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Tech and social media are making us feel lonelier than ever:
You've had a social day. Two hundred Facebook friends posted birthday messages, your video of Mr. Meow shredding the toilet paper stash got dozens of retweets, and all the compliments on your latest Instagram selfie have you strutting with an extra swagger. Still, you can't help but notice an ache that can only be described as loneliness.
That we feel this way even when hyperconnected might seem like a contradiction. But the facts are clear: Constant virtual connections can often amplify the feeling of loneliness.
"Internet-related technologies are great at giving us the perception of connectedness," says Dr. Elias Aboujaoude, a Stanford University psychiatrist who's written about the intersection of psychology and tech. The truth, he says, is the time and energy spent on social media's countless connections may be happening at the expense of more rooted, genuinely supportive and truly close relationships.
If virtual socializing cannot substitute for the real thing, will social media prove out to be nothing more than a fad of the late 20th and early 21st centuries?
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday June 19 2020, @01:20PM (25 children)
My view is that UBI would be a symptom of a better than present economy, not a cause. We have a lot of history where both ends of the pyramid did well without anything like UBI, and we have the present where there's a fair number of UBI-like programs that just don't do that much for anyone except collect votes.
My take is that if you have an economy where businesses are allowed to thrive and employ people painlessly, then you'll have that better than present economy. If those businesses aren't so allowed, then you won't have an economy that can afford a UBI.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 19 2020, @01:53PM (15 children)
What about jobs that are removed due to automation? United States GDP per capita is around double of what it was two generations back, because automation keeps making production more efficient. If the human race manages not to wipe itself out, in another two generations you won't need a person to drive a car or truck, maintain landscaping, collect trash, deliver packages, clean hotel rooms or do most other forms of housekeeping, or prepare most forms of food. Most factories today require 50% or even 10% of the human personnel as factories making the same volume of product in the 1970s. The number of jobs in creating and maintaining the software and hardware for all of those automated tasks will grow, but not nearly enough to employ everyone else in those fields that gets put out of work.
I'm open to counter arguments, but I think the need for UBI is inevitable. Arguably we're past due for implementing it. The only other alternative is some kind of Luddite attack on automation, and that would be a colossal waste of resources.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 19 2020, @03:21PM (3 children)
Kill all Boomers. Oh... wait...
I know. Kill all Milleni... Errrr... wut?
I don't know, I give up. Ask aristarchus.
Well, maybe we were always at war with Eastasia? Waste of resources or not, if the resources are cheap, nothing like keeping the population busy by the constant destruction of what is created.
(Score: 2) by aristarchus on Friday June 19 2020, @06:22PM (1 child)
Don't ask me, ask Confucius:
Analects, 12:19 [acmuller.net], Mulller, trans.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 19 2020, @10:18PM
I can't. We've always been at war with eastasia.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 19 2020, @09:35PM
I don't know that the people in power are intentionally causing wars to create jobs. I think they're simply doing it because they have friends in the petroleum and military equipment and munitions industries. But yes, it creates makework jobs - more oil, more military equipment, more ammunition, and of course more jobs for soldiers and their medical care.
(Score: 1, Disagree) by khallow on Friday June 19 2020, @06:23PM (10 children)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 20 2020, @07:58PM (1 child)
That's a fair point. Washing clothes isn't a tenth as resource-intensive as it was in 1900. Farming isn't as resource-intensive as it was in 1900. Medicine is more resource-intensive and more effective than it was in 1900. So as some jobs are automated away others do increase and new work does appear.
But I am convinced a lot of the created work today is pointless work, created solely to occupy people:
Take all of that away, and I think the actual number of constructive jobs has been declining.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday June 21 2020, @07:28PM
Take that all away, and the people so employed could be (and IMHO would be) constructively employed. I'll note that the greatest creators of bureaucracy, governments, would be running the UBI programs.
(Score: 2) by dry on Sunday June 21 2020, @01:38AM (7 children)
Used to be close to 100% labour participation, people started working at perhaps 5 years old and worked till death basically. Now what is the labour participation? Looking it seems to be about 60% after subtracting people in school and retired but it is hard to find honest statistics. There's lots of people on disability, stay at home partners, people getting educated (not a bad thing but not working at a job), people who have joined the idle rich, as well as the idle poor, sure a lot of street people now a days.
Then there's all the jobs that don't really produce stuff, things like nail saloons that never used to exist. Sure they're jobs but compared to making something. Then as the AC said, the increase in middle management and other types of paper pushers that if anything decrease productivity.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday June 21 2020, @05:06AM (6 children)
It's even higher.
(Score: 2) by dry on Sunday June 21 2020, @05:16AM (5 children)
So what, a 110% of the population is involved in jobs that are actually productive? Perhaps only 101%, but I sure know of a lot of people on disability.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday June 21 2020, @07:07PM (4 children)
(Score: 2) by dry on Sunday June 21 2020, @07:52PM (3 children)
I was talking about pre-industrial revolution for close to 100% labour participation. As you say, we're now lucky to get to 2/3rds labour participation, even with a far smaller pool of people in the labour pool.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday June 22 2020, @12:59PM (2 children)
I still think you're substantially exaggerating labor participation from those times.
(Score: 2) by dry on Tuesday June 23 2020, @02:50AM (1 child)
Perhaps, or I'm considering all the home industry. Inefficient but some of it has entered our language, words like spinster.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday June 23 2020, @04:03AM
Sounds like we've reached a dead end then. I'm not seeing the point of your posts in the first place. Even if we take seriously your claim that we've declined from 100% employment prior to the industrial age to 63% pre-covid, that's not a significant drop.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Friday June 19 2020, @01:53PM (8 children)
Historically, smaller (sub 200 member) hunter-gatherer bands would provide food and shelter for the elderly, young, new mothers, etc. even though they did not directly contribute to the construction/maintenance of the shelter, gathering of the food, etc. I'd call that a form of UBI benefiting the whole pyramid in ways both obvious and non-obvious.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 3, Disagree) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 19 2020, @02:23PM (7 children)
Two things here.
1) That seems improbable. Have you seen the Amazon/African tribes that still exist? Women work til the day that baby pops out and then they're right back on it again. The elderly also tend to take on productive roles on various sorts.
2) Local vs at scale. While I think you're off on the specifics, there's no doubt that tribal groups did (and do) provide for one another in a way much more cooperatively than we do for ourselves in the developed world. But on a small scale there is also implied (if not enforced) social responsibility. People who aren't doing their part will come under major pressure, and worse. Yet now in America take a random sample of people that have been on let's say SNAP for more than 1 year. What will their net contribution be to society? It's going to be substantially negative on average. They take and never give. It's this scale where this sort of antisocial behavior begins to kick in, and where social programs begin to fail.
I think this is why even when you look at the successful 'democratic socialist' nations (which are really 100% capitalist, but meh - the label's stuck so who I am to argue) they tend to be both small and mostly ideologically homogeneous. Norway/Finland/Denmark all only have around 5 million people each and, until very recently, those people were all damn near ideologically homogeneous. This is actually a testable hypothesis because of Sweden. Sweden is not only much larger than these nations but is also now far from homogeneous. And what we're seeing is groups like the Swedish Democrats [wikipedia.org] rapidly rising to power (they're expected to become the largest party in Sweden in the next election). And all of that social harmony is starting to collapse with just the slightest bit of diversity and multiculturalism. It could be that in a decade or two they'll get over the growing pains and things will be back to normal, but I think it's more likely that within a decade or two people will no longer be using Sweden as one of those countries they aspire to.
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Basically what I'm getting at is that you can't expect what applies on a small homogeneous scale to work on a large heterogeneous scale. And this goes all the way up. Imagine we were as large as India or China. Do you think our political system could work with 400%+ more people? I mean we see to be headed towards a collapse with a fraction of their populations, and things get exponentially harder with more people.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 19 2020, @05:55PM
SNAP fosters dependency because there is no escape route. Minimum wage and near minimum wage jobs don't cover a single person apartment, transportation, and food in most of the country. Dependence upon SNAP is a symptom, not the disease.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 20 2020, @02:36AM (5 children)
You seem to be blaming the poor for their poverty. Claiming that folks getting SNAP (food stamps, if you're unfamiliar with the acronym) are just lazy and don't want to work is completely false. It's also incredibly nasty and cruel.
When the largest employers in the US pay their employees so little that they're forced to utilize SNAP, Medicaid and other programs just to be able to live paycheck to paycheck, your argument takes on the sheen of falsehood.
The income cutoffs for SNAP [eligibility.com] (which gives you credit to purchase food items) are quite low:
And those that do qualify get a pittance to make sure they don't starve.
That you surely know this, makes it clear you want to punish those who have the least. That makes your mendacity both deliberate and cruel.
For shame!
Have you no feeling at all for your fellow humans? Is that sociopathic "fuck you, Jack! I'm all right." attitude the extent of your intellectual and emotional capacity?
Ugh!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 20 2020, @10:46AM (2 children)
Read his post again, he's a racist who wants a return to segregation. He has the feeling that his fellow men aren't men at all, so he desires to treat then worse than animals.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 20 2020, @06:18PM (1 child)
Isn't it funny how you people are such absurd racists? You probably don't even realize it due to echo chamber stuff. When you look at things like SNAP, the majority (plurality technically) of folks that are on it are white. Doesn't change the scenario in the least. I couldn't care less whether somebody who is working hard and doing good things is white, black, brown, blue, or green. And similarly I couldn't care less about whether a person who's let himself become dependent on others is white, black, brown, blue, or green.
The issue of unsustainable dependent underclasses is something that's becoming a recurring theme in many nations. It invariably happens when systems end up becoming abused - which is something that can occur from the bottom or the top, often from both simultaneously. But by shouting 'omg race' anytime anybody discusses this isssue, it helps perpetuate the problem which, in turn, is politically beneficial to the DNC. You might notice that even blacks who escape poverty and are able to look at things more objectively often tend to become somewhat more cool towards the DNC. Poor folks loyal the DNC staying poor is hugely beneficial to the DNC which creates a very perverse system of motivations.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 20 2020, @08:18PM
It's possible the top level DNC has an evil masterplan to create a permanent dependent group of voters. But the bigger problem is that the bottom 40% of jobs for unskilled and low skilled workers in the 1950s paid far better, relative to inflation, than they did in the 1980s or since. In order to stop using SNAP you need a path out. That path was taken away, and that's more a credit to the attacks on labor unions and minimum wage by the RNC.
I've brought up this story before, but in the early 1970s my father worked in a car battery factory stacking batteries making 6 times minimum wage. I worked the same job in the same factory 25 years later, and I made 1.3 times minimum wage. If someone living in that town today is on SNAP, who is to blame - the Democrats for promoting SNAP, or the Republicans (or both parties) for shifting the job market so that any time a job that pays so much as $12 an hour opens, you have 250 people apply for it?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 20 2020, @05:52PM (1 child)
The modern social programs, including SNAP, were first envisioned in the mid sixties. They were not widely implemented til the early mid 70s. Do you think people were just starving to deaths in massive numbers before the mid 70s?
These programs were envisioned and intially executed by LBJ. This [snopes.com] inquiry into an alleged quote of his emphasizes the sort of person he was. Snopes does not affirm the initial quote but the evidence provided for what he is, without doubt, known to have said is just as informative. For instance he was also the president when MLK was assassinated after the FBI had been trying to force him to commit suicide. [wikipedia.org] By the time these programs were starting poverty had already been on major decline for decades due to economic and technological development.
These programs are not about helping people, but about forcing people into a dependency relationship to ensure they are coerced into voting for such relationship to continue. It was an extremely clever, extremely unethical, and extremely effective ploy. However, yes you also have to understand that letting yourself get into a dependency relationship is also, in part, your fault. I grew up urban poor, like many do. And also got out of it, like many do. It was even relatively easy. In spite of an almost entirely absent parent I did well in school, was able to get some scholarships in large part thanks to my shit circumstance, went to college, took on a real degree, and it was gg poverty from there.
I think you'll find something quite frequent is that people who have no clue what it's like to live in poverty are those making all of these ignorant comments such as yourself. It's people that who have actually lived through this stuff that realize that these sort of programs are not helping anybody. It's all about political power and exploitation. I don't think you can get much worse off than I grew up, drive-by shootings on the reg, yellow tape a regular adornment at my apartments, single parent who was -at best- neglectful, and living primarily off a diet of ramen + iceberg lettuce (which is actually quite delicious). Doesn't really matter. Was still relatively easy to get out.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 20 2020, @08:05PM
Bullshit. If you're too sick, you're not getting out (can't hold down a job). If you're otherwise healthy but get sick at the wrong time, you're not getting out (you had a good job, but you were sick for two weeks and got fired). If there are no good employers near you, you can't find a good job and you can't save up enough to move somewhere with better job options. Maybe you could if you were friends with someone living near a better job - but that's not a 'relatively easy' thing, either. If none of your childhood role models were good people, able to impress upon you the value of education and hard work, you wouldn't even understand what you can do to get out.