Y Combinator Announces Funding For UBI-Supporting Political Candidates (latimes.com) 195
Most people "feel like they have great potential that is being wasted," argues Y Combinator president Sam Altman -- a Stanford dropout whose company's investments are now worth $65 billion, including Airbnb, Reddit, and Dropbox. Now an anonymous reader quote the Los Angeles Times:
A wealthy young Silicon Valley venture capitalist hopes to recruit statewide and congressional candidates and launch an affordable-housing ballot measure in 2018 because he says California's leaders are failing to address flaws in the state's governance that are killing opportunities for future generations. Sam Altman, 32, will roll out an effort to enlist candidates around a shared set of policy priorities -- including tackling how automation is going to affect the economy and the cost of housing in California -- and is willing to put his own money behind the effort. "I think we have a fundamental breakdown of the American social contract and it's desperately important that we fix it," he said. "Even if we had a very well-functioning government, it would be a challenge, and our current government functions so badly it is an extra challenge..."
Altman lays out 10 principles including lowering the cost of housing, creating single-payer healthcare, increasing clean energy use, improving education, reforming taxes and rebuilding infrastructure. He has few specific policy edicts, and floats proposals that will generate controversy, such as creating a universal basic income for all Americans in an effort to equalize opportunity, public funding for the media and increasing taxes on property that is owned by foreigners, is unoccupied or has been "flipped" by investors seeking a quick return on an investment.
Altman argues that he wants to "ensure that everyone benefits from the coming changes," and specifically highlights the idea of a Universal Basic Income. Altman writes that "If it turns out to be a good policy, I could imagine passing a law that puts it into effect when the GDP per capita doubles. This could help cushion the transition to a post-automation world."
Altman lays out 10 principles including lowering the cost of housing, creating single-payer healthcare, increasing clean energy use, improving education, reforming taxes and rebuilding infrastructure. He has few specific policy edicts, and floats proposals that will generate controversy, such as creating a universal basic income for all Americans in an effort to equalize opportunity, public funding for the media and increasing taxes on property that is owned by foreigners, is unoccupied or has been "flipped" by investors seeking a quick return on an investment.
Altman argues that he wants to "ensure that everyone benefits from the coming changes," and specifically highlights the idea of a Universal Basic Income. Altman writes that "If it turns out to be a good policy, I could imagine passing a law that puts it into effect when the GDP per capita doubles. This could help cushion the transition to a post-automation world."
Slippery slope to communism (Score:1, Insightful)
Giving people a free income makes the fat and lazy. It's a slippery slope to communism. Forget about it.
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I've seen it. I've lived it
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Left? There's a shit ton of alt-right and libertarian down here.
True about the Libertarians (probably the second largest /. group), not very true about alt-right. However my $0.02 is that the largest group would be left leaning. Certainly culturally if not also economically.
Re:Slippery slope to communism (Score:5, Insightful)
Giving people a free income makes the fat and lazy.
So we should ban capital-derived income? And inheritance over some threshold?
Yes - and we do (Score:2)
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I notice that you didn't mention anything about capital-derived income, though. Which we don't "tax the hell out of". In fact, we tax it less than sweat-of-the-brow income.
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The idea is not so much giving them an income, but replacing the bloated and inefficient welfare systems with a basic income - hint: basic.
It means you get enough to survive without much luxury, and if you want more (as everyone does) then you go out and earn some more. Any job paying anything is a net benefit to you.
right now, crap jobs are not taken up because it pays more to sit on welfare. UBI fixes that.
It also gives another factor in that some things do not pay much at all, eg if you're trying to star
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Fat and lazy peopel are not a problem, when there aren't any jobs for them to have anyway.
Yet we are in a full employment economy, and the rate of people being replaced by technology is going down, since most the the easy-to-automate manufacturing jobs are already gone, and service jobs are proving much harder to automate.
UBI is a solution to a theoretical problem that doesn't actually exist.
Slightly Tilted (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Slightly Tilted (Score:5, Insightful)
Look at the world we live in today where a large and growing part of society isn't working and not by and large starving in the streets for it. Productivity increases have made that possible whereas historically most countries practiced slavery because productivity was so low that paying wages to all laborers wasn't feasible and few would be willing to freely perform that labor for what would be given as wages.
If you think people need to be employed or engaged in some type of work, just have people getting the UBI who aren't employed (or somehow paying in to the system) do community service. Ten hours a week or keeping parks clean, etc. isn't a hard ask if it lets a person continue living.
"Ten hours a week or keeping parks clean..." (Score:2)
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You just described a job.
Yes, of course.
That's not the point.
The point, in the context of UBI, is that that job, in itself, is worth taking, such that the income from it is not taxed much, if at all. It is also not connected, in any way, to any other social security systems, causing other channels of income to be further limited or constrained in any way.
In a society with UBI, every job is worth taking, if more disposable income is what is most wanted at that point in time. But no job is required to be taken, in order to live. (I u
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Oh, it is. If you hold back automation domestically, it will just mean things get moved abroad where it is not held back. That is much, much worse. You can create a short-term straw-fire with attempts to hold back automation though (with a really nasty price to be paid later) and that seems to be what the current US administration is all about.
No Honest Candidates get on the ballot (Score:1)
What a pathetic group we get to vote for. Could you imagine any of the candidates being one of your circle of friends. Not Me.
'equalize opportunity' (Score:5, Insightful)
You mean like Harrison Bergeron?
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That story was about equalizing ability, not opportunity
If they care about people (Score:2)
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The ideology is that ppl are free to pursue their happiness. Should we have tested the Declaration of Independence before rashly committing so much blood and treasure? Emancipation is too risky; we must do experiments to see what will happen to the price of cotton before giving slaves freedom.
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At others' expense. Apparently you're in the "idealogy supersedes evidence" camp.
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Rights supercede experimentation. It's only at others' expense in the sense that the banks' toxic assets were made good at the Fed's expense, which made the dollar stronger. Therefore, fund basic income entirely on the Fed's balance sheet and index all incomes to price rises to eliminate nominal inflation. Win-win.
We should be constructing simulations of a Fed-funded basic income and test out virtually indexation schemes. But the idea of a basic income is not testable because it relies on a judgment about h
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banks' toxic assets were made good
We hear that a lot. If anyone ever received $1 in subsidy or service from government, they owe it back 10 million times over, payable mostly to non-workers and non-producers and the government workers who shepherd them. Meanwhile non-workers never owe anyone anything in return, not a dollar, not a thanks, not good civic behavior, not living a responsible life, not peace or domestic tranquillity, nothing, ever.
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Well i think a good start on that is getting a few people elected who will actually talk about that. Right now UBI is outside our political mainstream.
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Germany attempted things like that in the 1920-early 1930's https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Consider an average person from school to the old age pension in 2017.
Got so school and maybe the parents get a support payment from the gov.
When school is done a person has options? Mil, university study, scholarship, can pay or gets a loan for more education, vocational training, gov work, joins the private sector, looks for work, create some work or has to be looked after.
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Tax the corporations something insane like 80% of their profits
You would quickly see massive capital flight and job losses, as corporations moved assets overseas. You might think that with enough totalitarian restrictions and secret police survelliance you could stop that, but China has lost $3.8 trillion [forbes.com] over the last decade, despite severe capital controls.
Historically, capital controls have been about as effective as grabbing smoke.
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Corporations hide as much of their profits as possible.
You'd mostly see increases in indirect unemployment. When the economy shifts, jobs are lost and gained. You lose 0.1%, gain 0.1%, everything is fine. These movements of jobs come from consumer demand: the new jobs are created by consumers buying from new companies, buying new products, and so forth.
What happens when consumer demand moves, and the businesses don't have the cash to outlay for changes necessary to provide for that demand?
Taxing bu
"are now worth $65 billion" (Score:1)
65 billion imaginary dollars.
No one knows the true worth of a company until you go to sell it. How much would Reddit and Dropbox sell for if there were buyers? Not much. AirBnb? Not much more.
If he sold all his companies, right, now, he wouldn't get anything close to 65 billion.
Talk about... (Score:1, Insightful)
Talk about billionaires corrupting politics.
The investor class is powerful (Score:5, Interesting)
Things are going to get very ugly before they get better. The investor class will not relinquish its power without a fight. These guys will fight to the bitter end. They have everything to lose. They will use their resources to keep the status quo in place. Expect the skirmishes between main street and wall street to escalate. The outcome is very hard to predict, but there will be a conflict. Best case: We are able to wrest control from the investor class, and restore democracy. Worst case: Think Second Civil War, Robots killing citizens en-masse, biological agents released, or US military thermonuclear bombs targeted intra-US.
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Don't forget the quickly fermenting race war! CW2 is gonna be off the fuckin' chain.
We've already got blacks marching around with shirts like "Fuck White People" and shouting "Kill Whitey", it's only a small matter of time before that sentiment takes its inevitable violent turn. Once that happens, the "Nazis" will come out to plat and thus the Communists (aka Antifa) must fight back. Black guerrilla fighters blowing up buildings Al Qaeda style, and hell, even the Islamic terrorists would probably take a
No jobs where housing is cheap (Score:4, Interesting)
The real issue isn't a housing shortage, the real issue here is there are no jobs where housing is cheap.
There is plenty of cheap housing in California if you're willing to live anywhere but the bay area. Modesto, Stockton, Hollister, Tracy come to mind first. Problem is guys like Sam Altman want to live in Woodside, Atherton, or Los Altos. People like Sam Altman do not want to commute any more than 12 minutes to work. People like Sam Altman would never lower themselves to live in any of the aforementioned cities, much less start a company with decent paying wages in them.
We always hear the excuse, "WELL THE GOOD TALENT DOESN'T LIVE IN THOSE CITIES!" Really? Because I could have sworn we have over 100k H1b visa holders that were willing to live anywhere but where they came from. I could have sworn a lot of these folks would think that Stockton, even with it's high crime rate is a much better, much more civilized city than where they came from.
I've been preaching this for a while, seems like it would solve so many issues. Less traffic, less economic depression, and a foot up for people living in those cities. It's not like Atherton, Los Altos, or Woodside need anymore money. Give people a job, they won't need UBI.
Why don't you just say: Bribes for Dems (Score:2)
Funding for political candidates, really, that's what we call bribes now. At least lobbying and election contributions supposedly go towards specific issues or election funds, these bozos are just cutting the crap and funding politicians.
I don't want any collection of rich people basically buying out the entire candidate pool, at least right now we have our pick from rich people and even though they are further removed from our world than we care to admit, at least they are somewhat of a pick. Y Combinators
can certainly do better that this (Score:1)
Just got back from another trip to Silicon Valley. Couldn't help but notice that the place has become a very expensive ghetto. Infrastructure is essentially what was there in the 70s. Everyone is stuck in traffic on the way there/back. Folks are busy flipping 40yr old poorly-designed one-two story houses to each other at staggering prices. Even the cell phone coverage sucks. Clearly, negligible amount of resources has gone into making the area as a whole better .. and this is the golden child of US as a who
A good bridge to a new economic system (Score:2)
I'm not sure if I believe that 100% of knowledge worker jobs will be replaced in a timescale short enough to cause upheaval. However it is possible, and I think a basic income is a good option to bridge the gap. It's not because I'm lazy and don't want to work; it's because I can see a time when people won't have to work in some of the crappier knowledge worker jobs, and almost no one will be doing manual labor jobs.
The root of the problem is that our entire society is organized around educating people to t
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I doubt you're going to retrain someone who's been routing reports around forever to be a big data scientist.
The old joke was, "Go away or I'll replace you with a small shell script." This is that taken to a level many orders of magnitude higher. I'm automating tons of parts of my job at the moment. Lots of things that used to be done by hand are now scripted. Why? Because this job traditionally was held by someone much more of a report router and general knowledge bank.
However, what I'm realizing is that I've fundamentally changed this job. The person they hire to replace me when I leave is not going to
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When this discussion come
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...how corporate america keeps its war chests of money overseas in tax havens ... and suggest that maybe if they were paying their taxes like responsible citizens then maybe things wouldn't be so crappy.
If US corporate tax rates and other US corporate/business legal/regulatory-compliance costs were more on-par with foreign rates & costs, more of that money would stay in the US to be taxed for a net gain in revenue to public coffers and deposited in US financial institutions which provide capital for home loans, car loans, small business loans, etc etc.
The government is more focused on using taxation & regulation as social-engineering tools, not as *just* a tool to collect revenue to operate the go
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> Those citizens who pay less in income tax benefit more. Welfare.
And those who pay more (such as those with $500k/year taxable incomes) pay more and benefit less.
That's the point.
Social Security and Medicaid are two of the greatest programs this country has. You won't find a senior who disagrees.
I guess you've never seen crushing poverty up close?
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Crushing poverty is an absolute disgrace for a modern nation. There is no need at all for it economically either, because it is _expensive_ to have people live in poverty. The only thing it serves is to keep the middle-class in fear and timid. No other use.
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People who advocate for UBI don't math.
Actually, a universal social security would stabilize the social security OASDI system permanently by providing a basis; reduce total income tax burden on all income earners (the rough, unadjusted model cuts the top tax bracket from 39.6% to 35%); reduce payroll taxes by 0.9%; and reduce corporate income taxes by 2.5%.
Try actually doing the math once.
Math tallying government budgets and universal social security projections [google.com]. Also math about impacts on take-home wages [google.com].
I also did further math on the
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I don't see why you'd use a flat tax and not stick with a progressive tiered system (obviously you'd have to adjust the value and rates of those tiers to make it work)
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This presents UBI and welfare as either/or, which is not necessarily the case. We can still replace many means-tested welfare programs with UBI, without touching others. And this still presents a net reduction in bureaucracy.
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Why is the dollar now stronger after the Fed "printed" trillions to save world markets in 2008 and after? Why has Covered Interest Parity been consistently violated since 2008? Future dollars are worth more in world financial markets than today's dollars. The more dollars there are, the stronger the dollar gets.
We should fund a basic income on the Fed's balance sheet at zero taxpayer cost. Fix inflation the same way the private sector does: create more money. The rich put money in money-market funds that fu
Re:A UBI... (Score:4, Interesting)
This may be the dumbest post I have seen in a few days.
I did the math on UBI and found scrapping existing welfare, EI and veteran payments in favour for one UBI program would not only supply more income to more people, it would actually save the government money.
UBI is not magic, the money doesn't just come from the air, it comes from taxes. To pay for UBI the government merely needs to shift taxes to apply to wherever the money currently is. In other words, people who are making profits end up footing the bill for the people they laid off to make those profits.
The national debt is likely to go down, not up, if UBI is implemented because it saves money in the long run. Not just by unifying programs, but by reducing social housing, medical and emergency responder costs which are a result of poverty.
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So if welfare so far has failed the system in both cost and abuse without lifting anyone out of abject poverty, how well do you think UBI (basically welfare for the masses) will fare in the next 50 years? If we need such overhead managing current welfare funds that apply to 90% of the population?
Re:A UBI... (Score:5, Interesting)
The thing you UBI-detractors do not understand is that the UBI is Universal. It has minimal overhead, quite unlikely the system in place now. That is the whole point. It just distributes mostly the same money as is distributed now, but with almost no bureaucracy and nobody falling through the cracks. It eliminates a lot of value-destruction the current system does and fosters.
However, there are certainly problems with an UBI. For example, many people will find it really difficult to live without work and not because of financial aspects. That is the real killer here. With an UBI, all the make-work things currently done will fall away and that is going to hit hard. Just look at how many people run into massive issues when they retire or how many dies soon afterwards. People need something to do and many cannot create that by and for themselves.
That said, an UBI will happen, there is no way around that. The numbers just do not add up any other way, unless the whole world agrees to go back to a non-tech model of society. That is not going to happen.
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I had used the > and < and Slashdot ate my comment.
The whole procedure for current welfare comes down to "Check income level, give money". We are currently giving 1 Trillion dollar per year to less than 10% of the population. That is $20,000 per poor person in the US, $80,000 for a family of 4 and according to at least one left wing instiution there is less than 5% overhead on that.
We are giving poor people a UBI already and the poor are not getting any better off.
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I agree, but there just isn't enough money in our current welfare system to pay for a functional UBI system. We will need to extract some of the wealth that the top 20% has stocked away to fund UBI. And that is never easy to do, as they are the ones who control politics.
The good news is that redistribution of wealth should really help the economy. Giving the poor and middle class more to spend is great, because they will spend it. Right now that money is not benefiting anyone. The 1% already have m
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This.
Humans need to have a purpose to be individually happy.
Humans need to be productive to have a happy society.
Society needs the production of goods and services to avoid scarcity of resources, and thus survive.
UBI, as currently pitched, is mostly billionaires trying to foist their nouveau-riche guilt off onto society, so they don't have to take personal responsibility for anything.
Once technology gets to the point of creating a post-scarcity society, then the rules will change. For now, it's a recipe fo
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The problem with your argument is that humans can be productive and thereby find a purpose to be happy, without being paid for that purpose.
While we're at it, how many people who are working for a living are actually happy with what they do at work? Especially once you look at those earning less than median?
One could easily argue that UBI is exactly what would enable more people to find a purpose and be productive at it, instead of doing shitty work that they hate for shitty pay.
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I don't understand this line of thought (which I place in the same vein as "everyone will become fat and lazy"). I agree that make-work jobs will disappear, but charities and hobbies will not evaporate along with them. A lot of the human-dedicated charities might dwindle, as UBI replaces any need for them, but there are plenty of charities that are not focused on basic human welfare and many of these other gro
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The Social Security system is one of the most-successful anti-poverty systems in the world, if not the most-successful. I've been targeting a Universal Social Security, and I figure it will fare rather well. Unfortunately I'm bad at Web design [universal25.org] and communicating in general.
Also the argument about the welfare system sucking down tons of money in either overhead or abuse is a red herring. That's not a real thing; most such systems are actually quite efficient, and nearly all of the so-called abuse is bureau
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Please tell me how any social plans so far have worked. We are currently giving ~$20,000 per poor person (that's $80k/year for a "poor" 4 person family) in the US in welfare and they continue to be poor.
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The United States Social Security Administration provides Old-Age, Survivors, and Disability Insurance pensions. Like all of our welfare systems, it experiences an incredibly-low degree of recipient abuse, largely thanks to the Office of the Inspector General's effectiveness in identifying fraudulent applicants by a broad array of investigatory means including simple spot-checks. Largely, however, OASDI is practically-immune to fraud in the Old-Age and Survivorship pensions services, as it's hard to fake a
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In other words, people who are making profits end up footing the bill for the people they laid off to make those profits.
If they were laid off then by definition they aren't helping to make those profits.
The rest of your post may be correct or incorrect-- I haven't "done the math" myself-- but since your reasoning is obviously tainted by socialist ideology then I don't have much confidence in the rest of your analysis.
Or maybe instead (Score:5, Interesting)
Or maybe you dont have a strong grasp on what UBI is for or how it would work.
What it is for: a future where automation is cutting large numbers of people out of work. While there have always been people who have lost their jobs to automation the worry now is that robotics may be replacing manual labor almost entirely in the future. What are the manual laborers in this country going to do if that happens? Furthermore, advances in "ai" threaten many traditionally well paying jobs which makes the problems even worse.
How UBI works: UBI isnt as expensive as you make out. With UBI there's no unemployment payouts, food stamps, or any other number of social programs along with the large bureaucracies needed to make them work. While that money saved wont cover all the costs there's enough static wealth at the top even right now (let alone in a world so heavily automated) to make up the difference.
And really, I havent heard any viable solutions to what looks like a looming labor crises that isnt "let them all starve" or UBI
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Not sure, what did the weavers do after the steam powered loom? Or the blacksmiths when factories started casting metals? The economy has only grown when these upheavals came. What it will bring is unknown, but UBI has been peddled during the Renaissance, Thomas Paine was a known proponent just prior the Industrial Revolution and even the US has done trials with it when computers and automation were going to render "work for pay obsolete" in the 60's and 70's.
In the end, more people have jobs, less people a
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You easily gloss over a lot of unnecessary collateral damage.
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That is not an accurate model of what is happening now. We never ever had machinery before on the capability level that weak AI is currently reaching. At the same time, a lot of manufacturing technology is in a final state, and there is no next step, except eliminate the humans still in it.
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Exactly what Thomas Paine said about the machines people were inventing in his time. Weak AI is weak, it needs hard sciences and programmers to even get to a point of usefulness. If manufacturers want an AI-driven manufacturing line, we need many programmers, technicians, designers both in computers, electronics and mechanics.
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Except that's a bunch of shit. Outside of manufacturing, there is no industry that is heavily built on robotics. The idea that this will change everywhere, practically overnight, is stupid, believed by only the most stupid people in the world.
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We have no decision making AI yet, we're far, far away from even getting to that point, I think at least 50-100 years.
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Nonsense. Huge swaths of financial decision making (read as: trading) is now done entirely in software. Entire funds can be managed now with almost no human input. The same thing is happening in sales. Meanwhile, we're automating away the work of doctors and lawyers (presently in pretty narrow fields) with success rates that can exceed those of their human counterparts. This all really started getting traction in roughly ten years. I really don't think it's going to take another fifty to cause massive shif
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The steam engine made pretty much most manual crafts obsolete in a matter of a generation. Computers made half of the desk jobs obsolete in less than that. Robots and automation will do that to high-tech manual labor and has been doing that for more than a few generations already. There will be other jobs for people that want to work, it's not like "AI" will automate every job imaginable, it's only useful for a small subset of repetitive tasks and has to be programmed and tested rather well by humans for it
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just something that drives itself on a system that is pretty well defined by strict rules.
To be fair, a system well defined by strict rules with other participants that don't follow those well defined strict rules.
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And really, I haven't heard any viable solutions to what looks like a looming labour crises that isn't "let them all starve" or UBI
Seems a common problem. People waffle on about the difficulties in funding a UBI but have no imagination about a nation-state with 80+% of working age people unemployed and needing a hand-out to survive - either through government sanctioned methods or underground.
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Just because there might, in the far, far, far-flung future be a problem does not mean that UBI is a solution.
You sound like the typical shit-head politician: something must be done, this is something, so do it.
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Indeed. With that many unemployed and on minimal or no benefits, society begins to crumble fast. The economy does too, because people need to be able to buy things to keep commerce going.
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Indeed. This is the first time in history that machinery is not just shifting the labor to higher qualified labor, it is replacing the labor. Well, there _is_ a shift, but before it was something like 1 person shifted for 1 person working. Now it is 1 person shifted (engineers, IT experts, ...) for 10 person working before. The problem is that even dumb AI ("weak AI", i.e. automation, no intelligence) can replace an incredible number of workers. And while there are too few of the highly qualified people tha
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Right, so you can just go secure yourself a solid spot on that preppers tv show for the looming blood bath that will surely follow your ordained collapse.
The rest of us will keep looking for and talking about viable solutions to future problems.
Wow, where to start (Score:3, Interesting)
Now on to the next point: I get it. You don't like Government. We
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The government is useful if the citizens agree or forces that agreement and consensus. Saying "tough titties" for a proposed government action doesn't convince anyone that your solution is best and alludes to your acceptance of government force and tyranny. Yes, governments are useful but they have problems to ignore that reality is disingenuous.
You are setting your self up to be divisive on a topic that shouldn't be divisive because it is a problem that will take decades to manifest and solve. Regardless,
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"Acceptance of government force" is a misnomer - governments are about force, fundamentally. If a government can't use force, it stops being a government, since its laws and regulations become recommendations at most. That ability to use force and coercion in a legitimate way is exactly what makes them useful and irreplaceable.
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The 'and' changes much of the quote: "acceptance of government force and tyranny". Yes, the cop arresting the murderer is being forceful but like anything it is a balancing act between limp-wrist uselessness and goose-stepping tyranny.
The topic at hand isn't so clear cut as arresting a murderer. Forcing any position without enough of a consensus among the governed will de-legitimize the government's position and will eventually be thrown out by the people that disagree when they come to power. See Obamacare
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What about Obamacare? They still can't throw it out, and all plans that they have made to do so have dismal popular support - far less than Obamacare ever did, even at its lowest point (and, ironically, it has become more popular now that there's a threat that it'll actually go away).
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The proposals are irrelevant to the point.
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Not because it was attacked and invaded by barbarians (though that was occurring at the time as well) but because of the self-righteous greed of the mob.
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Redistribution-based societies/economies (which is what UBI is...it takes from the productive and redistributes it to the non-productive) based around collectivist ideology almost always results in equality. The 99% are all equally poor with no escape from poverty realistically possible, and the elite 1% leadership live like royalty. Also, those currently-productive people will not remain productive. The blue-collar types in the former USSR had a saying; "We pretend to work, they pretend to pay us."
That's o
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I'm going to go ahead and say that you're a moron and a rationalist. Things like ideals are more real to you thank actual observed reality. If your economics God says one thing, well then that's true even if the actual supporting evidence has yet to come around. In this case, I assume that you're waiting on the imminent collapse of western social democracies, based on the idea that all collectivism is bad.
Keep arguing exactly like this. You and APK make a great team.
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I'm going to go ahead and say that you're a moron and a rationalist.
A natural reaction from somebody who has no knowledge of history or human nature, or ignores such for political/ideological reasons. Nothing but ad hominem attacks. All this talk of "supporting evidence" and not one citation/link.
Before you go spouting off about others being morons you need to do a great deal of self-reflection.
Strat
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The onus is on you, cretin, and will remain that way so long as social democracies exist. There's no real need to argue with you, your beliefs won't outlive you. Do feel free to hasten that day, however.
Re: (Score:2, Troll)
[Trophies for Everyone!]
Get PAID for EXISTING!!
Yay socialism.... :-\
The Gods of the Copybook Headings
AS I PASS through my incarnations in every age and race,
I make my proper prostrations to the Gods of the Market Place.
Peering through reverent fingers I watch them flourish and fall,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings, I notice, outlast them all.
We were living in trees when they met us. They showed us each in turn
Re: Trophies for Everyone! (Score:1)
to save you a Google:
The "copybook headings" to which the title refers were proverbs or maxims, extolling virtues such as honesty or fair dealing that were printed at the top of the pages of 19th-century British students' special notebooks, called copybooks. The school-children had to write them by hand repeatedly down the page.
Re: Trophies for Everyone! (Score:2)
He broke into camps and stole what he needed.
Re: (Score:2)
That era of the human race is over. We are now moving into post-industrialism. Many people have not noticed or are in denial, but there is no stopping it.