Re: What I love...
What I love...
...is a good rant about the problem with X, without providing an alternative.
Lucky for you that El Reg exists, then.
How about this. Invest more in GOOD education (and I don't mean starting kids in school before they have learn't to eat solids).
Speaking of vagaries with no definition, exactly what is good education? Your suggestion is as worthless as the lack of alternatives from the rant that you loathed. The problem isn't investing, as there's heaps of money being thrown at education the world over, but how it's spent. As it stands, any teacher can tell you that the excess of money thrown at education has funded a huge bureaucracy and not addressed the issues in the classroom.
Additionally, the kids who need the most help tend to have the least help at home, so your solution had better address that side of things too.
Spend more on crime prevention, drug rehabilitation, homelessness, health promotion and social skills and all those other fluffy things that you can't measure.
How about we decriminalize victimless crimes like drug possession and stop ruining people's lives because it makes us feel like we're doing something about crime. People don't need more crime prevention, rehabilition, or any of the other fuzzy measures of societal well being. They need peace, domestically and internationally, and that starts with decriminalization. I could go on at length about all the other bad governmental policies causing such distress (minimum wage laws, immigration restrictions, trade tariffs, et al), but I already have enough downvotes as it is.
And hey presto, you find all the other budgets no longer require as much money.
But of course that involves a lot of short to mid term pain and we don't want pay taxes for that do we?
Unless you eliminate governmental agencies, you won't ever (EVER!) eliminate the spending. Politician cannot help but frantically give away government largess to their army of cronies that keep the political machine well-oiled. I think too many incorrectly assume that they would feel significant pain if somehow the government wasn't involved in virtually every area of our lives. It's truly short-sighted, since most of those institutions are a result of the growth of the developed nations and not a factor that caused the growth.
All of that being said, the article is utter shite, since the author conflates the robot-job takeover crowd with the universal-basic-income crowd, when both camps don't even require each other. UBI is a concept to replace the huge swaths of social services with a stipend, nothing more. It's purpose is to raise the reservation wage. Any article that discusses UBI without mentioning the reservation wage is completely disingenuous. The robot-job takeover crowd have things completely backward economically, since robots wouldn't completely replace humans if no humans can spend on consumption (hence, consumers) unless robots can allow all of us to consume at will without working (and no one will be complaining then).
/rantover