Daring Fireball: The Alaska Permanent Fund as Loose Precedent for AI Data Center 'UBI' Payments
By John Gruber
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OpenAI, Anthropic, Cursor, and Perplexity chose WorkOS over building it themselves.
The Alaska Permanent Fund as Loose Precedent for AI Data Center ‘UBI’ Payments
Wikipedia:
The Alaska Permanent Fund (APF) is a constitutionally established<br>permanent fund and sovereign wealth fund managed by a state-owned<br>corporation, the Alaska Permanent Fund Corporation (APFC). It was<br>established in Alaska in 1976 by Article 9, Section 15 of the<br>Alaska State Constitution under Governor Jay Hammond and Attorney<br>General Avrum Gross. [...] As of 2019, the fund was worth<br>approximately $64 billion that has been funded by oil and mining<br>revenues and has paid out an average of approximately $1,600<br>annually per resident (adjusted to 2019 dollars). The main use for<br>the fund’s revenue has been to pay out the Permanent Fund Dividend<br>(PFD), which many authors portray as the only example of a basic<br>income in practice. [...]
The PFD is a Basic Income in the form of a resource dividend. Some<br>researchers argue, “It has helped Alaska attain the highest<br>economic equality of any state in the United States... And,<br>seemingly unnoticed, it has provided unconditional cash assistance<br>to needy Alaskans at a time when most states have scaled back aid<br>and increased conditionality.”
Alaska is not exactly a left-wing state. Again, money talks.
★ Monday, 18 May 2026
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