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I hate to be critical because I love the core idea, and YCRs wonderful corporate generosity. However, this is path dependency in action, in all it's anti-intel

I hate to be critical because I love the core idea, and YCRs wonderful corporate generosity. However, this is path dependency in action, in all it's anti-intellectual glory. The only value that will be extracted here is the publicity/marketing value. If they can somehow leverage that into some kind of state or federal government supported largesse, I will happily stand corrected. But in the absence of that, as scientific experiments go, and dressing it up as such is a waste of money. I'm sure enough people have told them that by now. YCR says it's for figuring out the logistics, which implies some kind of future action. The only problem is if they wanted to do this correctly, this isn't going to be very useful way of figuring out the logistics for eg. people who speak Swahili. See my comment here for more info on why: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11812563 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11812563 I would love to be wrong but I doubt it. The study will no doubt make for interesting reading - if it's published.

stephengillie 10y ago
The financial side of the project is definitely...interesting. Another poster pointed out that tax-funded UBI would work like a redistribution of wealth. Almost any other way - funded by Angel/VC donations, Kickstarter, using another tax pool (having Congress pay for it), taking loans or increasing the US Federal debt, or even by pillaging other countries - would still just be a redistribution of wealth. There is one other way - Expansion of the overall money supply. But this is well-known to result in nearly equivalent inflation. Humans somehow want a certain percentage of all money - not just an arbitrary amount. This percentage may be extremely small for some - 0.0000001% of all money, or less - but when the total number of dollars increases, each person wants an equivalent percentage increase in the total number of dollars they get. This may be Bitcoin or ISK or priceless paintings instead of dollars, or whichever currency of the day. Has there been a UBI monetary-policy model produced that doesn't invoke large inflation or heavy wealth redistribution?

stephengillie 10y ago

The financial side of the project is definitely...interesting. Another poster pointed out that tax-funded UBI would work like a redistribution of wealth. Almost any other way - funded by Angel/VC donations, Kickstarter, using another tax pool (having Congress pay for it), taking loans or increasing the US Federal debt, or even by pillaging other countries - would still just be a redistribution of wealth. There is one other way - Expansion of the overall money supply. But this is well-known to result in nearly equivalent inflation. Humans somehow want a certain percentage of all money - not just an arbitrary amount. This percentage may be extremely small for some - 0.0000001% of all money, or less - but when the total number of dollars increases, each person wants an equivalent percentage increase in the total number of dollars they get. This may be Bitcoin or ISK or priceless paintings instead of dollars, or whichever currency of the day. Has there been a UBI monetary-policy model produced that doesn't invoke large inflation or heavy wealth redistribution?