Comrade Clod
Gay Space Communist
UBI isn't the worst idea but its not the best either.
Universal Basic Income
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Anyone who uses the phase "dignity of work" has obviously never had to work a shitty soul crushing job just to make ends meet. A strong social safety net of which food stamps and the theoretical UBI are part of mean that the people working at McDonald's or as Walmart clerks will be kids and people fresh out of school as rhey build up a little work history. The actual workers would be able to be more picky over their actual jobs when the options arent work or starve immediately. Such a system is abuseable but I'm sure people craving "the dignity of work" wont just lay around all day waiting for their Yangcheck to cash. They'll find something productive to do.Surely.
They will like as not hide in their rooms and cease to socialise and reproduce, and indulge in sundry perversions, as the social bonds of the modern age continue to break down. The UBI would accelerate this by ending the association and common bonds of work and deterring people from any motivation to better themselves. Of course, modern world is soulless, but that's a call to spiritually reform modern work -- i.e., the timeless wisdom of the Arts and Crafts movement and the fightback against the compulsory industrialisation of society for the sake of efficiency. Technology is not wrong, but the way we implement it certainly is. The whole point of tying benefits to work is to preserve the ethos and the community of a working society.
Porkchopper
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So you definitely hate Star Trek then? Cause when you arent living hand to mouth it means yes more time for pleasure. But it also means more time for self improvement. If I only have to work 20hrs a week to make ends meet in not going to sleep for that extra time. I and most people would do other things. Go back to school or go to the gym. Hell go on vacation and see the nation. You have a very low opinion of people.
She isnt wrong. The Hikikomori in Japan already do exactly what Punch Card Girl said and they dont have a UBI there. 1% or so of the entire population of the country basically are urban hermits.
Yeah, in general there is a variety of options how people would react to no longer having to spend their time selling their labor, depending on culture, socialization, and also individual character, among other things. Some would go for self-improvement of all sorts, some would engage in perfecting arts and crafts of all imaginable kinds, some would volunteer for charity, some would spend that time engaging in politics much like the nobility of old...
The worries presented here i think apply to a considerable portion of population that associates free time with less commendable or high brow activities, along the lines of drunken partying, or outright roaming about and looking for trouble, in such cases lots of free time is going to mean more of that, with all the consequences of doing such things a lot.
The worries presented here i think apply to a considerable portion of population that associates free time with less commendable or high brow activities, along the lines of drunken partying, or outright roaming about and looking for trouble, in such cases lots of free time is going to mean more of that, with all the consequences of doing such things a lot.
Porkchopper
Active member
Which goes to sgow that it isnt money or work that causes some people to check out of society. And 1% not exaclty a societal collapse.
No, but it isnt a good thing. And also it is absolutely work that does it. Japan has a pretty strong work culture and ethic that some people reacted adversely to and decided not to participate in. Many were able to do this because they had money in the form of living off relatives and living with someone who is working/retired and leaching from the family's income. If you add NEET bucks to the mix you are likely to see an increase in that number who check out as now it becomes even more viable to do so.
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This proves it's possible among humans, which makes the mice studies that much more concerning.
Oh those mice studies concern the shit out of me.
Personally, I think UBI is going to be an inevitability, just due to our use of automation (AI and robots) expanding and encroaching on white collar jobs. That said, I don't think we're anywhere near ready for it. Ideally, we'd have widespread modular nuclear reactor power farms and vertical farming in our major cities and hubs of smaller towns to bring down the costs of energy and food, and better zoning laws to provide affordable housing. We need to drastically lower the costs of essentials before we can do UBI, and that's before we get into the really big problem - how do we handle cost of living differences.
Personally, I would do a two tier system for UBI, with Tier 1 being a federal contribution of $500 per month (for example) indexed to inflation, then Tier 2 being a state contribution that gets you up to the median cost of living per month (again, indexed to inflation). Not sure about funding, although obviously, I would like to just funnel all the money going to entitlements into this system.
Personally, I would do a two tier system for UBI, with Tier 1 being a federal contribution of $500 per month (for example) indexed to inflation, then Tier 2 being a state contribution that gets you up to the median cost of living per month (again, indexed to inflation). Not sure about funding, although obviously, I would like to just funnel all the money going to entitlements into this system.
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Why is automation inevitable, and why is it worth seeking out? How can a transition which ends the usefulness of the vast majority of the human population actually be implemented without extreme bloodshed? How can we possibly imagine that it would be managed successfully, with the demonstrated short-sightedness of corporate leadership in the modern world...?
Well, from a business perspective, there's a lot of advantages, depending on what kind of automation you use. For example:
-I work in a machine shop. We use an automated saw to cut the metal stock faster, with more precision, & less stress on the saw operator than doing it manually on a bandsaw or cold saw. We also use CNC machines to handle complex geometry that would take forever for a person to handle on a manual mill or lathe to ensure precision and quality.
-People have developed AI neural networks that can upscale SD quality TV shows into high quality HD copies, without the need to rescan the original film elements (which may not exist anymore) and possibly re-edit them from scratch.
-If you're making an open world game set in a modern setting, it's way cheaper, easier, and faster to scan existing objects to generate textures and meshes to populate the map than paying thousands of people to create assets that have to scale up to 4K+ resolutions.
-Having AI driven trucks handling long haul trucks means removing a potential point of failure due to driver exhaustion.
As a worker, automation typically reduces the shittier parts of your job (assuming your job is not eliminated wholesale) to more manageable levels. I can attest to that, as we had three and half months without the automatic saw, and having to do everything by hand was a godawful experience.
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I think the situation is self-correcting, but I pray we can correct it ourselves, for I fear the self-correction as a terrible trampling of the grapes of wrath far exceeding all others we have known.
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@bullethead, that may be technically true, but is there any good reason other than economics? And what about accounting for the externalities on society of eliminating high paying jobs?
Yeah I don't buy that, liberals like Yang aren't so forward thinking and to not have it automatically adjust means the elites will ignore our class.
SNAP, HUD, etc.
What?
I'm a Third Positionist, which means I think it should go to OUR NATION and not internationalist traitors and invaders from outside our nation. We should be focusing exclusively on our own and damned the coastal and liberal elites.
The VAT is pumping a dry well, working class America doesn't have the money because we keep giving it to invaders and other less savory sorts. So unless you're starting the VAT first, which my understanding is they're implemented at the same time, then you have to get the money from somewhere.
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Ok, so what do you mean by them coming out of the UBI?
It kind of undermines your point to use smartass nicknames and the like.
So why not say "working class", instead of bringing up only one particular demographic group within the working class?
A tax on the tech industry isn't a VAT, and even if it was and they did pass that tax onto consumers, it's either going to hit such a massive part of society as to be unnoticable (like, imagine if everything amazon sold went up in price a cent or two. I think the working class can manage that), or hit people outside the working class entirely (facebook and youtube don't charge users anything, they charge advertisers).
Also, we haven't been invaded since around 1814, or maybe 1944 or if you count spies and sabotours as invaders. I'm fairly certain we're not giving any of those people money.
Well, yeah, I mentioned it in my post - you make the job more enjoyable/tolerable by mitigating the repetitive/miserable elements of it. Let me tell you, nothing is a bigger quality of life improvement than having some tedious task handle itself automatically.
Also, like I mentioned, a lot of times, automating things allows you to do things better than if humans were more involved in the process.
Well, here's the thing - I think society is just going to have to deal with it. Like, sure, there'll be companies that probably won't embrace automation as much as others, but consumers just want their stuff at prices they can afford. If you can automate production and distribution enough to drop the price of anything to dirt cheap levels, they won't give a damn about not having a six figure job.
Also, to be honest, most of the jobs with six plus figures are either ones that exist to deal with bureaucracy (which can be automated) and people or grossly overpaid due to sketchy logic regarding how much value a good corporate officer/creative person provides. Hard skills don't earn people as much money as they should, and those people with those skills could potentially see an increase in their value on the job market. That said, there are a few fields where hard skills do get people high pay, but that may be partially due to companies trying to deny competitors access to such valuable assets.
I can imagine, and I'd rather be optimistic about this too. And even moreso optimistic, that this would just be a gradual social change rather than some collapse, or the such.