The title seemed negative to me (I thought he complained and the CEO said "we're done with you!").

But really, the T-Mobile CEO was helping -- the author wanted out of his contract (well, out of the $200 fee).

(EDIT: The original title was "I emailed the CEO of T-Mobile and he killed my contract, no joke")

Just to put things in perspective (I'm swiss), 2500CHF is a really low salary in Switzerland. There is another initiative asking for a minimum wage of 4000CHF per month. The median swiss salary is close to 6000CHF[1]. The administration says the poverty line is around 2200CHF per month for someone living alone [2].

You can't really just convert to $ and say it's a lot of money. A lot of basic stuff like food, transportation, housing are really expensive in Switzerland.

[1] http://archives.tdg.ch/actu/suisse/suisses-gagnent-moyenne-5...

[2] http://www.bfs.admin.ch/bfs/portal/fr/index/themen/20/03/bla...

A Swiss franc is currently worth a little bit more than a dollar, so this works out to $2800/month or $33600/year. By US standards, this actually seems to be a good salary: significantly better than working full time at minimum wage.

It would cover all my current expenses handily. Of course, I'm young and single but by no means frugal. (I find that the little costs involved in worrying about my expenses easily outweigh the money saved.) So this is quite an income.

One of the main questions about something like this is about who would do boring, low-paid work with this sort of basic income. What I would really hope is that people would still do many of those jobs, but for far fewer hours--largely as a way to get money for incidental expenses and luxuries beyond the basic income. One problem I find with most jobs is that it's much easier to get more pay than less hours, even if I really want the latter. There is a large drop-off between full-time and part-time work.[1]

Beyond a certain level, I would value having more free time far more than making more money. Unfortunately, mostly for social reasons, it's hard to express this preference. A basic income could make this much easier to do.

While I suspect this might not pass, I think it would be very valuable for the entire world. One of the unfortunate realities in politics is that it is really hard to run experiments; small countries like Switzerland can act as a test subject for the entire world. Or perhaps like a tech early adopter for modern policies.

Either way, this passing would be very interesting.

[1]: For me, this is not quite as simple. In reality, there are plenty of jobs where I would be happy to work relatively long hours. But this stops being a question of pay, or even "work": after all, I'm happy to spend hours and hours programming for free. Being paid to do something I really like is wonderful, but it really changes the dynamics in ways that probably do not apply to most people.

Whoa. Definitely wasn't ready for HN-style exposure.

As bmoskowitz pointed out we have some rough words about the project. For this group, I'd in particular point out the roadmap and CONTRIBUTORS.md documents on the github repo:

  https://github.com/mozilla/appmaker/blob/master/ROADMAP.md 
  
  https://github.com/mozilla/appmaker/blob/master/CONTRIBUTING.md

I wrote some earlier words at https://github.com/mozilla/appmaker-words/wiki, but that's quite possibly out of date.

At the highest level, we're exploring whether it's possible to make a tool that lets non-devs (_not_ you folks!) who currently see their phones as a pure engine of consumption, as a place where they can create something fun or useful.

It's very, very early software, and it's public mostly because a) we kinda don't know how to do anything else, and b) we're going to use early and frequent user feedback to correct the aim on the product.

If people are interested, we're more than happy to entertain questions either here or on github, irc, the mailing list, etc.

Oh, and yeah, many of the components are broken, brittle, etc. This is still just a prototype.

That said, we're getting positive reactions from people close to our target audience, such as high school teachers, people teaching others how to make their first app, etc.

I'm sure we have loads of x-browser compatibility bugs, as well as known issues with respect to accessibility, absent localization, no great mechanism for contributing new components, and many more.

Oh, and the gamification bits in particular were really just testing the gamification APIs -- the levels we have in place are deeply unuseful =).