There's two ideas that combined, I think could reverse America's collapse: Universal Basic Income and Ranked-Choice Voting. I don't know how to make Ranked-Choice Voting happen (it's a chicken-and-egg problem as the people who benefit from the existing voting system would need to change it), but I have (what I think) is a new idea for Universal Basic Income.
Most UBI designs depend on support from the state, corporations or benevolent private benefactors. I don't think I need to elaborate on why none of these can be trusted with the long-term security of the people. Setting that aside, all three also require big steps and a lot of buy-in and commitment from a lot of people before they can even begin to operate in even an experimental fashion.
So I've been looking for alternatives and thinking about how I could start this at a district/block level. How could say, a dozen households generate enough revenue to provide UBI for the neighborhood without creating an additional burden that offsets it's value?
I'm sure there's a lot of ways, but since I'm an electronics guy one of my first thoughts was solar energy. Once installed, generating electricity from solar panels is about as low-effort as it gets and produces a valuable commodity. The hang-up is distributing that commodity and collecting payment for it. It's fairly straightforward to "sell" electricity back to the power company but that requires a significant up-front investment and doesn't provide income in a way that you can take to the grocery store and buy food.
So I started thinking about what you could do with that electricity that is easier to distribute and sell and this reminded me of an old idea I had about building a compute "cloud" out of "enriched" solar panels. Selling cloud compute is a well-established business, one that can be marketed directly to consumers (as opposed to a utility) and results in easily used currency. Also, it can be distributed globally with little more than a robust Internet connection.
The basic design consists of:
* Solar panel
* Charge controller
* Battery
* Single-board computer with wireless network interface
* Various supporting bits
This is all bundled into a self-contained unit that integrates into the back of the panel, resulting in a package that can be mounted just like a regular solar panel, just a little thicker.
So how does this apply to UBI? The idea is that each building in the neighborhood mounts some of these panels wherever they can to collect sunlight. The panels form a distributed computer via wireless network connections. This wireless network is uplinked to the Internet from at least two physical nodes (ideally through two difference carriers for redundancy), allowing customers to run paid workloads just like they would on any other cloud provider. The revenue from these customers is then distributed to the neighborhood as Universal Basic Income.
Of course the devil is in the details, (and frankly the details are fun to think about) so I started doing some back-of-the-napkin calculations to get some numbers to work with to have some idea of the practicality of the idea. I tried a number of variations in my head, but here's what I settled on as a baseline:
Roughly $350 per unit at retail, small-volume prices.
With this configuration, only 2 hours of full sun are needed to completely charge the battery and a full battery can run the RockPro64 at full-draw for about 50 hours. This doesn't account for losses, but even if we cut the minimum daily compute hours per charge in half, there's still enough power to run for more than a day. Given that it's unlikely to go 24 hours with no usable sunlight (even here in Wisconsin!), this should be more than sufficient.
On the revenue side, I used the cheapest Digital Ocean VPC as a starting point ($8.00/month) and bumped that to $10 because we're selling home-grown carbon-free socialist compute and that's got to be worth $2 more than whatever DO is selling. 10 VPC's with similar attributes (or equivalent workloads) should be able to run comfortably on a Rock64-based SBC, so we can expect about $100/month of revenue out of each unit.
This doesn't account for the Internet uplink. At the moment I don't have a viable option for this locally so any guess as to the cost would be pure speculation. Ideally, this would take the form of a wireless link with a static, public address and off-hand I don't know of anyone who can provide this locally.
This works out to a tidy $1/watt/month, how convenient! It also means that each unit pays for itself after about three-and-a-half months (assuming all planned capacity is sold).
So the question is, is this enough to create a viable Universal Basic Income?
I'm not sure but the potential is intriguing. Even the possibility of providing a UBI that is founded and supported by people instead of a government or business (is there a difference?) must be explored. Even if this specific implementation isn't enough, I'm sure other people have ideas like this which could be combined to make it so.
What's particularly exciting to me about this approach is the potential granularity of it, it doesn't require spending millions of dollars or getting buy-in from entire cities, states or countries. It can start with just a few people, experiment, measure, improve and grow. It can also scale-up without a lot of changes to larger groups (although I would recommend capping the size of any given "cluster" to something human scale).
So the next step for me is to fabricate a couple of these units and conduct some tests.