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https://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 th

by shaman1 7mo ago

https://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 7mo ago
Which 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 7mo ago
  The 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 7mo ago
    You'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 7mo ago
      [deleted]
- DeepSeaTortoise 7mo ago
  You 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.
  - zozbot234 7mo ago
    > The real problem to UBI is governments creating income via debt, IMO. The national debt is just a hidden tax on future generations. You're stealing resources from the future (by selling claims to them in advance, that's what national debt is) and spending them in the present. It's justifiable in extreme cases like a war (or perhaps for massive public investments that can't be funded within the existing budget - which is actually not that common), but really not otherwise.
    - notarobot123 7mo ago
      I've often thought of state debt as an accruing tax collection deficit. Selling bonds (creating more of this debt) is more politically convenient than raising taxes but it digs a deeper hole and obliges the state to pay interest largely to the same class of people they have failed to tax.
      - Obscurity4340 7mo ago
        Sounds like a win-win. Rich people win then they double dip and win again
    - ncruces 7mo ago
      It's fine if you're leaving something to those future generations. Like a bridge or a dam built to last 100 years.
    - crimsoneer 7mo ago
      This is like suggesting no business should ever borrow to invest.
- mike_hearn 7mo ago
  Forget UBI and AI. They are distractions. Today it's very unclear that even just existing welfare schemes are sustainable. Political parties can buy votes with welfare and they do, so it's an unstable configuration. Europe is full of countries with this problem. A good example of a country in a downward spiral towards UBI hell is the UK. Around 25% of the working-age population now claim to be disabled, and around 10% receive disability benefits. Labour have a genius idea for how to fix this: let disabled people try out employment for a bit to see if they like it, whilst keeping their welfare payments. So they're turning disability benefits into UBI by the back door. The UK can't afford anything even close to this. It can't even afford the theoretically non-universal benefits schemes it has: it has massive government debt and deficits because its economy doesn't generate enough wealth, and its health welfare system (the NHS) experiences Soviet-style shortages all the time. This has happened despite that we've been mass automating jobs with computers and robots for decades. Chips aren't magic wands that make communism suddenly work. The problems with wealth redistribution are fundamental and will never go away regardless of your level of technology. If you disagree, fine, but please for the love of God focus on walking before you can run. Drive government deficits to zero whilst keeping growth at US levels, and then talk about more generous welfare schemes. (you can't magic new money by eliminating means testing either, see my other comment on this thread).
  - deaux 7mo ago
    > The UK can't afford anything even close to this. It can't even afford the theoretically non-universal benefits schemes it has: it has massive government debt and deficits because its economy doesn't generate enough wealth, I'm fairly certain its economy generates more wealth per capita than at any point in the past, and this is the general consensus. If you believe it doesn't, please explain how, as it goes against the commonly held belief.
    - zozbot234 7mo ago
      Much of that wealth is wasted by excess government spending. Same pattern as India, which actually used to be ruled by the UK as a colony - then they became independent but kept all the excess bureaucracy and red tape from their former oppressors.
- rfwhyte 7mo ago
  Capitalism rewards those who CAPTURE the most value, not those who create it. Capitalism at its core is a system of expropriating the value of labor by those with capital who themselves create absolutely nothing.
  - zozbot234 7mo ago
    Capital allocation is a serious job with very real consequences. The decision of how many AI datacenters should be built, to take an an unusually topical example, is one of capital allocation. Central planning is not a viable solution, it has failed everywhere it's been tried.
    - swed420 7mo ago
      > Central planning is not a viable solution, it has failed everywhere it's been tried. Laughs in chinese (and yes I'm aware they use instances of capitalism. The difference is they have hard checks in place)
castral 7mo ago
Ah, well... TIL to not take anything geohot writes seriously in the future.
- actionfromafar 7mo ago
  xkcd://1053
  - esafak 7mo ago
    That URN made me chuckle.
- fragmede 7mo ago
  Alternately, he's right and you're wrong.
- mlrtime 7mo ago
  ^Young readers: The mark of wisdom. Throw out all readings because you dislike one of them. I may do it too, but I don't think I'd actually ever write it down.
  - vincston 7mo ago
    For me its more his attitude that puts me off. He might be intelligent, but his EQ doesnt seem that high. The condescending way he references the "malcolm in the middle"-episode "hot dumb girl" couldve been just the explaination of the "1 dollar = 1 million dollar".
  - darkwater 7mo ago
    Well, reputation is made by many dimensions. Writing takes like the UBI one is definitely a signal to take into account.
bravetraveler 7mo ago
Also: https://geohot.github.io//blog/jekyll/update/2025/02/19/nobody-will-profit.html https://geohot.github.io//blog/jekyll/update/2025/02/19/nobo... Apparently if we, the poorer ones, win the war of attrition, the problematic ones that own everything will resign to golf. Or something. Getting financial planning from a lottery winner.
- zozbot234 7mo ago
  > I dream of a day when company valuations halve when I create a GitHub repo. Someday. Isn't that exactly what Anthropic did to the SaaS sector? Taking the "I can replace you with a very small shell script" line from BOFH lore (except that it was a bunch of SKILLS.md files, not shell scripts) and making it real.
  - bravetraveler 7mo ago
    Hard to say. SaaS is dead, long live SaaS.
maybewhenthesun 7mo ago
Geohot is a smart dude. But here I think he misses the forest for the trees. He has a point, certainly. But while he is harping about the U part of ubi, he's completely ignoring the B part. UBI is meant to provide some basic income so people don't starve. It's just an optimization of welfare programs where you have a ton of bureaucracy and make people jump through endless hoops and cause them endless amounts of stress (which is known to make people work less, not more). And replace it by just giving all citizens the same amount. Yes, that's a bit stupid for the people first paying taxes and then getting them right back again minus overhead costs, but if you think about it: that's what happens now too, only less efficient (in the netherlands, that is) so you pay even more overhead. On top of that comes the other realization: If the current trend of automating everything continues,we'll ultimately end up with (hyperbole) 1 person owning all the machines doing all the work. That 1 person earning all the money, and (in an ideal case) paying his taxes to give everybody else welfare. Which just is the same as UBI. In a certain way this already happens now. Most not-too-smart people that used to be gainfully employed as laborer somewhere are now on welfare, and the threshold for not-too-smart could go up rather steeply with the current AI trends.
- mike_hearn 7mo ago
  Someone needs to make a website explaining why UBI doesn't work conceptually because this comes up over and over again on HN. You cannot make UBI work from money saved by removing means testing. Even UBI is a welfare scheme and would require significant bureaucratic hoop jumping to check that a person claiming it isn't: • Dead • Non-citizen • Already claiming it under a different name/bank account/etc • In prison • Moved abroad and so on. All that is expensive, and yet the overheads of even existing welfare systems just aren't high compared to the amounts they pay out. Getting rid of means testing doesn't magically make the numbers balance. Geohot is correct. UBI seems to only appeal to people who don't understand how the economy works. You can't have an economy in which one person earns all the money by definition.
  - flammafex 7mo ago
    Guess we'll starve then. Good luck dealing with hundreds of millions of hungry angry people.
booleandilemma 7mo ago
He's a privileged startup founder who has 301k followers on X. Who cares what he thinks about UBI, of all things? Also he looks like an ass.
joegibbs 7mo ago
I think it’s a bad idea for about the same reasons, but that’s assuming we’re implementing it right now in the current economy. If automation means that in the future there’s not much for all these people to do that creates value then it makes sense.
yard2010 7mo ago
> What do you plan to buy with your free government dollars? Want to buy eggs? Sorry, the egg people stopped making eggs, they are living free on UBI. Want to buy a house? Who built it? Nobody, because they all were getting UBI and didn’t want to build houses anymore. They write poems now. There’s still old houses available, but the price for them has 20xed, well outside of what you can afford. In my country the people that are producing and selling eggs do it almost for free, they could do something else and get much more money, but they choose to do eggs. My theory is that people choose to do stuff not just because of the money. Narrowing all the interests to just money doesn't capture the complex reality. When you cancel the money thing, you let people choose what to do based on their real ambitions and aspirations, removing the alien interest (money) that skews the world so much that even geohotz got confused.
- DangitBobby 7mo ago
  But then you can end up with a lot of people making what's fun to produce but we have an excess of (waste) and few people filling in to make what's missing (scarcity). Markets aren't perfect but they do help us solve that particular problem.
  - acuozzo 7mo ago
    The topical reply is that those positions aren't paying enough. However, if we have to pay e.g. miners millions to compete with a high UBI, we trigger a massive wage-price spiral. Since extracted raw materials are the bedrock of the entire supply chain, those costs cascade and multiply, eventually making the finished goods unaffordable for the very people receiving the UBI. In reality, markets don't solve the scarcity of un-fun labor through magic efficiency. They solve it by leveraging debt, poverty, and an exploitable lower class to keep the foundational costs of society artificially low. Without this DesperationFloor™, the math of our current commodity-based economy falls apart.
    - zozbot234 7mo ago
      > Since extracted raw materials are the bedrock of the entire supply chain Extracted raw material is incredibly cheap. Human industry and ingenuity are the real scarce resource, and UBI leverages these to an unprecedented extent. Debt and exploitation are an anti-pattern, even for a capitalist economy; they're deeply antithetical to true industry and creativity.

by shaman1 7mo ago

https://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 7mo ago

Which 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 7mo ago
The 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 7mo ago
  You'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 7mo ago
    [deleted]
DeepSeaTortoise 7mo ago
You 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.
- zozbot234 7mo ago
  > The real problem to UBI is governments creating income via debt, IMO. The national debt is just a hidden tax on future generations. You're stealing resources from the future (by selling claims to them in advance, that's what national debt is) and spending them in the present. It's justifiable in extreme cases like a war (or perhaps for massive public investments that can't be funded within the existing budget - which is actually not that common), but really not otherwise.
  - notarobot123 7mo ago
    I've often thought of state debt as an accruing tax collection deficit. Selling bonds (creating more of this debt) is more politically convenient than raising taxes but it digs a deeper hole and obliges the state to pay interest largely to the same class of people they have failed to tax.
    - Obscurity4340 7mo ago
      Sounds like a win-win. Rich people win then they double dip and win again
  - ncruces 7mo ago
    It's fine if you're leaving something to those future generations. Like a bridge or a dam built to last 100 years.
  - crimsoneer 7mo ago
    This is like suggesting no business should ever borrow to invest.
mike_hearn 7mo ago
Forget UBI and AI. They are distractions. Today it's very unclear that even just existing welfare schemes are sustainable. Political parties can buy votes with welfare and they do, so it's an unstable configuration. Europe is full of countries with this problem. A good example of a country in a downward spiral towards UBI hell is the UK. Around 25% of the working-age population now claim to be disabled, and around 10% receive disability benefits. Labour have a genius idea for how to fix this: let disabled people try out employment for a bit to see if they like it, whilst keeping their welfare payments. So they're turning disability benefits into UBI by the back door. The UK can't afford anything even close to this. It can't even afford the theoretically non-universal benefits schemes it has: it has massive government debt and deficits because its economy doesn't generate enough wealth, and its health welfare system (the NHS) experiences Soviet-style shortages all the time. This has happened despite that we've been mass automating jobs with computers and robots for decades. Chips aren't magic wands that make communism suddenly work. The problems with wealth redistribution are fundamental and will never go away regardless of your level of technology. If you disagree, fine, but please for the love of God focus on walking before you can run. Drive government deficits to zero whilst keeping growth at US levels, and then talk about more generous welfare schemes. (you can't magic new money by eliminating means testing either, see my other comment on this thread).
- deaux 7mo ago
  > The UK can't afford anything even close to this. It can't even afford the theoretically non-universal benefits schemes it has: it has massive government debt and deficits because its economy doesn't generate enough wealth, I'm fairly certain its economy generates more wealth per capita than at any point in the past, and this is the general consensus. If you believe it doesn't, please explain how, as it goes against the commonly held belief.
  - zozbot234 7mo ago
    Much of that wealth is wasted by excess government spending. Same pattern as India, which actually used to be ruled by the UK as a colony - then they became independent but kept all the excess bureaucracy and red tape from their former oppressors.
rfwhyte 7mo ago
Capitalism rewards those who CAPTURE the most value, not those who create it. Capitalism at its core is a system of expropriating the value of labor by those with capital who themselves create absolutely nothing.
- zozbot234 7mo ago
  Capital allocation is a serious job with very real consequences. The decision of how many AI datacenters should be built, to take an an unusually topical example, is one of capital allocation. Central planning is not a viable solution, it has failed everywhere it's been tried.
  - swed420 7mo ago
    > Central planning is not a viable solution, it has failed everywhere it's been tried. Laughs in chinese (and yes I'm aware they use instances of capitalism. The difference is they have hard checks in place)

castral 7mo ago

Ah, well... TIL to not take anything geohot writes seriously in the future.

actionfromafar 7mo ago
xkcd://1053
- esafak 7mo ago
  That URN made me chuckle.
fragmede 7mo ago
Alternately, he's right and you're wrong.
mlrtime 7mo ago
^Young readers: The mark of wisdom. Throw out all readings because you dislike one of them. I may do it too, but I don't think I'd actually ever write it down.
- vincston 7mo ago
  For me its more his attitude that puts me off. He might be intelligent, but his EQ doesnt seem that high. The condescending way he references the "malcolm in the middle"-episode "hot dumb girl" couldve been just the explaination of the "1 dollar = 1 million dollar".
- darkwater 7mo ago
  Well, reputation is made by many dimensions. Writing takes like the UBI one is definitely a signal to take into account.

bravetraveler 7mo ago

Also: https://geohot.github.io//blog/jekyll/update/2025/02/19/nobody-will-profit.html https://geohot.github.io//blog/jekyll/update/2025/02/19/nobo... Apparently if we, the poorer ones, win the war of attrition, the problematic ones that own everything will resign to golf. Or something. Getting financial planning from a lottery winner.

zozbot234 7mo ago
> I dream of a day when company valuations halve when I create a GitHub repo. Someday. Isn't that exactly what Anthropic did to the SaaS sector? Taking the "I can replace you with a very small shell script" line from BOFH lore (except that it was a bunch of SKILLS.md files, not shell scripts) and making it real.
- bravetraveler 7mo ago
  Hard to say. SaaS is dead, long live SaaS.

maybewhenthesun 7mo ago

Geohot is a smart dude. But here I think he misses the forest for the trees. He has a point, certainly. But while he is harping about the U part of ubi, he's completely ignoring the B part. UBI is meant to provide some basic income so people don't starve. It's just an optimization of welfare programs where you have a ton of bureaucracy and make people jump through endless hoops and cause them endless amounts of stress (which is known to make people work less, not more). And replace it by just giving all citizens the same amount. Yes, that's a bit stupid for the people first paying taxes and then getting them right back again minus overhead costs, but if you think about it: that's what happens now too, only less efficient (in the netherlands, that is) so you pay even more overhead. On top of that comes the other realization: If the current trend of automating everything continues,we'll ultimately end up with (hyperbole) 1 person owning all the machines doing all the work. That 1 person earning all the money, and (in an ideal case) paying his taxes to give everybody else welfare. Which just is the same as UBI. In a certain way this already happens now. Most not-too-smart people that used to be gainfully employed as laborer somewhere are now on welfare, and the threshold for not-too-smart could go up rather steeply with the current AI trends.

mike_hearn 7mo ago
Someone needs to make a website explaining why UBI doesn't work conceptually because this comes up over and over again on HN. You cannot make UBI work from money saved by removing means testing. Even UBI is a welfare scheme and would require significant bureaucratic hoop jumping to check that a person claiming it isn't: • Dead • Non-citizen • Already claiming it under a different name/bank account/etc • In prison • Moved abroad and so on. All that is expensive, and yet the overheads of even existing welfare systems just aren't high compared to the amounts they pay out. Getting rid of means testing doesn't magically make the numbers balance. Geohot is correct. UBI seems to only appeal to people who don't understand how the economy works. You can't have an economy in which one person earns all the money by definition.
- flammafex 7mo ago
  Guess we'll starve then. Good luck dealing with hundreds of millions of hungry angry people.

booleandilemma 7mo ago

He's a privileged startup founder who has 301k followers on X. Who cares what he thinks about UBI, of all things? Also he looks like an ass.

joegibbs 7mo ago

I think it’s a bad idea for about the same reasons, but that’s assuming we’re implementing it right now in the current economy. If automation means that in the future there’s not much for all these people to do that creates value then it makes sense.

yard2010 7mo ago

> What do you plan to buy with your free government dollars? Want to buy eggs? Sorry, the egg people stopped making eggs, they are living free on UBI. Want to buy a house? Who built it? Nobody, because they all were getting UBI and didn’t want to build houses anymore. They write poems now. There’s still old houses available, but the price for them has 20xed, well outside of what you can afford. In my country the people that are producing and selling eggs do it almost for free, they could do something else and get much more money, but they choose to do eggs. My theory is that people choose to do stuff not just because of the money. Narrowing all the interests to just money doesn't capture the complex reality. When you cancel the money thing, you let people choose what to do based on their real ambitions and aspirations, removing the alien interest (money) that skews the world so much that even geohotz got confused.

DangitBobby 7mo ago
But then you can end up with a lot of people making what's fun to produce but we have an excess of (waste) and few people filling in to make what's missing (scarcity). Markets aren't perfect but they do help us solve that particular problem.
- acuozzo 7mo ago
  The topical reply is that those positions aren't paying enough. However, if we have to pay e.g. miners millions to compete with a high UBI, we trigger a massive wage-price spiral. Since extracted raw materials are the bedrock of the entire supply chain, those costs cascade and multiply, eventually making the finished goods unaffordable for the very people receiving the UBI. In reality, markets don't solve the scarcity of un-fun labor through magic efficiency. They solve it by leveraging debt, poverty, and an exploitable lower class to keep the foundational costs of society artificially low. Without this DesperationFloor™, the math of our current commodity-based economy falls apart.
  - zozbot234 7mo ago
    > Since extracted raw materials are the bedrock of the entire supply chain Extracted raw material is incredibly cheap. Human industry and ingenuity are the real scarce resource, and UBI leverages these to an unprecedented extent. Debt and exploitation are an anti-pattern, even for a capitalist economy; they're deeply antithetical to true industry and creativity.