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Also UBI let people do what they wanted. If someone wants to study cockroaches they can without worrying how to monetize it. If they have to spend all day at th

Also UBI let people do what they wanted. If someone wants to study cockroaches they can without worrying how to monetize it. If they have to spend all day at their UBJ

fvdessen 9y ago
And if people want to do drugs all day ? In Belgium there's no time limit to unemployment benefits and the government doesn't really check if you're looking for work. The result is a lot of people who have spent decades unemployed, spending most of their time drinking and watching TV. The result hasn't been a scientific & creative boom, but a massive social disaster.
- dragonwriter 9y ago
  > And if people want to do drugs all day ? They’ll need to find a job, since drugs tend to be expensive luxuries.
  - philipkglass 9y ago
    Absent the markup from prohibition, a day's supply of drugs would be cheaper than a day's supply of food. Though if prohibition stays you're right. If people freed from the necessity of work can't figure out anything better to do with their lives than consume entertainment and get high all day, I find that rather sad. It's still not as sad as forcing them to LARP at obsolete agriculture on arable land that used to be productively mechanized. At least if people who can't be matched with genuinely productive jobs stay on their couches all day they're not actively sabotaging the productivity of the remaining market economy. I'm ok with governments employing people to do productive tasks that still require human labor -- many others have mentioned elder care or fixing aging infrastructure, for example -- but I think that the specific agricultural proposal floated in the original article is terrible. Unlike the author, I'm also not anxious on behalf of other people who might end up "deprived" of a time clock and obeying a boss 5 days a week. I'm not going to tell them that I know better if they think that games are more enjoyable than farming like it's 1899.
    - dragonwriter 9y ago
      > Absent the markup from prohibition, a day's supply of drugs would be cheaper than a day's supply of food. Which would be a rebuttal if doubling food cost wasn't an expensive luxury in context; people choosing drugs without food is a self-limiting problem, and most optimistic (and, unreasonably so, in my view) near term UBI proposals barely hit the federal poverty line for a one-person household.
      - philipkglass 9y ago
        Much cheaper than a day's supply of food, not just a bit cheaper. Synthetic stimulants and opioids are about as costly to synthesize at scale as those vitamins or OTC drugs that currently retail for $20 in a big bottle at supermarkets. You probably still can't get cheap cocaine, since it doesn't have a cheap synthesis route yet, but every major class of recreational drugs at least has potent, cheap-to-manufacture synthetic or semi-synthetic members. In the case of weed it's probably not even worth pursuing synthetic analogs to THC given how easy it is to grow. IMO choosing to indulge in some of these drugs, without medical need, may be akin to a slow-motion suicide. But I'm not in favor of outlawing suicide either.
    - ThrowawayR2 9y ago
      > At least if people who can't be matched with genuinely productive jobs stay on their couches all day they're not actively sabotaging the productivity of the remaining market economy. You're forgetting that these people can still vote. I can imagine a lot of ways that promises of bread and circuses could be used to form them into a dangerous voting bloc.
      - philipkglass 9y ago
        Any more dangerous a voting bloc than if the government gives them the same stuff but makes them perform a worthless pseudo-job to get it? If there are jobs that actually need doing by human labor, and the able-bodied unemployed can do them, having government guarantee jobs to the able-bodied unemployed seems better than guaranteeing income detached from labor. But sending people to perform work that machines plus skilled operators do faster or better, to busy their idled hands, is a cure worse than the disease. There are a lot of cases where introducing untrained human labor into an existing production process has a marginal productivity less than zero. Adding random people to a process that doesn't need more people, or needs people with specific skills, isn't just poor value for effort. It's negative value for effort. Every additional hour that somebody who doesn't know what they're doing tries to "help," they're destroying more. These caveats only apply if people are assigned pointless jobs that they're not even good at. It's destructive to replace high-productivity mechanized agriculture with random unemployed wielding hand tools. It's safe, though still IMO insulting and a bad idea, to make people perform some pointless but harmless pseudo-white-collar job like adding up columns of random numbers with pencil and paper. It actually adds value (though perhaps not a lot) if governments can assign jobs that people can actually perform competently and that machines aren't great at yet, like collecting litter.
- erik_seaberg 9y ago
  If your life is bleak enough that you'd rather anesthetize yourself than live it out, stopping you is cruel. The fix is to make better lives possible so that fewer people choose this.
bluGill 9y ago
I'm not against UBJ that pays somebody to study cockroaches all day, so long as they do that. UBI (or uncontrolled UBJ) that lets somebody do drugs all day makes society worse.

Also UBI let people do what they wanted. If someone wants to study cockroaches they can without worrying how to monetize it. If they have to spend all day at their UBJ

fvdessen 9y ago

And if people want to do drugs all day ? In Belgium there's no time limit to unemployment benefits and the government doesn't really check if you're looking for work. The result is a lot of people who have spent decades unemployed, spending most of their time drinking and watching TV. The result hasn't been a scientific & creative boom, but a massive social disaster.

dragonwriter 9y ago
> And if people want to do drugs all day ? They’ll need to find a job, since drugs tend to be expensive luxuries.
- philipkglass 9y ago
  Absent the markup from prohibition, a day's supply of drugs would be cheaper than a day's supply of food. Though if prohibition stays you're right. If people freed from the necessity of work can't figure out anything better to do with their lives than consume entertainment and get high all day, I find that rather sad. It's still not as sad as forcing them to LARP at obsolete agriculture on arable land that used to be productively mechanized. At least if people who can't be matched with genuinely productive jobs stay on their couches all day they're not actively sabotaging the productivity of the remaining market economy. I'm ok with governments employing people to do productive tasks that still require human labor -- many others have mentioned elder care or fixing aging infrastructure, for example -- but I think that the specific agricultural proposal floated in the original article is terrible. Unlike the author, I'm also not anxious on behalf of other people who might end up "deprived" of a time clock and obeying a boss 5 days a week. I'm not going to tell them that I know better if they think that games are more enjoyable than farming like it's 1899.
  - dragonwriter 9y ago
    > Absent the markup from prohibition, a day's supply of drugs would be cheaper than a day's supply of food. Which would be a rebuttal if doubling food cost wasn't an expensive luxury in context; people choosing drugs without food is a self-limiting problem, and most optimistic (and, unreasonably so, in my view) near term UBI proposals barely hit the federal poverty line for a one-person household.
    - philipkglass 9y ago
      Much cheaper than a day's supply of food, not just a bit cheaper. Synthetic stimulants and opioids are about as costly to synthesize at scale as those vitamins or OTC drugs that currently retail for $20 in a big bottle at supermarkets. You probably still can't get cheap cocaine, since it doesn't have a cheap synthesis route yet, but every major class of recreational drugs at least has potent, cheap-to-manufacture synthetic or semi-synthetic members. In the case of weed it's probably not even worth pursuing synthetic analogs to THC given how easy it is to grow. IMO choosing to indulge in some of these drugs, without medical need, may be akin to a slow-motion suicide. But I'm not in favor of outlawing suicide either.
  - ThrowawayR2 9y ago
    > At least if people who can't be matched with genuinely productive jobs stay on their couches all day they're not actively sabotaging the productivity of the remaining market economy. You're forgetting that these people can still vote. I can imagine a lot of ways that promises of bread and circuses could be used to form them into a dangerous voting bloc.
    - philipkglass 9y ago
      Any more dangerous a voting bloc than if the government gives them the same stuff but makes them perform a worthless pseudo-job to get it? If there are jobs that actually need doing by human labor, and the able-bodied unemployed can do them, having government guarantee jobs to the able-bodied unemployed seems better than guaranteeing income detached from labor. But sending people to perform work that machines plus skilled operators do faster or better, to busy their idled hands, is a cure worse than the disease. There are a lot of cases where introducing untrained human labor into an existing production process has a marginal productivity less than zero. Adding random people to a process that doesn't need more people, or needs people with specific skills, isn't just poor value for effort. It's negative value for effort. Every additional hour that somebody who doesn't know what they're doing tries to "help," they're destroying more. These caveats only apply if people are assigned pointless jobs that they're not even good at. It's destructive to replace high-productivity mechanized agriculture with random unemployed wielding hand tools. It's safe, though still IMO insulting and a bad idea, to make people perform some pointless but harmless pseudo-white-collar job like adding up columns of random numbers with pencil and paper. It actually adds value (though perhaps not a lot) if governments can assign jobs that people can actually perform competently and that machines aren't great at yet, like collecting litter.
erik_seaberg 9y ago
If your life is bleak enough that you'd rather anesthetize yourself than live it out, stopping you is cruel. The fix is to make better lives possible so that fewer people choose this.

bluGill 9y ago

I'm not against UBJ that pays somebody to study cockroaches all day, so long as they do that. UBI (or uncontrolled UBJ) that lets somebody do drugs all day makes society worse.