Some of the appeal of Universal Basic Income is its universality: a universally given income  may also be accepted without shame and may  be more universally supported.  Worries about UBI being paid to the rich when poorer people need the income tend not to recognize that the UBI which is paid to the rich is also collected from them, and so ends up washing out.  UBI is likely to offer people the chance to enrich their lives through education, pursuit of the arts and community, and via smarter choices about with whom and how they live.  

Missing from this discussion, though, are some unrecognized benefits from work.  Working a job in which you have a manager, co-workers, and customers. These interactions keep mayn within the realm of polite society, exposes people to common ideas and values, and ensure that those who need paternalistic support are able to receive it.

There's a danger with UBI that abusive societies begin flourishing: currently, only cults who can attract dollars thrive.  With UBI, any interest or cause might so flourish. 

This idea is a little bit "gross."  I don't pine for a paternalistic society.  But I do think requiring social participation in order to receive social support might lead to better outcomes for all - even those so controlled.

Google voice transcription is good enough that I've started using it to compose my texts.  While I speak, my voice is mostly flat and without affect because I know that it will be flattened into text to be sent.  But what if it weren't?  Type designers use leaning, kerning,  weight,  serifs, and  ligature to communicate a feeling: what if fonts could instead dynamically communicate meta-information?

This wouldn't have to be limited to emotional affect: difficulty can be used to slow down readers, weight could either indicate passages which were previously read or be used to identify passages which the reader hadn't read, and orthographic ligature could identify connection and speed of transcription.  

This is clearly not "just a feature": it would require integration with eye tracking, affective mechanisms, microphones that heard typing, and would require editing tools as well.  But the potential benefit is enormous: for a business, supporting both sides of this communication would offer an iMessage-like walled garden.  For individuals, better connection and clearer affective feedback would  enrich   relationships.

Classical liberalism is well-supported by a first class in economics: when economics assumes competitive markets, equilibrium outcomes have a number of desirable characteristics.   Classically, this was a reasonable expectation:   where patents might have offered a monopoly, it was temporary and the market was likely to eventually compete away the innovator's profits.

To the extent to which ideas may be patented and then their innovations exploited, this  premise was successful.  Modern machine learning, however, makes use of extremely large data-sets and has outputs which cannot be easily reverse-engineered.  It may well be that the reason that the methods are so widely published is that  researchers in this space realize that the data itself will be the source of future monopoly.

A natural monopoly occurs when successive units of a good are increasingly cheap.  In data-driven goods, this is super-charged: additional goods may actually reduce the cost of all other goods, as new data improves the algorithm across the system.  

Data-based monopolies are likely to be extremely durable.  Where safety is a concern, public policy is likely to guarantee their persistence.    Any upstart attempting to create a similar function will not have the data-set -and the underlying costs mean that any data owner may respond with lower prices, higher availability, or some other add-on to quash the competition.

What is the difference between leisure and laziness?  There's some factor - accomplishment, ability, or role which allows one to seem deserved and the other criminal.  Yet they are the same activity.

When we ascribe these labels to others, we are stating their deservedness.  When we ascribe them to ourselves, we are stating both our deservedness and also our worth. 

For some, the tragedy of the end of work would be that workers would lose their personal meaning.  My read is that this belief decries workaholism; meaning is available nearly everywhere: from the sublime to the absurd.  

If it's a palliative, then how do we prescribe it to others?  If it's a poison, how do we control its use?  If personal meaning is a good whose absence is costly, what is the minimum effective dose?  If meaning derives from work, what is the minimum effective dose?  And is there such a thing as a placebo - or does all meaning wear the same?