Journal – Feeding Birds, Basic Income and Steem

It was a bright sunny day today and the ducks were out playing at the pond. Sometimes they are there and people feed them. I stopped to take their picture and they came over expecting some goodies. I talked to the them quietly, “Nothing from me ducks but your pretty, thanks for the picture”.

Galaxy S7 with Google bot processing

Sometimes people feed them bread or other things that weigh them down so they have trouble flying. It kind of builds a dependency where they don’t migrate around like they should.

I think about how the bigger birds like geese can become very aggressive and messy. I’ve been places where there are signs up telling everyone not to feed them. Deer, squirrels, bunnies, rats and other critters can also get over populated when there is an abundance of food and a lack of carnivores.

The other day I was ridding my bike up my favorite mountain and I felt that I would see a rabbit at the top. Sometimes I see many of them but most days I don’t see any. Sure enough at the top was a rabbit munching away on the grass. You can see some of the mountains on the other side of the Puget Sound from here if the clouds clear.

Dependency

The animals are pretty tame around here; the rabbit looked at me without any concern. The nice thing about having plenty of food in the store is that you don’t need to eat everything moving and edible that you come in contact with.

Several years ago a coworker friend of mine that told me that in China there were none of these types of animals around. I asked him why and he told me that people had eaten them all. Geese and ducks are mighty tasty if your hungry. I remember all the cooks making Peking Duck by hanging them up to age in the kitchen where I used to work when I was younger.

When I get back to the house I fill the bird feeder thinking that if I don’t fill it this time of year it could be a hardship for the migrating birds who have come to depend on food to be there. I’ve heard that some of them can travel many miles just for a source of food that they remember about.

We are so very dependent on everything working together. It is such a complex interdependent system. When one species overpopulates and gets out of balance it can lead to all kinds of problems. I wouldn’t want to have to carry heat around just to protect myself from a bunch of hungry wolves, bears, and coyotes – not to mention humans.

Are we overpopulated? I think most would agree that we have reached way past the point where the earth could naturally sustain us through hunting and gathering a looong time ago. Without our advanced technologies and cooperation we would be facing a very serious population correction.

So unless we depend on each other we really can’t survive. I read an interesting article focusing mostly on universal basic income that @krnel thought wasn’t that good of an idea.

I’ve wrestled a lot with these issues and kind of go back and forth a bit. I debated some about the usefulness of giving birds a handout too. It’s kind of a universal basic income for all birds willing and capable of eating the seeds out of the feeder I suppose.

At this point if I stop feeding them they might gather on the rooftops and wait until I leave the house to swoop down on me like some scene in an old time horror movie. (Overactive imagination again, lol)

Basic Income

Providing a universal basic income to everyone just for being a human being seems radical. Maybe we need radical changes for some of the issues we face from automation, machine learning and advanced robotics taking our jobs. After all don’t we need some amount of comfort and security?

At anytime any of us could lose our job or house and most of our possessions. Our health could fail leaving us with huge bills and bankruptcy even if we have health insurance. Our boss could fire us just because we had a bad hair day. I don’t know - at least the birds have some consistent food in the feeder and they don’t seem to mind sitting out in the rain chirping away.

All of this fear is not doing us any good. I read a really good article by @getonthetrain about the news and why we need to stop consuming it. The gist of it is how fear causes us unnecessary suffering. Having a universal basic income could help reduce much of the fear we face and reduce the crime rate.

At the same time we can’t completely reduce the incentive to work. Yet some of us spend a lifetime working very hard but not getting much in return. Others luck out and work a couple weeks and make billions. In a way I think we can all identify with the problems that can happen from this.

I was attracted to crypto coins because of the opportunity that they represent for kind of experimenting with all these types of ideas. These smaller communities are really fun for me to study. In a way how the steem coin is setup reminds me of a type of basic income.

Steem as Basic Income

Let’s suppose that steem gets very successful – perhaps taking over bitcoin as the top dog of the crypto world. If it continues to pay out interest on steem power I can easily see people making a small investment and holding it until it gets to be a larger amount and then occasionally powering down to pay for things while not touching their capital.

In this way it looks like a basic income stream to me. Other than being in the right place at the right time your getting some value without doing any work per say.

If you add voting and creating content you would greatly increase the value that you got back. I don’t think that work is being discouraged in this case. Many of us continue to write and post for the fun of it. In a way I think it is kind of a good experiment to see if basic income could work.

As I watch the price of Steem continue to rise this evening I’m filled with good hope for the future. (I’m also thinking of unloading some of the coins I purchased earlier today but I’m resisting so far) ;)

---

Just a few of my rambling thoughts. Thanks for reading!