bought your company and shuts down everything because profit is barely up 0.5%) and I really don’t see how we can be against a basic income. It’s just fair. Things go fast. Amazon –97,000 employees- is going to hit WalMart –employing 2.2 million people- hard. I know a developer who was making nice money with web stuff mid 2000s. Today all that stuff is automated, he lost his job somehow. What my mom, accountant has been doing since the 80s is totally automatable. It eventually will. How many musicians lost their gigs to samplers? There’s no end to it.
Basic income solves a nice equation: you don’t have to work so hard and when you do, you do your job nicely because you’re not doing it to get by, you do it because you like it. Best of both US and French culture.
We would just need to stop being greedy, introduce a whole lot of transparency and we would be fine.