Whilst I agree that something that has been true need not be true into the future, you have to provide some means by which the old would change to the new.
This has not happened. I'm very aware of the literature and I've listened to people push these ideas. When the hard questions are asked... I get hand waving and "don't worry about that" and "SMOKE BOMB ".
This has caused me take this point in particular as being a crucial answer that has be detailed clearly before I can take the argument seriously. And absent that... I see no justification for any serious person to take it seriously.
The entire concept appears childish to me... wishful thinking... wish fulfillment... its half-bakery.
Now... if you think I'm in error and it isn't half-bakery... then correct my mistake by showing how it would not be a sad failure.
As to just saying "robots"... that's not enough. Who owns the robots? Why do the robots make stuff for you for free? I mean, we make all kinds of stuff more efficiently than we have in the past and that hasn't led to us giving away stuff for free, what we do instead is sell it cheaper.
If you told me that a car for example would be cheaper in the future because of robots, I'd agree with you. But "free"? No. Why am I gifting you a car from my robot factory just because you can't be assed to get a job? Can't you see how that isn't going to happen?
There's a whole sociopolitical rant I have in me on this issue... but I don't want to waste either of our time until I have to drop that. Suffice to say, if you make yourself logistically irrelevant to the society, the society will be inclined in time to not take you seriously as someone that should have agency in that society. You should be very afraid of that situation.
Very well, then I'll stop your rant right here: ""For all of time we've been taking care of non-working people like the young, old, sick and handicapped both temporarily and permanently.""
Such people generally represented a very small proportion of the total population. Restrict your UBI concept to similarly small portions of the total population and I'll agree with you.
If you don't then you're contradicting yourself and I don't have to even argue with you... as you've argued with yourself at that point.
What animates marxism is morality... its own moral paradigm. It doesn't say X or Y is more economically productive... it doesn't justify itself logistically but morally. It says "X is good" and "Y is evil".
As a result, when you identity marxism, you should first identify if the moral paradigm is in evidence.
It is very typical in these discussions for people to require that everyone read the collective works of Engles before determining something is or isn't in this wheel house. However, we don't require people to read the bible or the Quran before identifying something as Christian or Islamic.
We rely rather on flags, symbols, vocabulary that is typical of those systems... What is more, what is "capitalism"... ask different people and you get different answers.
If I were to apply a strict definition... an orthadox definition, then most of the great evils laid at the feet of capitalism especially by communists would have to be rejected to avoid hypocrisy.
Much of those evils involves government corruption for example... where in money is slipped to a politician and then the politician uses government power to secure the interests of the business. That isn't capitalism... in fact, capitalism doesn't even proscribe a political model. You can have a monarchy, a dictatorship, a democracy... and they can all be capitalistic.
Point is... why is the UBI considered "good"... not logistically... but "morally" good? Where do you draw your moral paradigm from? Why is the UBI good and contrary systems evil... or bad? Morally.
You're talking about 100 percent automation which won't happen. Even if you mostly automate a factory you still need techs and managers etc to maintain it.
And here you will say "but less people than before"... sure but we respond to that by producing things we didn't produce before.
We used to make food, shelter, and clothing. And when we had enough spare labor that we could produce more than that, then we did... we produced new tools, we made everything prettier because we had the time to do it, we invested all sorts of time in other things until yet again we had used up the labor.
That is what we do. If all the cars and iphones are produced using 1/100th the labor they're using now... we'll just produce all sorts of thing that we either produce in very small amounts now or entirely new things that you can't even imagine right now.
This is literally what we've done.
The introduction of industrial farming put roughly 80 percent of the human labor force out of work.
80 percent unemployment.
What happened? They got new jobs in the factories and cities.
Here you say "but we're going to lose jobs in the factories and cities"... and why would you think we can't make new jobs?
Again, even a highly automated factory etc will still need human labor. If we are 90 percent automated then we'll just produce ten times the product. Because why not? If we're going to reach into the stars then we're going to need that kind of abundance of industrial capability. Enough that we can pour the wealth of empires into space elevators and moon colonies etc.
This is the path forward, fellow human. We need vast increases in production.
UBI won't remove bureaucracy or cut existing welfare loads for obvious political reasons. If you require that to move forward then appreciate it is entirely hopeless.
The welfare state is deeply entrenched in western civic culture at this point and nothing short of a very serious war is going to remove it... civil or otherwise.
Keep in mind, the man pushing the UBI at one point in the US was Richard Nixon. But the Bernie Sanders people are attracted to it now. Think they're going to roll out your concept in a fiscally responsible manner?
You're not cynical enough. They don't see UBI as an either/or proposition but rather as an AND proposition. They want it in ADDITION to everything else.
As to specialization being unsustainable, to the contrary specialization is the most efficient and stable labor organization possible. Our economies run on it.
Imagine a man that was a doctor one day, a lawyer the next, a mechanic the day after that, and a farmer the day after that?
Specialization is very efficient for training and job experience reasons. It takes roughly 10 years for anyone doing anything to become a MASTER in that thing. Playing the violin... painting... doing accounting work... whatever. Roughly ten years of time invested to become a real expert in it.
That is only possible through specialization.
As to repetitious tasks that are not fulfilling and stressful... whole generations of people were born, worked, and died under those conditions.
From a logistical perspective it is clearly very sustainable and is proven to be sustainable.
So there is no valid argument that it isn't sustainable when it is objectively observed to be sustainable. You're basically holding a banana in your hand and calling it a pair of shoes.
90 percent of human labor went to agriculture prior to the industrial revolution... today its about 2 to 5 percent.
What happened to all those people?
They got new jobs in new industries.
Its been ongoing like that for some time.
When the factories closed there was a major relocation of labor to services, office work etc...
You can't avoid having some pain when we go through logistical paradigm shifts. However, take heart... every time we've done this we've found work for most people.
Yes, the old jobs will go away... just like the manual wheat farming went away. Do not mourn the passing of such jobs. You didn't want them anyway and we'll give you better jobs going forward. We always have.
A major element is population relocation. Sometimes the issue is that there isn't work "here" but there is work 100 miles to the east or west etc.
Too many people are subsidized to live in cities they can't afford to live in. Why is welfare money paying out to help unemployed people live in New York etc? The property is too expensive to support that and the kinds of jobs that people are going to get if they're that hard up are not going to support those people in those communities. Everything is too expensive because they literally cannot afford to live there. BUT there is work elsewhere and the cost of living is lower elsewhere.
Bundle the guarenteed job with a possible requirement for people to move. Let us say EVERYONE wants to live in New York or Los Angeles... and they can't afford it... what then? You pay the housing and they still can't afford it... they become homeless walking the streets and we treat this like its the fault of the city when the city's economics can't support that problem. You need to relocate people to lower cost of living areas with industries that better meet the abilities of that labor force.
Everyone wins. Society wins. The people win. The companies win.
if your problem is that you don't htink you can get a job then you really should look at why that is... why is it that people found it easier to find jobs in the past and less so today?
This has been studied extensively and its all quite fixable. It does require retiring some failed social experiments but in the grand scheme of things they're doomed no matter what.
How is it that you people get this far and yet don't understand supply and demand's relationship to price?
The very fact that so many goods are found to be expensive or beyond the means of people to the extent that they feel they need the UBI proves that there is scarcity of resources.
Price is set by supply or scarcity AND demand or consumer interest in the product.
Items with high scarcity are going to be more expensive unless in very low demand. Items with LOW scarcity are going to be at a low price indifferent to demand so long as the abundence out paces the demand.
If you want free money... consider that an easier way to get there is to make everything cheaper. This will be done by producing more... increasing production will require increasing employment... and will result in lower prices for whatever is produced.
You can't get away from that. You can try to make any kind of sophisticated dodge on that that pleases you and it won't work because if something is in abundance then the price will come down.
And if the price is low... do you really need free money to buy? Certainly you could work a little at some job to produce the pittance required to pay for things we've made cheap.
And here's the thing... by doing this we make our society richer. Unlike the UBI which does not make us richer. There is no net production boom with UBI. With what I am talking about there is... and that production boom is wealth. Wealth is abundance.
And abundance is a product of production. You can't argue against this... its cut and dry.
You're demanding other people's labor and wealth for nothing and you think that those that disagree with you are pushing calvinist work ethic... and you presume to tell such people to fuck off?
Listen, thief... explain why you are entitled to another man's labor?
And yes, calling you a thief is the appropriate escalation given you decided to bring religion and morality into the matter with the Calvinist crack.
Walk back your millennial sense of entitlement and undeserved moral superiority. When push comes to shove, that nonsense goes nowhere.
The cost of anything is a product of supply and demand. When you say we don't need people to do jobs, you are claiming an over abundance of supply. Were this the case, the price would be lower.
Everything you're talking about consuming... food, housing, etc must be produced. We do not have an finite quantity of it.
If more people want to consume and consume more per person to increase their standard of living then we must produce more.
Increasing production will require hiring more people to produce.
There is your new jobs.
The production doesn't come from no where. People complain about the cost of health care, education, food, housing, credit, etc etc etc.
Which means there is scarcity of those goods and services.
I've been encouraged to repeat myself by people... not you fine gentlemen, but... "people" not getting a point when said once. I include repetition for clarity.
The guarenteed job assumes people show up and make a token effort to do their work.
You can not be fired and not paid at the same time for all sorts of jobs.
Take jobs where you're paid by the hour... if you show up but don't work those hours... should you be paid for them? Depending on the employer you may or may not be paid excluding being fired as an option.
Various jobs pay according to some observable labor... Let us say I pay you to pick baskets of cherries... I may pay you by the basket of cherries you bring me... not by the hour. Bring me ONE basket or no baskets... or a thousand baskets. Your productivity will scale with the income.
These are just ways of dealing with stuff like that. We have thousands of years of experience managing people in manual labor. Your worries about how we'll deal with X or Y presumes that we haven't seen this before.
Take a peasant farmer from a thousand years ago. These people were generally not fired. How were they encouraged to work?
All sorts of feedback systems typically... where in more or less work would have different consequences. Whether or not you'd get food for example was often contingent on labor. If you really went out of your way to be useless such societies would typically write you off naturally. But the feedback loops are pretty good at keeping people active.
The UBI etc presumes to maintain the economy whilst destroying the feedback loops. It is a suicide pact in many ways. I wish it most seriously upon my worst enemies. I have enough cruelty in me for that. But upon those I love and care for?... I would spare them the consequences.
The dream of something for nothing is not sustainable.
The guaranteed job has problems but fewer problems than a guaranteed income. The job has a potential of you doing SOMETHING of value to the system. You finding it meaningful is not the issue. Things need to be put in boxes. Inventory has to be checked. There are lots of jobs held by billions of people on this planet that are hard to cite as "meaningful".
The job concept at the very least has you doing something. It need not be dig a ditch and then fill the ditch in with the same soil.
That said, EVEN IF the job is that bad it is at least motivating you to get another job. If I give you income there is no motivation for you to do anything. You got your income. If I require that you do something annoying to get the money then you'll be interested in finding a less annoying way to get the money... perhaps getting a better job.
We can iterate on the problems these these concepts quite deeply. Entire books have been written on these issues from many angles... moral, logistical, social, political, ethical...
However, many seem to take the complexity as meaning it is arbitrary and thus "there is no wrong answer" because its complicated.
This is why I like to keep it simple.
The simple inescapable point here is that the goods and services that people want to obtain in exchange for money must be produced by someone. And if you're not producing stuff... then where is it coming from?
Someone else? Magical fairy land?
A wealthy society can afford a certain amount of wealth spent on non-productive things. But that account is FINITE... not IN-FINITE. Which means there is a limit. The amount you can blow will be relative to the wealth of the society. So you have a paradox where the richer a society is the more money you can throw at welfare but... you have to be very careful with your taxation and regularitory policies otherwise you'll make the society poorer... not richer.
Its the goose and the golden eggs. And you have to be very careful that you eat ONLY golden eggs and no geese.
This balance is inherently unsustainable. It requires wisdom and restraint to the point of personal political self sacrifice on the part of politicians to maintain this balance. There will be a short term personal benefit to exceeding the balance and eating geese for the politician. He can promise the moon and the stars... and deliver it for a year or two at the price of economic collapse after five or ten years.
Do you trust your politicians to sacrifice their political power by not over promising, slaughtering the geese that lay the golden eggs, and then leaving their nation to rot after the politician retires to a private island somewhere?
This is not cynicism... the examples of this happening are easily accessible.
All of these concepts people are coming up with to slight of hand the magical money into pockets... it... is short term thinking. And the difference between short and long term... the difference between small and big picture is the difference between good and evil.
Literally.
Good and evil is a matter of scope.
Every act of evil seems like a good idea to the man that does it. And every act of evil seen from a wider perspective is seen for what it is.
Take every act of theft, murder, battery, abuse... etc... and contract it to a moment and the man doing it... and the act will have a "rightness" to it. I'm excluding literal insanity... consider acts of theft, revenge, etc. It all can be justified if you collapse the entire world to the man doing the action.
Then expand the perspective out... to include friends, family, community, strangers on the street... expand it in time as well as space by not merely considering a moment but days, months, years, and generations. The act takes on a different character in different contexts.
Guaranteed income seems like a good idea from a limited perspective over a short period of time. If you look at it in the context of millions or
As to IBM to Microsoft, it fails right there. Microsoft never had the dominance that IBM had in the 40s ~ 70s when it was thought to be unstoppable.
As to GM to Toyoda, you're not even arguing in good faith with that one as GM is one company and your transition infers either Toyota which doesn't have that same presence or you're attempting to cite the entire global auto market which doesn't support your position. Toyota in the US has a 15 percent market share today. GM at its peak was about 50% of the US car market. 15 =/= 50. Globally, Toyota only has 12 percent... which also doesn't get close to what GM used to be.
I mean, I can cite numbers at you if you want... but I'm getting the sense that this is just a bad faith internet argument.
Its possible you just don't appreciate how much power these companies used to have. I'm getting a very bad feeling about this exchange and feel it is probably going to non-productive very quickly. You like your idea... you perhaps feel philosophically married to it... I don't care to dislodge your ideology... there's no point. Suffice to say that the numbers don't help you and if you don't see that and feel honor bound to concede your position... then I'm going to say "good day, sir."
Every day is not like the day before from the beginning of time to the end of time.
Things change. Gods die. Entire socio-economic paradigms fade into obscurity.
Why did democracy work? Why did the corporation work
We change the way we do things and have done so many times.
As to my examples proving your point...
What unstoppable tech titan replaced IBM? There was nothing... they were ripped apart by a dozen competitors and to this day not a one of them reigns supreme.
In regards to General Motors... there's no car company that holds the prominence in the US market that GM used to hold.
We didn't hop from one master to the next... we went from one big company that was in total control of a market to a more diversified market with more choices.
Facebook and Twitter have chosen sides amongst various groups... this means they cannot house both... and if they do not house both then they become inherently partisan communities. This.... renders the international quality they desired impossible because they can't even get more than HALF of one country to trust them. And that is assuming the democrats do trust them... and as the democrats think that the Russians used social media to win an election... I don't think the social networks even have HALF of the country really. Those that stay don't stay because they trust but because they're indifferent. They don't value the vulnerability. But every time Facebook uses someone's account to give data to an employer or law enforcement etc... it grows weaker.
There are no ethics in tech. Never has been. And because of that, there is no inclination of institutions to grant ethical standards. Hospitals and medical schools and panels of lawyers enforce ethics in medicine and amongst legal professionals. There's nothing in tech to do the same thing. No standard. No oath. No systematic notion of best practices that means a damn.
Which means the bigger your institution gets... the more corrupt it gets. There's nothing to check that trend.
Large centralized systems have issues with scalability. They have issues in efficiency, issues in "buy in", and issues in sustaining themselves generation after generation.
As I said before, the big networks are already going into a death spiral.
We get this pretty much every time with monopolies... this notion of things being "forever" but the thing that keeps getting forgotten is that the death of the organization typically happens relatively shortly around the point people think it is "forever".
Reasons for this are a different discussion. But the point is that when you talk about... "this is how humans do things"... Sure... and when they do things this way "this" is what happens.
IBM was thought to be an unstoppable infinite monopoly... and immediately became irrelevant.
General Motors was thought to be an infinite monopoly... and immediately became irrelevant.
The old media titans were thought to be forever and always. And they come and go like anything else. Things change.
Facebook and Twitter are showing serious signs of weakness right now. Google is getting seriously challenged by peer organizations for all sorts of things. Not in a way that the press is noticing. But its happening.
The great dream of the internet was that we would be free of the centralized information control systems. A break from the centralized newspapers and centralized television networks.
And we got it for a time but as the internet became more mainstream in its use and appeal so to did many people flock to reincarnations of the very same systems in meatspace.
Youtube, facebook, twitter, Google Search, etc need to be deemphaized. We need to use a plethora of services that are so widely distributed that nothing can really be controlled in any kind of organized way across the systems.
My main problem with facebook is that it is too big. Same issue with Twitter etc. Second issue is that for its size it is under one corporation's dictatorial and arbitrary control. Any platform that is that popular should be an OPEN platform. Something where anyone can set up their space on it to do whatever and it is literally impossible to silence them... outside of court orders etc. But when its all hosted by some company that owns all the IP... there's no freedom. The instant that company feels it wants to nuke someone for any reason they they do it. Which is why such services are bad if they become primary means of information distribution. Its the same problem we had with newspapers and news networks. Bias. Agendas. Prejudice. If the local paper hates politician X and the paper is the primary news source of the region then that is a huge disadvantage to that politician. He could have good ideas or bad ideas... it doesn't matter. He's not going to get a fair try at office.
You see this all over the place in a million different ways.
Facebook and Twitter are "fine"... if small. The problem is that they're too prominent to wield the power over collective information that they do. And they've demonstrated repeatedly to be bad shepherds of what little trust has been put in them.
Solutions? Its already happening. The networks are already tearing themselves apart. They had an ability earlier to save themselves and they arrogantly refused to see the genius of it. What they had to do was democratize their platforms. Give up some control to the user base whilst also permitting healthy balkenization of social groups that don't interact productively with each other.
They demanded total control and demanded that the population be kept together. A million angry rats in one bag... held by a single hand.
""Given that Trump was forbidden from blocking people""
And you respond with this:
""No. Trump was not forced to use Twitter.""
I didn't say he was forced to use twitter, captain strawman.
If you want to have a rational productive discussion with a "human being" then you're going to have to make an effort to make arguments with SOME level of integrity. A level of "zero" is not sufficient.
You've instantly failed in this discussion and I won't engage with you further in this thread. IF you engage with me in another thread, please make an effort to at least honestly represent my argument before attacking it with your own. If you misrepresent my position then you're not actually attacking my position. You're attacking a 'strawman'... look up "strawman argument" in your search engine.
Don't presume to start an update absence confirmation of acceptance.
And give me a "fuck off and die" option on the update. A lot of these are very aggressive when told "not now". The ire at microsoft is that it is presuming when and what will happen and is not taking no for an answer.
Given that Trump was forbidden from blocking people from his twitter account I think you're trying to eat your cake and have it too.
The issue here is that it is complicated. I'm not saying it has to be one way or the other but there are arguments that can be sustained in a court of law that go different ways here.
This is not a cut and dry situation.
What is more, you're prosecuting a 2 year long investigation over Facebook memes posted by Russians that supposedly biased an election... do you see the problem with your argument?
Trump can't block people on twitter according to a judge. FBI investigating facebook meme posts by Russians.
But shadowbanning republicans from Twitter and facebook is okay?
You're trying to have it both ways. An INTERNATIONAL private company's social network is subject to US election laws?
Twitter is a public forum and thus the president cannot ban people from his twitter feed no matter how abusive and offensive they behave?
But shadowbanning one political party is okay?
You have a problem.
Even if you had a solid legal argument which you don't... the political fallout of trying to sustain that argument is not something you want absorb.
Besides isn't capitalism and self reliance and commerce all vestiges of our evil bourgeois past?
Shouldn't the government make a game that tells people how to complain properly?
First, get your allowance from your parents. Then go to the craft store to buy poster board and magic markers. Then write some really cutting phrase on the the poster board like "save the owl whales from corporate baby killers". Then get some friends to dance in a circle whilst you wave those around. And when you get tired, you can hang out at starbucks for half an hour and go home.
Slashdot Mirror
Whilst I agree that something that has been true need not be true into the future, you have to provide some means by which the old would change to the new.
This has not happened. I'm very aware of the literature and I've listened to people push these ideas. When the hard questions are asked... I get hand waving and "don't worry about that" and "SMOKE BOMB ".
This has caused me take this point in particular as being a crucial answer that has be detailed clearly before I can take the argument seriously. And absent that... I see no justification for any serious person to take it seriously.
The entire concept appears childish to me... wishful thinking... wish fulfillment... its half-bakery.
Now... if you think I'm in error and it isn't half-bakery... then correct my mistake by showing how it would not be a sad failure.
As to just saying "robots"... that's not enough. Who owns the robots? Why do the robots make stuff for you for free? I mean, we make all kinds of stuff more efficiently than we have in the past and that hasn't led to us giving away stuff for free, what we do instead is sell it cheaper.
If you told me that a car for example would be cheaper in the future because of robots, I'd agree with you. But "free"? No. Why am I gifting you a car from my robot factory just because you can't be assed to get a job? Can't you see how that isn't going to happen?
There's a whole sociopolitical rant I have in me on this issue... but I don't want to waste either of our time until I have to drop that. Suffice to say, if you make yourself logistically irrelevant to the society, the society will be inclined in time to not take you seriously as someone that should have agency in that society. You should be very afraid of that situation.
Is that how this is to be played. :D
Very well, then I'll stop your rant right here:
""For all of time we've been taking care of non-working people like the young, old, sick and handicapped both temporarily and permanently.""
Such people generally represented a very small proportion of the total population. Restrict your UBI concept to similarly small portions of the total population and I'll agree with you.
If you don't then you're contradicting yourself and I don't have to even argue with you... as you've argued with yourself at that point.
What animates marxism is morality... its own moral paradigm. It doesn't say X or Y is more economically productive... it doesn't justify itself logistically but morally. It says "X is good" and "Y is evil".
As a result, when you identity marxism, you should first identify if the moral paradigm is in evidence.
It is very typical in these discussions for people to require that everyone read the collective works of Engles before determining something is or isn't in this wheel house. However, we don't require people to read the bible or the Quran before identifying something as Christian or Islamic.
We rely rather on flags, symbols, vocabulary that is typical of those systems... What is more, what is "capitalism"... ask different people and you get different answers.
If I were to apply a strict definition... an orthadox definition, then most of the great evils laid at the feet of capitalism especially by communists would have to be rejected to avoid hypocrisy.
Much of those evils involves government corruption for example... where in money is slipped to a politician and then the politician uses government power to secure the interests of the business. That isn't capitalism... in fact, capitalism doesn't even proscribe a political model. You can have a monarchy, a dictatorship, a democracy... and they can all be capitalistic.
Point is... why is the UBI considered "good"... not logistically... but "morally" good? Where do you draw your moral paradigm from? Why is the UBI good and contrary systems evil... or bad? Morally.
Care to make a complete argument on that one? If I made an error, please state it clearly.
Absent a complete argument, I don't even know what you're saying and cannot evaluate its accuracy.
You're talking about 100 percent automation which won't happen. Even if you mostly automate a factory you still need techs and managers etc to maintain it.
And here you will say "but less people than before"... sure but we respond to that by producing things we didn't produce before.
We used to make food, shelter, and clothing. And when we had enough spare labor that we could produce more than that, then we did... we produced new tools, we made everything prettier because we had the time to do it, we invested all sorts of time in other things until yet again we had used up the labor.
That is what we do. If all the cars and iphones are produced using 1/100th the labor they're using now... we'll just produce all sorts of thing that we either produce in very small amounts now or entirely new things that you can't even imagine right now.
This is literally what we've done.
The introduction of industrial farming put roughly 80 percent of the human labor force out of work.
80 percent unemployment.
What happened? They got new jobs in the factories and cities.
Here you say "but we're going to lose jobs in the factories and cities"... and why would you think we can't make new jobs?
Again, even a highly automated factory etc will still need human labor. If we are 90 percent automated then we'll just produce ten times the product. Because why not? If we're going to reach into the stars then we're going to need that kind of abundance of industrial capability. Enough that we can pour the wealth of empires into space elevators and moon colonies etc.
This is the path forward, fellow human. We need vast increases in production.
UBI won't remove bureaucracy or cut existing welfare loads for obvious political reasons. If you require that to move forward then appreciate it is entirely hopeless.
The welfare state is deeply entrenched in western civic culture at this point and nothing short of a very serious war is going to remove it... civil or otherwise.
Keep in mind, the man pushing the UBI at one point in the US was Richard Nixon. But the Bernie Sanders people are attracted to it now. Think they're going to roll out your concept in a fiscally responsible manner?
You're not cynical enough. They don't see UBI as an either/or proposition but rather as an AND proposition. They want it in ADDITION to everything else.
As to specialization being unsustainable, to the contrary specialization is the most efficient and stable labor organization possible. Our economies run on it.
Doctors specialize.
Lawyers specialize.
Mechanics specialize.
Farmers specialize.
Imagine a man that was a doctor one day, a lawyer the next, a mechanic the day after that, and a farmer the day after that?
Specialization is very efficient for training and job experience reasons. It takes roughly 10 years for anyone doing anything to become a MASTER in that thing. Playing the violin... painting... doing accounting work... whatever. Roughly ten years of time invested to become a real expert in it.
That is only possible through specialization.
As to repetitious tasks that are not fulfilling and stressful... whole generations of people were born, worked, and died under those conditions.
From a logistical perspective it is clearly very sustainable and is proven to be sustainable.
So there is no valid argument that it isn't sustainable when it is objectively observed to be sustainable. You're basically holding a banana in your hand and calling it a pair of shoes.
That's nonsense.
90 percent of human labor went to agriculture prior to the industrial revolution... today its about 2 to 5 percent.
What happened to all those people?
They got new jobs in new industries.
Its been ongoing like that for some time.
When the factories closed there was a major relocation of labor to services, office work etc...
You can't avoid having some pain when we go through logistical paradigm shifts. However, take heart... every time we've done this we've found work for most people.
Yes, the old jobs will go away... just like the manual wheat farming went away. Do not mourn the passing of such jobs. You didn't want them anyway and we'll give you better jobs going forward. We always have.
A major element is population relocation. Sometimes the issue is that there isn't work "here" but there is work 100 miles to the east or west etc.
Too many people are subsidized to live in cities they can't afford to live in. Why is welfare money paying out to help unemployed people live in New York etc? The property is too expensive to support that and the kinds of jobs that people are going to get if they're that hard up are not going to support those people in those communities. Everything is too expensive because they literally cannot afford to live there. BUT there is work elsewhere and the cost of living is lower elsewhere.
Bundle the guarenteed job with a possible requirement for people to move. Let us say EVERYONE wants to live in New York or Los Angeles... and they can't afford it... what then? You pay the housing and they still can't afford it... they become homeless walking the streets and we treat this like its the fault of the city when the city's economics can't support that problem. You need to relocate people to lower cost of living areas with industries that better meet the abilities of that labor force.
Everyone wins. Society wins. The people win. The companies win.
There are no losers.
if your problem is that you don't htink you can get a job then you really should look at why that is... why is it that people found it easier to find jobs in the past and less so today?
This has been studied extensively and its all quite fixable. It does require retiring some failed social experiments but in the grand scheme of things they're doomed no matter what.
How is it that you people get this far and yet don't understand supply and demand's relationship to price?
The very fact that so many goods are found to be expensive or beyond the means of people to the extent that they feel they need the UBI proves that there is scarcity of resources.
Price is set by supply or scarcity AND demand or consumer interest in the product.
Items with high scarcity are going to be more expensive unless in very low demand. Items with LOW scarcity are going to be at a low price indifferent to demand so long as the abundence out paces the demand.
If you want free money... consider that an easier way to get there is to make everything cheaper. This will be done by producing more... increasing production will require increasing employment... and will result in lower prices for whatever is produced.
You can't get away from that. You can try to make any kind of sophisticated dodge on that that pleases you and it won't work because if something is in abundance then the price will come down.
And if the price is low... do you really need free money to buy? Certainly you could work a little at some job to produce the pittance required to pay for things we've made cheap.
And here's the thing... by doing this we make our society richer. Unlike the UBI which does not make us richer. There is no net production boom with UBI. With what I am talking about there is... and that production boom is wealth. Wealth is abundance.
And abundance is a product of production. You can't argue against this... its cut and dry.
You're demanding other people's labor and wealth for nothing and you think that those that disagree with you are pushing calvinist work ethic... and you presume to tell such people to fuck off?
Listen, thief... explain why you are entitled to another man's labor?
And yes, calling you a thief is the appropriate escalation given you decided to bring religion and morality into the matter with the Calvinist crack.
Walk back your millennial sense of entitlement and undeserved moral superiority. When push comes to shove, that nonsense goes nowhere.
Don't embarrass yourself with it.
The cost of anything is a product of supply and demand. When you say we don't need people to do jobs, you are claiming an over abundance of supply. Were this the case, the price would be lower.
Everything you're talking about consuming... food, housing, etc must be produced. We do not have an finite quantity of it.
If more people want to consume and consume more per person to increase their standard of living then we must produce more.
Increasing production will require hiring more people to produce.
There is your new jobs.
The production doesn't come from no where. People complain about the cost of health care, education, food, housing, credit, etc etc etc.
Which means there is scarcity of those goods and services.
Which means production can address that scarcity.
Which means you're 1+1=5 wrong.
I've been encouraged to repeat myself by people... not you fine gentlemen, but... "people" not getting a point when said once. I include repetition for clarity.
From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.
*swish*
The guarenteed job assumes people show up and make a token effort to do their work.
You can not be fired and not paid at the same time for all sorts of jobs.
Take jobs where you're paid by the hour... if you show up but don't work those hours... should you be paid for them? Depending on the employer you may or may not be paid excluding being fired as an option.
Various jobs pay according to some observable labor... Let us say I pay you to pick baskets of cherries... I may pay you by the basket of cherries you bring me... not by the hour. Bring me ONE basket or no baskets... or a thousand baskets. Your productivity will scale with the income.
These are just ways of dealing with stuff like that. We have thousands of years of experience managing people in manual labor. Your worries about how we'll deal with X or Y presumes that we haven't seen this before.
Take a peasant farmer from a thousand years ago. These people were generally not fired. How were they encouraged to work?
All sorts of feedback systems typically... where in more or less work would have different consequences. Whether or not you'd get food for example was often contingent on labor. If you really went out of your way to be useless such societies would typically write you off naturally. But the feedback loops are pretty good at keeping people active.
The UBI etc presumes to maintain the economy whilst destroying the feedback loops. It is a suicide pact in many ways. I wish it most seriously upon my worst enemies. I have enough cruelty in me for that. But upon those I love and care for?... I would spare them the consequences.
The dream of something for nothing is not sustainable.
The guaranteed job has problems but fewer problems than a guaranteed income. The job has a potential of you doing SOMETHING of value to the system. You finding it meaningful is not the issue. Things need to be put in boxes. Inventory has to be checked. There are lots of jobs held by billions of people on this planet that are hard to cite as "meaningful".
The job concept at the very least has you doing something. It need not be dig a ditch and then fill the ditch in with the same soil.
That said, EVEN IF the job is that bad it is at least motivating you to get another job. If I give you income there is no motivation for you to do anything. You got your income. If I require that you do something annoying to get the money then you'll be interested in finding a less annoying way to get the money... perhaps getting a better job.
We can iterate on the problems these these concepts quite deeply. Entire books have been written on these issues from many angles... moral, logistical, social, political, ethical...
However, many seem to take the complexity as meaning it is arbitrary and thus "there is no wrong answer" because its complicated.
This is why I like to keep it simple.
The simple inescapable point here is that the goods and services that people want to obtain in exchange for money must be produced by someone. And if you're not producing stuff... then where is it coming from?
Someone else? Magical fairy land?
A wealthy society can afford a certain amount of wealth spent on non-productive things. But that account is FINITE... not IN-FINITE. Which means there is a limit. The amount you can blow will be relative to the wealth of the society. So you have a paradox where the richer a society is the more money you can throw at welfare but... you have to be very careful with your taxation and regularitory policies otherwise you'll make the society poorer... not richer.
Its the goose and the golden eggs. And you have to be very careful that you eat ONLY golden eggs and no geese.
This balance is inherently unsustainable. It requires wisdom and restraint to the point of personal political self sacrifice on the part of politicians to maintain this balance. There will be a short term personal benefit to exceeding the balance and eating geese for the politician. He can promise the moon and the stars... and deliver it for a year or two at the price of economic collapse after five or ten years.
Do you trust your politicians to sacrifice their political power by not over promising, slaughtering the geese that lay the golden eggs, and then leaving their nation to rot after the politician retires to a private island somewhere?
This is not cynicism... the examples of this happening are easily accessible.
All of these concepts people are coming up with to slight of hand the magical money into pockets... it... is short term thinking. And the difference between short and long term... the difference between small and big picture is the difference between good and evil.
Literally.
Good and evil is a matter of scope.
Every act of evil seems like a good idea to the man that does it. And every act of evil seen from a wider perspective is seen for what it is.
Take every act of theft, murder, battery, abuse... etc... and contract it to a moment and the man doing it... and the act will have a "rightness" to it. I'm excluding literal insanity... consider acts of theft, revenge, etc. It all can be justified if you collapse the entire world to the man doing the action.
Then expand the perspective out... to include friends, family, community, strangers on the street... expand it in time as well as space by not merely considering a moment but days, months, years, and generations. The act takes on a different character in different contexts.
Guaranteed income seems like a good idea from a limited perspective over a short period of time. If you look at it in the context of millions or
As to IBM to Microsoft, it fails right there. Microsoft never had the dominance that IBM had in the 40s ~ 70s when it was thought to be unstoppable.
As to GM to Toyoda, you're not even arguing in good faith with that one as GM is one company and your transition infers either Toyota which doesn't have that same presence or you're attempting to cite the entire global auto market which doesn't support your position. Toyota in the US has a 15 percent market share today. GM at its peak was about 50% of the US car market. 15 =/= 50. Globally, Toyota only has 12 percent... which also doesn't get close to what GM used to be.
I mean, I can cite numbers at you if you want... but I'm getting the sense that this is just a bad faith internet argument.
Its possible you just don't appreciate how much power these companies used to have. I'm getting a very bad feeling about this exchange and feel it is probably going to non-productive very quickly. You like your idea... you perhaps feel philosophically married to it... I don't care to dislodge your ideology... there's no point. Suffice to say that the numbers don't help you and if you don't see that and feel honor bound to concede your position... then I'm going to say "good day, sir."
Every day is not like the day before from the beginning of time to the end of time.
Things change. Gods die. Entire socio-economic paradigms fade into obscurity.
Why did democracy work? Why did the corporation work
We change the way we do things and have done so many times.
As to my examples proving your point...
What unstoppable tech titan replaced IBM? There was nothing... they were ripped apart by a dozen competitors and to this day not a one of them reigns supreme.
In regards to General Motors... there's no car company that holds the prominence in the US market that GM used to hold.
We didn't hop from one master to the next... we went from one big company that was in total control of a market to a more diversified market with more choices.
Facebook and Twitter have chosen sides amongst various groups... this means they cannot house both... and if they do not house both then they become inherently partisan communities. This.... renders the international quality they desired impossible because they can't even get more than HALF of one country to trust them. And that is assuming the democrats do trust them... and as the democrats think that the Russians used social media to win an election... I don't think the social networks even have HALF of the country really. Those that stay don't stay because they trust but because they're indifferent. They don't value the vulnerability. But every time Facebook uses someone's account to give data to an employer or law enforcement etc... it grows weaker.
There are no ethics in tech. Never has been. And because of that, there is no inclination of institutions to grant ethical standards. Hospitals and medical schools and panels of lawyers enforce ethics in medicine and amongst legal professionals. There's nothing in tech to do the same thing. No standard. No oath. No systematic notion of best practices that means a damn.
Which means the bigger your institution gets... the more corrupt it gets. There's nothing to check that trend.
Their profits are down big... why their stock dropped 20 percent.
So does Babel. ;)
Large centralized systems have issues with scalability. They have issues in efficiency, issues in "buy in", and issues in sustaining themselves generation after generation.
As I said before, the big networks are already going into a death spiral.
We get this pretty much every time with monopolies... this notion of things being "forever" but the thing that keeps getting forgotten is that the death of the organization typically happens relatively shortly around the point people think it is "forever".
Reasons for this are a different discussion. But the point is that when you talk about... "this is how humans do things"... Sure... and when they do things this way "this" is what happens.
IBM was thought to be an unstoppable infinite monopoly... and immediately became irrelevant.
General Motors was thought to be an infinite monopoly... and immediately became irrelevant.
The old media titans were thought to be forever and always. And they come and go like anything else. Things change.
Facebook and Twitter are showing serious signs of weakness right now. Google is getting seriously challenged by peer organizations for all sorts of things. Not in a way that the press is noticing. But its happening.
The great dream of the internet was that we would be free of the centralized information control systems. A break from the centralized newspapers and centralized television networks.
And we got it for a time but as the internet became more mainstream in its use and appeal so to did many people flock to reincarnations of the very same systems in meatspace.
Youtube, facebook, twitter, Google Search, etc need to be deemphaized. We need to use a plethora of services that are so widely distributed that nothing can really be controlled in any kind of organized way across the systems.
My main problem with facebook is that it is too big. Same issue with Twitter etc. Second issue is that for its size it is under one corporation's dictatorial and arbitrary control. Any platform that is that popular should be an OPEN platform. Something where anyone can set up their space on it to do whatever and it is literally impossible to silence them... outside of court orders etc. But when its all hosted by some company that owns all the IP... there's no freedom. The instant that company feels it wants to nuke someone for any reason they they do it. Which is why such services are bad if they become primary means of information distribution. Its the same problem we had with newspapers and news networks. Bias. Agendas. Prejudice. If the local paper hates politician X and the paper is the primary news source of the region then that is a huge disadvantage to that politician. He could have good ideas or bad ideas... it doesn't matter. He's not going to get a fair try at office.
You see this all over the place in a million different ways.
Facebook and Twitter are "fine"... if small. The problem is that they're too prominent to wield the power over collective information that they do. And they've demonstrated repeatedly to be bad shepherds of what little trust has been put in them.
Solutions? Its already happening. The networks are already tearing themselves apart. They had an ability earlier to save themselves and they arrogantly refused to see the genius of it. What they had to do was democratize their platforms. Give up some control to the user base whilst also permitting healthy balkenization of social groups that don't interact productively with each other.
They demanded total control and demanded that the population be kept together. A million angry rats in one bag... held by a single hand.
What could possibly go wrong? :)
Wow... So I say this:
""Given that Trump was forbidden from blocking people""
And you respond with this:
""No. Trump was not forced to use Twitter.""
I didn't say he was forced to use twitter, captain strawman.
If you want to have a rational productive discussion with a "human being" then you're going to have to make an effort to make arguments with SOME level of integrity. A level of "zero" is not sufficient.
You've instantly failed in this discussion and I won't engage with you further in this thread. IF you engage with me in another thread, please make an effort to at least honestly represent my argument before attacking it with your own. If you misrepresent my position then you're not actually attacking my position. You're attacking a 'strawman'... look up "strawman argument" in your search engine.
This is bare minimum standard, sport.
Don't presume to start an update absence confirmation of acceptance.
And give me a "fuck off and die" option on the update. A lot of these are very aggressive when told "not now". The ire at microsoft is that it is presuming when and what will happen and is not taking no for an answer.
Given that Trump was forbidden from blocking people from his twitter account I think you're trying to eat your cake and have it too.
The issue here is that it is complicated. I'm not saying it has to be one way or the other but there are arguments that can be sustained in a court of law that go different ways here.
This is not a cut and dry situation.
What is more, you're prosecuting a 2 year long investigation over Facebook memes posted by Russians that supposedly biased an election... do you see the problem with your argument?
Trump can't block people on twitter according to a judge.
FBI investigating facebook meme posts by Russians.
But shadowbanning republicans from Twitter and facebook is okay?
You're trying to have it both ways. An INTERNATIONAL private company's social network is subject to US election laws?
Twitter is a public forum and thus the president cannot ban people from his twitter feed no matter how abusive and offensive they behave?
But shadowbanning one political party is okay?
You have a problem.
Even if you had a solid legal argument which you don't... the political fallout of trying to sustain that argument is not something you want absorb.
Step 2: Profit.
Besides isn't capitalism and self reliance and commerce all vestiges of our evil bourgeois past?
Shouldn't the government make a game that tells people how to complain properly?
First, get your allowance from your parents. Then go to the craft store to buy poster board and magic markers. Then write some really cutting phrase on the the poster board like "save the owl whales from corporate baby killers". Then get some friends to dance in a circle whilst you wave those around. And when you get tired, you can hang out at starbucks for half an hour and go home.
Why can't the government fund that game?