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My best argument for UBI is, “I’d love to be able to work on F/OSS full time.” Kudos for making it a reality. It may be scratching a personal itch, but the pos

My best argument for UBI is, “I’d love to be able to work on F/OSS full time.” Kudos for making it a reality. It may be scratching a personal itch, but the positive externalities to society are real.

dplgk 8y ago
Your best argument for the country to get UBI is so people can work on OSS full time?
- karandodia 8y ago
  If I understood correctly that's their personal best argument for UBI. We each have our own intrinsic motivations!
  - peatmoss 8y ago
    Yes, that’s what I meant. I can’t speak to the universal value or practicability of implementing and sustaining UBI :-)
blfr 8y ago
Yeah, it's the modern version of a minor landed gentleman who can pursue his interests. It's how we got science. Sadly, the best argument against UBI is that vast, vast majority of people will not be working full time on F/OSS or quite possible anything else.
- smt88 8y ago
  > vast, vast majority of people will not be working full time on F/OSS or quite possible anything else. I doubt this. Everyone has dreams or long-term things they enjoy working on. And UBI wouldn't be enough for most people, so they'd at least pursue some form of cash-generating work.
  - andy_adams 8y ago
    You must roll with some motivated crowds if everyone has long-term goals. > 60% of the folks I meet would be pretty content watching TV all day, every day. When you talk to them, they just talk about the shows they watched.
    - robohoe 8y ago
      Or all the video games they played in their copious amounts of spare time.
    - SolaceQuantum 8y ago
      I believe of the people who discuss shows they watched, this is actualy used as a way to bond with their peers, whom they are stuck with 8 hours a day.
    - Verdex 8y ago
      Most people just want to waste time watching TV would be the good outcome. I'm more concerned that it turns out that once money is no longer a concern that a large portion of people would spend their time trying to figure out how to cause problems for others. How many people would ignore education, socialization, and general societal cohesiveness if they knew that they would never have to worry about getting along with anyone else in order to survive.
      - ilovetux 8y ago
        I don't agree with this. People will still have to get along in order to survive. Two things: First, crimes usually come with financial consequences I doubt that this would change even with UBI. Secondly, its just as likely that the opposite becomes true and people learn to appreciate a sense of community much more deeply due to the lessening of competition. For instance intramural sports teams might become even more popular than they are now which could increase the general sense of camaraderie. edit: grammar
        fulltrottle 8y ago
- coldtea 8y ago
  >Sadly, the best argument against UBI is that vast, vast majority of people will not be working full time on F/OSS or quite possible anything else. That's sad only if we have the scarcity induced morality of associating "getting to have a living" with "earning it by working".
  - blfr 8y ago
    No, it's sad in the same sense gigahours wasted in front of TVs are sad.
    - chriswarbo 8y ago
      I get the sentiment, but "bullshit jobs" are also a waste of time (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs ); those also have the same downsides as many jobs, like stress, abusive managers, etc. There are also many jobs which are actively harmful to society and/or the environment (e.g. cold calling), where it would be better for everyone if those workers could just watch TV instead. I think this is one of those areas that can't be solved by deduction, since there are valid arguments pushing both ways. It needs measurements, observations and experiments to see what the relative impact of those arguments are.
      - blfr 8y ago
        Bullshit jobs problem is entirely caused by labour being too cheap in turn caused by the only now industrializing third world. Same with poor working conditions. If the corporations had to pay the full cost of employing people without the option to subsidize it witch cheap Chinese labour, they would long had to get rid of most bullshit jobs (some inefficiency is of course unavoidable) and make work much better organized.
        TeMPOraL 8y ago
        No. Bullshit jobs are the consequence of markets being short-sighted optimization systems, with goals only partially aligned with human values. It's quite easy to make money in ways other than delivering socially valuable things; in fact, many of the most profitable jobs and endeavours are precisely that.
- hinkley 8y ago
  The best argument I know for UBI is that manufacturing is propped up by overconsumption because we have been able to make more than we need for a very long time. If one worker makes enough stuff for five people what do the other four do?
  - idontpost 8y ago
    They starve.
- vram22 8y ago
  >Yeah, it's the modern version of a minor landed gentleman who can pursue his interests. It's how we got science. And some of how we got Perl. I had read some time ago that Larry Wall said that Tim O'Reilly was his patron, as in the medieval sense of the term (think Florence etc.), when the nobility or rich people used to patronize (i.e. financially sponsor and recognize) artists, craftsmen, scientists, etc. And Tim did sponsor Larry (and others who worked on Perl, I guess), via publishing Perl books and organizing conferences, etc.
- CuriousSkeptic 8y ago
  I’m quite happy if the vast majority of people doing active harm to society by working for evil corporations just do nothing instead. Quite possibly a net improvement just that. I also imagine that if vast amount of people suddenly had more time on their hands there would be lot less need for services now optimized to keep them employed. Day care, schools and such would perhaps change into something more participatory.
  - fulltrottle 8y ago
    Yeah people definitely end up doing unethical things out of desperation, whether it's committing a crime or working at an ethically questionable business
- Verdex 8y ago
  If people don't work on anything once they get UBI this isn't really a problem. Currently, there are many many people who already don't do anything. They only do a little as possible to avoid getting fired OR they do periodically get fired from every job they ever hold once their employers realize they're always going to be a drain on productivity. Having these people on UBI would actually allow productivity to rise. However, I'm really concerned about UBI because: 1) One way to get more money on UBI is to convince others to give you their money. Many people on UBI will stop producing positive or neutral work and start finding ways to trick their fellow citizens into giving them their money. We will still need some sort of welfare to provide food to people who are tricked into giving away all their money for worthless services or items. 2) Some people have terrible planning skills and just want to be happy now. They'll spend all of their UBI on worthless items and go hungry until the start of the next month. Worse, they'll spend their children's UBI allocation on worthless items as well (or trick their children into doing it if it turns out parents don't get direct access to their children's allocation). We will still need welfare to feed the children of these people. 3) Some people will decide that their calling in life is now to cause problems for others. The food check comes once a month, so now their full time job is dressing up as a clown and terrorizing random people. Don't have to get up for work? Be really loud until 4am. The people who actually do have to get up for work will naturally get the option to live in a gated community because we need the few that actually do produce more than ever. This very well may cause society to schism into people who work and people who don't. 4) The potential long term effects are pretty scary. If you never have to work will you worry about education, socialization, or how to function in a society? How many people will decide to never learn any skills whatsoever? Sure, we could build up a lot of automation to take care of these people, but the result is going to be a massive schism where some people only know how to take their UBI money card to the food silo. And their children are probably going to be in the same bucket. Ultimately, I think we as a society have a responsibility to use our plenty to help those who are going without. However, I'm not convinced that UBI is the right way to make this happen.
  - leppr 8y ago
    I'm sorry but 1), 2) and 3) are ridiculous. What are you basing those assumptions on ? I don't see how any of these points relate to UBI. Why would we be obligated to provide welfare to people who spend their allowance on things other than food and healthcare ? 4) is a very good point. We don't actually know what keeps our civilization running. UBI assumes that people have a natural drive to be productive, but we got to where we are in a context of natural selection, survival instincts and greed. Removing those aspects from society is rightfully scary.
- mcguire 8y ago
  I dunno; I'm ok with that myself. The actual best argument against UBI is that if you used the total of US government Social Security, Other, and Nondefense spending (At least portions of them seem to be UBI-replacable) on it, divided by the population of the United States (326,000,000), you end up with about $7,000 per person, per year. If you take the entire budget (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_federal_budget#/media/File:CBO_Infographic_2017.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_federal_budget#/...) of $4,000,000,000, you end up with $12,000 per each, per annum. $1000/month?
  - Zarel 8y ago
    $1000/month is enough to live off in many parts of the United States. I lived off it pretty comfortably a few years ago when I was in college – although I had four roommates, we all had our own rooms. Obviously, it's not affordable everywhere, but I think incentivizing people to live outside of expensive areas is a good thing (adjusting for cost of living would mostly just funnel the extra money towards landlords, i.e. rent-seekers).
  - aaron_m04 8y ago
    Your denominator is too large. Children would not be receiving UBI, presumably. Also the numerator could be increased via a wealth tax on the top 0.1% or so.
  - dllthomas 8y ago
    Bear in mind that an income can go much further when you can invest significant effort in seeing that it goes further. And certainly, as Zarel says in a neighboring comment, it wouldn't be affordable everywhere to live on just the BI. It doesn't need to be.
- RhysU 8y ago
  > Yeah, [UBI]'s the modern version of a minor landed gentleman who can pursue his interests Nah, that's called rolling in it. Not UBI.
zozbot123 8y ago
My best argument for UBI is I’d love to be able to work on F/OSS full time, and that seems impossible outside of a fully free, stable, smoothly-functioning and affluent society. And given current economic trends, UBI is very likely a required part of any such society, at least in any reasonably large polity-- think the average U.S. state, or even the U.S. as a whole. So, it seems we agree after all!
conanbatt 8y ago
Thats not an argument in favor of UBI, its an affirmation of what you would do if you got free money.
jefurii 8y ago
Do we really have to have a huge long thread on UBI here? Really? This is about a developer working on a cool project turning it into a living.
- xkapastel 8y ago
  A "living" despite the fact that it's negative income. UBI is absolutely relevant to people who want to see this sort of thing become possible.
hoaw 8y ago
I don't think UBI would work like that. The thing is that you can essentially simulate UBI yourself if you work in tech. Go and work a high paying job, or contract, for 3-6 months. Then take the rest of the year off. The problem is of course that quality of life still costs money. So in general having time for other things is a cost issue, not an income issue.
zxcvvcxz 8y ago
I used to think this too. Then I grew older, observed more of the world around me, and realized a fundamental truth. The vast majority of the population, 95%+, when given free resources, will choose to not work or do anything productive. In fact, their initial foray into leisure generally leads into negativity and moral ineptitude.
- rmdashrfstar 8y ago
  20% producers, 80% consumers; I think it’s unlikely that most people would choose to work if given the option not to along with being given a consistent, reliable amount of money to which they’d be able to use to settle into a repetitive lifestyle of creature comforts and pleasures. Given with how normalized 1) consistent drug usage (ie alcohol) and 2) prioritizing pleasures like watching TV or playing video games for the majority of one’s free time have become in western society, I can’t see UBI being of any productive benefit to society. A major problem is who is going to pay for it? The productive, taxing paying folk, who will be receiving UBI as a paltry percentage of their existing, work-based income? It doesn’t seem fair to penalize the most productive, those who choose to work, in order to subsidize those who don’t wish to contribute to the game we called society.
- chipotle_coyote 8y ago
  Interesting. As I've grown older and observed more of the world around me, the fundamental truth that I've learned is that the vast majority of the population has something that they would like to work on, but can't make a living wage on it. One of the best arguments for universal health care falls into this same category: tying health care to employment greatly increases the risks of being self-employed. I know more than one person who's stayed with a job they don't like -- even a job that doesn't pay particularly well -- because of this concern. The concept of a UBI expands this freedom past just health care. The point isn't to pay someone a handsome wage so they can sit around and do nothing; the point is to cover an absolute bare minimum so choices that might not otherwise be available become open.
shdh 8y ago
Who would be a garbage man or do construction with UBI?
- slothtrop 8y ago
  It would have to pay a good deal, with a pension. Generally don't think it would be enticing enough right now, which is why the turnover after the next phase in automation is a better opportunity.
- drusepth 8y ago
  I see this argument occasionally and it always blows my mind that people think there are careers that literally no one wants to do. With hundreds of millions of people suddenly free to do what they want to do, you're going to find a ton that will do every little job imaginable. That said, UBI and working aren't mutually exclusive. It seems entirely reasonable to assume there will still be people working lower-end jobs to augment their UBI. If there aren't enough garbage workers, it seems only natural to also assume the pay for garbage workers would go up to entice more people to take the job. I've always worked CS and CS-related jobs (but have volunteered at non-CS jobs), but I'd be very likely to take up some kind of monotonous-but-fulfilling service job like garbage collecting. Probably not full time, but I'd love to have the time to help out others more. As a side note, there's probably also a lot of work to be done in transitioning these kinds of assumedly-low-interest jobs into a gig-based paradigm. I think more people would take up "shifts" in something new than committing to it as a career. Obviously there's a lot of logistical problems (training, accountability, insurance, etc) that need addressed, but that's part of the fun of figuring it all out. :)
  - rjf72 8y ago
    Somebody suggesting nobody would want to do construction is probably more indicative of a person who has never had the privilege of ever building anything in their life, rather than any statement of reality. However, absolutely awful examples aside - I do think he is correct that there are plenty of jobs that indeed nobody would want to do. Toilets don't clean themselves, and won't reliably be doing so anytime in the foreseeable future. There's no fulfillment mopping up piss from somebody who thought it'd be fun to urinate all over something, just because it's not theirs. Of course you're right that we'd see pay go up for these jobs as a result, but I think the thing that many don't consider is how relatively little money there is to go around. This is masked by scale. We see billions and think of just enormous amounts of money, yet that's of course less than $3 per American. That of course means the even more unimaginable trillion dollars is merely $3000 per American. We have so many people that it can be difficult to really intuitively grasp. So one of the most important numbers here is the GDP per capita. The GDP being the total market value of absolutely everything produced within a nation over a set period of time. This is what makes GDP per capita so interesting. It tells us how much money each and every person would receive if the market value of absolutely every single good or service was split completely equally. And in the US it's shockingly less than $60,000. With an absolutely huge motivation to overproduce everything imaginable, and a countless array of artificial demand being created and sated, our GDP is still less than $60k. That's not a particularly huge amount of money! And while we could debate to what degree, I think nobody would disagree that an UBI would depress overall production. So we're not even going to be getting to that $60k point, and probably not even particularly close to it. And this amount of money needs to be used to provide a livable stipend to each and every person, and then also account for 100% of the market driven economic success for each and every individual. I'm sure you can see the problem. Exactly how much money is our janitor supposed to be earning? And where does this money come from? You have to keep in mind that when we talk about this < $60k GDP/capita this isn't "money" but rather real money that represents a share of access to a finite set of resources. In other words you can't just go above this number and call it debt - the resources that such "money" (as it would become at that point) would represent literally do not exist. It'd be like in a world of 100 with a total of 5 cars telling each and every person that they can have a car. It just doesn't work.
newnewpdro 8y ago
I don't think UBI is a good approach to this particular case. The F/OSS developer support case seems like a perfect candidate for a microtransaction-funded model. The kind of thing cryptocurrency enables, where one can passively receive as little as fractions of cents from a pool of millions of people without any transaction costs. We just need to integrate the solutions better. F/OSS developers work hard and provide value to many people. If there were a way for me to automate a tiny monthly donation to the projects I most use in Debian, without involving credit cards or routing numbers or other personally identifying information, where 100% of the contribution reached the intended people, I'd already be doing it. The kernel, Xorg, vim, firefox, screen/tmux, systemd, all these things would be on my list, and I doubt I'm alone here. The distributions should be working on this problem. Forget 'popcon', give me an integrated solution to distribute cryptocurrency from a wallet I occasionally top up somehow to the developers and package maintainers I implicitly love.

dplgk 8y ago

Your best argument for the country to get UBI is so people can work on OSS full time?

karandodia 8y ago
If I understood correctly that's their personal best argument for UBI. We each have our own intrinsic motivations!
- peatmoss 8y ago
  Yes, that’s what I meant. I can’t speak to the universal value or practicability of implementing and sustaining UBI :-)

blfr 8y ago

Yeah, it's the modern version of a minor landed gentleman who can pursue his interests. It's how we got science. Sadly, the best argument against UBI is that vast, vast majority of people will not be working full time on F/OSS or quite possible anything else.

smt88 8y ago
> vast, vast majority of people will not be working full time on F/OSS or quite possible anything else. I doubt this. Everyone has dreams or long-term things they enjoy working on. And UBI wouldn't be enough for most people, so they'd at least pursue some form of cash-generating work.
- andy_adams 8y ago
  You must roll with some motivated crowds if everyone has long-term goals. > 60% of the folks I meet would be pretty content watching TV all day, every day. When you talk to them, they just talk about the shows they watched.
  - robohoe 8y ago
    Or all the video games they played in their copious amounts of spare time.
  - SolaceQuantum 8y ago
    I believe of the people who discuss shows they watched, this is actualy used as a way to bond with their peers, whom they are stuck with 8 hours a day.
  - Verdex 8y ago
    Most people just want to waste time watching TV would be the good outcome. I'm more concerned that it turns out that once money is no longer a concern that a large portion of people would spend their time trying to figure out how to cause problems for others. How many people would ignore education, socialization, and general societal cohesiveness if they knew that they would never have to worry about getting along with anyone else in order to survive.
    - ilovetux 8y ago
      I don't agree with this. People will still have to get along in order to survive. Two things: First, crimes usually come with financial consequences I doubt that this would change even with UBI. Secondly, its just as likely that the opposite becomes true and people learn to appreciate a sense of community much more deeply due to the lessening of competition. For instance intramural sports teams might become even more popular than they are now which could increase the general sense of camaraderie. edit: grammar
      - fulltrottle 8y ago
coldtea 8y ago
>Sadly, the best argument against UBI is that vast, vast majority of people will not be working full time on F/OSS or quite possible anything else. That's sad only if we have the scarcity induced morality of associating "getting to have a living" with "earning it by working".
- blfr 8y ago
  No, it's sad in the same sense gigahours wasted in front of TVs are sad.
  - chriswarbo 8y ago
    I get the sentiment, but "bullshit jobs" are also a waste of time (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs ); those also have the same downsides as many jobs, like stress, abusive managers, etc. There are also many jobs which are actively harmful to society and/or the environment (e.g. cold calling), where it would be better for everyone if those workers could just watch TV instead. I think this is one of those areas that can't be solved by deduction, since there are valid arguments pushing both ways. It needs measurements, observations and experiments to see what the relative impact of those arguments are.
    - blfr 8y ago
      Bullshit jobs problem is entirely caused by labour being too cheap in turn caused by the only now industrializing third world. Same with poor working conditions. If the corporations had to pay the full cost of employing people without the option to subsidize it witch cheap Chinese labour, they would long had to get rid of most bullshit jobs (some inefficiency is of course unavoidable) and make work much better organized.
      - TeMPOraL 8y ago
        No. Bullshit jobs are the consequence of markets being short-sighted optimization systems, with goals only partially aligned with human values. It's quite easy to make money in ways other than delivering socially valuable things; in fact, many of the most profitable jobs and endeavours are precisely that.
hinkley 8y ago
The best argument I know for UBI is that manufacturing is propped up by overconsumption because we have been able to make more than we need for a very long time. If one worker makes enough stuff for five people what do the other four do?
- idontpost 8y ago
  They starve.
vram22 8y ago
>Yeah, it's the modern version of a minor landed gentleman who can pursue his interests. It's how we got science. And some of how we got Perl. I had read some time ago that Larry Wall said that Tim O'Reilly was his patron, as in the medieval sense of the term (think Florence etc.), when the nobility or rich people used to patronize (i.e. financially sponsor and recognize) artists, craftsmen, scientists, etc. And Tim did sponsor Larry (and others who worked on Perl, I guess), via publishing Perl books and organizing conferences, etc.
CuriousSkeptic 8y ago
I’m quite happy if the vast majority of people doing active harm to society by working for evil corporations just do nothing instead. Quite possibly a net improvement just that. I also imagine that if vast amount of people suddenly had more time on their hands there would be lot less need for services now optimized to keep them employed. Day care, schools and such would perhaps change into something more participatory.
- fulltrottle 8y ago
  Yeah people definitely end up doing unethical things out of desperation, whether it's committing a crime or working at an ethically questionable business
Verdex 8y ago
If people don't work on anything once they get UBI this isn't really a problem. Currently, there are many many people who already don't do anything. They only do a little as possible to avoid getting fired OR they do periodically get fired from every job they ever hold once their employers realize they're always going to be a drain on productivity. Having these people on UBI would actually allow productivity to rise. However, I'm really concerned about UBI because: 1) One way to get more money on UBI is to convince others to give you their money. Many people on UBI will stop producing positive or neutral work and start finding ways to trick their fellow citizens into giving them their money. We will still need some sort of welfare to provide food to people who are tricked into giving away all their money for worthless services or items. 2) Some people have terrible planning skills and just want to be happy now. They'll spend all of their UBI on worthless items and go hungry until the start of the next month. Worse, they'll spend their children's UBI allocation on worthless items as well (or trick their children into doing it if it turns out parents don't get direct access to their children's allocation). We will still need welfare to feed the children of these people. 3) Some people will decide that their calling in life is now to cause problems for others. The food check comes once a month, so now their full time job is dressing up as a clown and terrorizing random people. Don't have to get up for work? Be really loud until 4am. The people who actually do have to get up for work will naturally get the option to live in a gated community because we need the few that actually do produce more than ever. This very well may cause society to schism into people who work and people who don't. 4) The potential long term effects are pretty scary. If you never have to work will you worry about education, socialization, or how to function in a society? How many people will decide to never learn any skills whatsoever? Sure, we could build up a lot of automation to take care of these people, but the result is going to be a massive schism where some people only know how to take their UBI money card to the food silo. And their children are probably going to be in the same bucket. Ultimately, I think we as a society have a responsibility to use our plenty to help those who are going without. However, I'm not convinced that UBI is the right way to make this happen.
- leppr 8y ago
  I'm sorry but 1), 2) and 3) are ridiculous. What are you basing those assumptions on ? I don't see how any of these points relate to UBI. Why would we be obligated to provide welfare to people who spend their allowance on things other than food and healthcare ? 4) is a very good point. We don't actually know what keeps our civilization running. UBI assumes that people have a natural drive to be productive, but we got to where we are in a context of natural selection, survival instincts and greed. Removing those aspects from society is rightfully scary.
mcguire 8y ago
I dunno; I'm ok with that myself. The actual best argument against UBI is that if you used the total of US government Social Security, Other, and Nondefense spending (At least portions of them seem to be UBI-replacable) on it, divided by the population of the United States (326,000,000), you end up with about $7,000 per person, per year. If you take the entire budget (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_federal_budget#/media/File:CBO_Infographic_2017.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_federal_budget#/...) of $4,000,000,000, you end up with $12,000 per each, per annum. $1000/month?
- Zarel 8y ago
  $1000/month is enough to live off in many parts of the United States. I lived off it pretty comfortably a few years ago when I was in college – although I had four roommates, we all had our own rooms. Obviously, it's not affordable everywhere, but I think incentivizing people to live outside of expensive areas is a good thing (adjusting for cost of living would mostly just funnel the extra money towards landlords, i.e. rent-seekers).
- aaron_m04 8y ago
  Your denominator is too large. Children would not be receiving UBI, presumably. Also the numerator could be increased via a wealth tax on the top 0.1% or so.
- dllthomas 8y ago
  Bear in mind that an income can go much further when you can invest significant effort in seeing that it goes further. And certainly, as Zarel says in a neighboring comment, it wouldn't be affordable everywhere to live on just the BI. It doesn't need to be.
RhysU 8y ago
> Yeah, [UBI]'s the modern version of a minor landed gentleman who can pursue his interests Nah, that's called rolling in it. Not UBI.

zozbot123 8y ago

My best argument for UBI is I’d love to be able to work on F/OSS full time, and that seems impossible outside of a fully free, stable, smoothly-functioning and affluent society. And given current economic trends, UBI is very likely a required part of any such society, at least in any reasonably large polity-- think the average U.S. state, or even the U.S. as a whole. So, it seems we agree after all!

conanbatt 8y ago

Thats not an argument in favor of UBI, its an affirmation of what you would do if you got free money.

jefurii 8y ago

Do we really have to have a huge long thread on UBI here? Really? This is about a developer working on a cool project turning it into a living.

xkapastel 8y ago
A "living" despite the fact that it's negative income. UBI is absolutely relevant to people who want to see this sort of thing become possible.

hoaw 8y ago

I don't think UBI would work like that. The thing is that you can essentially simulate UBI yourself if you work in tech. Go and work a high paying job, or contract, for 3-6 months. Then take the rest of the year off. The problem is of course that quality of life still costs money. So in general having time for other things is a cost issue, not an income issue.

zxcvvcxz 8y ago

I used to think this too. Then I grew older, observed more of the world around me, and realized a fundamental truth. The vast majority of the population, 95%+, when given free resources, will choose to not work or do anything productive. In fact, their initial foray into leisure generally leads into negativity and moral ineptitude.

rmdashrfstar 8y ago
20% producers, 80% consumers; I think it’s unlikely that most people would choose to work if given the option not to along with being given a consistent, reliable amount of money to which they’d be able to use to settle into a repetitive lifestyle of creature comforts and pleasures. Given with how normalized 1) consistent drug usage (ie alcohol) and 2) prioritizing pleasures like watching TV or playing video games for the majority of one’s free time have become in western society, I can’t see UBI being of any productive benefit to society. A major problem is who is going to pay for it? The productive, taxing paying folk, who will be receiving UBI as a paltry percentage of their existing, work-based income? It doesn’t seem fair to penalize the most productive, those who choose to work, in order to subsidize those who don’t wish to contribute to the game we called society.
chipotle_coyote 8y ago
Interesting. As I've grown older and observed more of the world around me, the fundamental truth that I've learned is that the vast majority of the population has something that they would like to work on, but can't make a living wage on it. One of the best arguments for universal health care falls into this same category: tying health care to employment greatly increases the risks of being self-employed. I know more than one person who's stayed with a job they don't like -- even a job that doesn't pay particularly well -- because of this concern. The concept of a UBI expands this freedom past just health care. The point isn't to pay someone a handsome wage so they can sit around and do nothing; the point is to cover an absolute bare minimum so choices that might not otherwise be available become open.

shdh 8y ago

Who would be a garbage man or do construction with UBI?

slothtrop 8y ago
It would have to pay a good deal, with a pension. Generally don't think it would be enticing enough right now, which is why the turnover after the next phase in automation is a better opportunity.
drusepth 8y ago
I see this argument occasionally and it always blows my mind that people think there are careers that literally no one wants to do. With hundreds of millions of people suddenly free to do what they want to do, you're going to find a ton that will do every little job imaginable. That said, UBI and working aren't mutually exclusive. It seems entirely reasonable to assume there will still be people working lower-end jobs to augment their UBI. If there aren't enough garbage workers, it seems only natural to also assume the pay for garbage workers would go up to entice more people to take the job. I've always worked CS and CS-related jobs (but have volunteered at non-CS jobs), but I'd be very likely to take up some kind of monotonous-but-fulfilling service job like garbage collecting. Probably not full time, but I'd love to have the time to help out others more. As a side note, there's probably also a lot of work to be done in transitioning these kinds of assumedly-low-interest jobs into a gig-based paradigm. I think more people would take up "shifts" in something new than committing to it as a career. Obviously there's a lot of logistical problems (training, accountability, insurance, etc) that need addressed, but that's part of the fun of figuring it all out. :)
- rjf72 8y ago
  Somebody suggesting nobody would want to do construction is probably more indicative of a person who has never had the privilege of ever building anything in their life, rather than any statement of reality. However, absolutely awful examples aside - I do think he is correct that there are plenty of jobs that indeed nobody would want to do. Toilets don't clean themselves, and won't reliably be doing so anytime in the foreseeable future. There's no fulfillment mopping up piss from somebody who thought it'd be fun to urinate all over something, just because it's not theirs. Of course you're right that we'd see pay go up for these jobs as a result, but I think the thing that many don't consider is how relatively little money there is to go around. This is masked by scale. We see billions and think of just enormous amounts of money, yet that's of course less than $3 per American. That of course means the even more unimaginable trillion dollars is merely $3000 per American. We have so many people that it can be difficult to really intuitively grasp. So one of the most important numbers here is the GDP per capita. The GDP being the total market value of absolutely everything produced within a nation over a set period of time. This is what makes GDP per capita so interesting. It tells us how much money each and every person would receive if the market value of absolutely every single good or service was split completely equally. And in the US it's shockingly less than $60,000. With an absolutely huge motivation to overproduce everything imaginable, and a countless array of artificial demand being created and sated, our GDP is still less than $60k. That's not a particularly huge amount of money! And while we could debate to what degree, I think nobody would disagree that an UBI would depress overall production. So we're not even going to be getting to that $60k point, and probably not even particularly close to it. And this amount of money needs to be used to provide a livable stipend to each and every person, and then also account for 100% of the market driven economic success for each and every individual. I'm sure you can see the problem. Exactly how much money is our janitor supposed to be earning? And where does this money come from? You have to keep in mind that when we talk about this < $60k GDP/capita this isn't "money" but rather real money that represents a share of access to a finite set of resources. In other words you can't just go above this number and call it debt - the resources that such "money" (as it would become at that point) would represent literally do not exist. It'd be like in a world of 100 with a total of 5 cars telling each and every person that they can have a car. It just doesn't work.

newnewpdro 8y ago

I don't think UBI is a good approach to this particular case. The F/OSS developer support case seems like a perfect candidate for a microtransaction-funded model. The kind of thing cryptocurrency enables, where one can passively receive as little as fractions of cents from a pool of millions of people without any transaction costs. We just need to integrate the solutions better. F/OSS developers work hard and provide value to many people. If there were a way for me to automate a tiny monthly donation to the projects I most use in Debian, without involving credit cards or routing numbers or other personally identifying information, where 100% of the contribution reached the intended people, I'd already be doing it. The kernel, Xorg, vim, firefox, screen/tmux, systemd, all these things would be on my list, and I doubt I'm alone here. The distributions should be working on this problem. Forget 'popcon', give me an integrated solution to distribute cryptocurrency from a wallet I occasionally top up somehow to the developers and package maintainers I implicitly love.