5 ms·

If we create a UBI then people will have the time to be better educated, to be healthier, to raise healthier, happier, and more productive families. We're almos

by loceng 9y ago

If we create a UBI then people will have the time to be better educated, to be healthier, to raise healthier, happier, and more productive families. We're almost there, automation will strongly facilitate this. Because a new technology seems exciting - and gains adoption because early adoption means potential for an individual to turn $1000s of into $1,000,000s with very little individual effort of working towards mass adoption; along with the ecosystem of VCs pumping $100s of millions into creating platforms to support this speculation - doesn't mean we give up on the existing system. If you don't think the same demagogues, special interest groups, or simply evil/bad actors won't attempt to takeover - then you're already proven wrong by this blackhat 'abuse' of sending themselves money. And it can get much worse than that. The value of the blockchain is the public ledger IMHO, and the way $100 can because $70 million just because demand is higher, that has too strongly incentivized it and has and will attract very bad people - even if there are good people involved in the ecosystem.

justadeveloper2 9y ago
If we get a UBI, I'm quitting my developer job and just going to coast the rest of my life. I don't care how many corners I have to cut, lol. Gonna milk that cow as hard as I can. My dad used to ask to be laid off jobs (blue collar) so he could collect unemployment for a few months. He did that off and on for years.
- wu-ikkyu 9y ago
  When there's too many cooks in the kitchen, we all benefit when there is less people trying to cook.
  - Jabanga 9y ago
    We will not benefit from fewer people working..
    - wu-ikkyu 9y ago
      How do you know?
    - erikpukinskis 9y ago
      Well you won't have any coworkers who are just there for the paycheck and actually have zero interest in solving the company's problem.
      - Jabanga 9y ago
        People don't need to be motivated by high-minded ideals to make useful contributions.
        loceng 9y ago
        Of course they don't - and that's fine. All throughout our evolution we would of had children and elders who would have had limited productivity. Now with automation, how many less people do we actually require to work? It will be very few - it will definitely be more people than the minimum required.
    - Dagger2 9y ago
      The upcoming AI/robot automation apocalypse means that we are going to have fewer people working. The question is how we're going to deal with that.
      - Jabanga 9y ago
        http://www.economicshelp.org/blog/6717/economics/the-luddite-fallacy/ http://www.economicshelp.org/blog/6717/economics/the-luddite...
        Dagger2 9y ago
        That article covers what happens before the apocalypse. What happens after it, i.e. after the point where AI and robots can not only do our current jobs better than we can, but also all of the ones we could possibly retrain to?
- s73ver 9y ago
  You might. I wouldn't. I'd be willing to wager that most people here wouldn't. They might take more vacations, but they'd probably also be starting more companies.
- loceng 9y ago
  Hopefully you're a good person or the environment around you will help you grow in positive ways. Would you have a family? And why are you unhappy at your developer job? Is it more stress than you'd like? It seems like your dad had a strong influence on you.
Jabanga 9y ago
>If we create a UBI then people will have the time to be better educated, to be healthier, to raise healthier, happier, and more productive families. We're almost there, automation will strongly facilitate this. Compulsory redistribution programs like UBI pervert incentives, leading to less individual responsibility over time. They're clumsy cookie cutter solutions, which with a stroke a pen, impose the same formula to tens/hundreds of millions of people. On one end, the people lose out, and on the other, they win out in the short term. The only determinant of which side a person is on is the amount of currency that they report to the government that they received for that year. This is an overly simplistic formula that not only adversely affects incentives, but also becomes increasingly better gamed over time, leading to competitive energies being diverted to economically wasteful activities like tax avoidance (which is an industry worth hundreds of billions of dollars per year now). These kinds of programs do not take into account the unique circumstances found in the vast population they affect. In other words, they ignore the vast majority of the knowledge of society, which is in the form of localized knowledge diffused across millions of people. So in place of spontaneously formed economic relationships based on the rich localized knowledge of millions of individuals, they create simplistic economic relationships based on categories created by legislators. They are pure economic destruction. And we have evidence of this from the last 40 years. UBI is just the doubling down of an economic model that has been failing for over 40 years. Social welfare increased 4.8 percent per year on average, between 1972 and 2011 [1]. This represents a massive shift to the social democratic economic model. And it's not just the US. Almost all advanced economies underwent this transition over the last 40 years, and it has been associated with stagnating wage growth and less economic dynamism. The key to accelerating gains in quality of life is not more centralization and dependence on government. It is to remove all artificial barriers to access to capital. As it is, only large financial institutions can access global capital markets directly. Regulatory agencies have created very onerous compliance requirements that one has to meet to engage in a wide array of financial transactions. This in turn means that in practice, the majority of the population must pay economic rent to very rich and powerful groups to participate in all aspects of the economy. Distributed blockchain technology promises to democratize access to global capital markets, so that small businesses and ordinary individuals can trade equity for capital directly with each other, with no 'tax' being paid to rent-seeking institutions and professionals, playing the role of middle-man thanks to special government-granted privileges. To further elaborate: I believe everyone should be part of the ownership class. The average person should own microshares in thousands of companies big and small, and be assessing enterprises everyday to determine which ones to purchase a tiny amount of shares in, with zero friction and next-to-zero fixed costs that would otherwise make small purchases uneconomical (if each trade has a $10 trading fee like it does now, you can't economically buy $1 worth of shares, so that's why trading fees have to approach zero to make this kind of dynamic economy possible). These shares in turn would earn people passive income, so that they don't have to work all the time. If distributed blockchains and cryptocurrency become the main economic institutions in the world, I believe this vision will become possible, and we will experience a renaissance in economic and technological progress like never before seen. [1] https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/what-is-driving-growth-in-government-spending/amp/ https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/what-is-driving-growth-...

by loceng 9y ago

justadeveloper2 9y ago

If we get a UBI, I'm quitting my developer job and just going to coast the rest of my life. I don't care how many corners I have to cut, lol. Gonna milk that cow as hard as I can. My dad used to ask to be laid off jobs (blue collar) so he could collect unemployment for a few months. He did that off and on for years.

wu-ikkyu 9y ago
When there's too many cooks in the kitchen, we all benefit when there is less people trying to cook.
- Jabanga 9y ago
  We will not benefit from fewer people working..
  - wu-ikkyu 9y ago
    How do you know?
  - erikpukinskis 9y ago
    Well you won't have any coworkers who are just there for the paycheck and actually have zero interest in solving the company's problem.
    - Jabanga 9y ago
      People don't need to be motivated by high-minded ideals to make useful contributions.
      - loceng 9y ago
        Of course they don't - and that's fine. All throughout our evolution we would of had children and elders who would have had limited productivity. Now with automation, how many less people do we actually require to work? It will be very few - it will definitely be more people than the minimum required.
  - Dagger2 9y ago
    The upcoming AI/robot automation apocalypse means that we are going to have fewer people working. The question is how we're going to deal with that.
    - Jabanga 9y ago
      http://www.economicshelp.org/blog/6717/economics/the-luddite-fallacy/ http://www.economicshelp.org/blog/6717/economics/the-luddite...
      - Dagger2 9y ago
        That article covers what happens before the apocalypse. What happens after it, i.e. after the point where AI and robots can not only do our current jobs better than we can, but also all of the ones we could possibly retrain to?
s73ver 9y ago
You might. I wouldn't. I'd be willing to wager that most people here wouldn't. They might take more vacations, but they'd probably also be starting more companies.
loceng 9y ago
Hopefully you're a good person or the environment around you will help you grow in positive ways. Would you have a family? And why are you unhappy at your developer job? Is it more stress than you'd like? It seems like your dad had a strong influence on you.

Jabanga 9y ago

>If we create a UBI then people will have the time to be better educated, to be healthier, to raise healthier, happier, and more productive families. We're almost there, automation will strongly facilitate this. Compulsory redistribution programs like UBI pervert incentives, leading to less individual responsibility over time. They're clumsy cookie cutter solutions, which with a stroke a pen, impose the same formula to tens/hundreds of millions of people. On one end, the people lose out, and on the other, they win out in the short term. The only determinant of which side a person is on is the amount of currency that they report to the government that they received for that year. This is an overly simplistic formula that not only adversely affects incentives, but also becomes increasingly better gamed over time, leading to competitive energies being diverted to economically wasteful activities like tax avoidance (which is an industry worth hundreds of billions of dollars per year now). These kinds of programs do not take into account the unique circumstances found in the vast population they affect. In other words, they ignore the vast majority of the knowledge of society, which is in the form of localized knowledge diffused across millions of people. So in place of spontaneously formed economic relationships based on the rich localized knowledge of millions of individuals, they create simplistic economic relationships based on categories created by legislators. They are pure economic destruction. And we have evidence of this from the last 40 years. UBI is just the doubling down of an economic model that has been failing for over 40 years. Social welfare increased 4.8 percent per year on average, between 1972 and 2011 [1]. This represents a massive shift to the social democratic economic model. And it's not just the US. Almost all advanced economies underwent this transition over the last 40 years, and it has been associated with stagnating wage growth and less economic dynamism. The key to accelerating gains in quality of life is not more centralization and dependence on government. It is to remove all artificial barriers to access to capital. As it is, only large financial institutions can access global capital markets directly. Regulatory agencies have created very onerous compliance requirements that one has to meet to engage in a wide array of financial transactions. This in turn means that in practice, the majority of the population must pay economic rent to very rich and powerful groups to participate in all aspects of the economy. Distributed blockchain technology promises to democratize access to global capital markets, so that small businesses and ordinary individuals can trade equity for capital directly with each other, with no 'tax' being paid to rent-seeking institutions and professionals, playing the role of middle-man thanks to special government-granted privileges. To further elaborate: I believe everyone should be part of the ownership class. The average person should own microshares in thousands of companies big and small, and be assessing enterprises everyday to determine which ones to purchase a tiny amount of shares in, with zero friction and next-to-zero fixed costs that would otherwise make small purchases uneconomical (if each trade has a $10 trading fee like it does now, you can't economically buy $1 worth of shares, so that's why trading fees have to approach zero to make this kind of dynamic economy possible). These shares in turn would earn people passive income, so that they don't have to work all the time. If distributed blockchains and cryptocurrency become the main economic institutions in the world, I believe this vision will become possible, and we will experience a renaissance in economic and technological progress like never before seen. [1] https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/what-is-driving-growth-in-government-spending/amp/ https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/what-is-driving-growth-...