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Y Combinator Plans To Start Doling Out $60 Million Next Year to Study Universal Basic Income (gizmodo.com)
The research arm of Y Combinator plans to begin a study on universal basic income next year in which it will give unconditional cash payments to 3,000 participants. From a report: The test is partially intended to see if receiving routine payments will quell anxieties around losing jobs to automation. As Wired reports, the study will be called "Making Ends Meet." Under the plan, a thousand people would get $1,000 per month and the other 2,000 would get $50 per month to serve as a control group. Some of the participants would receive monthly payments for three years and some would get paid every month for five years. Sam Altman, CEO of Y Combinator, a highly successful startup accelerator that helped give rise to companies like Dropbox, Airbnb, and Reddit, announced the company's plans to research universal basic income -- or as he put it, "giving people enough money to live on with no strings attached" -- in a January 2016 blog post. Altman explained his belief that universal basic income will eventually be implemented across the nation as more jobs are automated and "massive new wealth gets created."
When a leading VC starts chasing after weird ideas, you know that the end is nigh!
No way I would quit my job to 'do nothing' for $1000 per month.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
We need immigrants to do the jobs that robots won't do and a program to pay people to not care if they lose their job.
Well, I wonder how this is going to turn out.
But you will be forced — at gun point, which is how all taxes are collected — to pay for somebody else doing it.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
When I was 5 years old I figured out that if everyone has $1,000,000 dollars everyone would be rich.
I realized when I was 10 why if everyone had $1,000,000 nobody would be rich.
Sure, this experiment will work because the source of the money isn't other people's money and it isn't inflation.
When the source of the money is inflation or other people's money, that $12,000 a year will be sunk into rent increases and increased home prices, amongst other things.
I think the idea for UBI is that, while you may not be eating out buying filet mignon, you can at least survive on it.
Is $1,000 survivable? It is significantly less than minimum wage, which people already struggle with.
...increase the value of the money VC funders have put into the startup accelerator?
This will create no jobs and no value. If I were backing Y Cabinator, I'd want to pull all my money out and invest in something that actually creates jobs for Americans (and comes with the possibility of my money earning a profit), rather than waste it handing out welfare.
(Psst: Universal basic Income failed when they tried it in the SIME/DIME experiments, where it discouraged work. Try reading Losing Ground instead of repeating failure...)
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
Certain things are part of the social contract. If this comes to pass, I'm cool with it.
Where does this money come from? All the people touting UBI all say to watch this video or read this paper yadda yadda. Bottom line is taxes will go up for middle class.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
It is not a "contract".
The problem with Universal Basic Income is that it could push wages down and increase prices. If the government is going to give a certain amount of money, then the assumption by business is that people can afford to pay more for goods and services. Furthermore, businesses may assume that with UBI, they can pay their employees less. Therefore, any assistance that UBI offers will end up negating any advantage.
as more jobs are automated and "massive new wealth gets created."
If more jobs are automated that means more people without jobs. Who is going to pay them this income? Those getting massive new wealth?
All you've done is make the masses dependent on a select few continuing to give them money and in doing so create a redistribution of wealth (such that it is ).
I'm not the smartest person in the room, but how is this even remotely feasible and sustainable?
That's about as useful as this is. Why not spend that $60,000,000 on training people for different jobs if theirs are in dire danger of being lost to 'automation'? Wouldn't that be smarter? "Teach a man how to fish" instead of "Give a man a fish", remember how that works?
Back in the seventies a firm did this in the Seattle area, though back then it was something like $600 a month. The guy I knew who was in the program spent all his money on turquoise jewelry.
How about a moderation of -1 pedantic.
Yup that group is in a lower caste than you. Funny thing though is that plumbers, welders, electricians, etc. can make as much or more money than you do.
Restrict recipients *only* to people that have lost their job to automation.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Under the plan, a thousand people would get $1,000 per month and the other 2,000 would get $50 per month to serve as a control group.
Sam Altman, CEO of Y Combinator, a highly successful startup accelerator that helped give rise to companies like Dropbox, Airbnb, and Reddit, announced the company's plans to research universal basic income -- or as he put it, "giving people enough money to live on with no strings attached"
So $12K is a living wage?
Ken
I've been paying taxes for more than 30 years, and nobody has pointed a gun at me yet. Perhaps you're doing it wrong.
The results aren't relevant anyway, as at its best, $12000/yr isn't enough to live on unless you live under a bridge, so the whole "will people still work" and "what might they do otherwise" bit falls flat on its face. This isn't a UBI test. This is an "auntie Sarah died and left you a tiny bit of money which you can't get at all at once anyway" test.
It's not basic. It's not universal, either. It is income, but so is that $100 bill you got for xmas.
It amazes me how often these "tests" get the whole idea completely wrongheaded... and then people run around saying "test X proves..." when all it really proves is its not a test of UBI at all.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Same here. And I am sure it will be a very significant tax hit, which I will duly pony up. I like the idea of everyone having enough to live on, a comfortable and climate-controlled place to shelter, food on the table, and medical care.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
If the Fair Tax were passed, everybody would get a prebate based on what they'd pay on tax with an income at the poverty level. Back in 2014 that amount was about $12,000/year for adults and about $4,000/year for children.
It really is a good plan, but I doubt Washington D.C. would ever give up the power they have now with the income tax.
This. I've known a few people who didn't pay their taxes and the U.S. government never used a gun to force them to pay taxes. I've never even seen them arrested. What the government did do was to garnish their wages. In one specific case they sold their home to get current; they actually sold it to one of their kids who then rented the home to them. I don't think it's really worked out well for either of them but they did mean well.
The reality is that if a government starts demanding taxes like that then things start to break down and everyone is worse off.
Well, look at it this way. As automation increases, due to these very startups and their peers, the available number of jobs will decrease. So now, do you want your neighbors robbing you, or hanging out relatively peacefully, painting watercolors or whatever? Seems like a very good time to test these waters (not that this instance is a decent test, it's not, $12k/yr is ridiculously low in this economy), before people begin to experience desperation.
And in so doing, this provides some insurance that these Y-folk and those like them can continue to invent more and better automation. Without, you know, the torches and pitchforks coming out.
Again, jobs are going to go away due to automation. The point of real UBI (which, again, this isn't) is not to create jobs. It's to make sure people can survive what's almost certain to be coming, which will be an employment drought of unprecedented magnitude. Barring natural disaster, war, etc.
You can keep pretending things will just keep going along as they have been, but eventually it'll come home to roost, no matter how firm your convictions are otherwise. As automation proves to be cheaper, faster, better, it will eat the jobs market like wildfire.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
The social contract is that the government provides for all the citizens
Nope.
The social contract is that we refrain from initiating violence to get what we want.
But you will be forced - at gun point, which is how all taxes are collected - to pay for somebody else doing it.
The implication is that you wouldn't be paying for "somebody else" otherwise, but reality is that you do. Like our little eGamer wacko recently, I bet he didn't have the assets to cover all the medical expenses he caused, much less if he had to pay restitution to everyone from the inconvenienced to the deceased's relatives. Even if there's health insurance and whatnot that just means the costs gets smeared broad and thin. And anything but anarchists wants law and order so somebody's paying cops and judges and prisons and it's not the penniless perp. Heck it could be simple things like theft, or even if not theft then the cost of the anti-theft system you need to keep thieves away. Maybe you think UBI is a poor strategy of appeasement, but taxes is far from the only way you end up with the bill. Less desperate people do less desperate things, of course it's no miracle worker but it helps.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Also, it isn't permanent. If it is only 3 to 5 years, you can't drop out of your career. People will behave differently than if it was a real permanent UBI. So it isn't a good test.
UBI is addressing a problem that doesn't actually exist. We are in a full employment economy, and there is no evidence that robots are "stealing jobs". Machines don't automate "jobs", they automate "tasks", making workers more productive, more valuable and increasing demand. This is an example of Jevon's Paradox.
UBI is also a political non-starter. By spreading out current transfer payments, current recipients will be big losers. Social security recipients are not going to be willing to give up much of their benefits, that they work a lifetime for, so that an able bodied millennial can veg out on the sofa. If you leave out SS, then the numbers don't work at all.
Unless the goal is to kill the idea of UBI, this is wasted money.
UBI enable people to make projects if the income is high enough that you do not have to starve for a paid job, any shitty paid job, to make a decent living. And it works if you do not have to bother wbout when it stops.
That's usually how it goes. You like the idea of everyone having everything they need, so you support a guy who says he can make it happen. Next thing you know you're wiping your ass with worthless $1,000 bills and killing feral dogs in the streets to feed your family for dinner.
And then you wonder how it could possibly have happened when wealth distribution has worked out SO well every other time it's been tried ....
is breaking down! Let's make new chains and keep people dependent on the system forever!
exactly, 75% of it is just 0s on bank accounts.
When I was 5 years old I figured out that if everyone has $1,000,000 dollars everyone would be rich.
I realized when I was 10 why if everyone had $1,000,000 nobody would be rich.
Sure, this experiment will work because the source of the money isn't other people's money and it isn't inflation.
When the source of the money is inflation or other people's money, that $12,000 a year will be sunk into rent increases and increased home prices, amongst other things.
When I was 25 years old I figured out that $1,000,000 invested in an index fund would increase in value enough to account for inflation and give an income of $2000 a month in perpetuity.
Also when I was 25, I figured out that any reduction of the workforce would push wages up and make jobs better by way of competition from supply and demand.
Also also, I noted that you don't need to give everyone the income immediately. Having a lottery will take people out of the workforce gradually, which could be funded over time in a reasonable way. Each $1 billion spent this way takes 1,000 people out of the workforce.
I noticed many things when I was 25, including that if you took all the entitlements programs and simply gave the money out with no regulatory oversight, you could have 5 times as many people using entitlements.
Looking at the cost of entitlements, it's clear that we *could* start moving people off of welfare and related services and eventually get to UBI or something close to it, with no increase in taxes.
Individual productivity keeps rising, and it's pretty easy to see that UBI has to happen.
Or if it doesn't, then we're in for a world of hurt as all the goods and services needed by everyone are made by fewer and fewer people, while the people who can't find a job either starve or revolt.
I disagree, it is only if the UBI is excessive, if we don't eliminate other forms of welfare at the same time, etc...
I figure that a modest UBI can be funded with existing welfare spending combined with eliminating the lowest tax brackets. You don't need them if people are getting about $6k/year up front.
I don't read AC A human right
I would argue that the country has to be wealthy enough to support it in the first place. However the USA does have the resources.
Sure UBI may not work but it may we should be willing to try new things. People are complicated, there are just to many factors to take into consideration to be certain of what the outcome would be. A small trial maybe not be perfect but it may give some insights into whether it would work or not.
There are plenty of things about people that are counter intuitive such as paying them more reduces creativity or winning the lottery doesn't make you happier.
But best go with peoples gut feeling that's very scientific.
yea, not gunpoint. they just take your home and ability to buy food. your right, that's sooo much better.
then all you have to do is rob a liquor store and the govt.will give you shelter food and medical care for free!!
Sure Moviepass may not work but it may we should be willing to try new things!
MONEY DOES NOT GROW ON TREES!
Two possibilities here. You are unfamiliar with fiat currency or you are unfamiliar with lumber as an enterprise.
One certainty: Your mind is made up, and you don't want to consider how you might be wrong.
It is a problem that doesnâ(TM)t exist today, true, but we are seeing increasing automation even into white collar domains. It seems prudent to research solutions before the problem becomes real. Whether this is a good test or not is a separate question.
You'd still see them coming into work, but you'd probably have to pay them more to do so.
There was recently an article about human feces having become such a problem that San Francisco was hiring human poo cleaners. Wage? $75k/year each.
If the potential plumber wants more than a very modest life, he still has to go out and work.
I don't read AC A human right
Please stop believing Fox News and Trump. We are FAR from FULL employment. Many people are under-employed, barely able to keep themselves afloat in the current economy. Millions have yet to back peddle from the crash of '08. Many more, whose numbers are NOT counted, have fallen through the cracks entirely. Speak only for yourself.
I'm curious as to how you think that this could reduce wages. My line of thinking is that with a substantial portion of people looking at just staying home if the pay isn't worth it, that pay will have to increase to lure people out.
As such, businesses that assume they can pay less because of the UBI will discover that said potential employees decide that just staying home is better.
I figure that market forces will tend to adjust such that living on just the UBI sucks enough, and working improves that enough, that most people still end up working.
I don't read AC A human right
If I could count on my rent being made and some or all of my monthly expenses I would start making beef jerky on a more than pastime basis. I'd also volunteer more than 1 day a week at the animal rehab preserve, I specialize in snakes and lizards. I also spend one day a week as a library volunteer reading to kids and indexing the books in their book store. I think most people would not just quit doing things but would find more personally fulfilling things to do with their time that wouldn't normally make enough money to warrant or allow them to devote the effort. Imagine musicians, writers and countless other creative pursuits which could arise.
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
>People need meaningful work to do which is appreciated in some form by others. Depriving them of that need is part of the current economic problem, and giving them free money does nothing to fix that.
I think you've missed something important. As you say, people need meaningful work to do which is appreciated in some form by others. You can't deprive them of that need - it's inherent. All you can deprive them of is the additional motivation of the fear of starvation and homelessness.
And there's always work to be done - it's just that there's nobody willing to pay for much of it to get done. But if you have a lot of people with a lot of time on their hands, and a lot of work that needs doing that nobody is willing to pay for, but many will appreciate, then you have ample opportunity for people to do meaningful work that will be appreciated.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
When you run out of SOMEBODY ELSE'S MONEY to give away. This won't work, it hasn't worked and it will NEVER work. "oh, but we are just getting it from the rich" Yeah, and they will flee the states, countries that have this, and hide their money elsewhere. What RIGHT does someone else have with someone else's property? I think these people that come up with this garbage should allow these people to live in their homes a while, or, take THEIR money and give it away. NO! Tell the lazy butts to get up and work!
I respectfully disagree. UBI won't change my life. I'm still going to work. However, I work for a company that sells goods and services to other businesses that deal with all walks for life from the .01% to the poorest. By giving my customer's customers more money in their pocket, it all comes back to me in the form of higher wages, higher profitability, and better returns on my stock options.
This is stimulating the economy on the low end. As someone who is a productive member of society, this benefits me in the form of my company's profitability selling goods and services. As an added bonus, there is less incentive for the poorest to commit crime. The homeless, destitute, and drug addicted can afford to get treatment and stop harassing me on the street and scaring my small children. There are less evictions, less repossessions and the economy becomes much smoother. A bolstered middle class benefits everyone in the short term, medium term, and long term.
I will happily pay more taxes for higher wages, less suffering of the poor, less fear of my kids being a victim of violent crime. I'm not even sure UBI would raise my taxes substantially, but I am happy to give it a try. One thing is clear, the current system is failing, income inequality is getting depressingly worse, and while I have a good job, life is getting worse every year for all those around me. I see no future on our current path. I think a well implemented UBI program will protect the masses from the job losses that are coming due to automation and ensure a healthy flow of income to buy goods and services and keep our economy running smoothly. I want people to be able to afford my company's products.
To me, UBI is not a charity program, but an investment that looks like an inevitability.
Agreed, but the comment was in response to a person that implied that everyone would sit around and do nothing. I was making the point that it wasn't enough for most people to quit their jobs so this probably wouldn't happen. Also, the people who aren't working are probably already subsidized through welfare and thus are costing us money anyway. The difference is, it will be easier to get a job when on UBI than it is if you are on welfare.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
For the $60M they are spending on these 1000 people getting free income, YC could instead invest their same standard $120k deal on 500 more startups -- $120k*500=60M. They regularly turn away hundreds (thousands?) of hardworking, dedicated entrepreneurs every year with great businesses that just don't fit their model perfectly, who have likely invested all their time, money and lives building their businesses. The startups would in aggregate create actual jobs, likely more than the 1000 people that are just getting free money. This investment would incentivize entrepreneurship and more startups being created and creating more jobs....Even as someone who is open to the idea of UBI someday as a public policy/governmental cost, I just don't understand this move. Instead of giving people free money, why not provide pre-seed capital to people who have a legit plan and want to work?
One mechanism I like to implement such a thing is to require that X% of the stock of all corporations or other such liability limiting/wealth concentrating legal tools always automatically and irrevocably belongs to the country's citizens
You mean like state capitalism in the People's Republic of China?
Certain things are part of the social contract. If this comes to pass, I'm cool with it.
When you say "If this comes to pass" you concede that you have no say and thereby admit that the "Social Contract" is not a contract.
By making the statement "I'm cool with it" you betray your belief that other people may not be "cool with it" (otherwise why make the statement at all) and consequently concede that the "Social Contract" is not social.
Please note: I'm not contradicting your statement, just suggesting that a more accurate term for the "Social Contract" would be the "Anti-Social Mandate". I just dislike the misleading language.
with jail / er as your only doctor
benefits cliff makes people not want to work
You bought an inexpensive house in BCS in 2013 - you might have bought mine. My income wasn't much higher than $1,500 / month when I bought it. Congrats on getting out of the rent trap.
I sold my BCS house and used the money for a down payment in Dallas, where was recruited for a higher-paying job. I found that In Dallas I could afford either A 2,000 sq foot house, or this 3,500 sq foot one that someone had skipped about 20 Saturdays of upkeep and repairs.
Things like a faucet dripping (20 minute fix, $4) and they didn't finish painting one end of the house (3 hours, $60), and the bushes hadn't been trimmed in years (3 hours, $0). I expect that after spending 100 hours and $4,000 I should be able to sell it for $50-70,000 more than I paid for it.
That cheap little house in Bryan started something pretty good.
Well, good thing I had a tax increase to pay for the UBI in the post you replied to, right?
The important point is that, once you eliminate other forms of welfare and plow that money into the BIG, the additional taxes only need to more or less neutralize the BIG for middle class and above income earners.
So, while technically a tax increase, actually revenue neutral to most people.
I don't read AC A human right
Just lost a lot of respect for Y Combinator. I'll still keep reading Hacker News as that seems to be their most successful and enduring effort.
I swear to God, I think people are becoming so open-minded, their brains are falling out of their collectiv(e|ist) heads!
This is not about giving everybody an UBI now. An UBI is a permanent emergency measure, and it would be good to understand it better before it becomes necessary (and it will be). "Money" is pretty much an abstract idea that only continues to hold value if all people have access to it. If we lose enough jobs (and it looks pretty much like that) we need a replacement for assignment of money to people via the job. An UBI is a such a replacement. But, like everything, it can be done well or badly or it may not work at all. Hence this research is urgently needed to find out.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
In this country (USA) the rules were written specifically to prevent the majority from stripping the rights away from the minority.. To strip away basic rights you need a super majority (3/4).
Unless you can get 3/4 of the states to take away my guns (for example), your 51%-74% can go fuck itself..
Democracy sucks. I prefer a representative republic.
Really? So Wesley Snipes wasn't in prison for tax evasion?
The gun is a metaphor, but it has the potential to become literal.
Tax evasion is a crime that CAN result in a prison sentence. You will be escorted to prison by guards with guns.. If you attempt to flee, that can shoot you.
Don't sit there and tell us that taxes aren't enforced with guns.
The government enforces ALL of it's edicts with the threat of violence. if it did not, more people would ignore those decrees.
So ... it would actually be a step up from the fourth world country it currently is?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Yeah, sure.
Did the free money we pump into banks increase inflation? Or where do you think the bailouts come from? When you deposit 100 bucks with your bank, your bank lends out 1000 of them. Yes, I'm not kidding. Where do you think that money comes from? You don't pay back? No worries, here's a loan of 1100 to cover the 1100 you owe us. Of course you don't get that money, it's just now in your book as debt. And you suddenly owe us 1100 of the 1000 we gave you. Did that free money increase inflation?
Money is numbers on an account. Nothing else. Inflation, like pretty much all in this economy, is artificial. A tool to direct money and its flow. Your economy, like any economy in the developed world, relies mostly on services. Services, like money, can be multiplied at will. At least as long as you have available workforce. So unless your unemployment rate is very close to 0 (and please don't try to bullshit with the "official" numbers, you know as well as I do that the "official" unemployment numbers of the US have nothing to do with how many people are looking for a job), you can easily multiply your service offer ... which only happens of course if there is demand, since you can hardly store services.
Poor people are now also the demographic that gladly and very willingly spends money on services. In other words, here's your chance to drive your economy forward.
Of course, if your goal is just to have a cheap, dependant workforce to maximize your own profit and to hell with the general economy, this would certainly be not in your interest.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Manafort didn't pay taxes, and Rosenstein under Obama didn't think the government had a strong enough case to pursue him, but just last week he was sentenced to time in prison. The government does force you at gunpoint to pay taxes.
I really don't care if you secede from society and pay no taxes. Strangely enough, people who refuse to pay taxes still feel entitled to use facilities and services paid for with tax money. As far as I'm concerned, if you refuse to pay taxes you had better not make use of any single thing that was funded with tax money either. There are very few people who have the honest conviction to do that. Ayn Rand raged against social security all her life but ended her life on social security which makes her a hypocrite.
You're not going to continue working when you get about 500 bucks a month? Well... ok, if that's enough for you, great. Where I live this might even allow you to survive. Somewhere outside a town, without infrastructure, without a car, with ... maybe ... electricity and the closest store about 5 miles away. But hey, since you don't have to waste time to work, you have plenty of time to walk there.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
It's a free country, you're free to leave and settle in one that doesn't participate.
Don't come back running though when you're out of a job, though.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
You do know that UBI isn't to the tune of 10 grand a month, yes?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
In some parts of America a single man with a $1,000 a month income would be better off in prison. Medical care alone would wipe them out. I am aware that in some places local prices and conditions would make life at times reasonable for a single person. In my area the rent for a humble one bedroom apartment is $1500 a month. A social security net implies an income that keeps you squarely up with the community. At $1,000 a month that person is locked into almost a depraved poverty meaning that it is no social safety net at all. And it creates another severe issue. What can any business gain from people with seriously low income? Businesses hate the poor as they simply can not be farmed. After all, they won't be buying cars, eating out or buying clothing. That hatred is what was behind attacking the hobo camps in 1930. Any place hobos wanted to build a camp was attacked both by mobs and the government. The attitude was that they could not buy anything and they would surely steal your chickens and laundry off of your clothes lines. If one looks at the hell hole slums in S. America and thinks a bit those slums exist because they need to exist. Despite the depravity, disease, crime and filth the people in those slums are better off than if the slums were demolished. Perhaps it is time for the US to allow slum communities with cardboard and scrap metal housing.
Nothing is more permanent than 3-5 years because that's how often governments change.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
This. To clarify: in the US, since 1833 we haven't put people in prison just because they can't pay their debts, which used to be a relatively common practice just about everywhere. But if you commit fraud, lie about your situation in order to reduce the amount of taxes you owe, etc. and you get busted, you absolutely can run afoul of multiple Federal and state laws depending on where you live, and you CAN and likely WILL go to jail for that.
Blah blah blah ..Good idea!,, blah blah ..Bad Idea!.. blah blah...
Could someone just post a link where I can sign up to get $1,000 a month?
I already make good money, but an extra grand would certainly help.
You are assuming a steady state economy. What you fail to see is that an increased demand will be met with an increased supply. Our economy is predominantly dependent on services, a product that is practically entirely dependent on workforce.
So unless you have zero unemployment (and if you had, UBI wouldn't even be discussed because the very reason UBI is on the table is that we're heading towards a time when we have not enough work for the people available), you can easily multiply services as long as there is capable workforce available.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
If it's any help, I'll sing and beat a dog while doing so 'til you pay me to stop...
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
And you think doing housework doesn't qualify as "meaningful work that is appreciated by others"? Live somewhere where no one has done house work for a few months and get back to me on that.
The point is, with increasing automation we simply won't have traditional employment opportunities available - period. A small handful of people are all that's needed to run the machines that produce the wealth to sustain everyone (maybe a large double-handful if the work is spread around a lot). The rest will have to find value in work they don't get paid for. Either that or we'll have to create a lot of "makework"employment - public beautification and the like perhaps.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
If you’re over in Dallas, I’m afraid I didn’t buy your home. The couple whose home I purchased still lived in the area as recently as last year. Mine is an 1800 sqft home on a third of an acre, tucked into a nice, quiet neighborhood in Bryan. I purchased it at $163K in 2013. We had it reassessed in 2016 for a refinancing (by the same assessor, no less), and it had already gone up to $205K at that point, what with market improvements and modest upgrades we had been making to the home. At this point, I’d wager we could get quite a bit more than that, were we to list it, just based on what less updated comparable are going for in the neighborhood.
Oddly, my monthly mortgage is less than I was paying for that apartment (though obviously there’s insurance and property tax as well, so it ends up being more), but 2011 was when I started working a full-time job, so the money started piling up quite a bit faster at that point. Also interestingly, my wife was making roughly the same full-time salary as I was when we met in 2014, but the cheapest place she could find where she lived in D.C. was a cramped basement apartment that cost her 3x my monthly mortgage payment, so it was a no-brainer for her to join me down here once we got married.
Have you actually read what he allegedly did? Using him as an example is like using Al Capone as an example of: "see, they will send you to prison". They were only able to convict him for failing to file taxes but it looks like he was doing a lot of shady stuff to defraud the government. It is vary far from the idea that the government will come hunt you down with guns if you don't pay your taxes.
Why?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Why should not it be? If it is Ok to compel Peter to pay for Paul's comfort at all, why shouldn't they both live equally comfortable regardless of whatever they are doing?
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
You might have to pay that burger flipper more. At least 'til he's replaced by robots, which would actually come sooner, if anything, the higher the cost of your workforce, the more drive any kind of automation has gotten. Take Japan for an example.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
You do know, you can already "pony up" whatever you wish to help others directly or via a charity of your choice? And if you don't think, private efforts can do it, the US Treasury would gladly accept your voluntary contribution too.
But that's just not good enough for you, is it? "Voluntary" is for wussies, right? Like a good Collectivist — with an internal Authoritarian screaming to get out — you want to see other people compelled into doing the same.
Because fuck them, the greedy selfish cunts — whoever does not want to help others, ought to be forced to help others. Did I get the gist of your world-view correctly, uhm? I bet, I did...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
This conversation can continue once you got a clue on how UBI works.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
From the summary: The research arm of Y Combinator plans to begin a study on universal basic income next year in which it will give unconditional cash payments to 3,000 participants.
They will study it and will find, as every other UBI study or implementation I've heard of in the USA, that UBI doesn't work. This country wasn't built by people who depended on government handouts. It was built on hard work and independence of government. UBI fosters neither hard work nor independence of government and, as such, is an extremely poor fit for the continuance of this country. All you UBI fans should study the current situation in Venuzuela. If you do, you will discover it isn't a good paradigm.
Circle the wagons and fire inward. Entropy increases without bounds.
It does not. But I accept your surrender...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Never play chess with a pigeon, it will just flutter about, throw down the pieces, shit on the board and claim victory.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
A pigeon claiming victory? Something is seriously wrong with your choice of metaphor — and the rest of your non-argument. Remember to logout.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
I 'respectfully' inform you that you're bad at basic arithmetic and furthermore have no fucking idea what you're talking about. There isn't going to be any 'mass unemployment' from bullshit fake-ass shitty excuse for 'AI', UBI it utter and complete nonsense that will never work and needs to be forgotten, and people who actually believe it will work are either utter fools with room-temperature IQs or they're trolls trolling like trolls do. Get off it you're embarassing yourself.
Trollolololol.
Oh look the room-temperature IQ mogoloids and the trolls had mod points today! The former punished me for ruining their Echo Chamber, and the trolls punished me for ruining their LULZ. Fuck all of you, you're all idiots for even discussing this UBI nonsense.
Let's see, in the US, 80% of the wealth is owned by the top 0.1%, and 400 families own over 60% of that wealth. In fact, the top 20 people own more wealth than HALF THE US POPULATION.
Where's the good jobs these "job creators" are creating with their tax breaks?
Of course, there's the std. troll line, about how socialists want HALF OF WHAT YOU OWN!!!! EEEK. That, of course, is stupid - why would we want half of what *you* own (and if you're posting to slashdot, you're not in the 1%).
A more correct who do we want to take from would be the famous quote of Willie Sutton, who, when asked why he robbed banks, said, "That's where the money is".
How 'bout we take 90% of Bill Gates, M$, Apple, the Walton family (That's Walmart, where they tell their employees how to apply for food stamps), etc, and use that money for a UBI?
You know, like a reverse income tax for the rest of us... the way they do using oil and gas revenues in Alaska?
What the government did do was to garnish their wages.
And how exactly did they enforce that, if not with guns? (Literally or metaphorically—any direct or indirect use or threat of force counts, whether or not it actually involves firearms.)
"The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else." - Bastiat
I really don't care if you secede from society and pay no taxes. Strangely enough, people who want to refuse to pay taxes still feel entitled to use facilities and services paid for with their tax money.
FTFY. You aren't given the option of refusing. Even if you would prefer not to pay taxes, and advocate for the same, there is nothing hypocritical about continuing to use facilities and services which you are are, in fact, still paying for, however much you would prefer otherwise. And then, of course, there all the rules and regulations which prevent you from providing many of these services on your own—you can hardly complain that someone turns to public services when you actively prevent them from being provided any other way.
Ayn Rand raged against social security all her life but ended her life on social security which makes her a hypocrite.
She was forced to pay social security taxes all her life, even while advocating against it, and those taxes prevented her from investing that money for her own retirement. There is nothing hypocritical about expecting something in return.
"The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else." - Bastiat
$1000/mo is not enough for anything basic and giving people any money at all is not a good control because regardless of the amount you receive, you will ALWAYS feel better getting it.
To be accurate representation you need to give your 100 people $2500/mo and then take $2500/mo at gunpoint from about 150-200 people and compare that to your control of 300 random people in a generally capitalist society. You should also inflate costs for your test group to the point that $2500 now has the same value as $500 in your control group.
You can try these things and see who would volunteer.
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Actually, it kind of does. Or at least, I'm not looking solely at housing, but looking more towards cost of living.
The Federal poverty line, rounding to nearest thousand, is a simple formula. It is basically $8k + $4k*number of people.
So, household of 1? $12k for federal poverty line.
Household of 2? $16k. For this reason while I start at $6k, I say that I can be talked up to $8k.
3? $20k
4? $24k. Done. Household sizes beyond 4 start getting a little more complicated though, especially if you're talking "roommates" that are not related to each other.
I don't read AC A human right
Let's see, we have:
1. Ad hominem
2. False Dilemma
3. Appeal to the Stone
4. Proof by assertion/argument from repetition
I don't read AC A human right