Same way outsourcing was proven to work sometimes, I think the coolness of youth will also be re-evaluated at some point and the experience of old will be appreciated more.
Your comment just made the following occur to me: Upper management is generally in their 50s and 60s, right? Someone around 60 joined the workforce 35 years ago, give or take. That would be around 1980.
We've only had about one generation of tech bosses at this point. Yes, there were computers prior to 1980, but every company over 20-30 employees didn't need IT staff until when? Mid 90s?
I'm really curious where we'll end up another 35 years from now. Will we still be hiring kids out of college to chase the newest tech, or will we have learned from the previous generation of IT management?
You aren't the only person saying this, but neither you nor anyone else has bothered to mention what those jobs might be. OP is exactly right:
How many of them are going to be able to learn to do something better/more valuable? If they could have, wouldn't many of them already have done so?
If we can automate driving, we can automate a lot of the other possible jobs for these people. Driving is not a trivial job to automate. However, driving is not a skilled job in most circumstances. Most people can be a driver. (Maybe not a good one, but the actual skill bar is rather low.)
If we can replace human drivers, we can replace humans in most other jobs that require spatial awareness, navigation, and hand-eye coordination. That is actually most low-skilled jobs. Having met a lot of humans, I can say that a lot of them aren't going to be fit for high-skilled jobs. So what then?
What low-skill job can replace driving for these millions, that can't be done better/faster/more efficiently by machine learning and robotics?
I just posted this elsewhere, but I'll summarize here: Now, a business competes for workers against other businesses and against starvation and homelessness. That's not good competition, as the other companies have the same players. With UBI, they're now competing against other businesses and UBI for workers. That ups the ante significantly.
If you have to reasonably treat your workers, because they don't need you, the amount of money you can pay your CEO, shareholders, and horde overseas goes down very quickly. But where does the money go? Back into the economy, because it's going back to workers to make them happy. And taxed in the process. Then they spend it in businesses, (taxed in the process) more goes back to the workers, and the cycle repeats.
This is an implication of UBI that I didn't get until today, in this thread. I like it.
Not just bad math. Math also based on the assumptions that companies will be able to continue to hoard money like they do currently. A number of them are going to get very poor very quickly with UBI, because people aren't going to keep working for them if UBI means that they don't have to anymore. Walmart is one good example. Fast food joints, janitorial services, telemarketing and helpdesk, data entry and a lot of manual labor jobs.
I would expect that there will be far more people in the "well above UBI" with UBI than without, because every business is now competing with UBI for workers rather than competing against homelessness and starvation. You can't abuse and shit on your workers when they lose very little by not taking your shit any more. For this reason, if you want to keep your workers, they are now a commodity. They are now a valuable resource that you're going to have to foster, coddle, and play nice with. All that is going to cost companies money, and that's a good thing. Every dollar that goes back into the economy helps it a ton. Every dollar hoarded stunts it. And this is true in large part EVEN FOR THE COMPANIES HOARDING THE MONEY! FFS, Apple could buy something like a hundred million iPhones with the cash they have on hand. If that was in the hands of the general population, that would be significant.
That's not all it's going to do. Would you take $16k/year to do manual labor in outdoors in the scorching sun? No? Then if a company needs this, they're going to have to pay a lot more money. Would you take $16k/year to work in a hot kitchen with no benefits, no sick time, in 12 hour shifts? No? Then the company will need to improve those working conditions.
What UBI will do is give power back to the populace to tell companies that they won't suffer their abuses.
If companies want employees, they're going to have to treat them like a valuable commodity.
And he might also be able to pay people less if the working conditions and work are great. Sewage treatment plant workers are going to become expensive, dog walkers, gardeners, and artists are going to become cheap. Dog lover, UBI, might just walk dogs for free every day. Not enough workers willing to work for free, up the pay a bit until you find some that want to do the job. Not enough people want to work for you at your rates? Either make the job better to work at, or make the rates higher.
It's going to be very disruptive to businesses, because we currently don't know how much jobs need to pay to be worth doing. Right now, plenty of people hate their jobs but don't want to starve. It's hard to predict, but some businesses are going to be really hard hit by UBI, and some are going to hugely benefit from it.
I've actually had periods where I wasn't employed for a reasonable stretch of time. Sure, I did a bunch of video gaming at first, but pretty soon I got bored and restless...
Everyone in that situation is going to need to consume entertainment. They may even spend some of their UBI on it. And guess what? If your hobby is playing video games while "idle", and you decide to go stream on Twitch, it's quite possible that your idle time plus theirs turns into their UBI headed into your pocket. And maybe they decide that the're spending too much money on Twitch, but someone in the neighborhood is offering $2/hr for dog walking, might as well do that to pay for the entertainment.
Suddenly your idle time is making you money, they're entertained with their idle time, and they find something to do that makes them happy to earn a little more money. Compared to most welfare systems, that's pretty sweet. It's not doing paperwork, proving you're looking for a job, taking the bus across town to wait in line for shit, etc., etc. It's not worrying that you might earn too much and lose your benefits.
I might start doing....X or Y or Z....
And if any one of those part-time jobs or hobbies takes off, there's a really good chance that the person follows it, because they are doing what they love, not doing whatever they have to in order to survive.
That aspect of UBI makes me really, really excited.
The converse is that employers who want employees to stick around are really going to have to offer an incentive. I can think of a few jobs in my life where, if I had UBI, I would have flipped my desk and walked out.
I'm actually really excited about this aspect of UBI. If you can set up an awesome work environment, you might be able to get people to work for free, because they love it, and UBI is enough to get by on. If you set up a shitty work environment, or the work itself is shitty (garbage collector, sewage worker), you're going to have to offer sweet pay and benefits for people to want to do that.
When nobody has to work to live, it's going to very much uncover the true cost of employment for businesses. In the long run, that will put a lot of power back in the hands of employees, and require businesses to really care about the people they employ. I can't see that as being a bad thing for humanity.
Alternately, children could receive a "bare survival" UBI - just enough to feed them.
I think this is the most reasonable approach. Have a graduated UBI that starts at "feeds child and buys diapers" and has a few stepwise increases based on age up to "pays rent in a shared space and feeds you beans and rice" at 18.
It would likely cause some stress around age 18, when it could go with the kid if they chose to leave, however. But if it meant not having to save as much for college, or allowing your kid to fly the nest any time they were ready, that might not be so bad for a lot of families.
The next fastest way is outside in zoned, so you fill the back window seats first, then the middle window seats and back middle seats, the the front window seats, middle middle seats and back aisle seats.
Not quite, according to one study done with some college kids as volunteers. The fastest way is alternating outside windows, alternating middle and isle, back to front. The reason for this is that if you alternate the rows, nobody is blocking the person across from them from accessing the overhead bins.
The problem is, it's freaking complicated to announce.
Not much worse than what they have now. The last time I flew...United? They had something like 10 zones. They had like 5 premium ones, 2 economy upgrade ones, and then another 3 economy zones. We've already got half the zones needed to set up a system like this. And computers are good at sorting things. Zone 1 - first class. Zone 2a - back half of the plane alternating windows, Zone 3a - middle alternating windows. When 3a is settled, Zone 2b - other half of back windows, Zone 3b other half of middle windows, Zone 4a front windows. Wait till they're in, fill middle back, etc.
I've been fingerprinted for two jobs so far. (Both totally legit, to be honest about it. I wouldn't have taken them if it wasn't.) Call me paranoid, but due to this I don't use my fingerprint to unlock my phone.
Because they don't see this as a premium. They see this as a net loss. There's the overhead of the system, the chance you'll invite 10 people over to watch, the chance you'll capture it and torrent it, the chance you'd have spent more at the theater.
The entire business model is designed around theater viewing until it's not profitable, then abusing limited runs on disk. From trailer making to aspect ratios to video and sound files, I'm guessing everything is built to do this. To think about doing something else is mind-blowing, because that means potentially changing the system, or having two systems, or a branching system. They know how this one works. A new one would be scary and hard to understand and abuse properly.
Not that I care what they do. I'm so far past caring. Just about anything non-AAA title and more than a few years old is available online. The last many movies we've watched were highly rated indie and/or low profile films. Some old cult classics. I've got a mini comp running ubuntu pushing HDMI to the big screen, wireless keyboard and mouse, great beer, good food, VLC, and google. Maybe I can't always find the exact movie I want, but with millions out there, I'll find something interesting. For the cost and convenience, it works for me. It's like Netflix with a thousand times more movies for the one-time hardware cost.
Fewer road traffic accidents also means less work for the health care industry, for emergency services, vehicle recovery services, body shops...
Thanks for pointing this out. Almost everyone I see dismissing the economic impact of driving automation ignores the giant web of interrelated services that will get disrupted. Right now, stores are often placed in locations that get good traffic going by. Is automation going to change the traffic routes? Quite likely yes, as most phone GPS systems already pay attention to traffic volume and accidents. Is automation going to whisk people past those stores while they're browsing porn? Also quite likely yes.
And maybe stores will be able to load self-driving vans with orders and send them to peoples' homes for delivery, and now we're losing cashiers, baggers, cart wranglers, and a whole bunch of other jobs.
but what it doesn't answer the question of what they are all going to *do*.
I don't think that most people are even considering who this is going to impact fully yet. What they're all going to do is way harder once you do that. The sheer number of potentially impacted jobs is staggering, doubly so because we're automating away most of the potential options rather quickly.
My wife and I bank a week of vacation for between Christmas and New Years every year. We don't travel, because holiday travel sucks. What we do is just chill at home. Do inside projects. Sit in coffee shops and watch the snow fall. It's marvelous. Best vacation of the year, because we don't have to deal with travel. Usually about 10 straight days of no alarms, lazy mornings, and a detachment from work.
I don't get the other half of the people in the US who don't use their time. Vacation significantly increases our productivity in the weeks that follow.
I'm fairly lucky to be in a position where people get this. Our current team plans almost to a fault. Documentation gets done along with the work, and everything is well padded for time. It's boring around here. People are cheerful and nice. Sometimes people slide in late, and sometimes people slide out early.
Having worked in a "firefighter" shop before, where everyone was always scrambling to put out fires, I'm shocked by how much more we accomplish. On the few occasions where we have flare-ups, lots of people are available to assist, because we all have some capacity in our jobs. What's fascinating is that someone will say, "Well, I have about 4 hours of time I can give you over the next week, but I can't do more than that. Will that be enough?" Then you're trying to figure out if that's likely enough time to help, not enough to make a difference, and whether or not you need someone else.
Professional, no-drama, well planned out. There's a good chance that any new bosses will come from among our ranks, as that's been tradition for a decade or so. My only fear is if that doesn't happen. We're either going to continue being awesome, or it's downhill all the way. Not a lot of up to go from here.
Businesses can and do have contingency plans to work without computers.
Some businesses can and do. Not all. If your business relies on giant SQL databases, it relies on giant SQL databases. (Mine does.) You don't print them out nightly and warehouse the paper copies.
All the eggs in one basket? Yep. Are the databases backed up? Extremely well. But recreating the ecosystem needed to leverage those databases is something that will take time.
If my business had a major computer meltdown, I think we'd have critical access back in 3-4 days, at very limited capacity. We'd need to be getting all the new hardware online, the data restored, the server addresses restored/updated, and then all the endpoints connected back. I doubt that we have spares for a lot of the hardware. We've potentially got older stuff that was taken offline when newer stuff was purchased, but the reason we needed the newer stuff was capacity. Using the old stuff will get us online more quickly, but not at full capacity.
We've never been in a budget situation where we could buy double of everything and keep a spare off-site. We've been able to buy double the capacity needed when upgrading, to ensure that we have room, but double the hardware costs quite a lot more.
You do know that the welfare queen was invented by Reagan, used by conservatives since then, and has never been true, right?
And who are you to tell people what they spend their UBI on? What makes your judgement better than theirs?
To most successful (where success is having a job, a house, and can afford food) people...
Aaah, got it. If you currently have a job, you're successful, but if not, you're stupid, lazy, and criminal, and zbobet2012 needs to tell you how to live your life, and police your life choices? That speaks far more poorly on you than it does on them.
What your authoritarian response misses is the basic reason we're even talking about UBI: We're very quickly running out of jobs for people to do. Agriculture used to employ 50% of the population, now it employs 2% and produces more food than we can consume in this country. Manufacturing is increasingly automated, and it looks like a couple million driving jobs may be up next for automation. Warehouses are becoming very automated, and shipping is getting very automated. Our service industry is falling to automation as well, with the rapid rise of self-service kiosks, checkouts, websites and phone trees.
The point of UBI is because we don't think there are going to be enough jobs in the near future. You can no longer call success having a job when there aren't enough jobs to go around. It's not laziness at that point, it's that it's cheaper and better to automate so much that some sizable amount of the population literally has nothing to offer society in exchange for food and shelter. At that point, there are two options: Provide for those people, or let them die.
We've decided already that we're going to provide for our elderly. We've got Social Security and Medicare. This is just extending that decision to everyone, replacing our current nightmare of patchwork supports, while providing an incentive to actually work for those who can. That incentive involves material goods, vacations, and overall nicer stuff. It involves scratching a creative itch, making meaning of their life, and producing things that will make them happy. I really don't share your pessimism that some significant amount of the population will just starve in the street because they can't manage their money. If that's the case, that's more of a case of them needing a legal guardian than a need to recreate the wasteful bureaucratic snarl that is our current welfare system.
Given that any and every system will be abused, one of the reasons I like UBI is because it seems like the least abuse-prone system possible.
I completely agree. Well said. A second reason to love it is that it's Universal, so it's also a very easy system to administer. It's very low overhead compared to most other programs. Add in that it's offset by taxes gradually as you earn more and more, and you've got a mechanism to effectively wean people off the benefit without needing to nickle and dime or make value judgements. (You don't meet the qualification to be disabled anymore...)
Another huge benefit I see is that the jobs people have managing our current social welfare programs aren't jobs that produce anything that benefits society. If UBI can replace all those jobs, it sucks for them, but paper pushing accountant cubicle jobs aren't good for anyone. Hopefully they can find something more beneficial and meaningful to both them and society.
I don't doubt that. Everyone has a great idea on how to start a business. The fact that something like 80% fail in the first 5 years shows that no, no they don't have a great idea most of the time. But lots of people (including me) don't even try, because of that lack of safety net. Opening that floodgate, we'll likely have tons more businesses popping up and then going bust, as people try new things.
I can't see how this is a bad thing. Some of those will actually be great ideas, well executed, and a net benefit to the economy and society. We need innovation and new ideas, products, and services. And the more of these that happen, the more they're going to need employees, and that starts pulling people up. UBI could really unleash a major revolution in businesses.
Yes, lots of failures, but even then, people are doing something that's meaningful to them. That's far better than food stamps and unemployment.
There's nowhere near as much manual labor to be done any more, and it's getting less every year. What are the replacement jobs for all the agriculture, manufacturing, mining, construction, warehouse, and soon, driving jobs that used to exist? The short answer is that there aren't any. Manual labor jobs are drying up, and we need something to replace them. It used to be white collar jobs, but those are getting the squeeze with automation and machine learning as well. Plus outsourcing.
UBI gives us the option of non-full employment to mitigate this loss of jobs, without people homeless and dying in the streets. We're already spending a sizable percent of what we would spend for UBI on SNAP, CHIP, Medicare, Medicade, Unemployment, Disability, Social Security, etc., etc. The downside with many of these is that if you earn too much money, you get kicked out of the program, likely losing money because the threshold is too low, and there's no graduated loss of benefits. UBI would allow people to work a bit while not worrying about losing the benefit if they work too much. Most plans I've seen gradually tax non-UBI income offset UBI by the time you reach $50k-$75k/year. That's a huge improvement over our current programs.
And UBI isn't going to pay for a pool and a mercedes. You talk about incentives to work as if materialism will disappear, and everyone will turn into sloths. When UBI gets you a one bedroom apartment, OTA TV, and rice and beans, you're not living the good life. Sure, for some, that will be enough. But most people want a new car, to go out to eat, and to take a vacation once in awhile. That's incentive to work, to get an education, to get trained, and to do something other than sit in a chair all day and watch the world go by.
I'm excited for the change to paying people for what jobs are actually worth. People making UBI may happily walk dogs for free, and people on UBI may ask $40/hr to collect garbage. Right now we insist on getting paid, because we need to have an income to not be homeless and starving. We also take shit jobs because they are better than no job. UBI lays bare what jobs are actually worth, and that's pretty interesting to me.
Where do you shop? Where I shop, it's always faster to bag it myself. The $7/hr folks bagging (or the $2/hr folks with disabilities) almost always take forever, pack crushable stuff on the bottom, overfill one bag and underfill another, and generally make a mess of things.
When I fill, my items get sorted into bags by type, with heavy, packable stuff on the bottom, and light, crushable stuff on the top. In far less time.
More to the point, the reason that people currently on existing social safety net programmes overwhelmingly do end up working if they are capable of it is because people want a better life.
Conversely, the reason that people currently on existing social safety net programmes don't end up working in the US is that as soon as they cross a magical threshold, they lose their entire benefit, and the money they are making doesn't make up for the loss. I know one family that made $150 too much last year. They qualified for medicade for them and their kid, and now they need to get private health insurance, which will cost them something like $250 per month. Made $150 too much, now going to lose thousands in benefits.
UBI is better, because people on the border of poverty don't run into bullshit like this, which traps them in a cycle of poverty.
Slashdot Mirror
And don't forget to leave your window open!
They'll just skip the parachute and aim a little lower then.
Same way outsourcing was proven to work sometimes, I think the coolness of youth will also be re-evaluated at some point and the experience of old will be appreciated more.
Your comment just made the following occur to me: Upper management is generally in their 50s and 60s, right? Someone around 60 joined the workforce 35 years ago, give or take. That would be around 1980.
We've only had about one generation of tech bosses at this point. Yes, there were computers prior to 1980, but every company over 20-30 employees didn't need IT staff until when? Mid 90s?
I'm really curious where we'll end up another 35 years from now. Will we still be hiring kids out of college to chase the newest tech, or will we have learned from the previous generation of IT management?
You aren't the only person saying this, but neither you nor anyone else has bothered to mention what those jobs might be. OP is exactly right:
How many of them are going to be able to learn to do something better/more valuable? If they could have, wouldn't many of them already have done so?
If we can automate driving, we can automate a lot of the other possible jobs for these people. Driving is not a trivial job to automate. However, driving is not a skilled job in most circumstances. Most people can be a driver. (Maybe not a good one, but the actual skill bar is rather low.)
If we can replace human drivers, we can replace humans in most other jobs that require spatial awareness, navigation, and hand-eye coordination. That is actually most low-skilled jobs. Having met a lot of humans, I can say that a lot of them aren't going to be fit for high-skilled jobs. So what then?
What low-skill job can replace driving for these millions, that can't be done better/faster/more efficiently by machine learning and robotics?
I just posted this elsewhere, but I'll summarize here: Now, a business competes for workers against other businesses and against starvation and homelessness. That's not good competition, as the other companies have the same players. With UBI, they're now competing against other businesses and UBI for workers. That ups the ante significantly.
If you have to reasonably treat your workers, because they don't need you, the amount of money you can pay your CEO, shareholders, and horde overseas goes down very quickly. But where does the money go? Back into the economy, because it's going back to workers to make them happy. And taxed in the process. Then they spend it in businesses, (taxed in the process) more goes back to the workers, and the cycle repeats.
This is an implication of UBI that I didn't get until today, in this thread. I like it.
Not just bad math. Math also based on the assumptions that companies will be able to continue to hoard money like they do currently. A number of them are going to get very poor very quickly with UBI, because people aren't going to keep working for them if UBI means that they don't have to anymore. Walmart is one good example. Fast food joints, janitorial services, telemarketing and helpdesk, data entry and a lot of manual labor jobs.
I would expect that there will be far more people in the "well above UBI" with UBI than without, because every business is now competing with UBI for workers rather than competing against homelessness and starvation. You can't abuse and shit on your workers when they lose very little by not taking your shit any more. For this reason, if you want to keep your workers, they are now a commodity. They are now a valuable resource that you're going to have to foster, coddle, and play nice with. All that is going to cost companies money, and that's a good thing. Every dollar that goes back into the economy helps it a ton. Every dollar hoarded stunts it. And this is true in large part EVEN FOR THE COMPANIES HOARDING THE MONEY! FFS, Apple could buy something like a hundred million iPhones with the cash they have on hand. If that was in the hands of the general population, that would be significant.
That's not all it's going to do. Would you take $16k/year to do manual labor in outdoors in the scorching sun? No? Then if a company needs this, they're going to have to pay a lot more money. Would you take $16k/year to work in a hot kitchen with no benefits, no sick time, in 12 hour shifts? No? Then the company will need to improve those working conditions.
What UBI will do is give power back to the populace to tell companies that they won't suffer their abuses.
If companies want employees, they're going to have to treat them like a valuable commodity.
And he might also be able to pay people less if the working conditions and work are great. Sewage treatment plant workers are going to become expensive, dog walkers, gardeners, and artists are going to become cheap. Dog lover, UBI, might just walk dogs for free every day. Not enough workers willing to work for free, up the pay a bit until you find some that want to do the job. Not enough people want to work for you at your rates? Either make the job better to work at, or make the rates higher.
It's going to be very disruptive to businesses, because we currently don't know how much jobs need to pay to be worth doing. Right now, plenty of people hate their jobs but don't want to starve. It's hard to predict, but some businesses are going to be really hard hit by UBI, and some are going to hugely benefit from it.
Idle time might actually drive a new economy.
I've actually had periods where I wasn't employed for a reasonable stretch of time. Sure, I did a bunch of video gaming at first, but pretty soon I got bored and restless...
Everyone in that situation is going to need to consume entertainment. They may even spend some of their UBI on it. And guess what? If your hobby is playing video games while "idle", and you decide to go stream on Twitch, it's quite possible that your idle time plus theirs turns into their UBI headed into your pocket. And maybe they decide that the're spending too much money on Twitch, but someone in the neighborhood is offering $2/hr for dog walking, might as well do that to pay for the entertainment.
Suddenly your idle time is making you money, they're entertained with their idle time, and they find something to do that makes them happy to earn a little more money. Compared to most welfare systems, that's pretty sweet. It's not doing paperwork, proving you're looking for a job, taking the bus across town to wait in line for shit, etc., etc. It's not worrying that you might earn too much and lose your benefits.
I might start doing....X or Y or Z....
And if any one of those part-time jobs or hobbies takes off, there's a really good chance that the person follows it, because they are doing what they love, not doing whatever they have to in order to survive.
That aspect of UBI makes me really, really excited.
The converse is that employers who want employees to stick around are really going to have to offer an incentive. I can think of a few jobs in my life where, if I had UBI, I would have flipped my desk and walked out.
I'm actually really excited about this aspect of UBI. If you can set up an awesome work environment, you might be able to get people to work for free, because they love it, and UBI is enough to get by on. If you set up a shitty work environment, or the work itself is shitty (garbage collector, sewage worker), you're going to have to offer sweet pay and benefits for people to want to do that.
When nobody has to work to live, it's going to very much uncover the true cost of employment for businesses. In the long run, that will put a lot of power back in the hands of employees, and require businesses to really care about the people they employ. I can't see that as being a bad thing for humanity.
Alternately, children could receive a "bare survival" UBI - just enough to feed them.
I think this is the most reasonable approach. Have a graduated UBI that starts at "feeds child and buys diapers" and has a few stepwise increases based on age up to "pays rent in a shared space and feeds you beans and rice" at 18.
It would likely cause some stress around age 18, when it could go with the kid if they chose to leave, however. But if it meant not having to save as much for college, or allowing your kid to fly the nest any time they were ready, that might not be so bad for a lot of families.
The next fastest way is outside in zoned, so you fill the back window seats first, then the middle window seats and back middle seats, the the front window seats, middle middle seats and back aisle seats.
Not quite, according to one study done with some college kids as volunteers. The fastest way is alternating outside windows, alternating middle and isle, back to front. The reason for this is that if you alternate the rows, nobody is blocking the person across from them from accessing the overhead bins.
The problem is, it's freaking complicated to announce.
Not much worse than what they have now. The last time I flew...United? They had something like 10 zones. They had like 5 premium ones, 2 economy upgrade ones, and then another 3 economy zones. We've already got half the zones needed to set up a system like this. And computers are good at sorting things. Zone 1 - first class. Zone 2a - back half of the plane alternating windows, Zone 3a - middle alternating windows. When 3a is settled, Zone 2b - other half of back windows, Zone 3b other half of middle windows, Zone 4a front windows. Wait till they're in, fill middle back, etc.
I've been fingerprinted for two jobs so far. (Both totally legit, to be honest about it. I wouldn't have taken them if it wasn't.) Call me paranoid, but due to this I don't use my fingerprint to unlock my phone.
Because they don't see this as a premium. They see this as a net loss. There's the overhead of the system, the chance you'll invite 10 people over to watch, the chance you'll capture it and torrent it, the chance you'd have spent more at the theater.
The entire business model is designed around theater viewing until it's not profitable, then abusing limited runs on disk. From trailer making to aspect ratios to video and sound files, I'm guessing everything is built to do this. To think about doing something else is mind-blowing, because that means potentially changing the system, or having two systems, or a branching system. They know how this one works. A new one would be scary and hard to understand and abuse properly.
Not that I care what they do. I'm so far past caring. Just about anything non-AAA title and more than a few years old is available online. The last many movies we've watched were highly rated indie and/or low profile films. Some old cult classics. I've got a mini comp running ubuntu pushing HDMI to the big screen, wireless keyboard and mouse, great beer, good food, VLC, and google. Maybe I can't always find the exact movie I want, but with millions out there, I'll find something interesting. For the cost and convenience, it works for me. It's like Netflix with a thousand times more movies for the one-time hardware cost.
Fewer road traffic accidents also means less work for the health care industry, for emergency services, vehicle recovery services, body shops...
Thanks for pointing this out. Almost everyone I see dismissing the economic impact of driving automation ignores the giant web of interrelated services that will get disrupted. Right now, stores are often placed in locations that get good traffic going by. Is automation going to change the traffic routes? Quite likely yes, as most phone GPS systems already pay attention to traffic volume and accidents. Is automation going to whisk people past those stores while they're browsing porn? Also quite likely yes.
And maybe stores will be able to load self-driving vans with orders and send them to peoples' homes for delivery, and now we're losing cashiers, baggers, cart wranglers, and a whole bunch of other jobs.
but what it doesn't answer the question of what they are all going to *do*.
I don't think that most people are even considering who this is going to impact fully yet. What they're all going to do is way harder once you do that. The sheer number of potentially impacted jobs is staggering, doubly so because we're automating away most of the potential options rather quickly.
What jobs will it make the labor available for?
Ones that can be automated, and replaced with robots and machine learning, of course!
My wife and I bank a week of vacation for between Christmas and New Years every year. We don't travel, because holiday travel sucks. What we do is just chill at home. Do inside projects. Sit in coffee shops and watch the snow fall. It's marvelous. Best vacation of the year, because we don't have to deal with travel. Usually about 10 straight days of no alarms, lazy mornings, and a detachment from work.
I don't get the other half of the people in the US who don't use their time. Vacation significantly increases our productivity in the weeks that follow.
I'm fairly lucky to be in a position where people get this. Our current team plans almost to a fault. Documentation gets done along with the work, and everything is well padded for time. It's boring around here. People are cheerful and nice. Sometimes people slide in late, and sometimes people slide out early.
Having worked in a "firefighter" shop before, where everyone was always scrambling to put out fires, I'm shocked by how much more we accomplish. On the few occasions where we have flare-ups, lots of people are available to assist, because we all have some capacity in our jobs. What's fascinating is that someone will say, "Well, I have about 4 hours of time I can give you over the next week, but I can't do more than that. Will that be enough?" Then you're trying to figure out if that's likely enough time to help, not enough to make a difference, and whether or not you need someone else.
Professional, no-drama, well planned out. There's a good chance that any new bosses will come from among our ranks, as that's been tradition for a decade or so. My only fear is if that doesn't happen. We're either going to continue being awesome, or it's downhill all the way. Not a lot of up to go from here.
Businesses can and do have contingency plans to work without computers.
Some businesses can and do. Not all. If your business relies on giant SQL databases, it relies on giant SQL databases. (Mine does.) You don't print them out nightly and warehouse the paper copies.
All the eggs in one basket? Yep. Are the databases backed up? Extremely well. But recreating the ecosystem needed to leverage those databases is something that will take time.
If my business had a major computer meltdown, I think we'd have critical access back in 3-4 days, at very limited capacity. We'd need to be getting all the new hardware online, the data restored, the server addresses restored/updated, and then all the endpoints connected back. I doubt that we have spares for a lot of the hardware. We've potentially got older stuff that was taken offline when newer stuff was purchased, but the reason we needed the newer stuff was capacity. Using the old stuff will get us online more quickly, but not at full capacity.
We've never been in a budget situation where we could buy double of everything and keep a spare off-site. We've been able to buy double the capacity needed when upgrading, to ensure that we have room, but double the hardware costs quite a lot more.
You do know that the welfare queen was invented by Reagan, used by conservatives since then, and has never been true, right?
And who are you to tell people what they spend their UBI on? What makes your judgement better than theirs?
To most successful (where success is having a job, a house, and can afford food) people...
Aaah, got it. If you currently have a job, you're successful, but if not, you're stupid, lazy, and criminal, and zbobet2012 needs to tell you how to live your life, and police your life choices? That speaks far more poorly on you than it does on them.
What your authoritarian response misses is the basic reason we're even talking about UBI: We're very quickly running out of jobs for people to do. Agriculture used to employ 50% of the population, now it employs 2% and produces more food than we can consume in this country. Manufacturing is increasingly automated, and it looks like a couple million driving jobs may be up next for automation. Warehouses are becoming very automated, and shipping is getting very automated. Our service industry is falling to automation as well, with the rapid rise of self-service kiosks, checkouts, websites and phone trees.
The point of UBI is because we don't think there are going to be enough jobs in the near future. You can no longer call success having a job when there aren't enough jobs to go around. It's not laziness at that point, it's that it's cheaper and better to automate so much that some sizable amount of the population literally has nothing to offer society in exchange for food and shelter. At that point, there are two options: Provide for those people, or let them die.
We've decided already that we're going to provide for our elderly. We've got Social Security and Medicare. This is just extending that decision to everyone, replacing our current nightmare of patchwork supports, while providing an incentive to actually work for those who can. That incentive involves material goods, vacations, and overall nicer stuff. It involves scratching a creative itch, making meaning of their life, and producing things that will make them happy. I really don't share your pessimism that some significant amount of the population will just starve in the street because they can't manage their money. If that's the case, that's more of a case of them needing a legal guardian than a need to recreate the wasteful bureaucratic snarl that is our current welfare system.
Given that any and every system will be abused, one of the reasons I like UBI is because it seems like the least abuse-prone system possible.
I completely agree. Well said. A second reason to love it is that it's Universal, so it's also a very easy system to administer. It's very low overhead compared to most other programs. Add in that it's offset by taxes gradually as you earn more and more, and you've got a mechanism to effectively wean people off the benefit without needing to nickle and dime or make value judgements. (You don't meet the qualification to be disabled anymore...)
Another huge benefit I see is that the jobs people have managing our current social welfare programs aren't jobs that produce anything that benefits society. If UBI can replace all those jobs, it sucks for them, but paper pushing accountant cubicle jobs aren't good for anyone. Hopefully they can find something more beneficial and meaningful to both them and society.
I don't doubt that. Everyone has a great idea on how to start a business. The fact that something like 80% fail in the first 5 years shows that no, no they don't have a great idea most of the time. But lots of people (including me) don't even try, because of that lack of safety net. Opening that floodgate, we'll likely have tons more businesses popping up and then going bust, as people try new things.
I can't see how this is a bad thing. Some of those will actually be great ideas, well executed, and a net benefit to the economy and society. We need innovation and new ideas, products, and services. And the more of these that happen, the more they're going to need employees, and that starts pulling people up. UBI could really unleash a major revolution in businesses.
Yes, lots of failures, but even then, people are doing something that's meaningful to them. That's far better than food stamps and unemployment.
There's nowhere near as much manual labor to be done any more, and it's getting less every year. What are the replacement jobs for all the agriculture, manufacturing, mining, construction, warehouse, and soon, driving jobs that used to exist? The short answer is that there aren't any. Manual labor jobs are drying up, and we need something to replace them. It used to be white collar jobs, but those are getting the squeeze with automation and machine learning as well. Plus outsourcing.
UBI gives us the option of non-full employment to mitigate this loss of jobs, without people homeless and dying in the streets. We're already spending a sizable percent of what we would spend for UBI on SNAP, CHIP, Medicare, Medicade, Unemployment, Disability, Social Security, etc., etc. The downside with many of these is that if you earn too much money, you get kicked out of the program, likely losing money because the threshold is too low, and there's no graduated loss of benefits. UBI would allow people to work a bit while not worrying about losing the benefit if they work too much. Most plans I've seen gradually tax non-UBI income offset UBI by the time you reach $50k-$75k/year. That's a huge improvement over our current programs.
And UBI isn't going to pay for a pool and a mercedes. You talk about incentives to work as if materialism will disappear, and everyone will turn into sloths. When UBI gets you a one bedroom apartment, OTA TV, and rice and beans, you're not living the good life. Sure, for some, that will be enough. But most people want a new car, to go out to eat, and to take a vacation once in awhile. That's incentive to work, to get an education, to get trained, and to do something other than sit in a chair all day and watch the world go by.
I'm excited for the change to paying people for what jobs are actually worth. People making UBI may happily walk dogs for free, and people on UBI may ask $40/hr to collect garbage. Right now we insist on getting paid, because we need to have an income to not be homeless and starving. We also take shit jobs because they are better than no job. UBI lays bare what jobs are actually worth, and that's pretty interesting to me.
Where do you shop? Where I shop, it's always faster to bag it myself. The $7/hr folks bagging (or the $2/hr folks with disabilities) almost always take forever, pack crushable stuff on the bottom, overfill one bag and underfill another, and generally make a mess of things.
When I fill, my items get sorted into bags by type, with heavy, packable stuff on the bottom, and light, crushable stuff on the top. In far less time.
More to the point, the reason that people currently on existing social safety net programmes overwhelmingly do end up working if they are capable of it is because people want a better life.
Conversely, the reason that people currently on existing social safety net programmes don't end up working in the US is that as soon as they cross a magical threshold, they lose their entire benefit, and the money they are making doesn't make up for the loss. I know one family that made $150 too much last year. They qualified for medicade for them and their kid, and now they need to get private health insurance, which will cost them something like $250 per month. Made $150 too much, now going to lose thousands in benefits.
UBI is better, because people on the border of poverty don't run into bullshit like this, which traps them in a cycle of poverty.