Facebook Should Pay Us A Basic Income?

Welcome back to the channel, and I hope you all are having a nice day. So today, interesting video: Facebook should pay us a basic income. And this is an article I found online that I'm gonna read by John Thornhill. The article has a very similar title to the video, Facebook Should Pay Us a Basic Income. This article entails why should Facebook pay us a basic income. Why Facebook Should Pay Us a Basic Income is the title. We'll try to leave a link in the description. You can't see the article in front of us, but I am going to try to read it. To you all, and we're gonna explore, you know, should Facebook pay us essentially a basic income? So let's, let's read the article. So the idea of guaranteeing a basic income for everybody has many obvious flaws. Laws. But one overwhelming virtue— it enshrines the principle that every citizen is a valued member of society and has a right to share in this collective wealth, right? That conviction has animated radical thinkers for 500 years since the argument was first sketched out in Sir Thomas More's Utopia, the idea has gained renewed resonance in our own times as we fret about the erosion of living standards, the concentration of wealth, and the possible threat of mass unemployment caused by technological change. But for half a millennium, universal basic income has, um, remained little more than a utopian dream because it has always crashed up against the rocks of a reality. The chief of objections are ones of principle and practicality, encapsulated in two questions: why should people be paid to do nothing? And how could we possibly afford it? Yet it is possible to design a basic income scheme that retains its main attractions while minimizing its flaws. By default, a good working model has been operating in Alaska for more than 30 years. In 1976, Alaska's voters approved a constitutional amendment to create a permanent investment fund financed by revenues from the state's incipient oil boom. A few years later, the Alaska Permanent Fund began paying out a dividend to every registered resident. Depending on the fund's performance, the annual payout has ranged from $878 to $2,072 a head over the past decade. So that's very, very interesting. Um, it, it is in all but name a universal basic income paid irrespective of social contribution or wealth. Wow, very interesting. A lot of people are familiar with the Alaskan permanent fund. Um, so the scheme has not led to mass indolence as the critics of basic income fear. The clue lies in the adjective basic. The scheme, which has commanded bipartisan support, has also proved increasingly popular and been described as the third rail of state politics because it electrocutes any politician who touches it. In a recent telephone survey, Alaskans described the fund's top 3 advantages as being its equality of treatment, its fairness of distribution, and its assistance to struggling families. Some 58 58% of respondents said they would even be prepared to pay more state taxes to preserve the fund. Although Alaska has been knocked by lower oil prices, in spite of its natural resources, Alaska does not rank among the richest of U.S. states in terms of gross domestic product per head. Also very interesting. Yet partly as a result of its annual dividend, it is one of the most economically equal states and has one of the lowest poverty rates. Last month, Mark Zuckerberg, chief executive of Facebook, visited Alaska and praised the state's social program, saying they provided some good lessons for the rest of the country. Like other Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, Mr. Zuckerberg believes that thousands of jobs are going to be swept away by new technologies such as driverless cars. In such a world, he says, we need to invent a new social contract. Basic income could be part of the answer. Some argue that Alaska is a special case as it's just distributed the fruits of an oil bonanza, but it may be possible to find other sources of revenue to fund similar schemes elsewhere. Some have suggested a land value tax. Others have argued for a financial transaction tax. But there is one other potential source of revenue that Mr. Zuckerberg knows all about, and that is data. If, as the saying goes, data are the new oil, then we may have found a 21st century revenue stream. Data could do for the world what oil has done for Alaska. Mr. Zuckerberg's concern for the marginalized in society is commendable, as is his commitment to building strong communities. Unlike most of the rest of us, he has the personal influence to help tackle the problems of our age. He runs one of the world's most valuable companies and has a ready-made digital pulpit from which he can make his case to Facebook's 2 billion global users. He should now live up to his rhetoric and launch a Facebook Permanent Fund to cover a broader universal basic income expense. Experiment. You should encourage other data businesses such as Google to contribute too. The most valuable asset that Facebook possesses is the data that its users often unwittingly hand over for free before they are in effect sold to advertisers. It seems only fair that Facebook makes a bigger social contribution for profiting from this massively valuable collectively, collectively profitably generated resource. His shareholders would hate the idea, but from Facebook's earliest years, Mr. Zuckerberg has said his purpose has been to make an impact rather than build a company. Besides, such a philanthropic, uh, gesture, or philanthropic gesture, might even prove to be the marketing coup of the century. Facebook users could continue to swap cat pictures knowing that every click was contributing to a greater social good. Such a data-for-basic-income swap is simple and clear. It should appeal to the solutionist, solutionalist mindset of Silicon Valley. Many tech entrepreneurs are suspicious of government intervention, but there is no rule to say that only governments can be in the wealth redistribution business. We should explore ideas like universal basic income to give everyone a cushion to try new things, Mr. Zuckerberg told Harvard graduates in a commencement address. Quite right, Mark. Give it a go. So that's the article from Mr. John Thornton, and I thought it was a great article, and I thought that the article raised some valid points. Now I know a lot of people like to think of, um, you know, Mark Zuckerberg, you know, in the scope, pretty much in the scope of, um, you know, this diabolical genius to take over the world and, uh, who creates a lot of problems for us, but A lot of people do feel he's on to something about universal basic income. Now the issue has become, if that is the case, why doesn't he do something about it? And what could be more useful than one of the most valuable companies in the world to experiment with? And that would of course be Facebook, right? Why not do this with Facebook? It seems like as good a place to start as any, right? Just trying to find my wallet transfer button here if I can. So, um, yeah, so why doesn't Mark Zuckerberg then try this out? And so part of the, the problem has been that from a business standpoint, perhaps the shareholders would not like it, right? But I did find it very interesting in examples given, like in Alaska. Here's the funny thing about Alaska. Here's the funny thing about Alaska, and that is that Alaska isn't one of the richest states. In the world, right? Or in the United States. So what's very interesting about that is then it shows that you do not, um, have to really even be a rich state to support, you know, support, uh, universal basic income. I always felt that, uh, Alaska was a quite wealthy state because it had the oil reserves and so on and so forth. As the article mentioned, the, um, the oil reserves, right? But it's interesting to note that Alaska— let's see if I can— not found. Okay, I must have typed his name in wrong. I was trying to find a member here, uh, to send some, some money to on a social network. Get that? Isn't that interesting? His name is Ali Hamza. Let's try it again. So what was interesting was that Alaska, I'm sorry, not even one of the richest states in the United States. I thought with all the oil and the population, it would be a very wealthy state, and that's what would allow them to be able to pay out this dividend to its citizens, right? But that's not the case. At all. That's not turned out— that's not what's turned out to be the case. There are states that could afford to do it, right? There are states that could afford to do it that aren't doing it, right? See if it'll let me back in there. Okay, all right. Uh-oh, had a little trouble there. Okay. I think it was hum, so what is A? Let me clear it out. Okay. Alright, so back to what I was saying. So Alaska isn't even the most wealthy of the states in the United States. And so that means there are other states that could afford, could more than afford a universal basic income, as you know, many experts have determined. Now, of course, not every state has oil. And, you know, in relation to Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg, who seems to be a big advocate for universal basic income these days. You know, this could be— this could happen with Mark Zuckerberg, and the reason it could is because he understands data. Now what happens is it doesn't have to be oil. There are, as the article brought out, there could be many other things that could be used in place of oil, like land. Um, and in the 21st century, one of our most valuable commodities now is data. And I know Facebook has got a bad rap with data and what they do with our data, but I think where clarity needs to be brought is that I don't think so much it's about what they do with our data or even the misconception about how exactly they use our data and maybe algorithms that track you or what have you as to your likes and not likes and how that gets back to companies. I don't think that's so much the problem more so than you don't, as an end user, you don't get the option on how your data could be used and you don't get paid for your data. I think if given the option people would, uh, have a, uh, a different outlook on that, and they might be open to it under certain circumstances. Um, the problem though is we give our data away free already through, uh, systems like Facebook. Now, I like Mark Zuckerberg. I want to believe that he's a genuine guy, and perhaps he is. You know, he's, he's already earned a lot of money. He's set financially in the future. He can be for universal basic income, still be wealthy, and still make it out okay. So it doesn't have to be a diabolical plan. But I do find it interesting, the wording of the article, or did get me to thinking about, uh, the idea that a social network as huge as Facebook, worth, uh, almost a trillion dollars, that has formed this model pretty much on the backs of the data of end users, right? It does concern me that, um, this information, um, doesn't benefit the end user and that it goes straight into Facebook and these shareholders and so on and so forth. I, I just feel like social media platforms aren't the best systems for the creation of business models. Um, and, um, so, uh, I, you know, I think that, uh, networks that allow, uh, the, the content creators, right, the people who hand over their data, to benefit from them monetarily could be used to pay for universal basically income for these people on this network. In Facebook case, about 2.5 billion people, a great portion of the global population, and I'm sure that number is going to grow even so bigger. So yes, when you consider these factors, this very much does seem to now become more plausible, more affordable, more possible. Now, of course, there are again business constraints that could strangle something like Facebook from doing this, but I think the purpose of this video is just understanding just how possible this is. And, and whereas this has kind of been looked at as a very far-fetched idea, just how possible the idea really is. To imagine a social network that has this transferable currency, if you will, and is based on a like system. It's based on, um, attention value, uh, based on promotional data, right? And, uh, all monetized to give back the users of the network value. And I believe this is the idea of what many propose, an idea like how Facebook would be able to afford universal basic income. But not just Facebook, but we're seeing many other projects that have working models like that. Projects like BitcoinMYK that we're part of. But how great would it be to see Facebook pull this off and do this? I don't think it's impossible, but I don't think it's likely given the model of Facebook. So it probably would have to happen through some type of subsidiary or some other type of, you know, Facebook company. And I think that was— may have been kind of the basis with some of its You know, basically it's universal— I'm sorry, it's cryptocurrency that they were talking about, where you could do so much with a network like Facebook, with a layout like Facebook. And interesting enough, BitcoinNYK kind of does resemble Facebook, and it kind of does, you know, have this wallet that's part of the network. Well, Facebook doesn't have that, but it does. And that's all very interesting that you can see something like this tested out and see if it works. So far it seems to be working quite well for the BitcoinNYK project, but not without its challenges. And, um, you know, of course, um, it would certainly help a lot if it was more like the, uh, value-wise like Facebook. Imagine how many people could be fed, how much universal basic income could be sent out to people. But that is something definitely to consider. If this is a topic that interests you, uh, we invite you to join our project BitcoinMYK, where you're able to, uh, put this into practice, and it uses a cryptocurrency that does have an actual market value, right, that you earn absolutely free based on the idea of how universal basic income works, right, and using the social network as the distribution method. So very, very interesting stuff. The guaranteed income, the basic income. Tell us what you all think. Would you like to receive a universal basic income? Um, from Facebook for using it? And have you tried Bitcoin NYK as of yet to see just how that experience would be? That's all I want to say in this video. If you like content like this, don't forget to like, subscribe. Until next time, as always, take care.