Operative words there are 'so far'. This is some Dr. Evil style stuff, intentionally being criminal on a massive scale for profit, and if Volkswagen does it and gets away with it this long, other car companies must surely ask what they have to do in order to compete in the market with this sort of monster.
Race to the bottom (in diesel cars): they ALL have to start lying like rugs and making computers that cheat on tests, as much or worse than VW was doing.
That's unfettered market capitalism, and that is what you get. Alternative is regulation and holding somebody accountable.
Oh no no. Nearly everybody wants to be creatives. Look at the music business, game development: those markets are both racing to the bottom and being flooded at exponential rates. These are not ways to earn a living.
Even without basic income, people are stampeding to that stuff out of desperation, making those markets ugly. It'd be nice if gaming, for instance, had fewer mobile game developers working like rabid weasels on how to 'monetize' as much as they possibly can. Everything's getting affected by the desperation everywhere. The jobs aren't there either: not enough of them.
If you pay attention to austerity politics, they are all making big noises about inflation, but in every case they're losing more in GDP than they save in 'austerity'. It's a trap that causes economies to shrink and die, and we're damn lucky the USA hasn't wholeheartedly bought in to this thinking.
Already being done, on a massive scale. Not working.
You're advocating for basically a feedback loop, a way for a functioning system to flip out and cease to function.
Pretty much the whole concept of Basic Income is to say that some aggregations of capital are superfluous. You don't 'need' a billion dollars as an individual. Nothing about you is 'worth' that kind of power and influence, especially since the people who get that kind of money tend to be psychos.
Therefore, the superfluous capital is nothing but a prize. So here, have a trophy cup saying you beat everybody else, and then the government through taxation seizes your superfluous capital and takes it and uses it. (It's proposing to give it to your customers, so go and sell more stuff to them, keep it moving)
FOSS is about accumulated information and tools ALSO being in circulation. You'll still have your education and your contacts, plus your contacts will also be taxed like you so you'll still be in the same relative position you were before (this is why Donald Trump wants to jack up taxes on the rich: winning is relative, plus he doesn't respect the rich people he's personally seen, and thinks they're losers)
Enough losers sitting at home playing XBox and smoking weed, and you'll probably be able to start a business developing video games and actually make appreciable sales. Even smoking weed you'll eventually get bored if all you do is play video games.
And if you, too, have basic income you can afford to develop your dream video game without worrying too hard about whether it'll return on investment. Otherwise you can be compelled not to do it, because the chances of market success (in the non-basic-income world with many fewer customers who have less time to shop) are far too low: without Basic Income, if you're really smart you have to NOT start that business, it's too risky.
Replacing the commercially available food supply with processed stuff made out of a scientifically calculated, tested blend of sugar, salt and fat to promote the most extreme consumption (and thus market success) is kind of a separate issue.
Maybe if we did Basic Income we could then wipe out corn subsidies, HFCS would go to its natural price, and the pressure to dump unhealthy crap into processed food could just be ordinary market pressure to compete, rather than that plus massive subsidies to the corn syrup industry?
I know, crazy talk. Still, by African standards, we eat POISON all day long. And export it, too.
Yes, indeed it is shorthand, but there's not a lot of point in saying 'the insanely wealthy tend to have capital abstracted away in just as insanely overleveraged financial instruments and are constantly trying to strike a balance between impressive/risky rates of return, and the danger of default: assuming they won't just be made whole by rich-person socialism, also known as quantitative easing' http://www.washingtonsblog.com...
How about we just call it 'cayman islands' for short?
Then those jobs become more lucrative because supply for filling them has dried up.
Might even become well worth doing, if they're that nasty and unpopular. You could do quite well taking such a job. Or, they'd simply be replaced by automation.
On the contrary. He's proposing to spend money on housing and food, forever (well, until he dies) and I can't fault the library idea: more and more, every form of human expression is free and attention is the only currency. You won't ever survive through working in game development, music, art etc. etc. because even to get attention is doing very well, much less getting paid.
Give me enough of these bored people living in a small apartment, eating and reading, and I will start a business selling them better food, or I'll write books and see if I can get the people to buy them. Unlike how things are today, they'll have a bit of superfluous capital and could spend money on such things, in small ways.
I will make the things people live a decent life WITH, and if everybody gets given the money to do that, hell, I could probably do without the Basic Income myself. I'm surviving self-employed even now, and this isn't an abstract concept to me: it might save my butt:)
And if I have the Basic Income too, I can take bigger chances. There's stuff I want to do. It amazes me how many people think the world will just grind to a stop if 'everybody' becomes a pure consumer, with disposable income, but outright stops doing all the things they used to do.
Some people just are not entrepreneurs. Basic Income is an entrepreneur's paradise. Suddenly everybody has money to spend, and many of them are not entering the market to compete against you! Think of it as 'world of consumers'. That's capitalism (and with very minimal regulation: no administrative overhead)
As the bar (between poor and insanely rich) keeps moving, the concept of 'survival of the fittest' changes in relevance and effectiveness.
In a world where everybody needs to dig ditches and pick cotton and grow crops, almost anybody is going to be able to exchange some effort and time for capital (in a very small way). To drop out of that system is super hard: what you have to do in order to join the ranks of the workers is little more than show up and use your muscles for a while. There's lots of demand for labor.
In a world that's all robots and computers where fifteen people do the work of thirty thousand (think Instagram vs. Polaroid, that sort of thing) or a bunch of robots do the work of a hundred thousand, almost nobody is in a position to come out on the right end of that 'survival' equation. They are needed to purchase the products created by the robots and computers and fifteen-people corporations worth billions, but they do not have labor to do. In order to keep up with that poverty level, they have to do more and more, and the people worth billions have to do less and less.
At that point, survival of the fittest is a really stupid idea because you're pitting humans against computers, robots, and corporations.
Goodbye humans: and robots don't buy goods for themselves (yet!)
So forget the whole survival of the fittest/motivation argument. It depends on pre-industrial industry efficiencies, such as existed in Ben Franklin's day. Human labor was the electricity of the day.
No, that's not true. I'm not sure where you're even getting that (citation needed!). Generally the argument is that the 1% and 0.001% are amassing a huger and huger amount of the wealth and that this is GOOD and righteous (which I strongly disagree)
I'm not even sure where you're getting this idea unless you're just making it up to feel better about something. Every other side of the discussion seems united in the perception that it's a runaway train, a feedback loop.
Blyth is primarily concerned with the fallacy of austerity, and is very in touch with macroeconomics as it currently exists in the world. His thinking is incredibly relevant to this discussion. Effectively, if we push basic income policies it's a form of economic stimulus that will tend to make the USA's economy boom (we are already doing better than the Eurozone) which places us in a better competitive position relative to other countries.
It came from presumably your employer. Where did they get it? They made things and consumers of some kind bought the things.
Where did the consumers get the money to spend?
This is where your concept fails. The basic income idea is so simple and obvious. It says 'okay, let's continue to have a relatively unregulated capital-based system, and this is where the money comes from'. It's nothing more than a negative feedback loop on a variable that would otherwise go into a runaway condition and crash the program.
If you don't believe 'capital' is going into a runaway condition and crashing capitalism, then you clearly do not run your own business and rely on customers having money to spend.
Robot unemployment is the single biggest argument for Basic Income.
Money's the way to have an economy through which capital is exchanged for activity and resources. If robots and automation (and the connectivity of the internet: think about how much easier it is to find free options for things when you can really get busy googling for that one guy somewhere in the world who's doing it FOSS) lead to widespread inability to work at all, the mechanism for 'exchanging capital for stuff' needs to still function.
Therefore, you have to be supplying it to the robot-unemployed consumer SO THAT THEY can buy things and funnel that capital up to the rentiers and controllers of property/intellectual property/innovators/etc... without doing that, the captains of industry may 'deserve' all the capital but no more is entering the system. It becomes meaningless if it hasn't already.
We're already past the point where effort and merit translate to capital in any direct way: capital translates to more capital and that's all. There are no things to do that can enter into the system if you're not already in it. Total disconnect in inventing, music, game development soon it will be, total disconnect in willingness to do manual labor. Robots are better at that even than human slaves. Computers will soon be better at evolving business models than driven brilliant nerds in executive positions at Amazon.
We cannot stay ahead of this system with effort, brilliance, blood or even death.
The only solution is changing the rules of the system, with Basic Income, and returning capital to serving as a mechanism of exchange. It can't work as an engine of competition because it kills the host: awarding people percentages of $1000 by effort keeps people working, but awarding people percentages of $0 doesn't. It stops being theoretically possible to function in such a system.
Because it doesn't scale. Money has to keep moving or civilization collapses, and when you guys that turn the screws and get ALL the money keep it, it gets sucked out of the economy and stuck in the Cayman Islands or some such place.
This has happened before and was called the Gilded Age and led to the Great Depression. You guys simply don't produce as much economic activity as a thousand poor people each with a thousandth of the money.
Nations that don't figure this out are gonna die, so it's kind of up to them what they do about it.
It's really not about simple social value, or people in general being motivated only by money.
Mostly it's about the ability of local concentrations of capital to distort the situation so that there's a stick as well as the carrot: you can't just urge people to make more money, you have to also be able to burn everything else to the ground and salt the earth and force people to go your way.
This is what happens now. Stuff gets 'disruptive' and jobs are wiped out and it becomes literally impossible to survive in our society where 'go and compete in a labor market because this determines your fitness as an organism' is the moral law above all others.
We've already got enough capital in the world that we could be living your Star Trek future, with everybody just tending the robots and replicators and exploring the galaxy. We choose not to because the currently trendy conceptual system, advanced freemarket capitalism, decrees that the unfit shall perish so the half-fit will fight harder to avoid joining 'em. It's a moral system based on axioms taken as articles of faith. People who would happily raise and care for a puppy will recoil in horror at the idea of doing likewise for a human, though the human might be capable of so much more if properly reared.
Instead, society as it's currently implemented is about seeking out failures and making them die. That's a choice. So, the desperation produces by this inevitably causes any intelligent person to become obsessed with hoarding money. It is the litmus test telling society whether you deserve to live or die, and we keep raising the bar and claiming it's for the greater good. Depends on what your moral system defines as 'good'.
The logical extension of all this is, everybody is either an Amazon employee or dead of starvation. It's hard to find a more 'virtuous' bunch under this moral system than Amazonians, but when you investigate them, the holes in the theory begin to show through. Delivering toilet paper three seconds faster and half a cent cheaper is that important that you should throw away a society to do it?
Well, this or it might tell you that society has been distorted to the point where you WILL NOT SURVIVE unless you join the race to the bottom, doing your work for something like Uber because they fully intend to starve and kill anything else in the sector you're training for.
This distorts the 'market' for your intellectual labor.
In a world where you can choose what you're going to do, people have a certain flexibility and can opt for a humbler, cozier existence doing what they care about. If pockets of capital and influence grow so powerful that they can make a corporate decision like 'let's buy everybody working in this field and then kill every other place they could possibly work at because it's competition', then an intelligent person working in the field might correctly observe that they don't have a choice: to use their particular skills they've got to go with the winning 'competitor'.
Not because they're that committed to aiding that 'competitor', but because they've made an estimation of the 'competitor's power and figured out whether they can survive as a researcher anywhere else, in the field that competitor is buying up with their exaggerated, limitless capital.
Meanwhile, the stock market manufactures more capital for this competitor entirely based on how much they can arbitrage the situation: if they are in a position to gut a field of research, they must do so and are rewarded with the very capital with which to do so. It's a feedback loop.
Or you could graduate with your student debt from your PhD and go work for McDonalds. Provided your PhD wasn't in designing robots to replace workers at McDonalds. Again: an intelligent person might see no option but to get bought up by the biggest poacher, which is funded by valuation based on how poach-ey they're willing to be. You could have a company specifically buying up a research sector in order to kill it, to pay the people NOT to research further.
Nope, absolutely not. It's grotesquely inefficient and in this case we're talking about valuable research getting taken out of the 'market' by pockets of exaggerated capital and relegated to probably little better than a pyramid scheme, a high-tech Enron built of nothing but stock valuation based upon willingness to break laws to 'disrupt'. It's a lot easier to break stuff than it is to build lasting structures. Academia and the mass of scientific discovery is such a lasting structure, and corporate pillaging of science is breaking stuff.
It'll produce 'innovation' about as reliable and lasting as a Google skunkworks project. Think about that for a moment. Of all the tech monsters which is known for actually producing amazing, useful things one might see out of academia, and then scuttling them for no reason, completely unanswerable to anybody? Google. Now consider that something like Uber is WORSE by a big margin.
No, absolutely not. It's experientally proven by now that trying to directly link achievement with reward and resources leads to nothing but a useless snake pit of evilness where 'exploits' always beat 'the most potential'.
My pet theory on why this is, is that it's related to the concept of the genetic algorithm, where progress evolves in distinct plateaus and allowing the genetic 'soup' to be dominated by a winning organism means death and stultification. We're looking at situations where our current society actively pushes for the currently most fit organism to wipe out everything else, at which point there's no further crossover/evolution because everything not 'fit' has been obliterated.
That's not how science works, it's not how evolution works and it's not how progress works. If you're planning an economy and expect to actually thrive, the fit can take care of themselves, and your biggest interest is in growing additional vectors for further progress beyond what's currently possible. These can only exist as parts of unfit organisms, not yet combined into their 'final form'.
You realize this is becoming harder to do, than keeping a Linux system working? And I'm a Mac guy with no special reason to advocate for Linux.
It just seems like the funky details of resisting Windows 10 are starting to look more like bleepy gearhead console incantations just like if you had a non-working Linux system and had to hunt down the messy details of what parts to adjust.
Except that in your case it's enemy action, not entropy.
Hey, it's a luxury brand walled garden but it's also not Microsoft. I'm using it and I'm quite happy with it as a rule. Spent a lot of largely trouble-free years on Apple stuff.
My brother's a rightwing corporate programmer and he has recently bailed on Microsoft and is trying much harder than ever before to get into Linux. He's been MS guy for decades. it's interesting to see (encouraging, even). I can't imagine he'll react sympathetically to this news that MS is basically force-updating Windows 10 to people.
Slashdot Mirror
Operative words there are 'so far'. This is some Dr. Evil style stuff, intentionally being criminal on a massive scale for profit, and if Volkswagen does it and gets away with it this long, other car companies must surely ask what they have to do in order to compete in the market with this sort of monster.
Race to the bottom (in diesel cars): they ALL have to start lying like rugs and making computers that cheat on tests, as much or worse than VW was doing.
That's unfettered market capitalism, and that is what you get. Alternative is regulation and holding somebody accountable.
Sounds nasty but not super hard. How many tens or hundreds of dollars an hour would it take to get you to supplement your basic income by doing that?
Might be a really time-efficient way to get a bunch of money, think about it.
Oh no no. Nearly everybody wants to be creatives. Look at the music business, game development: those markets are both racing to the bottom and being flooded at exponential rates. These are not ways to earn a living.
Even without basic income, people are stampeding to that stuff out of desperation, making those markets ugly. It'd be nice if gaming, for instance, had fewer mobile game developers working like rabid weasels on how to 'monetize' as much as they possibly can. Everything's getting affected by the desperation everywhere. The jobs aren't there either: not enough of them.
If you pay attention to austerity politics, they are all making big noises about inflation, but in every case they're losing more in GDP than they save in 'austerity'. It's a trap that causes economies to shrink and die, and we're damn lucky the USA hasn't wholeheartedly bought in to this thinking.
Already being done, on a massive scale. Not working.
You're advocating for basically a feedback loop, a way for a functioning system to flip out and cease to function.
Pretty much the whole concept of Basic Income is to say that some aggregations of capital are superfluous. You don't 'need' a billion dollars as an individual. Nothing about you is 'worth' that kind of power and influence, especially since the people who get that kind of money tend to be psychos.
Therefore, the superfluous capital is nothing but a prize. So here, have a trophy cup saying you beat everybody else, and then the government through taxation seizes your superfluous capital and takes it and uses it. (It's proposing to give it to your customers, so go and sell more stuff to them, keep it moving)
FOSS is about accumulated information and tools ALSO being in circulation. You'll still have your education and your contacts, plus your contacts will also be taxed like you so you'll still be in the same relative position you were before (this is why Donald Trump wants to jack up taxes on the rich: winning is relative, plus he doesn't respect the rich people he's personally seen, and thinks they're losers)
Enough losers sitting at home playing XBox and smoking weed, and you'll probably be able to start a business developing video games and actually make appreciable sales. Even smoking weed you'll eventually get bored if all you do is play video games.
And if you, too, have basic income you can afford to develop your dream video game without worrying too hard about whether it'll return on investment. Otherwise you can be compelled not to do it, because the chances of market success (in the non-basic-income world with many fewer customers who have less time to shop) are far too low: without Basic Income, if you're really smart you have to NOT start that business, it's too risky.
Replacing the commercially available food supply with processed stuff made out of a scientifically calculated, tested blend of sugar, salt and fat to promote the most extreme consumption (and thus market success) is kind of a separate issue.
Maybe if we did Basic Income we could then wipe out corn subsidies, HFCS would go to its natural price, and the pressure to dump unhealthy crap into processed food could just be ordinary market pressure to compete, rather than that plus massive subsidies to the corn syrup industry?
I know, crazy talk. Still, by African standards, we eat POISON all day long. And export it, too.
Yes, indeed it is shorthand, but there's not a lot of point in saying 'the insanely wealthy tend to have capital abstracted away in just as insanely overleveraged financial instruments and are constantly trying to strike a balance between impressive/risky rates of return, and the danger of default: assuming they won't just be made whole by rich-person socialism, also known as quantitative easing' http://www.washingtonsblog.com...
How about we just call it 'cayman islands' for short?
Then those jobs become more lucrative because supply for filling them has dried up.
Might even become well worth doing, if they're that nasty and unpopular. You could do quite well taking such a job. Or, they'd simply be replaced by automation.
On the contrary. He's proposing to spend money on housing and food, forever (well, until he dies) and I can't fault the library idea: more and more, every form of human expression is free and attention is the only currency. You won't ever survive through working in game development, music, art etc. etc. because even to get attention is doing very well, much less getting paid.
Give me enough of these bored people living in a small apartment, eating and reading, and I will start a business selling them better food, or I'll write books and see if I can get the people to buy them. Unlike how things are today, they'll have a bit of superfluous capital and could spend money on such things, in small ways.
I will make the things people live a decent life WITH, and if everybody gets given the money to do that, hell, I could probably do without the Basic Income myself. I'm surviving self-employed even now, and this isn't an abstract concept to me: it might save my butt :)
And if I have the Basic Income too, I can take bigger chances. There's stuff I want to do. It amazes me how many people think the world will just grind to a stop if 'everybody' becomes a pure consumer, with disposable income, but outright stops doing all the things they used to do.
Some people just are not entrepreneurs. Basic Income is an entrepreneur's paradise. Suddenly everybody has money to spend, and many of them are not entering the market to compete against you! Think of it as 'world of consumers'. That's capitalism (and with very minimal regulation: no administrative overhead)
As the bar (between poor and insanely rich) keeps moving, the concept of 'survival of the fittest' changes in relevance and effectiveness.
In a world where everybody needs to dig ditches and pick cotton and grow crops, almost anybody is going to be able to exchange some effort and time for capital (in a very small way). To drop out of that system is super hard: what you have to do in order to join the ranks of the workers is little more than show up and use your muscles for a while. There's lots of demand for labor.
In a world that's all robots and computers where fifteen people do the work of thirty thousand (think Instagram vs. Polaroid, that sort of thing) or a bunch of robots do the work of a hundred thousand, almost nobody is in a position to come out on the right end of that 'survival' equation. They are needed to purchase the products created by the robots and computers and fifteen-people corporations worth billions, but they do not have labor to do. In order to keep up with that poverty level, they have to do more and more, and the people worth billions have to do less and less.
At that point, survival of the fittest is a really stupid idea because you're pitting humans against computers, robots, and corporations.
Goodbye humans: and robots don't buy goods for themselves (yet!)
So forget the whole survival of the fittest/motivation argument. It depends on pre-industrial industry efficiencies, such as existed in Ben Franklin's day. Human labor was the electricity of the day.
No, that's not true. I'm not sure where you're even getting that (citation needed!). Generally the argument is that the 1% and 0.001% are amassing a huger and huger amount of the wealth and that this is GOOD and righteous (which I strongly disagree)
I'm not even sure where you're getting this idea unless you're just making it up to feel better about something. Every other side of the discussion seems united in the perception that it's a runaway train, a feedback loop.
Try some Mark Blyth: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Blyth is primarily concerned with the fallacy of austerity, and is very in touch with macroeconomics as it currently exists in the world. His thinking is incredibly relevant to this discussion. Effectively, if we push basic income policies it's a form of economic stimulus that will tend to make the USA's economy boom (we are already doing better than the Eurozone) which places us in a better competitive position relative to other countries.
Where did the money in your pocket come from?
It came from presumably your employer. Where did they get it? They made things and consumers of some kind bought the things.
Where did the consumers get the money to spend?
This is where your concept fails. The basic income idea is so simple and obvious. It says 'okay, let's continue to have a relatively unregulated capital-based system, and this is where the money comes from'. It's nothing more than a negative feedback loop on a variable that would otherwise go into a runaway condition and crash the program.
If you don't believe 'capital' is going into a runaway condition and crashing capitalism, then you clearly do not run your own business and rely on customers having money to spend.
Robot unemployment is the single biggest argument for Basic Income.
Money's the way to have an economy through which capital is exchanged for activity and resources. If robots and automation (and the connectivity of the internet: think about how much easier it is to find free options for things when you can really get busy googling for that one guy somewhere in the world who's doing it FOSS) lead to widespread inability to work at all, the mechanism for 'exchanging capital for stuff' needs to still function.
Therefore, you have to be supplying it to the robot-unemployed consumer SO THAT THEY can buy things and funnel that capital up to the rentiers and controllers of property/intellectual property/innovators/etc... without doing that, the captains of industry may 'deserve' all the capital but no more is entering the system. It becomes meaningless if it hasn't already.
We're already past the point where effort and merit translate to capital in any direct way: capital translates to more capital and that's all. There are no things to do that can enter into the system if you're not already in it. Total disconnect in inventing, music, game development soon it will be, total disconnect in willingness to do manual labor. Robots are better at that even than human slaves. Computers will soon be better at evolving business models than driven brilliant nerds in executive positions at Amazon.
We cannot stay ahead of this system with effort, brilliance, blood or even death.
The only solution is changing the rules of the system, with Basic Income, and returning capital to serving as a mechanism of exchange. It can't work as an engine of competition because it kills the host: awarding people percentages of $1000 by effort keeps people working, but awarding people percentages of $0 doesn't. It stops being theoretically possible to function in such a system.
Because it doesn't scale. Money has to keep moving or civilization collapses, and when you guys that turn the screws and get ALL the money keep it, it gets sucked out of the economy and stuck in the Cayman Islands or some such place.
This has happened before and was called the Gilded Age and led to the Great Depression. You guys simply don't produce as much economic activity as a thousand poor people each with a thousandth of the money.
Nations that don't figure this out are gonna die, so it's kind of up to them what they do about it.
Oh, you mean 'insightful'?
Citation needed...
unless your child is a dog. Specifically, a big dog. 'cos, let the big dog eat :)
He'll build a wall. Out of Mexicans.
It's really not about simple social value, or people in general being motivated only by money.
Mostly it's about the ability of local concentrations of capital to distort the situation so that there's a stick as well as the carrot: you can't just urge people to make more money, you have to also be able to burn everything else to the ground and salt the earth and force people to go your way.
This is what happens now. Stuff gets 'disruptive' and jobs are wiped out and it becomes literally impossible to survive in our society where 'go and compete in a labor market because this determines your fitness as an organism' is the moral law above all others.
We've already got enough capital in the world that we could be living your Star Trek future, with everybody just tending the robots and replicators and exploring the galaxy. We choose not to because the currently trendy conceptual system, advanced freemarket capitalism, decrees that the unfit shall perish so the half-fit will fight harder to avoid joining 'em. It's a moral system based on axioms taken as articles of faith. People who would happily raise and care for a puppy will recoil in horror at the idea of doing likewise for a human, though the human might be capable of so much more if properly reared.
Instead, society as it's currently implemented is about seeking out failures and making them die. That's a choice. So, the desperation produces by this inevitably causes any intelligent person to become obsessed with hoarding money. It is the litmus test telling society whether you deserve to live or die, and we keep raising the bar and claiming it's for the greater good. Depends on what your moral system defines as 'good'.
The logical extension of all this is, everybody is either an Amazon employee or dead of starvation. It's hard to find a more 'virtuous' bunch under this moral system than Amazonians, but when you investigate them, the holes in the theory begin to show through. Delivering toilet paper three seconds faster and half a cent cheaper is that important that you should throw away a society to do it?
Well, this or it might tell you that society has been distorted to the point where you WILL NOT SURVIVE unless you join the race to the bottom, doing your work for something like Uber because they fully intend to starve and kill anything else in the sector you're training for.
This distorts the 'market' for your intellectual labor.
In a world where you can choose what you're going to do, people have a certain flexibility and can opt for a humbler, cozier existence doing what they care about. If pockets of capital and influence grow so powerful that they can make a corporate decision like 'let's buy everybody working in this field and then kill every other place they could possibly work at because it's competition', then an intelligent person working in the field might correctly observe that they don't have a choice: to use their particular skills they've got to go with the winning 'competitor'.
Not because they're that committed to aiding that 'competitor', but because they've made an estimation of the 'competitor's power and figured out whether they can survive as a researcher anywhere else, in the field that competitor is buying up with their exaggerated, limitless capital.
Meanwhile, the stock market manufactures more capital for this competitor entirely based on how much they can arbitrage the situation: if they are in a position to gut a field of research, they must do so and are rewarded with the very capital with which to do so. It's a feedback loop.
Or you could graduate with your student debt from your PhD and go work for McDonalds. Provided your PhD wasn't in designing robots to replace workers at McDonalds. Again: an intelligent person might see no option but to get bought up by the biggest poacher, which is funded by valuation based on how poach-ey they're willing to be. You could have a company specifically buying up a research sector in order to kill it, to pay the people NOT to research further.
Nope, absolutely not. It's grotesquely inefficient and in this case we're talking about valuable research getting taken out of the 'market' by pockets of exaggerated capital and relegated to probably little better than a pyramid scheme, a high-tech Enron built of nothing but stock valuation based upon willingness to break laws to 'disrupt'. It's a lot easier to break stuff than it is to build lasting structures. Academia and the mass of scientific discovery is such a lasting structure, and corporate pillaging of science is breaking stuff.
It'll produce 'innovation' about as reliable and lasting as a Google skunkworks project. Think about that for a moment. Of all the tech monsters which is known for actually producing amazing, useful things one might see out of academia, and then scuttling them for no reason, completely unanswerable to anybody? Google. Now consider that something like Uber is WORSE by a big margin.
No, absolutely not. It's experientally proven by now that trying to directly link achievement with reward and resources leads to nothing but a useless snake pit of evilness where 'exploits' always beat 'the most potential'.
My pet theory on why this is, is that it's related to the concept of the genetic algorithm, where progress evolves in distinct plateaus and allowing the genetic 'soup' to be dominated by a winning organism means death and stultification. We're looking at situations where our current society actively pushes for the currently most fit organism to wipe out everything else, at which point there's no further crossover/evolution because everything not 'fit' has been obliterated.
That's not how science works, it's not how evolution works and it's not how progress works. If you're planning an economy and expect to actually thrive, the fit can take care of themselves, and your biggest interest is in growing additional vectors for further progress beyond what's currently possible. These can only exist as parts of unfit organisms, not yet combined into their 'final form'.
You realize this is becoming harder to do, than keeping a Linux system working? And I'm a Mac guy with no special reason to advocate for Linux.
It just seems like the funky details of resisting Windows 10 are starting to look more like bleepy gearhead console incantations just like if you had a non-working Linux system and had to hunt down the messy details of what parts to adjust.
Except that in your case it's enemy action, not entropy.
Hey, it's a luxury brand walled garden but it's also not Microsoft. I'm using it and I'm quite happy with it as a rule. Spent a lot of largely trouble-free years on Apple stuff.
My brother's a rightwing corporate programmer and he has recently bailed on Microsoft and is trying much harder than ever before to get into Linux. He's been MS guy for decades. it's interesting to see (encouraging, even). I can't imagine he'll react sympathetically to this news that MS is basically force-updating Windows 10 to people.