With a flat x% tax, it would be more accurate to say "people who are earning enough will give all of their UBI back in taxes". I was not attempting to say that x would be 100 (and setting it at 100 would be bad because... uh, because it would make it impossible to earn money by working. You weren't seriously thinking I was suggesting that, right?)
What, because you can't understand how a percentage works? Please leave this stuff to the professionals then; sometimes things can't be fully explained in a few paragraphs.
You'd structure the taxes so that wouldn't happen. One way of doing that is a flat x% tax on income, so that working always gets you more money than not working does.
"Maintain everybody's standard of living" is the non-starter. Like I said, it's a universal basic income. It's not supposed to let you live exactly the same as you do now without needing to work, it's meant to cover basic living costs so that don't have to worry about basic survival if you lose your job.
That means that if you want to maintain your current standard of living with a UBI, and your current standard of living is higher that can be done on the UBI, then you'll have to work.
(Note that I used the poverty line here as a rough guideline; maybe a UBI would be slightly or somewhat above that, but I doubt that twice as much would count as a basic income. Also, I may not have been very clear, but the UBI should be per person, so it would be $14k*2 = $28k in this example, regardless of whether you're living together or not. Yes that means people that live together will have more spare cash than people who are living separately, but that seems somewhat fair given that living together does save on resources.)
Good point with handling existing guarantees from SS, I'm not sure how you'd handle a transition there.
I'm not sure where you got the idea that we'd stop paying for the military or the roads in order to pay for UBI.
Depends on what you mean by "high speed typing". If you're hunt and peck typing, that's definitely going to get in the way of a programming job. Not only does it slow down your code writing, it also affects your ability to write documentation and to take part in email/IM conversations. Time spent on painstakingly typing your code out is time you can't spend doing more creative thinking or other tasks that matter.
Of course there's a point of limited returns (I doubt going from, let's say, 50 WPM to 100 WPM is going to help massively), but there's a point where you're going to be I/O bound enough that it's going to be significant.
I didn't say you were wrong, I said you were being either naive or deliberately misleading.
For example, about half of people work, so that's half of it accounted for right there, and social security + related programs are something like $1.25tn which accounts for a quarter of the rest. Medical-related funding (Medicare et al) costs ~$1tn on top of that and would presumably be unnecessary if people could pay for healthcare from their UBI. So that's two thirds of the total amount accounted for already (if very approximately), yet the numbers you gave didn't mention any of that at all.
And in fact, now that I look again, I notice that you use the per capita income, which includes things like CEOs that get paid millions of dollars per year. A UBI isn't going to pay wages like that; it's a universal basic income. That makes a massive difference. It should pay somewhere around enough for food and rent, which is something like $8k per household + $4k per person in the household, which would put a more appropriate UBI amount at closer to $12k/person which is $4tn in total, of which social security and Medicare et al would already account for over half before we even start considering the UBI that's given back by people who earn enough to do so.
Those are very handwavy numbers, yes (a full analysis is way too involved to fit into a Slashdot comment), but you didn't even attempt to try, you just worked out the total income of the US and presented that as the cost of a UBI, and by comparing it to the current US budget you gave the impression that that would be the amount of money we'd have to find on top of the budget. That very much counts as either naive or deliberately misleading.
Much of which will be paid for by taxes, since people who are working will essentially give their UBI back in taxes. A lot of the rest of it will be covered by the money currently going into social security, and some of the remaining part will be paid by the savings in administration overhead of social security.
So yes, the direct calculation of the yearly total amount of UBI that would get paid is trivial, but has very little to do with the much more important question of "how hard is it to do?". Presenting just the raw number (and especially comparing that to the current US budget!) is being either naive or deliberately misleading.
And as for creative reasoning, I saw this recently. It's an AI neural network that can color images based on a few hand-drawn squiggles of hints. Okay, so coloring isn't reasoning, but it's creative and that thing does a better job at it than I could. And it exists now and you can play with it yourself over here.
But in practice, your children generally don't harm you even when they're out of your control.
If we can't keep AI under control (which I agree will be hard) then we need to design the AI so it doesn't need to be kept under control in the first place. The problem with this is that we have no idea how to do it, and there's not even general agreement that it's something we need to bother figuring out how to do. This is, to put it mildly, extremely reckless of us.
They did, and they were right then, but that doesn't mean they'll be right this time.
We're approaching the stage where AI can do not only the jobs we're currently doing better than we can, but also any possible other future jobs that we might be able to invent. That one point makes AI very, very different from the steam engine, power tools, cars, or computers.
Perhaps, but we were talking about what Mozilla did, not what individual employees or other members of the community did. And "what Mozilla did" was to give him the CEO job, despite knowing about the donation (aka exactly what you said: "believe what you want so long as you don't bring it into the workplace").
Note that even if all of Mozilla's employees had stood with him, there was still a massive public outcry. I had forgotten, but another post elsewhere in the comments mentioned that some site owners were blocking Firefox user-agents over this. That would probably have been enough to put him into "more harm than good by not resigning" territory before you even consider the actions of any Mozilla employees.
And that's a good reason to put that access behind a permission. It's not good reason to remove it altogether with no alternative that can possibly replace it.
That's not the impression I got. The impression I got was that his being CEO was causing a massive shitstorm, that he wasn't going to get anything done when that was the only thing people could talk about, and that he was likely to leave a lot of the Mozilla community pissed off by staying on. None of that happened behind the scenes in the slightest, it happened on Reddit and in blog posts. If I was in that position, I think I would've reached the conclusion, from just the public response alone, that I'd be doing more harm than good by staying around.
It's entirely possible they said something to him behind the scenes (obviously neither of us have any way to prove anything either way here), but I think there was enough stuff going on in public that his resignation can be explained without needing to invoke any extra private pressure.
Yes, he was, by some individual Mozilla employees being unwilling to work under him, and some members of the Mozilla community kicking up a shitstorm. So what did Mozilla do, besides give him the job in the first place and accept his resignation afterwards? Neither of those things strike me as being very unsavory.
It's actually not very tied to anything. Bootstrapped (restartless) extensions are just a Javascript file with two functions, "startup" and "shutdown", that have a reference to an object that allows access to the rest of the code in Firefox. Firefox's Javascript support certainly isn't going anywhere.
(Extensions that require a restart are loaded via XUL overlays, and so are somewhat tied to that particular XUL feature, but it's not like you couldn't port that to HTML.)
Of course, it's true that much of the existing extension code is dependent on current implementation details, but the fix for "extensions break when we change stuff" is not "let's break all extensions and then make it impossible to fix them". That just makes the breakage problem worse, not better.
Just to be clear, abandoning XUL wouldn't kill Firefox's current extension model. Mozilla killing Firefox's current extension model is what's killing it. The current extension model does not depend fundamentally on XUL, and would work fine in a world where the browser UI had been migrated from XUL to HTML.
Who did what now? Eich resigned because of massive public outcry, when it became obvious that him staying around wasn't going to work. Mozilla didn't fire him.
The bigger issue is that Eich was a tech guy. Beard is a marketing guy. Having a marketing guy in charge of my browser is not really my ideal preference.
AIs that desire to exterminate humanity are more the Hollywood version of threatening AI. What we need to be worried about first is the AIs that are indifferent; the ones that would do us harm as a side effect of getting something else done, simply because nobody bothered to program them to tell right from wrong.
(I'm not trying to say that the human unemployability part isn't an issue -- because it definitely is -- but it's important to realize that when people talk about an AI existential risk, it's not Cylons that they're thinking about.)
I'm sure I can find you more than 7 millipeople that will say otherwise. Or you can look at the paper that I linked, which outright says as much in the abstract and then does in fact go on to design a system for making payments but not one for being a general currency.
Yes, you should generally be converting to or from Bitcoin into your local currency (although the actual conversion might be handled for you by someone else, depending on how you're doing things). It's useful for making payments to people -- I'm fairly sure that was more or less the first thing I said in this discussion.
Do you have an example where they censored something? Normally any censoring in CR's streams is because they're showing the same footage that airs on Japanese broadcast TV, and the censoring is done in Japan for those -- with the uncensored version being considered a BD perk. It's a bit of a stretch to blame CR for that.
The closest example I can think of was that one episode of Girls und Panzer, but even then the scene in question was cut out by the Japanese publisher (and it was, as you mention, for music copyright reasons rather than censorship per se).
Cool cryptography stuff is cool, but it only protects the coins, not their value. And who knows where that's going to go; if China and the US made it illegal or impractical to run a Bitcoin exchange then that would remove a lot of the speculation that's currently pushing Bitcoin's price up.
I don't really have any idea how good gold is for storing money either, it's just that the AC clearly thought it was a good idea so I figured I'd run with it. You're free to bet on whatever you think will work out well. I'm just tired of seeing people claim that Bitcoin is a failure due to not being good at doing something that it wasn't designed to do.
Or you can read Nakamoto's paper which says things like "What is needed is an electronic payment system based on cryptographic proof instead of trust, allowing any two willing parties to transact directly with each other without the need for a trusted third party." -- and which then goes on to describe a system which solves that problem.
Slashdot Mirror
With a flat x% tax, it would be more accurate to say "people who are earning enough will give all of their UBI back in taxes". I was not attempting to say that x would be 100 (and setting it at 100 would be bad because... uh, because it would make it impossible to earn money by working. You weren't seriously thinking I was suggesting that, right?)
What, because you can't understand how a percentage works? Please leave this stuff to the professionals then; sometimes things can't be fully explained in a few paragraphs.
You'd structure the taxes so that wouldn't happen. One way of doing that is a flat x% tax on income, so that working always gets you more money than not working does.
"Maintain everybody's standard of living" is the non-starter. Like I said, it's a universal basic income. It's not supposed to let you live exactly the same as you do now without needing to work, it's meant to cover basic living costs so that don't have to worry about basic survival if you lose your job.
That means that if you want to maintain your current standard of living with a UBI, and your current standard of living is higher that can be done on the UBI, then you'll have to work.
(Note that I used the poverty line here as a rough guideline; maybe a UBI would be slightly or somewhat above that, but I doubt that twice as much would count as a basic income. Also, I may not have been very clear, but the UBI should be per person, so it would be $14k*2 = $28k in this example, regardless of whether you're living together or not. Yes that means people that live together will have more spare cash than people who are living separately, but that seems somewhat fair given that living together does save on resources.)
Good point with handling existing guarantees from SS, I'm not sure how you'd handle a transition there.
I'm not sure where you got the idea that we'd stop paying for the military or the roads in order to pay for UBI.
Depends on what you mean by "high speed typing". If you're hunt and peck typing, that's definitely going to get in the way of a programming job. Not only does it slow down your code writing, it also affects your ability to write documentation and to take part in email/IM conversations. Time spent on painstakingly typing your code out is time you can't spend doing more creative thinking or other tasks that matter.
Of course there's a point of limited returns (I doubt going from, let's say, 50 WPM to 100 WPM is going to help massively), but there's a point where you're going to be I/O bound enough that it's going to be significant.
I didn't say you were wrong, I said you were being either naive or deliberately misleading.
For example, about half of people work, so that's half of it accounted for right there, and social security + related programs are something like $1.25tn which accounts for a quarter of the rest. Medical-related funding (Medicare et al) costs ~$1tn on top of that and would presumably be unnecessary if people could pay for healthcare from their UBI. So that's two thirds of the total amount accounted for already (if very approximately), yet the numbers you gave didn't mention any of that at all.
And in fact, now that I look again, I notice that you use the per capita income, which includes things like CEOs that get paid millions of dollars per year. A UBI isn't going to pay wages like that; it's a universal basic income. That makes a massive difference. It should pay somewhere around enough for food and rent, which is something like $8k per household + $4k per person in the household, which would put a more appropriate UBI amount at closer to $12k/person which is $4tn in total, of which social security and Medicare et al would already account for over half before we even start considering the UBI that's given back by people who earn enough to do so.
Those are very handwavy numbers, yes (a full analysis is way too involved to fit into a Slashdot comment), but you didn't even attempt to try, you just worked out the total income of the US and presented that as the cost of a UBI, and by comparing it to the current US budget you gave the impression that that would be the amount of money we'd have to find on top of the budget. That very much counts as either naive or deliberately misleading.
Much of which will be paid for by taxes, since people who are working will essentially give their UBI back in taxes. A lot of the rest of it will be covered by the money currently going into social security, and some of the remaining part will be paid by the savings in administration overhead of social security.
So yes, the direct calculation of the yearly total amount of UBI that would get paid is trivial, but has very little to do with the much more important question of "how hard is it to do?". Presenting just the raw number (and especially comparing that to the current US budget!) is being either naive or deliberately misleading.
Take a look at this video.
And as for creative reasoning, I saw this recently. It's an AI neural network that can color images based on a few hand-drawn squiggles of hints. Okay, so coloring isn't reasoning, but it's creative and that thing does a better job at it than I could. And it exists now and you can play with it yourself over here.
But in practice, your children generally don't harm you even when they're out of your control.
If we can't keep AI under control (which I agree will be hard) then we need to design the AI so it doesn't need to be kept under control in the first place. The problem with this is that we have no idea how to do it, and there's not even general agreement that it's something we need to bother figuring out how to do. This is, to put it mildly, extremely reckless of us.
They did, and they were right then, but that doesn't mean they'll be right this time.
We're approaching the stage where AI can do not only the jobs we're currently doing better than we can, but also any possible other future jobs that we might be able to invent. That one point makes AI very, very different from the steam engine, power tools, cars, or computers.
It's nothing you can't do in assembly either. What's your point? That this stuff should be harder than it needs to be? That makes no sense.
Perhaps, but we were talking about what Mozilla did, not what individual employees or other members of the community did. And "what Mozilla did" was to give him the CEO job, despite knowing about the donation (aka exactly what you said: "believe what you want so long as you don't bring it into the workplace").
Note that even if all of Mozilla's employees had stood with him, there was still a massive public outcry. I had forgotten, but another post elsewhere in the comments mentioned that some site owners were blocking Firefox user-agents over this. That would probably have been enough to put him into "more harm than good by not resigning" territory before you even consider the actions of any Mozilla employees.
And that's a good reason to put that access behind a permission. It's not good reason to remove it altogether with no alternative that can possibly replace it.
That's not the impression I got. The impression I got was that his being CEO was causing a massive shitstorm, that he wasn't going to get anything done when that was the only thing people could talk about, and that he was likely to leave a lot of the Mozilla community pissed off by staying on. None of that happened behind the scenes in the slightest, it happened on Reddit and in blog posts. If I was in that position, I think I would've reached the conclusion, from just the public response alone, that I'd be doing more harm than good by staying around.
It's entirely possible they said something to him behind the scenes (obviously neither of us have any way to prove anything either way here), but I think there was enough stuff going on in public that his resignation can be explained without needing to invoke any extra private pressure.
Yes, he was, by some individual Mozilla employees being unwilling to work under him, and some members of the Mozilla community kicking up a shitstorm. So what did Mozilla do, besides give him the job in the first place and accept his resignation afterwards? Neither of those things strike me as being very unsavory.
It's actually not very tied to anything. Bootstrapped (restartless) extensions are just a Javascript file with two functions, "startup" and "shutdown", that have a reference to an object that allows access to the rest of the code in Firefox. Firefox's Javascript support certainly isn't going anywhere.
(Extensions that require a restart are loaded via XUL overlays, and so are somewhat tied to that particular XUL feature, but it's not like you couldn't port that to HTML.)
Of course, it's true that much of the existing extension code is dependent on current implementation details, but the fix for "extensions break when we change stuff" is not "let's break all extensions and then make it impossible to fix them". That just makes the breakage problem worse, not better.
Just to be clear, abandoning XUL wouldn't kill Firefox's current extension model. Mozilla killing Firefox's current extension model is what's killing it. The current extension model does not depend fundamentally on XUL, and would work fine in a world where the browser UI had been migrated from XUL to HTML.
Who did what now? Eich resigned because of massive public outcry, when it became obvious that him staying around wasn't going to work. Mozilla didn't fire him.
The bigger issue is that Eich was a tech guy. Beard is a marketing guy. Having a marketing guy in charge of my browser is not really my ideal preference.
AIs that desire to exterminate humanity are more the Hollywood version of threatening AI. What we need to be worried about first is the AIs that are indifferent; the ones that would do us harm as a side effect of getting something else done, simply because nobody bothered to program them to tell right from wrong.
(I'm not trying to say that the human unemployability part isn't an issue -- because it definitely is -- but it's important to realize that when people talk about an AI existential risk, it's not Cylons that they're thinking about.)
Because these things will be connecting over a 5G mobile connection, not via your router.
I'm sure I can find you more than 7 millipeople that will say otherwise. Or you can look at the paper that I linked, which outright says as much in the abstract and then does in fact go on to design a system for making payments but not one for being a general currency.
Yes, you should generally be converting to or from Bitcoin into your local currency (although the actual conversion might be handled for you by someone else, depending on how you're doing things). It's useful for making payments to people -- I'm fairly sure that was more or less the first thing I said in this discussion.
Do you have an example where they censored something? Normally any censoring in CR's streams is because they're showing the same footage that airs on Japanese broadcast TV, and the censoring is done in Japan for those -- with the uncensored version being considered a BD perk. It's a bit of a stretch to blame CR for that.
The closest example I can think of was that one episode of Girls und Panzer, but even then the scene in question was cut out by the Japanese publisher (and it was, as you mention, for music copyright reasons rather than censorship per se).
All of those things are true of stocks too. Does that make stocks a currency? I don't see many people treating them like one.
Cool cryptography stuff is cool, but it only protects the coins, not their value. And who knows where that's going to go; if China and the US made it illegal or impractical to run a Bitcoin exchange then that would remove a lot of the speculation that's currently pushing Bitcoin's price up.
I don't really have any idea how good gold is for storing money either, it's just that the AC clearly thought it was a good idea so I figured I'd run with it. You're free to bet on whatever you think will work out well. I'm just tired of seeing people claim that Bitcoin is a failure due to not being good at doing something that it wasn't designed to do.
Or you can read Nakamoto's paper which says things like "What is needed is an electronic payment system based on cryptographic proof instead of trust, allowing any two willing parties to transact directly with each other without the need for a trusted third party." -- and which then goes on to describe a system which solves that problem.