Until the machines take over those jobs too. It only takes one person to build CAM models of a selection of little filigrees like that and them bam, the machines can put all the filligree-ers out of work too.
It's very heartening to me to see that you are at least the second libertarian highly-modded in this thread who thinks that something like this is, at the very least, better than what we've got already.
For decades I've been advocating that we could comfortably get rid of a whole bunch of statist intervention and have a really free, libertarian market if we just slapped one simple elegant bandaid over the problem of growing inequality and concentration of wealth that comes about when you do that naively. (I have thoughts on how to do it less-naively and not even require that bandaid, but that's a topic for elsewhere).
Just make sure that nobody can get too far from the mean income, up or down -- that the further away from it you get, the harder you are pulled back toward it, but in the wide ranges nearer to it you're free to succeed or fail on your own -- and then let the market sort out things like paying wages and providing services as efficiently as possible, knowing that even the most desperately needy person is getting at least enough to cover their basic needs, and that the cost of that is being paid only by those most easily able to shoulder it, leaving the bulk of people in the middle classes largely alone and free.
I make about twice what the median American makes and I still have plenty of things (mostly a house) I could use more money for and work hard to get more money to get those things.
You can sure well bet that I wouldn't quit this job to live off of $10k a year work-free.
And if I was working part-time at McDonalds, I sure as hell wouldn't quit that job to live off of $10k a year work-free, instead of working AND getting that $10k/year and enjoying all the better quality of living that would afford me.
My mom lives off $10k/year because of disability, and believe me, it is a terrible existence. Even though she's disabled and isn't supposed to be able to work, she still wants to, because she needs more damn money. Of course, with disability, if she gets any job at all, even one paying minimum wage for an hour a day, she loses all her benefits. With a basic income, people like that would be allowed to work to better their lives, unlike with the perverse incentives current programs offer.
I'd rather have a completely free-market economy with ONE simple elegant bandaid slapped on to stem runaway class division and concentration of wealth, than the statist mish-mash of different programs dictating how people must live their lives if they want a little hand with surviving.
Exactly, so we get a negative feedback loop that diminishes economic activity and wealth. People are working for money building things that people buy with the money they get from building other things and so on; that's how the economy works and how people's needs get met. If we replace the people building things with machines building things, then those machines would also have to do the buying of things (and be paid money with which to do so) to justify their own existence, which they're not going to do, so you'll end up with people not working, having no money, not building things, and nobody buying them; and machines not working and building things either, and everything stops. That is the problem.
Since paying the machines so that they can go buy the products (like we used to pay the people the machines replaced) isn't going to happen, one possible solution is that, even once machines are doing the work, we keep paying the people (who aren't working anymore) so they can keep buying the stuff that the machines are making, and use the money made by those machines to fund that paying of people so that they can keep buying the stuff that the machines make, and so on. In the end it's just like the pre-machine economy, except that people don't have to work. Which was the point of inventing machines in the first place, wasn't it?
At least you've got it better than my generation, who are still paying into social security and pretty much guaranteed, whether this basic income happens or not, that it's not going to be there when we're old enough to collect. Instead, all our SS payments will be funding your SS income, if you still get it... the way that your payments were actually to fund your parents' income, and so on since the beginning. SS is not a savings account, and though I agree that it's a really unfair broken way of doing things, the first generation of people who got SS got it without paying anything in, so the last generation, whenever it ends, are going to be totally fucked, and it's that first generation who fucked them.
If we do this by giving everyone half of (the average income minus their own income), then we basically guarantee that nobody makes less than half of average, we cost average people nothing to pay for it, and the burden on the rich who do pay for it scales with the inequality of income distribution automatically. In a market where income distribution was close to uniform already, this kind of distribution would automatically scale back to almost nothing. If a tiny handful of people get almost all the money and most people get almost none, then that tiny handful will be paying a lot to a lot of people. It creates a spring-like centerward pressure on everyone; people near average are barely affected at all, the further from average you get the harded it pulls you back toward average.
It has nothing to do with the political spectrum. The "liberal" in "liberal arts" refers to freemen, i.e. full citizens, not slaves. The classical liberal arts were the things needed to conduct life as a free citizen: grammar, logic, and rhetoric (the most basic three, the "trivium", whence our term "trivial"), and four kinds of mathematics: arithmetic, geometry, "music" (meaning harmonics) and "astronomy" (meaning dynamics).
Modern use of the term to mean "non-STEM" is just misuse of the language.
The US is both a republic and a (representative) democracy. The two are not contrary, they are orthogonal. Besides democratic republics like the US, you can have democratic non-republics like the UK, non-democratic republics like North Korea, and non-democratic non-republics like Saudi Arabia.
First things's first, I'd hire an accountant, a lawyer, and an executive assistant, have them all keep each other in check and keep me financially and legally secure, and let me direct the use of that money more easily than having to spend it all myself. But that settled, I would fix the problems that personally affect me the most, first:
My mom is presently homeless and in terrible physical health, and her mom (my only living grandparent) likewise; grandma at least can stay with another of her kids for now, but I live in a tiny trailer and can't really help mom. But simultaneously, the first childhood home I can remember, near where I live now, is for sale. I'd buy that house in cash immediately and let mom and grandma live there, with in-home nursing care and a personal assistant to help them with anything they need, and instructions to help enroll them both in creative and social programs (painting classes, book clubs, etc) to help bring them both back into good enough mental shape that I can have positive relations with them again.
I'd buy my dad's underwater land off him, and basically redevelop the entire thing into a proper house, rather than the decaying frankenstein partially rebuild mobile home and unpermitted slapdash structures it's made of now. It would include a lot of garden space, so that dad could grow his own food, which he loves to do already, and which would save him a lot of money. I'd probably also buy him a lot of musical instruments, and let him retire to the music he's always wanted to do his entire life.
And lastly I'd buy the property at the top of the hill from where dad lives now, the ruins of the huge old house I grew up in as a kid, before the mountain fell on it. I'd have the whole place rebuilt the way I remember it, and retire there myself. I'd finally be able to live with my girlfriend, and we'd get married and live happily ever after in there.
Of course, new cars and computers and phones and such for all of the above, and physical and mental health care and therapy for everyone involved until everyone's in as good a shape as possible, but that's all trivial on the scale we're talking about.
I'd then invest enough money in some stable long-term investment like index funds, such that the returns are enough to fund the upkeep of all of the above and a comfortable lifestyle for everyone involved indefinitely. I would then spend my time completing the life's work that I've had to put off until retirement.
I'd probably finish the mod for an ancient video game that I never quite completed, and then make another mod for another ancient game that I never even got to start, just for a warm-up. I would likely hire a bunch of my old friends who wanted careers as video game developers to help me with this, and maybe fund a startup for them to bring their own projects to fruition together and realize their own life dreams.
Then I would finish writing my philosophy book (probably hiring a philosophy student or graduate from the local university to be my sounding-board and fact-checker, since I'm so out of practice in that world now). Then I would probably spend the rest of my life fleshing out the speculative fiction series I've been very slowly developing in one form or another my entire life. I'd probably also study a lot on my own, or take classes or hire teachers when I can't teach myself something from books.
I might want to make the personal-funding investment large enough that I could afford to travel while I do all of this, and then I'd buy a boat and sail from port to port along all the coasts (and up all the rivers) of the world, maybe traveling by horseback up the rivers where boats can't fit. Bringing an entourage with me the whole time to make sure we can communicate with the locals, get us through customs, stay out of trouble with the law, don't miss any important sights, etc. See the world, while doing my life's work, since all I need to write is a laptop and I can do that from any hotel room anywhere.
I can totally see why someone would be furious if someone was threatening to release embarrassing information about them, but what I don't see is why it's not a crime to just release the information, but it is a crime to agree not to release the information (in exchange for something from the other party).
Say I'm in a mostly-empty public place and I see someone who thinks they're alone doing something really embarrassing, like picking their butt or something.
I laugh and say I'm gonna tell everybody what a ridiculous butt-picker they are. That's legal, right?
If they say "no, please don't!", and I take pity and agree not to, that's still legal of course.
But if I don't agree, and they say "I'll give you $20 if you just keep your mouth shut!"...?
If I say "no" and tell anyway, we're back in case one which was legal, but if I say "ok sure"... now that's not legal?
Or maybe that is, but if I say "nah I'm totally telling... unless you make it worth my while not to". Now that's a crime?
I've met plenty of women who've bemoaned their ability to get laid.
Of course, that's because they have standards, and aren't willing to sleep with just anyone.
A man who's willing to sleep with just anyone, including women he finds from attractive, can get laid with the same frequency as women with those same standards.
Seriously, go find a lonely ugly fat girl somewhere, don't call her a lonely ugly fat girl, and insinuate that you would like to have sex with her. Pretty sure shot at getting laid.
That's about what a woman has to do to guarantee she gets laid too. Just drop all standards and be open to fucking anything with a pulse, and bam, boorish contemptible assholes will be all over her, terrible people she hates, but at least she's getting laid right?
It occurs to be that the solution to this problem is simple, but you're not going to like it.
First thing I do when I get my hands on robots is build an army of killbots capable of telling anyone who threatens me to fuck right off. And then I stay here and happily get ignored while my robots service me.
Of course everyone else is going to do the same thing and humanity will go extinct in a robot apocalypse.
Unless we fix the fucking problem ahead of time and avoid the need to have killbots telling people to fuck off and die.
Do not reply to me again you thick-headed stupid fucking troll who apparently has nothing else to do but sit on Slashdot all day (seriously, five fucking pages worth of comments since yesterday?).
Your reading comprehension problems are too fucking thick and your UID is too low, you punk-ass fucking kid. Get a fucking job and shut your ignorant fucking pie hole.
You still don't fucking get it. This isn't hunter-gatherers vs farmers. Read the fucking large print, and get it through your thick fucking skull:
I AM NOT ARGUING AGAINST AUTOMATION.
I AM NOT ARGUING AGAINST AUTOMATION.
I AM NOT ARGUING AGAINST AUTOMATION.
I'm arguing that when everybody shifts to "farming" instead of "hunting and gathering", we can't let some people claim all the arable land and kick everyone else off of it. YES, let's fucking farm instead of hunting and gathering; but NO, you don't get to say that ONLY YOU get to farm, and everyone else has to die because you won't even let them keep hunting and gathering on "your" farmland. IT IS NOT YOUR FUCKING LAND. THE WORLD DOES NOT BELONG TO YOU.
And you especially don't get to say "then get some farmland of your own" while actively hoarding it from everyone else. THEY'RE TRYING TO GET FARMLAND OF THEIR OWN, SO WHEN THE AGRICULTURAL REVOLUTION HAPPENS THEY CAN JOIN IN ON IT TOO, AND YOU'RE KEEPING IT FROM THEM.
Now why don't you fuck off and die yourself you goddamn genocide apologist. I hope someone skins you alive in your sleep you despicable filthy fucking monster.
Slashdot Mirror
If this is the case, can people who aren't on Facebook at all even be rated?
In any case, if Facebook is a prerequisite for registering, can people who aren't on Facebook be rated?
I hope not. All the more reason to be glad I'm not on Facebook, in that case.
Until the machines take over those jobs too. It only takes one person to build CAM models of a selection of little filigrees like that and them bam, the machines can put all the filligree-ers out of work too.
It's very heartening to me to see that you are at least the second libertarian highly-modded in this thread who thinks that something like this is, at the very least, better than what we've got already.
For decades I've been advocating that we could comfortably get rid of a whole bunch of statist intervention and have a really free, libertarian market if we just slapped one simple elegant bandaid over the problem of growing inequality and concentration of wealth that comes about when you do that naively. (I have thoughts on how to do it less-naively and not even require that bandaid, but that's a topic for elsewhere).
Just make sure that nobody can get too far from the mean income, up or down -- that the further away from it you get, the harder you are pulled back toward it, but in the wide ranges nearer to it you're free to succeed or fail on your own -- and then let the market sort out things like paying wages and providing services as efficiently as possible, knowing that even the most desperately needy person is getting at least enough to cover their basic needs, and that the cost of that is being paid only by those most easily able to shoulder it, leaving the bulk of people in the middle classes largely alone and free.
The world desperately needs more reasonable people like you.
I make about twice what the median American makes and I still have plenty of things (mostly a house) I could use more money for and work hard to get more money to get those things.
You can sure well bet that I wouldn't quit this job to live off of $10k a year work-free.
And if I was working part-time at McDonalds, I sure as hell wouldn't quit that job to live off of $10k a year work-free, instead of working AND getting that $10k/year and enjoying all the better quality of living that would afford me.
My mom lives off $10k/year because of disability, and believe me, it is a terrible existence. Even though she's disabled and isn't supposed to be able to work, she still wants to, because she needs more damn money. Of course, with disability, if she gets any job at all, even one paying minimum wage for an hour a day, she loses all her benefits. With a basic income, people like that would be allowed to work to better their lives, unlike with the perverse incentives current programs offer.
I'd rather have a completely free-market economy with ONE simple elegant bandaid slapped on to stem runaway class division and concentration of wealth, than the statist mish-mash of different programs dictating how people must live their lives if they want a little hand with surviving.
Exactly, so we get a negative feedback loop that diminishes economic activity and wealth. People are working for money building things that people buy with the money they get from building other things and so on; that's how the economy works and how people's needs get met. If we replace the people building things with machines building things, then those machines would also have to do the buying of things (and be paid money with which to do so) to justify their own existence, which they're not going to do, so you'll end up with people not working, having no money, not building things, and nobody buying them; and machines not working and building things either, and everything stops. That is the problem.
Since paying the machines so that they can go buy the products (like we used to pay the people the machines replaced) isn't going to happen, one possible solution is that, even once machines are doing the work, we keep paying the people (who aren't working anymore) so they can keep buying the stuff that the machines are making, and use the money made by those machines to fund that paying of people so that they can keep buying the stuff that the machines make, and so on. In the end it's just like the pre-machine economy, except that people don't have to work. Which was the point of inventing machines in the first place, wasn't it?
Not if the people who need them can't buy them because they have no money because they have no jobs because machines do that work now...
At least you've got it better than my generation, who are still paying into social security and pretty much guaranteed, whether this basic income happens or not, that it's not going to be there when we're old enough to collect. Instead, all our SS payments will be funding your SS income, if you still get it... the way that your payments were actually to fund your parents' income, and so on since the beginning. SS is not a savings account, and though I agree that it's a really unfair broken way of doing things, the first generation of people who got SS got it without paying anything in, so the last generation, whenever it ends, are going to be totally fucked, and it's that first generation who fucked them.
If we do this by giving everyone half of (the average income minus their own income), then we basically guarantee that nobody makes less than half of average, we cost average people nothing to pay for it, and the burden on the rich who do pay for it scales with the inequality of income distribution automatically. In a market where income distribution was close to uniform already, this kind of distribution would automatically scale back to almost nothing. If a tiny handful of people get almost all the money and most people get almost none, then that tiny handful will be paying a lot to a lot of people. It creates a spring-like centerward pressure on everyone; people near average are barely affected at all, the further from average you get the harded it pulls you back toward average.
And you'll be getting it, just under a different program.
Take all those 'eliminates' he said and turn them into 'consolidate' instead. This is one program to replace all those other programs.
It has nothing to do with the political spectrum. The "liberal" in "liberal arts" refers to freemen, i.e. full citizens, not slaves. The classical liberal arts were the things needed to conduct life as a free citizen: grammar, logic, and rhetoric (the most basic three, the "trivium", whence our term "trivial"), and four kinds of mathematics: arithmetic, geometry, "music" (meaning harmonics) and "astronomy" (meaning dynamics).
Modern use of the term to mean "non-STEM" is just misuse of the language.
The US is both a republic and a (representative) democracy. The two are not contrary, they are orthogonal. Besides democratic republics like the US, you can have democratic non-republics like the UK, non-democratic republics like North Korea, and non-democratic non-republics like Saudi Arabia.
Not when it first appeared, whereupon it was fully expanded and took up the entire front page. And also had red instead of the usual green trim.
First things's first, I'd hire an accountant, a lawyer, and an executive assistant, have them all keep each other in check and keep me financially and legally secure, and let me direct the use of that money more easily than having to spend it all myself. But that settled, I would fix the problems that personally affect me the most, first:
My mom is presently homeless and in terrible physical health, and her mom (my only living grandparent) likewise; grandma at least can stay with another of her kids for now, but I live in a tiny trailer and can't really help mom. But simultaneously, the first childhood home I can remember, near where I live now, is for sale. I'd buy that house in cash immediately and let mom and grandma live there, with in-home nursing care and a personal assistant to help them with anything they need, and instructions to help enroll them both in creative and social programs (painting classes, book clubs, etc) to help bring them both back into good enough mental shape that I can have positive relations with them again.
I'd buy my dad's underwater land off him, and basically redevelop the entire thing into a proper house, rather than the decaying frankenstein partially rebuild mobile home and unpermitted slapdash structures it's made of now. It would include a lot of garden space, so that dad could grow his own food, which he loves to do already, and which would save him a lot of money. I'd probably also buy him a lot of musical instruments, and let him retire to the music he's always wanted to do his entire life.
And lastly I'd buy the property at the top of the hill from where dad lives now, the ruins of the huge old house I grew up in as a kid, before the mountain fell on it. I'd have the whole place rebuilt the way I remember it, and retire there myself. I'd finally be able to live with my girlfriend, and we'd get married and live happily ever after in there.
Of course, new cars and computers and phones and such for all of the above, and physical and mental health care and therapy for everyone involved until everyone's in as good a shape as possible, but that's all trivial on the scale we're talking about.
I'd then invest enough money in some stable long-term investment like index funds, such that the returns are enough to fund the upkeep of all of the above and a comfortable lifestyle for everyone involved indefinitely. I would then spend my time completing the life's work that I've had to put off until retirement.
I'd probably finish the mod for an ancient video game that I never quite completed, and then make another mod for another ancient game that I never even got to start, just for a warm-up. I would likely hire a bunch of my old friends who wanted careers as video game developers to help me with this, and maybe fund a startup for them to bring their own projects to fruition together and realize their own life dreams.
Then I would finish writing my philosophy book (probably hiring a philosophy student or graduate from the local university to be my sounding-board and fact-checker, since I'm so out of practice in that world now). Then I would probably spend the rest of my life fleshing out the speculative fiction series I've been very slowly developing in one form or another my entire life. I'd probably also study a lot on my own, or take classes or hire teachers when I can't teach myself something from books.
I might want to make the personal-funding investment large enough that I could afford to travel while I do all of this, and then I'd buy a boat and sail from port to port along all the coasts (and up all the rivers) of the world, maybe traveling by horseback up the rivers where boats can't fit. Bringing an entourage with me the whole time to make sure we can communicate with the locals, get us through customs, stay out of trouble with the law, don't miss any important sights, etc. See the world, while doing my life's work, since all I need to write is a laptop and I can do that from any hotel room anywhere.
Any money left over would g
I can totally see why someone would be furious if someone was threatening to release embarrassing information about them, but what I don't see is why it's not a crime to just release the information, but it is a crime to agree not to release the information (in exchange for something from the other party).
Say I'm in a mostly-empty public place and I see someone who thinks they're alone doing something really embarrassing, like picking their butt or something.
I laugh and say I'm gonna tell everybody what a ridiculous butt-picker they are. That's legal, right?
If they say "no, please don't!", and I take pity and agree not to, that's still legal of course.
But if I don't agree, and they say "I'll give you $20 if you just keep your mouth shut!"...?
If I say "no" and tell anyway, we're back in case one which was legal, but if I say "ok sure"... now that's not legal?
Or maybe that is, but if I say "nah I'm totally telling... unless you make it worth my while not to". Now that's a crime?
argh, why don't I use preview
"bemoaned their inability to get laid"
"finds far from attractive"
I've met plenty of women who've bemoaned their ability to get laid.
Of course, that's because they have standards, and aren't willing to sleep with just anyone.
A man who's willing to sleep with just anyone, including women he finds from attractive, can get laid with the same frequency as women with those same standards.
Seriously, go find a lonely ugly fat girl somewhere, don't call her a lonely ugly fat girl, and insinuate that you would like to have sex with her. Pretty sure shot at getting laid.
That's about what a woman has to do to guarantee she gets laid too. Just drop all standards and be open to fucking anything with a pulse, and bam, boorish contemptible assholes will be all over her, terrible people she hates, but at least she's getting laid right?
what part of don't fucking reply to me again don't you understand you dense self-entitled motherfucker
Thank you, it's nice to hear I'm not the only person who thinks this guy is batshit fucking insane.
It occurs to be that the solution to this problem is simple, but you're not going to like it.
First thing I do when I get my hands on robots is build an army of killbots capable of telling anyone who threatens me to fuck right off. And then I stay here and happily get ignored while my robots service me.
Of course everyone else is going to do the same thing and humanity will go extinct in a robot apocalypse.
Unless we fix the fucking problem ahead of time and avoid the need to have killbots telling people to fuck off and die.
Or your rent, or your mortgage, or your property taxes...
Yep. He's a fucking genocide apologist, and someone should track him down and kill him in his sleep. As slowly and painfully as possible, please.
Do not reply to me again you thick-headed stupid fucking troll who apparently has nothing else to do but sit on Slashdot all day (seriously, five fucking pages worth of comments since yesterday?).
Your reading comprehension problems are too fucking thick and your UID is too low, you punk-ass fucking kid. Get a fucking job and shut your ignorant fucking pie hole.
You still don't fucking get it. This isn't hunter-gatherers vs farmers. Read the fucking large print, and get it through your thick fucking skull:
I AM NOT ARGUING AGAINST AUTOMATION.
I AM NOT ARGUING AGAINST AUTOMATION.
I AM NOT ARGUING AGAINST AUTOMATION.
I'm arguing that when everybody shifts to "farming" instead of "hunting and gathering", we can't let some people claim all the arable land and kick everyone else off of it. YES, let's fucking farm instead of hunting and gathering; but NO, you don't get to say that ONLY YOU get to farm, and everyone else has to die because you won't even let them keep hunting and gathering on "your" farmland. IT IS NOT YOUR FUCKING LAND. THE WORLD DOES NOT BELONG TO YOU.
And you especially don't get to say "then get some farmland of your own" while actively hoarding it from everyone else. THEY'RE TRYING TO GET FARMLAND OF THEIR OWN, SO WHEN THE AGRICULTURAL REVOLUTION HAPPENS THEY CAN JOIN IN ON IT TOO, AND YOU'RE KEEPING IT FROM THEM.
Now why don't you fuck off and die yourself you goddamn genocide apologist. I hope someone skins you alive in your sleep you despicable filthy fucking monster.