I can barely begin to imagine what you&#x27;ve been thru, I was evicted from a flat once and that was incredibly stressful - but we had a support network and were helped out and got back on our feet.  This is one of the reasons I feel viscerally that Basic Income is important - it would have made a massive impact in working thru this.<p>Yes, as a society we don&#x27;t value that kind of work that traditionally women have done the majority of - child rearing for example.   Maybe as a single dad I can now have some empathy or appreciation of that, that I wouldn&#x27;t have otherwise as a middle class white male.<p>Looking after my kid and making paintings have probably been the most useful things I&#x27;ve ever done - neither of them paying anything, unlike programming work which does provide an income.  I have to wonder what more useful things I could have spent my time doing, rather than some projects which paid ok, but were unlikely to be of much use to anyone.<p>I can relate to some of your comments - when I see people who want an Uber clone developed, or who think programmers should get 5 bucks an hour because they enjoy their work anyway.. or who dont understand how much skill it takes to draw a plausible figure, who think a one off oil painting should cost 70 bucks.  But then these people are using apps that cost 20 million bucks to develop but are free to use, or they can buy a print for 30 bucks and a chinese replica for 150..<p>There are some economists and even politicians who have been talking about the value of all the work that is done which is not paid for - value and money don&#x27;t match up, in many cases.  I hadnt seen the term &#x27;emotional labor metafilter&#x27; but I&#x27;d heard of the concept [ as I listen to people like Piketty, Paul Krugman, Elizabeth Warren and lately Bernie Sanders ]<p>My hope is that a Basic Income might be a way of partly fixing this flaw [where real work is undervalued], rather than entrenching it - if the free market is not efficient enough to pay you for the useful work you are doing, basic income might at least cover the cost of living.<p>Its not a solution to every ill.. teachers will probably still be paid less than their true worth, stay at home parents will probably still have to sacrifice a lot of income.  It wont solve sexism, racism, ageism .. but it might alleviate some of the worst symptoms, some of the current pain ?<p>Maybe the government service is in fact BI, because it covers so many special cases where individuals can do useful work, that the government wont ever be able to implement an overall program ?<p>&gt; No one should be expected to live in poverty on an allotment of Basic Income while taking care of others. It is a shitty, shitty expectation.<p>I agree.. but I assume the Basic Income is more than being poor, that it was high enough to cover living expenses so that you are free to function without stress.<p>So the question is how much should BI be - equivalent to 15 bucks an hour ? 25 an hour ?  Should the minimum wage be set at the same level as BI ?  Location dependent on average rent ?