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It's easy to create value for others and not worry about returns when you have enough money to not worry. Unfortunately for most people, there's plenty of comp
by avaer 8mo ago
It's easy to create value for others and not worry about returns when you have enough money to not worry.
Unfortunately for most people, there's plenty of companies willing to take the returns and leave you paycheck to paycheck. That's literally what they are optimized to do.
I don't even disagree with the ideal, but I think a prerequisite step to this philosophy is UBI.
- simianwords 8mo agoWhile I think you are not wrong, these are excuses to continue doing useless things
- nine_k 8mo agoWhat useless things?
- simianwords 8mo agoPartake in war
- bratbag 8mo agoWar against someone who wants my society eradicated provides a lot of value to my people.
- wartywhoa23 8mo agoAnd much more pain, misery and suffering to people who never wished you anything bad but happen to live on the other side.
- simianwords 8mo agodo you have the intelligence to verify that?
- mlrtime 8mo agoWar has existed as long as humans have. If you have any ideas for how to remove fear, aggression and disagreement from humans you might just be a god or a saint.
- nine_k 8mo agoIf you do not partake in a war when a war is waged against you, you lose, and you either get subdued, or perish altogether. This is why pacifism for some part of a society is only possible when another part of the society is willing and capable of using lethal force to defend the society as a whole. Due to this, it's important to always have sufficient quantities of very efficient weapons, exactly so that you would never have to put them to use.
- nine_k 8mo agoNot necessarily UBI; one just needs an adequate day job. Then the hobby could be creating value with no expectation of any direct return: writing a blog, writing and giving away music, writing open-source software, doing any volunteer work, etc.
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- bombcar 8mo agoThere's something more than just an adequate day job (which is perhaps necessary in more ways than just "get the money get the cheddar") - because we can find pages and pages of examples of "well paid" (doctor, lawyer, tech) people who are drowning in debt, living paycheck to paycheck, and perpetually unhappy.
- nine_k 8mo agoDrowning in debt means the job is inadequate :-\ Paycheck to paycheck is sort of fine, if you can still dedicate the time to your WoW clan, or your music, or your writing, and be happy about that. Well, to your kids, not expecting anything tangible in return. If the day job expends all motivation, all your energy, and it + the commute eats all your time, then again it's an inadequate job.
- apples_oranges 8mo agomoney is a judgement of value to society and a motivator to only allocate work in a useful way.. wouldn't UBI, even if coupled to actually producing _something_ will lead to a lot of useless stuff being made?
- dmantis 8mo agoWould be great if true, but that doesn't really correspond in reality truly, especially in intellectual products. Compare even Linus Torvalds fortune with e.g. snapchat founder. Not even talking about thousands of 0 profit open source projects with millions of installations versus some saas hustler - usually the former provide much more value to society than some guy who is just good at selling stuff. UBI might fuel some useless work, but it also might provide a way to people to be more into creative side of things rather than selling and marketing rat race. Also in less developed countries money even less corresponds to value. It almost always has some kind of mafia and corruption that extracts huge portions of value from the economy and basically net negative, though profitable. I'd like to live in the world where money are always allocated fairly, but we see that in IT, for example, predating, stealing data, spying on people bring more money than the honest work due to misaligned incentives, when bad actors pay more money than actual consumer.
- sdeframond 8mo agoMoney is a function of demand, availability and leverage. Value is only an indirect part of it: a factor that drives demand. It is easy to find examples of money not being a judgement of value in practice: think about thief or extortion for example, or pushing drugs.
- AnthonyMouse 8mo ago> wouldn't UBI, even if coupled to actually producing _something_ will lead to a lot of useless stuff being made? The general premise of a UBI is that it's unconditional. If you tried to say someone is required to produce something without specifying what it is, they'll produce whatever is the easiest thing to produce, which will naturally be useless if they otherwise wouldn't have produced anything because the only reason they're doing it is to satisfy the demand of someone not imposing any specific requirements on the output. But if it's actually unconditional then the things produced would only be the things someone wants to produce, i.e. the things worth their time to produce when they're not actually required to spend their time producing it. Those things would tend to be useful because at least the author found them to be and there's a decent chance they're not unique in the world. If you e.g. make an app just because you want to use it yourself, maybe someone else wants to use it too.
- card_zero 8mo agoI guess then you disagree with the previous blog post, The Insane Stupidity of UBI, which says free money for all just makes prices go up.
- DangitBobby 8mo agoEven if I accept that as true, which I do not, the value of money would have to go to zero for that to mean UBI doesn't work.
- muyuu 8mo agoI see your post as a pretty strong refutation of OP's premise. Unless for those who can afford not worrying about money, of course.
- shaman1 8mo agohttps://geohot.github.io/blog/jekyll/update/2026/02/27/the-insane-stupidity-of-ubi.html https://geohot.github.io/blog/jekyll/update/2026/02/27/the-i... from the same author
- zozbot234 8mo agoWhich of course ignores the obvious point that UBI is all about taking existing resource redistribution and making it less costly and more efficient. Practically all Western countries redistribute income on a massive scale (compared to the default outcomes of a completely free market capitalism) in order to ensure everyone can provide for their basic needs, and that could all be gradually replaced by UBI. This is broadly in line with OP's suggested ethic "create value for others, don't play zero sum games" since capitalism is based on rewarding those who create the most value, whereas zero-sum games are largely political in nature.
- card_zero 8mo agoThe inefficiency of the bureaucracy of limiting welfare (or charity) to the poor and needy. I don't know, though, maybe giving everybody's money to everybody cancels itself out.
- zozbot234 8mo agoYou're giving money to everybody but then anyone who isn't poor and needy has to pay taxes on their income that more than offset the money. It's taking "the bureaucracy of limiting welfare (or charity)" and folding it in with the IRS and the local Department of Revenue.
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- DeepSeaTortoise 8mo agoYou can never just use existing resources as long as those end up in places they're no longer accessible to the market anymore. Cash just about never sits just around as long as whoever holds onto it has no current need for extremely liquid assets. Like insurances. I doubt that the ratio of cash that ends up bound up that way to the one that doesn't changes a lot overall. The real problem to UBI is governments creating income via debt, IMO.
- wisty 8mo ago"Don't worry about money" is something a lot of companies do. They can just try to create value first, then look for profits later (albeit often though "enshitification"). This bias towards creating value makes them more moral than mere mortals, creating huge amounts of innovation and surplus value.
- armchairhacker 8mo agoDid you RTA? The author is predicting that those employees (at least in software dev) will get laid off; so they should get out and find some way to create real value (or make some other change) for their own sake, because they’re about to lose even “paycheck to paycheck”. You should debate this instead, because if true, it makes your point irrelevant.
- tmvnty 8mo agoAs long as the global population is still rising, they will be carnage between competitions. The author and many others might be foresee the (near) future where the global population start declining, maybe then, we can do things just because we can.
- PowerElectronix 8mo agoPopulation growth or size has nothing to do. No matter how much resources a society has, natural selection pushes everyone to keep trying hard to get more, as those that don't end up without resources. In a society, the fastest way to get resources is to provide something in exchange to other members of the society. The most common thing we have to exchange for resources is work. From those two things we can see that no matter what society you have or how wealthy it is, people will work as much as they can, or else they get behind in the rat race.
- fragmede 8mo agoNot just if you already have enough money, but it's easy to say if you're as smart as Geohot. For those who aren't, (I'm not), creating that kind of value isn't just hard, it's impossible!
- PowerElectronix 8mo agoHey, don't dismiss your intelligence like that!
- fragmede 8mo agoHaha, thanks! I like to think I'm smart (sometimes), just not at Geohot's level.
- cpursley 8mo agoI think there’s a strong bias towards hacking and cool side projects from the hackernews crowd. But I’m not so sure much of the general population would use their free time afforded by UBI for productive and useful endeavors. At least from my observations there’s a significant portion of the population that uses their free time to be idle and veg in front of the TV and/or get wasted. My concern with UBI, even if it was financially tenable as it would underwrite a whole lot of that - including the more criminal, antisocial sub-population.
- XorNot 8mo agoWouldn't convincing the criminal part of the population to just stay home be a net win? Policing and prisons are both notably more expensive then welfare.
- zetanor 8mo agoI wouldn't be satisfied with my share of UBI. I'd want yours, too.
- DangitBobby 8mo agoPeople would probably still steal but without real world data we can only speculate on whether crime would increase or decrease. My bet is still on decrease.
- pdyc 8mo agoIndeed, what is worse is expectation created by rich people that whatever little value you did create should be given away for free! I see it frequently on HN with product launches where people are demanding product to be opensource with liberal license which effectively means it should be free.
- kudokatz 8mo ago> when you have enough money to not worry. Unfortunately for most people ... paycheck to paycheck This is some truth to this argument, but the frequency with which it's brought out as an excuse to just dismiss any argument one doesn't like is too high in North America. Simply bashing every argument with, "but some people are in a bad situation" doesn't really further discussion all that much.