Suppose our society is just 100 people. We're going to give everyone $30,000 in basic income, for example. Where does it come from? Everyone pays $30,000 in taxes to fund the pool of money that pays everyone $30,000 each? What would be the point of that?
I'm no expert but you are making the mistake that the economy is some finite state machine.
There is some analogy I remember about a traveler who comes to town and gives the local hotelier $100 deposit for a room. The Hotelier uses the $100 to pay his bill with the butcher, who in turn pays his bill with the Publican, who in turns pays the Prostitute when then pays the Hotelier. The traveler decides not to stay so gets his $100 back and leaves town.
Without a single penny being created or destroyed, $400 has been injected into the economy.
So without knowing anything about it, I know there is more to economics than simple arithmetic. And I'm sure someone smarter than the both of us knows the science behind UBI.
Cardinal rule: If something is given away for free, it either has no value or YOU are the product.
Once you are beholden to a government for something, they own your ass. You will do what they want. But you probably won't realize it until it's way too late.
Well that sounds scary, but when you put down the fiction, most actual no-fiction governments actually look out for their citizens.
If you believe otherwise, maybe try living in a country with very little government (eg Syria, Afghanistan) and see how you get on. I know it doesn't gel with your OMGZ evil govt! But real life doesn't always work out like the movies.
... or any number of countries that have tried, and failed at socialism. It always fail, eventually.
In the black and white universe both extreme capitalism (the law of the jungle) and extreme socialism (communism) fail. The path to success is finding an appropriate balance.
If we compare quality of life across countries, the top ones seem to be slightly more socialist than the US. So if your benchmark is winning, you need to change the current formula...
They've found a warm welcome. In a March survey, 68% of Europeans said they would vote yes in a basic-income referendum, up from 64% last year.
I suppose, it depends on how the question is phrased:
Would you like to be given money even if you do not work?
Hell yah!
Would you like to pay higher taxes so that some of it will be given to others even if they do not work?
Hell no!
Or it depends on the type of person you are. I happily pay higher taxes so the most needy don't have to live on the streets. So I already answer yes to both questions.
My diet: eat real foods, including... Avoid processed foods, including...
Why?
The "eat real food" mantra is well worn, but I've never seen any science to back it up. Sure it sounds right on the surface, I mean surely fresh food must be better for you than something in a tin, but is it? I eat whatever, tinned, packet, fresh, I don't care, I'm hungry I eat and my body seems to deal with it just fine.
How much if this is based on real science and how much of it is feel good hipster dieting fads?
Or you could activate at least one brain cell, and understand that storing your business data on someone else's server, one you don't control, is horrendously stupid.
Since you claim to have at least one brain cell, perhaps you could tell us why you think this is?
Cities aren't designed; they evolve. They start out as small settlements or towns, and then grow from there. No one planned for LA to become a giant sprawling metropolis.
Yes they did. Someone was always in charge and someone allowed zoning for large tracts of land and large freeways and a city designed around the automobile. You may not be aware of that fact, but all of that was designed by people, over time resulting in repeated failures to plan for the future.
Hong Kong isn't just a city, it's an island: the city is dense because the water limited the growth.
But someone designed a train system to service most of it after most of it had been built. At some point someone made that decision.
Paris was (re-designed) by Napoleon, a dictatorial emperor.
So some design activity happened at some point yeah?
Of course it isn't easy, but it doesn't change the fact that the most liveable cities are a result of constant planning and design effort from those charged with running them.
Not true. You're assuming everyone wants to travel along a line. If a city is spread out equally in a grid in both axes, you'll need a lot of train lines.
Like London, Paris, Tokyo, Singapore you mean? Well yes if that's the solution then that's what you do.
Trains are great when you need to move a lot of people from one point to another point all at once. They don't work very well when people are moving between all different points, all going to all different endpoints.
Like London, Paris, Tokyo, Singapore you mean?
They also don't work so well if the city isn't very dense.
True, but that's why city design should fit within a range of density that promotes efficient transport solutions.
You know, in ancient Rome and even outlying territories, they had worked out that commercial deliveries had to be restricted to certain hours to make things manageable. You would think we would um, take advantage of proven techniques like that?
The problem here is that a delivery truck will make a stop in the middle of a street not meant for that activity, but a shopper in a car will find a parking spot already designed for that. As we shift to an economy where goods are delivered directly by truck, the traffic infrastructure needs to adapt.
Not sure how it works where you live, but trucks deliver to warehouses and vans deliver to houses. I've bought tons of stuff online and the delivery guy comes in a van about the same size of a car. And he parks in the driveway for 30 seconds rather than taking up an entire 15 square metres of land for hours on end. If you multiply that by the hundreds of parcels he delivers, there is thousands of square metres of expensive city land being freed up by people choosing to buy online instead of at the mall.
When you actually think about it, delivery vans offer much greater relief for congestion than the opposite.
Same for central planning of anything - it's an information theoretical problem - the central planners always lack sufficient information and sufficient information processing capacity to make good decisions.
You mean like say the military? Given the choice to defend my home, I'll chose a centralised military over and disorganised rabble carrying pitchforks.
I think you need to revise your hypothesis.
Hmm....this sounds to me like yet another reason not to want to live in a dense, urban setting
And what reason is that, being a sucker for Fake News?
TFS fails the logic test. If people are buying online instead of going to the shops themselves shops it means less vehicles on the road. Since one delivery truck can deliver hundreds of parcels instead of hundreds of individuals each driving one car each to go out and buy a t-shirt each. And we're not even going into the masses of bicycle delivery services around now meaning even less cars.
Don't believe everything you read...
There's also the time cost: even if you're riding a train, sitting on it for hours and hours every day to go back and forth to work is a massive waste of your time and your life. This isn't much different from some places here in the US, such as NYC.
The problem is moving large amounts of people in a large city. A car focused strategy will move less people and take longer than a train focused strategy.
But constantly evolving, like most cities.
You can throw your hands in the air in despair and in 50 years you grand-kids will face even worse problems than you, or we can try and turn it around so that in 50 years our grand-kids thanks us for creating a great space to live and work.
Ok, so you get in a train that drops you off in the middle of LA. Now, how do you get to where you're going from there? LA is hundreds of square miles of urban area, all spread out so there's no way any train will take you to all parts of it.
So you've actually identified the real problem but skimmed right over it. The problem is poorly designed large sprawling cities that were sort-of designed for cars but not really because they don't scale to suit. The solution to this isn't more cars, it's more intelligent city design, one that takes both development AND transport into account, not just one or the other.
If you were to design a brand new city of 3 million plus today you wouldn't build LA, it'd probably look more like Hong Kong or Paris. Smaller geographical area but still just as many people. But much less cars, more trains and more walking.
Why rationalize one' s selfish viewpoints without understanding that the culture under which one's gains were made have laid waste to most of the next generation?
Yeah yeah, whinge whinge, moan moan, we know it goes, the world owes me a living. We were young too once remember, so don't worry you'll grow out of it...
And a big reason you can get away with relatively old hardware today is that a lot of the new & intensive work has been offloaded to massive server arrays, where any cheap phone with a network link can use it.
Exactly which is why once you reach 'good enough' people stop caring. I think we have reached that point with mobile devices. (if you take China as an example, powerful devices from Apple and Samsung are losing market share to the likes of Oppo and Vivo who make 'good enough' versions of very similar devices.
Which is fine for some things, but I also see a growing preference for local storage and processing rather than sending your every habit to the cloud. Maybe CPUs will soon be powerful enough to run a genuinely personal assistant entirely locally...
But why would you? It'll cost more and perform worse.
Complete and utter fucking bullshit kid. Go ask your dad instead of making shit up. The plastic bags were a shitload cheaper, around an order of magnitude, than paper ones and that was the reason.
I'm old enough to remember when plastic bags became mainstream. Not only were they cheaper, they were stronger, moisture resistant, and had handles so you could carry more than one at once.
Until new and more-demanding uses become possible, then common. The point is, our needs tend to grow to match available processing power, so as faster laptops are created, more powerful software will be made available to use it.
Such as?
Sure a small percentage of users use more powerful apps, but most users use email, browsing, facebook etc, stuff that still works well on 10 year old hardware. Phones are reaching that point the PCs got to in about 2005 when processing power no longer mattered for most people, and other things became more important to buyers. In fact up until 6 months ago I was still using my old laptop from 2007 until it finally gave up on me.
I always wondered why they even bothered to wear the body armor when it couldn't even stop their own weapons
You're over thinking it. My take was that ST was deliberately stupid in a Beverly Hills 90210 in space type fashion. The real point was more a political stab at the way we approach war.
Slashdot Mirror
Suppose our society is just 100 people. We're going to give everyone $30,000 in basic income, for example. Where does it come from? Everyone pays $30,000 in taxes to fund the pool of money that pays everyone $30,000 each? What would be the point of that?
I'm no expert but you are making the mistake that the economy is some finite state machine. There is some analogy I remember about a traveler who comes to town and gives the local hotelier $100 deposit for a room. The Hotelier uses the $100 to pay his bill with the butcher, who in turn pays his bill with the Publican, who in turns pays the Prostitute when then pays the Hotelier. The traveler decides not to stay so gets his $100 back and leaves town.
Without a single penny being created or destroyed, $400 has been injected into the economy.
So without knowing anything about it, I know there is more to economics than simple arithmetic. And I'm sure someone smarter than the both of us knows the science behind UBI.
Cardinal rule: If something is given away for free, it either has no value or YOU are the product. Once you are beholden to a government for something, they own your ass. You will do what they want. But you probably won't realize it until it's way too late.
Well that sounds scary, but when you put down the fiction, most actual no-fiction governments actually look out for their citizens.
If you believe otherwise, maybe try living in a country with very little government (eg Syria, Afghanistan) and see how you get on. I know it doesn't gel with your OMGZ evil govt! But real life doesn't always work out like the movies.
... or any number of countries that have tried, and failed at socialism. It always fail, eventually.
In the black and white universe both extreme capitalism (the law of the jungle) and extreme socialism (communism) fail. The path to success is finding an appropriate balance.
If we compare quality of life across countries, the top ones seem to be slightly more socialist than the US. So if your benchmark is winning, you need to change the current formula...
I suppose, it depends on how the question is phrased:
Would you like to be given money even if you do not work? Hell yah! Would you like to pay higher taxes so that some of it will be given to others even if they do not work? Hell no!Or it depends on the type of person you are. I happily pay higher taxes so the most needy don't have to live on the streets. So I already answer yes to both questions.
I just don't get why refusal to change for the better is a thing.
I have a similar story to you, and I thought about it many times yet have no answers. But at least be aware that you're not alone.
My diet: eat real foods, including ... Avoid processed foods, including...
Why?
The "eat real food" mantra is well worn, but I've never seen any science to back it up. Sure it sounds right on the surface, I mean surely fresh food must be better for you than something in a tin, but is it? I eat whatever, tinned, packet, fresh, I don't care, I'm hungry I eat and my body seems to deal with it just fine.
How much if this is based on real science and how much of it is feel good hipster dieting fads?
Or you could activate at least one brain cell, and understand that storing your business data on someone else's server, one you don't control, is horrendously stupid.
Since you claim to have at least one brain cell, perhaps you could tell us why you think this is?
Cities aren't designed; they evolve. They start out as small settlements or towns, and then grow from there. No one planned for LA to become a giant sprawling metropolis.
Yes they did. Someone was always in charge and someone allowed zoning for large tracts of land and large freeways and a city designed around the automobile. You may not be aware of that fact, but all of that was designed by people, over time resulting in repeated failures to plan for the future.
Hong Kong isn't just a city, it's an island: the city is dense because the water limited the growth.
But someone designed a train system to service most of it after most of it had been built. At some point someone made that decision.
Paris was (re-designed) by Napoleon, a dictatorial emperor.
So some design activity happened at some point yeah?
Of course it isn't easy, but it doesn't change the fact that the most liveable cities are a result of constant planning and design effort from those charged with running them.
Not true. You're assuming everyone wants to travel along a line. If a city is spread out equally in a grid in both axes, you'll need a lot of train lines.
Like London, Paris, Tokyo, Singapore you mean? Well yes if that's the solution then that's what you do.
Trains are great when you need to move a lot of people from one point to another point all at once. They don't work very well when people are moving between all different points, all going to all different endpoints.
Like London, Paris, Tokyo, Singapore you mean?
They also don't work so well if the city isn't very dense.
True, but that's why city design should fit within a range of density that promotes efficient transport solutions.
You know, in ancient Rome and even outlying territories, they had worked out that commercial deliveries had to be restricted to certain hours to make things manageable. You would think we would um, take advantage of proven techniques like that?
We do where I live. Catch up...
The problem here is that a delivery truck will make a stop in the middle of a street not meant for that activity, but a shopper in a car will find a parking spot already designed for that. As we shift to an economy where goods are delivered directly by truck, the traffic infrastructure needs to adapt.
Not sure how it works where you live, but trucks deliver to warehouses and vans deliver to houses. I've bought tons of stuff online and the delivery guy comes in a van about the same size of a car. And he parks in the driveway for 30 seconds rather than taking up an entire 15 square metres of land for hours on end. If you multiply that by the hundreds of parcels he delivers, there is thousands of square metres of expensive city land being freed up by people choosing to buy online instead of at the mall.
When you actually think about it, delivery vans offer much greater relief for congestion than the opposite.
Same for central planning of anything - it's an information theoretical problem - the central planners always lack sufficient information and sufficient information processing capacity to make good decisions.
You mean like say the military? Given the choice to defend my home, I'll chose a centralised military over and disorganised rabble carrying pitchforks.
I think you need to revise your hypothesis.
Hmm....this sounds to me like yet another reason not to want to live in a dense, urban setting
And what reason is that, being a sucker for Fake News?
TFS fails the logic test. If people are buying online instead of going to the shops themselves shops it means less vehicles on the road. Since one delivery truck can deliver hundreds of parcels instead of hundreds of individuals each driving one car each to go out and buy a t-shirt each. And we're not even going into the masses of bicycle delivery services around now meaning even less cars.
Don't believe everything you read...
There's also the time cost: even if you're riding a train, sitting on it for hours and hours every day to go back and forth to work is a massive waste of your time and your life. This isn't much different from some places here in the US, such as NYC.
The problem is moving large amounts of people in a large city. A car focused strategy will move less people and take longer than a train focused strategy.
The answer is better city planning.
Keep in mind that the city is already there.
But constantly evolving, like most cities.
You can throw your hands in the air in despair and in 50 years you grand-kids will face even worse problems than you, or we can try and turn it around so that in 50 years our grand-kids thanks us for creating a great space to live and work.
Ok, so you get in a train that drops you off in the middle of LA. Now, how do you get to where you're going from there? LA is hundreds of square miles of urban area, all spread out so there's no way any train will take you to all parts of it.
So you've actually identified the real problem but skimmed right over it. The problem is poorly designed large sprawling cities that were sort-of designed for cars but not really because they don't scale to suit. The solution to this isn't more cars, it's more intelligent city design, one that takes both development AND transport into account, not just one or the other.
If you were to design a brand new city of 3 million plus today you wouldn't build LA, it'd probably look more like Hong Kong or Paris. Smaller geographical area but still just as many people. But much less cars, more trains and more walking.
Why rationalize one' s selfish viewpoints without understanding that the culture under which one's gains were made have laid waste to most of the next generation?
Yeah yeah, whinge whinge, moan moan, we know it goes, the world owes me a living. We were young too once remember, so don't worry you'll grow out of it...
Capitalism needs a tincture of socialism otherwise its just as bad as Communism just in different ways.
I think the GP was being sarcastic...
Yeah why spend lifetime working to retire when you can kill someone and steal their stuff instead?
....it means more of the welfare of the UNION of the states, and the ability of the Feds to lay taxation for that purpose.
Um ok.. since you said so...
And a big reason you can get away with relatively old hardware today is that a lot of the new & intensive work has been offloaded to massive server arrays, where any cheap phone with a network link can use it.
Exactly which is why once you reach 'good enough' people stop caring. I think we have reached that point with mobile devices. (if you take China as an example, powerful devices from Apple and Samsung are losing market share to the likes of Oppo and Vivo who make 'good enough' versions of very similar devices.
Which is fine for some things, but I also see a growing preference for local storage and processing rather than sending your every habit to the cloud. Maybe CPUs will soon be powerful enough to run a genuinely personal assistant entirely locally...
But why would you? It'll cost more and perform worse.
Complete and utter fucking bullshit kid. Go ask your dad instead of making shit up. The plastic bags were a shitload cheaper, around an order of magnitude, than paper ones and that was the reason.
I'm old enough to remember when plastic bags became mainstream. Not only were they cheaper, they were stronger, moisture resistant, and had handles so you could carry more than one at once.
Until new and more-demanding uses become possible, then common. The point is, our needs tend to grow to match available processing power, so as faster laptops are created, more powerful software will be made available to use it .
Such as?
Sure a small percentage of users use more powerful apps, but most users use email, browsing, facebook etc, stuff that still works well on 10 year old hardware.
Phones are reaching that point the PCs got to in about 2005 when processing power no longer mattered for most people, and other things became more important to buyers. In fact up until 6 months ago I was still using my old laptop from 2007 until it finally gave up on me.
Surprised it isn't on the list already...
I always wondered why they even bothered to wear the body armor when it couldn't even stop their own weapons
You're over thinking it. My take was that ST was deliberately stupid in a Beverly Hills 90210 in space type fashion. The real point was more a political stab at the way we approach war.