Bread & Potatoes pt3

bread & potatoes pt3

funding things in a “universal basic income” system that i created for a science-fiction story

— Housing —

– costs –

The cost of a house when I was drafting I•L was between £75K and £125K. By about 1994, I was spending about £1 on a loaf of bread, Hovis Granary.
In my mind, in the story, a 2-up-2-down was 100,000 loaves.
Average worker annual pay; 12K loaves.

This presupposes a means of transferring funds.

– banking –

You could reject the notion of any form of money and write a story *that way* but I definitely decided that I would not simply just declare that they “No longer used money.” but that there were other societies/nations/blocs that were still using money and so there had to be points of contact where the value of money had to be decided and agreed upon.
Having a local competitor currency helped with this but I could foresee all sorts of stresses and problems in that relationship. For instance, if the Serling was under stress should the Mondays leverage the value of the Patata to back the Serling?
I decided “No.”.
The relationship had to be mutually hostile but respectful. The Patata was more than a currency, it was a literal measure of the health of the people in the Monday bloc.

– co-dependency –

The basis of (“The point of contact at which there was”) cooperation between Monday and Patriot was the arms industry.
The Mondays purchased arms from the Patriots. The Patriots made weapons and sold them. Other nations/organizations/blocs also made & sold weapons.
There were other sectors; the Mondays with the Non-Cons and land-owners were pre-eminent in agricultural farming. Patriots had specialist and vanity farms; Mondays enforced the environmental standards.
Mining was organised by Patriots and land-owners.

– crime –

Due to the divisions in society, there were still “Haves & Have-Nots”. This was portrayed as people who aspired to live the luxurious lifestyle of the Patriots rather than the modest stable lives due to mutual-support in the Monday community.
The non-conformists were a complete mixture but socially similar to Mondays.
One of the conventions that survived the Third World War was criminal organisations; in England, this included the Freemasons and the Metropolitan Police – they aligned with the Patriots.
So, the problem in I•L is that crime has a protected status …

Another real-life import into the story was a means of recompensating victims of crime and also seizure of assets (stolen or produced) and money from individuals and organizations. As these organizations were also the main providers of jobs and labour (thus “taxable income”), this formalized “taking a fall and keeping shtum” in order to protect “the firm” and protect one’s own “pension plan”.

– labour –

I•L had many types of robot; positronic, electronic and mechanoid. The Pozzies (some called Çapekniks) were at least equal to human intelligence, the Lekkies ranged in human characteristic intelligence, the Mekkanos were mainly unaware service bots which some could interact with sentients as if they were self-aware but it was just programming (they would be called something like Interactive Behavioural Models, today).
The Pozzies were sovereign-individuals capable of earning; the Lekkies varied in the degree of their individual freedom and human/corporate ownership.

Most work in the society was organized by labour unions (leftist) & associations (rightist) with the criminal organizations involved in various ways.
Collective Bargaining Rights existed in all blocs as well as individual contracts. The Zero Hours Contract was unknown to me at the time but could be seen as casual work or the individual oral contract type.
Employers who broke agreements (not to mention Health & Safety laws) would first face the ire of their peers before other organizations became involved.

And, there was a lively entertainment sector (*coff coff*).

– community cells –

A major aspect of the story was how communities recovered after the Third World War. Initially, there was to be a major nuclear exchange but then the problems of radioactive contamination became too much to sensibly allow survival in the story.
Many of the nukes in the conflict were replaced with powerful “conventional” weapons; incendiary bombs specifically started firestorms.

In the post-devestation, groups formed for mutual defence and support. In England, American airbases distributed aid and arranged local security in their areas.
Actual “British” military bases had been directly targeted while American ones on foreign soil were deliberately left untouched so as to complicate response decisions. This again causes (“supplied for the story a source of”) tensions with host populations post-apoc.

It is often cited that a person can comfortably interact on a daily basis with between 90 and 110 people.
Post-apoc, this is how the local communities organised.
With the anti-American groupings, these communities took the name Community Cell Co-operative to describe the network of support between them.
In the irradiated version, they dug in to the land and used large concrete pipe sections to make living areas joined together then filled in with uncontaminated (or less contaiminated) soil. Problems such as drainage were dealt with by pumps run by solar panels. (Not much improvement in Solar efficiency was foreseen by me.)

Decades after the war, these community arrangements remained strong, especially with the non-conformists and the Mondays while the Patriots went back to rebuilding & rennovating “premier” properties – the Patriots did still have gated-communities, though.

The Monday version of the Community Cell would continue to survive into the future due to its relationship with the RDA system. Accommodation was a guaranteed right of all Monday community members but they added a few cheats.
Each community had to have at least one hundred personal bedrooms. These were usually arranged in groups of four or five bedrooms with other facilities (lounge, laundry-room, bathroom, kitchen). So,about twenty to twenty-five cellblocks to a community cell.

But, the Mondays kept population of each cell to between eighty-five to ninety people. Surplus accommodation was kept in case of emergencies (such as war!) to house refugees and asylum seekers (but also directly to replace the need for hotels). The Third World War made the Mondays reject notions of “who was deserving of having a good standard of life”.
((That was mighty big of me.))
The Patriots continued the pre-war policies but as they mainly accommodated people of their peer status group or who were working with/for them then they hardly had to “deal” with “refugees and asylum seekers”.

Mondays also had policies of at least one “hospital bed” apartment to each community cell. And, there were provisions for a detainment/detention cell to hold at least one person at a time per community cell (not necessarily their own comm-cell member). Most criminal sentences were served by being restricted to the area/properties of a community cell.
Prisons were run by Patriots for profit.

– the Militia –

As the communities were formed during a time of war and then civil-strife, there is a militant ethic in the communities.
This became formalised with general “basic training” for all members and specialised training for those who were good at it (or who were selected as having to work alongside the specialists or in Militia facilities).
Personal firearms were not allowed but each community cell had an armoury.
(The Militia name came from what I knew of C18th and C19th Britain but also from AmericanFlagg and the constant references to militias in the television/radio news at the time of writing I•L drafts.)
The Monday Militia as a force was also the project of a Trotskyite version of myself inserted into the war-&-post-war era of the story who had a personal guard of religious right-wing pre-op transfems; The Pray-Tory-Anne Guard.
((These days “Arm Transgirls Not Police” is a real slogan!))
(The population’s nickname for the DPP was “the Dishwashers”. There were just 6 or 8 total parliamentarian members of the DPP but they represented about 20% of Britain’s post-war pop. Their “leader”, William Edwards, who became *de facto* British Prime Minister, was known as “Big Brother” … and was the commanding officer of a USAF base in the Midlands! One of them was a Lekkie, Caphaud Raichupe. The Trotskyite Militia leader was probably called … Mike …)

– the story’s main compromise –

Legitimate ownership-of or right-to-stay-on land was a problem for survivors of the war. My solution was that some land-owners chose to side with the Monday and Non-conformist blocs by “giving” them land; they may have had to abandon the homes that they had previously built and relocate to these freeholds.
Mondays and Non-Cons who were permitted to stay on Patriot land were more likely to be seen by those landowners as guarantees of a tacit non-aggression pact with them. This permissive practice also formed “mixed” communities.

– the end for now –

All of the details outlined in these three essays were in the background of the “Inside Love” story with some direct clarifications when needed.
There’s still a lot more.
I haven’t even mentioned what happened to the Royal Family, yet.

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