Walmart's CEO talked about this a few years ago—how crowded their stores get around midnight on the last day of the month, because that's when people's payments clear:

about 11 p.m., customers start to come in and shop, fill their grocery basket with basic items, baby formula, milk, bread, eggs, and continue to shop and mill about the store until midnight, when electronic — government electronic benefits cards get activated and then the checkout starts and occurs. And our sales for those first few hours on the first of the month are substantially and significantly higher. And if you really think about it, the only reason somebody gets out in the middle of the night and buys baby formula is that they need it, and they’ve been waiting for it. Otherwise, we are open 24 hours — come at 5 a.m., come at 7 a.m., come at 10 a.m. But if you are there at midnight, you are there for a reason.

That stuck in my mind. It's a poignant image.

http://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2010/09/20/watching-walmart-a...

Russians have us beat -- they decoded an address with the wrong character encoding hand written on this package.

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Koverto-kun-krakozjab...

What really gets me going is the realization of how much more value people would produce if they could own their lives outright instead of renting it from one boss to the next. There'd be less "work" of the traditional, low-productivity, subordinate zombie sense, but a lot more getting done.

I want to see BI not because I have an interest in not working. Rather, I want it to free people to work. Work is too important (both as a human need, and as a productive force in society) to leave it in the hands of the entrenched boss men who currently own Work.

It would be such an excuse-killer, too, to implement BI and get rid of compulsory labor. People could no longer justify making so little of their lives due to having to work. Now, it turns out to still be quite hard to make something of one's life but, when that excuse is gone, the only thing to say is "Yes, it's hard; but go on, do it."

Sometimes I wonder, though, if we invented institutional Work to justify mediocrity, and make it OK. It's often portrayed as an oppression brought in by deceptive, aggressive Boss Men; but I also think people willingly participate because it's a way to substitute mediocre/subordinate social acceptance for the much more intermittent reward/thrill of genuine work. Boss men definitely were more principal in driving Work to its current state, but it was a coevolution.