Tony's Stuff

  I don’t think UBI would hurt unskilled employment and might even help. Anthony Lawrence (Pcunix) Photo by   Erik Mclean   on   Unsplash One of the many claims against Universal Basic Income is that businesses wouldn’t be able to find people willing to work for low wages. I’m not sure that’s true. If you have enough UBI to be secure, a job is extra money, money you don’t need. Maybe you have impediments that eliminate higher-paying jobs, maybe you don’t want to travel far, maybe you actually enjoy customer service. Maybe you are just bored. People work really crappy volunteer jobs right now, so money isn’t always the motivation. If you can get extra money for something that you enjoy, but can afford to quit the minute you don’t enjoy it, your attitude and your employer’s attitude change. I think it would be true that low pay workers under UBI would expect more respect, would not put up with being treated as throwaway tools, but the plus side for the employer is that...

  Anthony Lawrence (Pcunix) PodcastMedia Photo by  Matt Botsford  on  Unsplash Podcasting has become quite hot during this pandemic, but it was heating up before all this.  Looking at it logically, people who produce content should consider adding a podcast to their output. I will not argue against that. I’ve been a consumer of podcasts for years. I listened in my car as soon as that became technologically easy, and now that I drive less, I listen while I walk for exercise. It may be hard to become popular, but when is that not the case? I’ve thought about podcasting for a long time, longer than the word itself even existed. I even recorded a few (very few) of my early tech articles and hosted them on my own site as that was the only option back then. But I didn’t like doing it. It’s not that I don’t like talking; quite the opposite. I’ll blabber on for hours. I’ve given extemporaneous lectures; off the cuff doesn’t bother me at all. Nor does the thought of larg...