I completely agree and (hopefully) understand that. I only mention it as welfare because I believe that’s harder to argue against and at least gets us most of the way there.

As for working 8 hours and still making the same as you would on benefits, I see this issue today constantly in the current (US) system. Especially around people with disabilities who would otherwise be able to work.

UBI is the ideal, but replacing the complex welfare system with something cash based (similar to UBI, or exactly as UBI for certain demographics) would be a great first step.

As one implementation of that, a UBI can simplify the complexities of the existing safety net systems and smooth the welfare cliff.

I no longer need to pay for low income housing (I can just get some money and rent something), I’m no longer restricted by what an EBT card can buy (I just get money), I don’t need to qualify for XYZ niche benefit (I just get some money), etc. And that money could more easily be adjusted/reduced as my income grows which smooths the welfare cliff.

It also frees up a ton of money that was previously used to manage the existing complex systems and allows more efficient spending.

• Openhab (smarthome controller)
• Zigbee2mqtt (converts zigbee devices to talk mqtt)
• Mosquitto (Mqtt server)
• frigate
• Jellyfin
• Jellyseerr
• Radarr, sonarr, lidarr, bazarr, prowlarr
• transmission + a VPN tunnel
• Uptime Kuma
• Prometheus, Telegraf
• Grafana
• Influxdb, chronograf
• Three PiHole instances, synced with Orbital Sync
• Unifi Controller

And some small services to pipe metrics into Grafana dashboards for apps that don’t have native support for metrics. Most of this is managed through Docker with a Traefik reverse proxy with letsencrypt certs for https.

My most useful so far has to be openhab. I’m barely using it to it’s full potential but it’s so freeing to be able to buy (nearly) any smart device and know I can integrate it with the rest of my system. It also allows me to block Internet access to most of my smart devices completely for added privacy.

Second most useful is probably the Jellyfin/*arr stack to manage and view my collection. Soon I’m planning on adding either Calibre or something similar for books to sort my ebooks and old digital textbooks.

And once you have two or three services, monitoring obviously helps. I honestly wish I had set it up earlier, in particular Uptime Kuma for general uptime tracking. It would have saved me so much time pinging all my services to try to diagnose issues.