> Right. I don't think that proponents of universal income really 'get' this. :-) FWIW, I'm a proponent of UBI, and I get it. (But as I said in a sib comment

> Right. I don't think that proponents of universal income really 'get' this. :-) FWIW, I'm a proponent of UBI, and I get it. (But as I said in a sib comment, to me UBI is an alternative to mass unemployability due to rampant automation, it's not about ideology or utopian dreams.) > They seem to have the idea that people will just accept their lot, forever. Personally I'd find that utterly soul destroying. Almost no-one is on top, and a good percentage of people are in tiny flats. That's sounds to me like what we have now. I worked on the Google campus as a contractor, and two things (at least) seem relevant to this thread: First, early on I realized that this was a model for what I called "secular utopia": the Quality of Life of a Googler is IMO the baseline for what a human should expect on Earth. (Given the physical conditions: the Sun and the differential between it and the rest of the sky; 4By-old self-improving self-replicating nanotechnology; and approx. 2.25 acres per human arable land surface; ...modulus psychosis (what most people call politics) and ignorance. We have knowledge to dispel ignorance and tools to cure psychosis. So really, it's just a matter of getting in the right place and putting one's back into it.) Er, anyway, cheap and healthy food, ready transport, freedom from avoidable BS, etc.: it's a baseline. If we can get the seven or eight billion humans to a Googleplex level of QoL I would be sooooooo happy. All the other BS can be sorted out orthogonally to that simple, easy, cheap baseline (I'm factoring in Permaculture, et. al. Given land, even desert, it is not hard to bootstrap economically to this baseline.) Second, a lot of people really are happy in lives that might seem to others to be trite or "utterly soul destroying". It's subjective. The Googleplex was the first place in my life I encountered true "jobbers": people who are totally content (as far as I can tell from external cues) to get up every day, grind out the 9-to-5, go home, and do the whole da,n thing all over again the next day. One of my co-workers had a stroke. It was in the evening, so most of the cubicles were empty, but even so, nobody noticed and nobody said anything. It was ten days before I realized I hadn't seen him and asked our supervisor what had happened to him. But the most disturbing thing to me was, when he got better he came right back to work. Different strokes for different folks, eh? (Morbid humor, lol.) I didn't mean to rant at you. I've had a cold and been stuck inside.