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Many tech workers do this to themselves because they feel like they need to keep up with the Joneses. That $120k startup job? Move to a cheaper locale, make ha

Many tech workers do this to themselves because they feel like they need to keep up with the Joneses. That $120k startup job? Move to a cheaper locale, make half of that in a job that gives you more free time, and you are still making a salary that most workers would kill for. That's easier said than done, but tech workers are some of the most privileged in the world. If you can't make it by on a tech salary, an extra $10k isn't going to do you any good - and that's what basic income promises for each person if the government decides to spend 3 trillion a year. If you don't want to live off of $12k a year, you have to get another job, which you can do right now if you have decent skills. Sorry to rant, but basic income gets brought up in every thread like it's a solution, but a basic analysis of numbers says it's...going to be hard to do, realistically.

neon_electro 10y ago
Can you expand on how you don't see basic income as a solution?
- aaron-lebo 10y ago
  I thought the post said it? $12k is the cited number that you see a lot in basic income discussions. That's just over the poverty level. That's not enough to live on and it's practically a bonus for some members of this site. It's not enough to do anything with. But just to do that in the US you are talking about 3 trillion dollars (300 million x $10k for easy math) that you have to find in the budget. Now basic income advocates will say you can make up some if not most of that by cutting welfare programs, but given the nature of welfare programs - good luck. That stipend is also not enough to pay for healthcare, so you can't cut that. How exactly do you convince a nation which already isn't willing to pay for healthcare to pay for basic income, too? I'd love to be wrong, but I've never seen any numbers that are workable, especially in a political climate anything like today.
  - ant6n 10y ago
    If you've spent so much time on this discussion, you should know that only people near and below the poverty line actually receive that money, the rest have it absorbed into their own taxes.
    - bigtimeidiot 10y ago
      >only people near and below the poverty line actually receive that money, the rest have it absorbed into their own taxes. This will never fly politically. You think lower-middle class people (the vast majority of the country) are going to agree to that?
    - anigbrowl 10y ago
      Good luck selling that one pal I love the idea of basic income, but proponents need to a) make much, much better economic arguments, b) stop being so afraid of numbers, and c) get a dose of political realism. We do not live in a Star Trek universe when you only need to convince one wise leader like Captain Picard or Janeway. If you're American or based in the USA, that means accepting the fact that a large chunk of the population adheres (consciously or not) to a particularly stark version of Calvinism that says wealth is a sign of God's favor, poverty is a punishment for sin, and a whole truckload of authoritarian correlates. Considerations of rationality, economic efficiency, and equity all factor into policy discussions in the US, but are by no means dominant - hence the perennial proposals to impose drug tests on welfare recipients despite the abundant evidence that this is a complete waste of time and money in the places where it has already been tried.
  - Danihan 10y ago
    It's fantasy thinking based on the fallacious worldview that life isn't a competition.
    - pasquinelli 10y ago
      Life isn't a competition.
      - Danihan 10y ago
        Of course it is. That's why it's guided by natural selection and territorial acquisition.
        pjmorris 10y ago
        If you're a gazelle, or a lion, maybe. If you're human, you've benefited from millennia of cooperative work invested by your predecessors and peers.
        anigbrowl 10y ago
        That's an ideology, not a fact. There is lots of evidence of cooperation, symbiosis, and eusocial behavior, all of which differ from pure competition and complicate things. Nature can be very competitive, but a lot of the time it's also lazy and harmonious and prefers slack over maxing out efficiency.
    - Nomentatus 10y ago
      Sexual selection is a competition. Life is more than that for some, but certainly not all humans.
  - erikpukinskis 10y ago
    I'm living on less than $12k in Oakland while also self-funding a homebuilding startup. What do you mean "can't do anything"? I have to be careful when I do a work day with my partner, because I can't always afford it, so progress is slow, but it's working. It's happening. He wanted to work this weekend, but I'm just barely going to make rent so we have to wait. We're doing a work day next weekend though.
    - aaron-lebo 10y ago
      It's not meant to be literal, but anyways the fact that you are prevented from working because you have so little money available says enough. I've lived on $30k and that takes a lot of sacrifice. It's hard for me to imagine $12k. Even a ghetto $500 a month apartment means you're left with $500 for food, transport, etc. Ugh. Car insurance and gasoline cuts out a car. Public transport can still be expensive. You're either walking or biking and probably renting a bedroom? Someone's subsidizing your diet and/or you are eating lots of cheap food. It'd be interesting to hear more about how you pull it off. Good luck with your efforts!
      - erikpukinskis 10y ago
        No car. I only use public transit a few times a week. I walk a lot. It's not hard to eat for $100-200 a month if you cook for yourself. You're right it's a sacrifice, but it's doable. It would not be doable on $0, and that's the difference basic income makes. I have an immense amount of stress from coming up with the $1000 every month. It's hard to predict, but I suspect without that distraction I would be further along in my process. It's been slow, although I'm almost done with this phase.
      - pasquinelli 10y ago
        "It's not meant to be literal, but anyways the fact that you are prevented from working because you have so little money available says enough." Wait, if he got that money in basic income then he wouldn't have to work his day job as much, giving him both more time and money to bootstrap his business, yeah?
      - deleted 10y ago
  - tw04 10y ago
    In the theoretical world of nearly complete automation, the price of goods would drop precipitously.
- jjt-yn_t 10y ago
  From my food stamp days, now some 30-40 somewhere years later, thanks for the gift which was so necc. Once back out on the sidewalk with worries where my next quarter gallon of gas was going to come from, the movie show to have a respite from stern lectures I did not deserve, or deserve three hours rather than two, some nights, being in a very small square footage living area and in the corner on a mattress behind my privacy wall of another mattress, or the equivalent, the taxpayer would be paying for spending more unhealthy and wasteful than the taxpayer would choose. Surmising from here, half of recipients non-transparency as to the continuation of the program, irrevocably. Like the THING tadpole that would refuse to turn into a frog and thrive on kudzu until the southeast USA would be evacuated due the symbiotic relationship between the two. OR an equivalent scenario. But that's just me.
tannhauser23 10y ago
Hear hear. Anytime there's any discussion remotely related to income, welfare, healthcare, startups, creativity, the basic income evangelical squad shows up in full force. As if Hacker News readers will suddenly quit their jobs and do 'what they really want' if government writes them a $15k check once a year! Most people in this board can make $15k in a year right. now. They can do that living anywhere. But then the whining begins, 'Oh I don't want to move to X because there's nothing to do there', 'Oh that place Y? It's full of [insert people assumed to be ignorant and evil because they have different political beliefs, and they don't eat organic]', 'I need to be close to Z', 'I have a family', blah blah blah. None of this is going to change if the government starts shoveling cash out to anybody and everybody.
- ant6n 10y ago
  Many tech people take sabbaticals to work on creative projects or open source it just leaving, using savings from previous years as a form of "minimal income". I'd say many would like to have more people to have this sort of opportunity, which is currently only limited to the very privileged.
- ribosometronome 10y ago
  It seems you're misunderstanding what people mean when they talk about that freedom. It's not that we can't already earn 15k doing _something_. It's that we can't earn 15k working solely on a pet project for a few years. Think Stardew Valley -- the dev relied on being a movie usher and his girlfriend's grad student stipend to get by.
dominotw 10y ago
I don't care about Joneses. I fear being irrelevant as I age, losing my mental acumen. Falling victim to an illness ect. I want my savings to cushion me during the fall. I want to retire comfortably as I don't plan to have kids.
leggomylibro 10y ago
Yeah, it does seem hard to make the numbers work. I always get tripped up because I usually wind up around $2-4 Trillion per year, which is like the whole federal budget. Let's see if I'm remembering that wrong. So we'll give every adult in the United States a basic annual income of $10,000. It's hard to live off of that in many parts of the country, but we should start small. There are about 250 million adults in the USA as of 2016 (245.3 according to wikipedia, but let's keep it round.) So...yep, that's $2.5 Trillion a year. You can argue that you'd pay for it with a tax on upper earners, but I haven't seen any actual numbers to support the theory that you could raise that amount via taxes on the wealthy. And I don't feel like looking into tax brackets and wages and crap right now. I also think you're right that your average tech worker should be able to scrape together a 5-figure unemployment/job-hunting backup fund fairly quickly.
- saghm 10y ago
  I'm not making a judgment about whether it's economically feasible or not (as I have neither the expertise or the data to be able to figure out out), but I think part of the idea of basic income is that it would replace other forms of welfare, so the actual increase in the budget wouldn't be the full $2.5 trillion (although it would still be quite sizable).
- chongli 10y ago
  which is like the whole federal budget Don't forget the state and municipal budgets. Leaving those out can really skew your comparison to other countries which may be structured very differently. State budgets in the US combine to another $1.9 trillion [0], with some states like North Dakota having a budget as high as $18,760 per capita! Now I'm not saying it's possible to simply sacrifice all of those budgets on the altar of basic income, but it seems pretty reasonable that we might find a more efficient allocation of resources. After all, California's budget per capita is only $4,366. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._state_budgets https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._state_budgets
- mempko 10y ago
  Taxes don't fund the federal government. There would be no issue making the money to fund it. Issue is inflation.

neon_electro 10y ago

Can you expand on how you don't see basic income as a solution?

aaron-lebo 10y ago
I thought the post said it? $12k is the cited number that you see a lot in basic income discussions. That's just over the poverty level. That's not enough to live on and it's practically a bonus for some members of this site. It's not enough to do anything with. But just to do that in the US you are talking about 3 trillion dollars (300 million x $10k for easy math) that you have to find in the budget. Now basic income advocates will say you can make up some if not most of that by cutting welfare programs, but given the nature of welfare programs - good luck. That stipend is also not enough to pay for healthcare, so you can't cut that. How exactly do you convince a nation which already isn't willing to pay for healthcare to pay for basic income, too? I'd love to be wrong, but I've never seen any numbers that are workable, especially in a political climate anything like today.
- ant6n 10y ago
  If you've spent so much time on this discussion, you should know that only people near and below the poverty line actually receive that money, the rest have it absorbed into their own taxes.
  - bigtimeidiot 10y ago
    >only people near and below the poverty line actually receive that money, the rest have it absorbed into their own taxes. This will never fly politically. You think lower-middle class people (the vast majority of the country) are going to agree to that?
  - anigbrowl 10y ago
    Good luck selling that one pal I love the idea of basic income, but proponents need to a) make much, much better economic arguments, b) stop being so afraid of numbers, and c) get a dose of political realism. We do not live in a Star Trek universe when you only need to convince one wise leader like Captain Picard or Janeway. If you're American or based in the USA, that means accepting the fact that a large chunk of the population adheres (consciously or not) to a particularly stark version of Calvinism that says wealth is a sign of God's favor, poverty is a punishment for sin, and a whole truckload of authoritarian correlates. Considerations of rationality, economic efficiency, and equity all factor into policy discussions in the US, but are by no means dominant - hence the perennial proposals to impose drug tests on welfare recipients despite the abundant evidence that this is a complete waste of time and money in the places where it has already been tried.
- Danihan 10y ago
  It's fantasy thinking based on the fallacious worldview that life isn't a competition.
  - pasquinelli 10y ago
    Life isn't a competition.
    - Danihan 10y ago
      Of course it is. That's why it's guided by natural selection and territorial acquisition.
      - pjmorris 10y ago
        If you're a gazelle, or a lion, maybe. If you're human, you've benefited from millennia of cooperative work invested by your predecessors and peers.
      - anigbrowl 10y ago
        That's an ideology, not a fact. There is lots of evidence of cooperation, symbiosis, and eusocial behavior, all of which differ from pure competition and complicate things. Nature can be very competitive, but a lot of the time it's also lazy and harmonious and prefers slack over maxing out efficiency.
  - Nomentatus 10y ago
    Sexual selection is a competition. Life is more than that for some, but certainly not all humans.
- erikpukinskis 10y ago
  I'm living on less than $12k in Oakland while also self-funding a homebuilding startup. What do you mean "can't do anything"? I have to be careful when I do a work day with my partner, because I can't always afford it, so progress is slow, but it's working. It's happening. He wanted to work this weekend, but I'm just barely going to make rent so we have to wait. We're doing a work day next weekend though.
  - aaron-lebo 10y ago
    It's not meant to be literal, but anyways the fact that you are prevented from working because you have so little money available says enough. I've lived on $30k and that takes a lot of sacrifice. It's hard for me to imagine $12k. Even a ghetto $500 a month apartment means you're left with $500 for food, transport, etc. Ugh. Car insurance and gasoline cuts out a car. Public transport can still be expensive. You're either walking or biking and probably renting a bedroom? Someone's subsidizing your diet and/or you are eating lots of cheap food. It'd be interesting to hear more about how you pull it off. Good luck with your efforts!
    - erikpukinskis 10y ago
      No car. I only use public transit a few times a week. I walk a lot. It's not hard to eat for $100-200 a month if you cook for yourself. You're right it's a sacrifice, but it's doable. It would not be doable on $0, and that's the difference basic income makes. I have an immense amount of stress from coming up with the $1000 every month. It's hard to predict, but I suspect without that distraction I would be further along in my process. It's been slow, although I'm almost done with this phase.
    - pasquinelli 10y ago
      "It's not meant to be literal, but anyways the fact that you are prevented from working because you have so little money available says enough." Wait, if he got that money in basic income then he wouldn't have to work his day job as much, giving him both more time and money to bootstrap his business, yeah?
    - deleted 10y ago
- tw04 10y ago
  In the theoretical world of nearly complete automation, the price of goods would drop precipitously.
jjt-yn_t 10y ago
From my food stamp days, now some 30-40 somewhere years later, thanks for the gift which was so necc. Once back out on the sidewalk with worries where my next quarter gallon of gas was going to come from, the movie show to have a respite from stern lectures I did not deserve, or deserve three hours rather than two, some nights, being in a very small square footage living area and in the corner on a mattress behind my privacy wall of another mattress, or the equivalent, the taxpayer would be paying for spending more unhealthy and wasteful than the taxpayer would choose. Surmising from here, half of recipients non-transparency as to the continuation of the program, irrevocably. Like the THING tadpole that would refuse to turn into a frog and thrive on kudzu until the southeast USA would be evacuated due the symbiotic relationship between the two. OR an equivalent scenario. But that's just me.

tannhauser23 10y ago

Hear hear. Anytime there's any discussion remotely related to income, welfare, healthcare, startups, creativity, the basic income evangelical squad shows up in full force. As if Hacker News readers will suddenly quit their jobs and do 'what they really want' if government writes them a $15k check once a year! Most people in this board can make $15k in a year right. now. They can do that living anywhere. But then the whining begins, 'Oh I don't want to move to X because there's nothing to do there', 'Oh that place Y? It's full of [insert people assumed to be ignorant and evil because they have different political beliefs, and they don't eat organic]', 'I need to be close to Z', 'I have a family', blah blah blah. None of this is going to change if the government starts shoveling cash out to anybody and everybody.

ant6n 10y ago
Many tech people take sabbaticals to work on creative projects or open source it just leaving, using savings from previous years as a form of "minimal income". I'd say many would like to have more people to have this sort of opportunity, which is currently only limited to the very privileged.
ribosometronome 10y ago
It seems you're misunderstanding what people mean when they talk about that freedom. It's not that we can't already earn 15k doing _something_. It's that we can't earn 15k working solely on a pet project for a few years. Think Stardew Valley -- the dev relied on being a movie usher and his girlfriend's grad student stipend to get by.

dominotw 10y ago

I don't care about Joneses. I fear being irrelevant as I age, losing my mental acumen. Falling victim to an illness ect. I want my savings to cushion me during the fall. I want to retire comfortably as I don't plan to have kids.

leggomylibro 10y ago

Yeah, it does seem hard to make the numbers work. I always get tripped up because I usually wind up around $2-4 Trillion per year, which is like the whole federal budget. Let's see if I'm remembering that wrong. So we'll give every adult in the United States a basic annual income of $10,000. It's hard to live off of that in many parts of the country, but we should start small. There are about 250 million adults in the USA as of 2016 (245.3 according to wikipedia, but let's keep it round.) So...yep, that's $2.5 Trillion a year. You can argue that you'd pay for it with a tax on upper earners, but I haven't seen any actual numbers to support the theory that you could raise that amount via taxes on the wealthy. And I don't feel like looking into tax brackets and wages and crap right now. I also think you're right that your average tech worker should be able to scrape together a 5-figure unemployment/job-hunting backup fund fairly quickly.

saghm 10y ago
I'm not making a judgment about whether it's economically feasible or not (as I have neither the expertise or the data to be able to figure out out), but I think part of the idea of basic income is that it would replace other forms of welfare, so the actual increase in the budget wouldn't be the full $2.5 trillion (although it would still be quite sizable).
chongli 10y ago
which is like the whole federal budget Don't forget the state and municipal budgets. Leaving those out can really skew your comparison to other countries which may be structured very differently. State budgets in the US combine to another $1.9 trillion [0], with some states like North Dakota having a budget as high as $18,760 per capita! Now I'm not saying it's possible to simply sacrifice all of those budgets on the altar of basic income, but it seems pretty reasonable that we might find a more efficient allocation of resources. After all, California's budget per capita is only $4,366. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._state_budgets https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._state_budgets
mempko 10y ago
Taxes don't fund the federal government. There would be no issue making the money to fund it. Issue is inflation.