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Imagine that within two or three decades we'll have morphed into the Robotic States of America. Most manual laborers will have been replaced by herculean bots. Truck drivers, cabbies, delivery workers and airline pilots will have been superseded by vehicles that do it all. Doctors, lawyers, and business executives will have seen their ranks thinned by charming, attractive, all-knowing algorithms. So how will humans earn a living after they've been made redundant?
Farhad Manjoo writes at The New York Times that one idea has gained widespread interest — including from some of the very technologists who are now building the bot-ruled future — is a plan known as "universal basic income," or U.B.I. - just give everyone a paycheck. "Imagine the government sending each adult about $1,000 a month, about enough to cover housing, food, health care and other basic needs for many Americans," writes Manjoo. "U.B.I. would be aimed at easing the dislocation caused by technological progress, but it would also be bigger than that." Supporters argue machine intelligence will produce so much economic surplus that we could collectively afford to liberate much of humanity from both labor and suffering in the sort of quasi-utopian future we've seen in science fiction universes like that of "Star Trek."
There is an urgency to the techies' interest in U.B.I. They argue that machine intelligence reached an inflection point in the last couple of years, and that technological progress now looks destined to change how most of the world works. Wage growth is sluggish, job security is nonexistent, inequality looks inexorable, and the ideas that once seemed like a sure path to a better future (like taking on debt for college) are in doubt. Even where technology has created more jobs, like the so-called gig economy work created by services like Uber, it has only added to our collective uncertainty about the future of work. "All of a sudden," says Roy Bahat, "people are looking at these trends and realizing these questions about the future of work are more real and immediate than they guessed."
Previously:
"Silicon Valley Startup Funder Eyes Universal Basic Income"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 06 2016, @11:29PM
Just give us all jobs with state government.
(Score: 2) by davester666 on Wednesday March 09 2016, @08:25AM
Doesn't really matter.
whatever the monthly number is(X), minimum rent will just happen to be 0.95*x, so you are boned automatically.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 06 2016, @11:43PM
This isn't a bad idea at all. We already have this, you just need to be 65+ to claim it, it's called Social Security.
We used to have a proper welfare system too, but that was gutted forcing millions of unqualified people back into the workforce.
I knew a guy in the 1980s who made really incredible art and was only able to do so because welfare freed him to be able to make these incredible sculptures.
He was welder but he moved too slow to work it as a job. Art is just funny that way I guess.
Then the 1990s hit, welfare to work was mandated and my friend eventually died in an industrial accident when a pipe he was welding collapsed.
Who knows what he could have produced had he just been given the time and space to do what he loved because he loved it, not what he had to because he had to.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 06 2016, @11:49PM
More likely you'd have people spending all their time watching TV, playing video games, surfing the web, traveling and posting selfies on social media. In other words, like today but more extreme.
(Score: 1, Troll) by Ethanol-fueled on Sunday March 06 2016, @11:57PM
So people become more dependent than ever on the government just for basic subsistence, so then the government can just cut your funding if they think those things you are posting online are too extreme. Sounds legit.
Not to mention that it would result in a migrant crisis and an even greater strain on the system from all the economic migrants who would seek to take advantage of Free Shit™ . Because if that idea of Free Shit for All™ is ever realized, it's a Democratic Party idea and Democrats want to open the borders and destroy the country's livelihood just to get those votes and stay in power.
(Score: 0, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 07 2016, @12:00AM
Some of us Democrats are working hard and paying taxes so you can get you welfare payments and post shit online.
Maybe you should go to Canada. Help us out!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 07 2016, @02:03AM
Except, in this case there are no fucking jobs.
More, one can own their own robots, then those robots make stuff for you. Then you don't need a universal income.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by HiThere on Monday March 07 2016, @07:42PM
Sorry, but robots aren't assemblers, and even assemblers need to be able to find the correct atoms to work with.
This is a real problem. Jobs are going away. ALL of them. But not all at the same time. Those who still need to work resent those who can't, as is already happening. It will get worse. With increasing rapidity. And it's not just robots, it's not just manual laborers. It's everybody except top management, and the only reason that they are excepted is because they are the ones who make the decisions. But this is over a period of perhaps three or four decades.
How we handle it starting now will determine what kind of society we end up with.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Monday March 07 2016, @04:06AM
Every country in the world has Free Shit for all, it's just a question of how much they give.
I can't think of one that charges for air, many give away water - some of them even clean drinkable water, the Danish give away a small apartment with a TV and food.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 2, Offtopic) by aristarchus on Monday March 07 2016, @07:41AM
Every country in the world has Free Shit for all, it's just a question of how much they give.
Now you see there is the problem right there! All these libertarians, and Conservatives, and Personal Responsibility types thinking that it would be a good thing to get free shit. But just ask yourself: What would you do with all this free shit once you had it? After all, it is shit. If you had crop-land, perhaps you could use it as fertilizer, after proper sanitization. Or if you had a Bio-energy plant, where you could produce Methane and Bio-diesel! Of course, it is not the giving of free shit to these types that pissed of the Republicans amoung us: It is the giving of free shit to people who can do nothing with the shit except to accept it as more shit. This, I would suggest, is both nothing to get upset about, an not a situation to try to get yourself into out of libertarian envy (a real thing, a very real thing). So next time you think you may want some more free shit, just think: where are you going to put it, and what are you doing to do with it? Because shit you can't use, is just more shit.
(Score: 1) by bitstream on Monday March 07 2016, @08:12AM
It's simple to solve. Make completed high school a requirement to get UBI. And of course one can make the same requirement at the border.
And make any new residents to hug the cross and obligatory bikini for the wives for the first 5 years. That would keep certain bad elements at bay ;)
(Score: 2) by sjames on Monday March 07 2016, @06:06AM
Or making and doing useful things in their actually copious free time.
I doubt people will be doing a lot of globe trotting on $1000/month but having that to fall back on may just enable entrepreneurship.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 07 2016, @12:24AM
I've seen people suggest one way of instituting basic income in the US would be to gradually decrease the age for social security from 65 until it was down 18 (or 0? Not sure what the best policy on UBI for minors is). It's probably not a good idea though: one of the major advantages of UBI over welfare is that you can get rid of most of the bureaucracy around deciding who should get it.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by frojack on Monday March 07 2016, @04:31AM
I'll overlook the fact that You talk about Social Security, (which is not welfare).
But then drift off to talk about welfare not supporting a welder who created really incredible thing for which apparently absolutely no one would pay him a living wage.
The clear implication in your story was that welfare SHOULD have paid him to continue creating unwanted junk sculptures. And that would be a return to a "proper welfare system". (I don't know what era you thought it was returning to, because that never existed as you describe it.
And in telling this story you do point out WHY a system of a U.B.I. will probably never exist. Not while goverment is involved:
Americans have been assured for ages that the government in could competently manage the economy, their retirement benefits, medical care, the culture, and foreign affairs.
But with each passing year the government's foolishness across the board has become blindingly clear. The national debt soars; the annual budget deficit is enormous; Social Security and Medicare have huge unfunded liabilities; "Proper welfare" no longer exists, recessions strike periodically; taxes are onerous; economic growth is anemic; and wars go on forever.
I can't see any way you could have people retire to the countryside for a life of leisure, and expect that same governmental system to suddenly change its ways. Unless of course government too is to be turned over to robots.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 07 2016, @04:47AM
Many problems are created by the Republicans. They are, afterall, the ones saying that government doesn't work. So that's why you should elect them so they can prove it. By breaking government. They quit being a political party that had the country's best interest in mind decades ago. Now they are just tools for the elite upper class.
Good idea to turn government over to the robots though. I'm picturing something like Terminator, except instead of killing humans it will do horrible things like providing at least a minimum means for people to live, and healthcare for all, and unbiased free education. Basically anathema to Republicans. But I think we should start small. Maybe IBM's Watson can take over all management positions. Employees of a business can be considered part owners and paid out as such while IBM's Watson can do all of the management stuff without stealing the profits from the workers like a typical CEO does.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 07 2016, @03:54PM
yeah if that where true the problems would be US specific
however you see the same kind of problems with budgets in the entire world
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 08 2016, @02:58AM
yeah if that where true the problems would be US specific
however you see the same kind of problems with budgets in the entire world
There are conservatives bent on ruining things in every nation.
(Score: 2) by bradley13 on Monday March 07 2016, @09:51AM
There are so many things wrong UBI. It's yet another unrealistic, but oh-so-well-intentioned idea. The story in this comment illustrates a lot of those problems.
"I knew a guy...who made really incredible art, and was only able to do so because [he was on] welfare"
Art is cheap, because essentially everybody does it. How many people play an instrument? Write short stories? Draw, or paint, or participate in amateur theater, or whatever? Art is not a profession, except for a very, very few.
"He was welder but he moved too slow to [weld] as a job"
So he was incompetent, or in the wrong profession.
"...eventually died...when a pipe he was welding collapsed"
Indeed.
So the argument for UBI is that some people are incompetent, so the rest of us should pay them, so that they can goof off and realize their dreams. Um, no.
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
(Score: 3, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 07 2016, @12:39PM
I think the argument is that some people are incompetent, so the rest of us should pay them so they can stay the fuck out of the way, and let those of us who can and do get on and improve things, get on and improve things.
A lot of the former group of people work in government.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 07 2016, @06:50PM
Original AC here.
The argument was that UBI, Welfare, Social Security and these other systems exist to keep people who shouldn't be in the workforce, out of the workforce.
Consider SS for instance which was started during the great depression in order to get older folks out of the workforce so a younger generation could come in and work.
SSDI was created to keep handicapped people out of the workforce as well.
As productivity per worker increases, the need for labor decreases. However societies need consumption of goods & services in order to continue. Furthermore hungry & homeless people tend to act in an antisocial manner.
Ergo it is in society's best interests to fund social welfare and safety net programs. The first to go should be the one who do not want to work. Let them do what they want, they might be the next Michaelangelo, or Einstein, or they might eliminate themselves from the gene pool in a drug and ethanol fueled high.
Imagine how much more you could be if you could pursue your passions instead of your next meal.
(Score: 1, Flamebait) by Ethanol-fueled on Sunday March 06 2016, @11:45PM
Yeah, no. Hey, Manjoo, I don't know if you got the memo yet, but this ain't India.
"About $1000 a month" ain't shit here in California. Even when I was on the dole I was getting 1800 bucks a month and even that didn't leave very much left after rent, car payment, bills, subsistence, and the cheapest Obamacare plan being $250/mo* here.
What needs to be done is to kick out the illegals and bullshit visas, so that the existing automation-related work is for only citizens to earn money, and America can be a model of efficiency and prosperity as well as a highly-skilled workforce -- but that would never happen because Democrats need to make end-runs around immigration laws and rig elections to get more votes from professional welfare-breeders with no loyalty to anything but their base animal urges, and that is the reason why -- they say -- a guaranteed income would be only $1000 bucks a month. Cramming 3 generations into a 1-bedroom apartment is fine for illegals, but never fine for me.
* When you're not working you get $100/mo tax credits for Obamacare, but if you've worked at all that year and made enough to pay your bills, they'll just take those tax credits out of your taxes anyway. I don't have a problem with the idea of Obamacare other than that the rates and that the mandatory penalty for not enrolling are both fucking extortion. A healthy younger person with no preexisting conditions other than a love for booze should not have to pay 250 fucking bucks a month for basic healthcare.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 06 2016, @11:56PM
Kicking out illegals would only drive the cost of things you need to survive through the roof.
The vast majority of illegals are doing farm and manual labor tasks. If they were all kicked and replaced with people that were actually paid minimum wage you wouldn't be able to afford the food you eat.
I don't disagree with the visas though. No company should be able to hire foreign employees without demonstrating a concerted search for an American citizen took place.
Another thing that might help too is if the laws were changed so that a company that does a layoff has to pay their laid off let go employees at their full wage + benefits until such time as the employee finds new employment. If there were no financial incentive for letting people go, companies wouldn't let people go unless they were literally going bankrupt.
I've considered asking politicians to consider a wage disparity law that would ensure that the CEO of a company can be given total compensation of no more than 10x the salary of the lowest paid employee, in any year in which the company shed citizen FTEs. I think that would pretty much end the H1B system all together since H1Bs wouldn't be considered citizen FTEs.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 07 2016, @12:11AM
While I like the idea I can see some easy ways around your proposed wage disparity law. The most obvious one would be to push all the low wage slaves off to temp work hired by outside contractors. "Of course I deserve to be paid a $1M salary! What's that? What about all those admins working for minimum wage? Well, those folks were hired through a temp agency. They aren't employees of the company. So, it's all good!"
(Score: 2) by frojack on Monday March 07 2016, @12:14AM
The vast majority of illegals are doing farm and manual labor tasks. If they were all kicked and replaced with people that were actually paid minimum wage you wouldn't be able to afford the food you eat.
Mostly bullshit.
Farm labor does have minimum wage waivers [paywizard.org] but they are color and nationality blind.
So illegals would not be replaced with minimum wage workers, they would be replaced with people earning about the same as the illegals were paid. Rather than spending summers driving around burning gas on their parent's dime pretending to look for work thousands of teens of high school age might actually be employed.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Monday March 07 2016, @01:58AM
The busiest seasons for farm workers, planting in the spring and harvesting in the fall, are during the school year, not in the summer.
Also, for most food products, the farming portion of the product is not even close to the majority of the cost. The price of farm products has actually been declining steadily for decades, especially when you're talking about the kinds of industrial monoculture operations that employ the largest number of migrant farm hands. (Where does your hard-earned money at the grocery store actually go, you ask? About half to the store, and another quarter to shipping and distribution.) So there really is a lot more room for labor to be paid more than they are without busting the prices that everybody is paying too badly.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 07 2016, @01:44AM
The statement was " $1,000 a month, about enough to cover housing, food, health care ..."
Your reply included: "... .when I was on the dole I was getting 1800 bucks a month and even that didn't leave very much left after rent [i.e., housing], car payment, bills, subsistence [i.e., food], and the cheapest Obamacare plan [i.e., health care] being $250/mo* here."
So you expect a free car and "bills" (whatever that means) on top of housing, food, and health care. Sounds like $1000 per month is just about right for California, given the stated goals of the UBI program.
Also, $250/month is not an unreasonable premium for a major medical insurance plan. And BTW, the way insurance works is that "healthy young" persons do in fact subsidize others ... because eventually, your youth and health will pass ... especially if you are a "boozer".
(Score: 2) by BK on Monday March 07 2016, @05:08PM
In some parts of the country, no car == no opportunity to work and no way to obtain basic necessities. If you're going to have [program], it had better account for this else you still get the [riots] and the [problems].
...but you HAVE heard of me.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 07 2016, @08:56PM
Very hard to [riot] if you are so spread out you need a [car] to get there but don't have one...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 09 2016, @10:35PM
And the Bay Area BART corridors *IS* impossible to get around in a timely fashion by public transit. Furthermore, in many parts of the state unless you are a student, government employee, or have state aid, bus passes are up to 300/month. That is not including the 2+ hours you are likely to spend each day commuting by public transit compared to a 20-40 minute car commute for the same distance. I had actually calculated (outside car repairs) that it would be cheaper monthly to commute by car, including insurance, than it would be to take public transit, not including the time saved commuting if used to either work extra hours or a secondary job. In my particular case it was the different between being able to study for classes and struggling with both work and school simultaneously.
I have great respect for anyone who successfully juggles public transit, work, and school in California, because the system is stacked against them. Maybe not as badly as people who 'walked uphill both ways', but not as far from it as some people make out.
(Score: 2) by fnj on Monday March 07 2016, @11:02PM
"A car" is just a standin for the ability to somehow go about life, do (food, clothing, and other) shopping, visit physicians and healthcare facilities, and so on. Everyone has to be able to do these things; not just privileged pricks. Sure, it doesn't have to be a car, but transportation needs to be provided somehow.
"Bills" pay for things like electrical power, heat, running water, sewage, trash removal, telephone service, etc. The UBI recipient requires those services, just like anyone else. If he's not going to be billed for them, they need to be provided somehow. It doesn't do you any good to have a shack if it's dark, cold, has no water faucet or flush toilet, and you have no way to prepare meals.
If housing is provided in communal form, then these services still figure into the cost.
I could observe that it seems as if you live in your parents' basement and everything is magically provided for you, and you never see the machinery of that provision, but that would be presumptuous.
(Score: 2) by looorg on Monday March 07 2016, @12:03AM
"Imagine the government sending each adult about $1,000 a month, about enough to cover housing, food, health care and other basic needs for many Americans,"
Where in the USA is it that you can cover rent, utility, health care, basics and food for a $1000? Is that if you live under the bridge somewhere?
I guess perhaps if everyone would move out into the middle of nowhere you could live of that. Everybody living in their own Unabomber-style shack then $1k a month would be fine.
I do wonder what would happen to all the cities then, would anyone still live there? Why would you live in a little cramp slumlord apartment in the city when you can live in a house in the countryside. After all you don't have to work - that is for the robots!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 07 2016, @12:13AM
How much acetone peroxide can one make for $1k?
(Score: 3, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 07 2016, @12:22AM
Health care, I don't believe (assume single payer?), but $1000/mo is enough to pay for cheap housing and food. It is possible to feed an adult on $100/mo if you're willing to cook every meal and eat nothing but rice and beans. A more reasonable diet is probably $200-300/mo, once again, assuming you cook every meal. Of course, cooking every meal means having access to a kitchen. For the remaining $700/mo, you'll have trouble finding an apartment you want to live in in most cities, but that's certainly enough for one person's share of the rent in a house or apartment.
I don't expect UBI to be enough to live comfortably, just enough to live. The whole point of UBI instead of welfare is that you can still earn additional money; you just don't end up starving in the streets if you fail to do so.
(Score: 5, Informative) by looorg on Monday March 07 2016, @12:32AM
I don't expect UBI to be enough to live comfortably, just enough to live. The whole point of UBI instead of welfare is that you can still earn additional money; you just don't end up starving in the streets if you fail to do so.
I think this, the quote, is the part that is often missed in the UBI discussion. It's not intended for people to stop working or earning a wage. You are not just going to have work as your main or only source of income, you'll survive without work just like today but it will be a very basic form of living as in you have a roof over your head and you won't starve to death. You'll still work, perhaps not as much (hours/week) and not for as much pay (wage) but on the other hand you might work with something that you find "fun" or more fulfilling then your current drone job.
(Score: 2) by shrewdsheep on Monday March 07 2016, @09:42AM
And this is what would be considered a lower acceptable standard of social security in Europe.
(Score: 2) by scruffybeard on Monday March 07 2016, @08:44PM
I thought this was the point of UBI. If robots are taking all/most of the jobs, then vast numbers of people will unable to find work. The proposals I have seen take some of the money earned by the robot owners and operators, and gives it to the people who were displaced.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 07 2016, @01:08AM
A more reasonable diet is probably $200-300/mo
Are you kidding? That is insane. By buying in bulk and keeping each meal (667 calories, say) under $2 on average, you can save a lot on food and still eat reasonably. Your food expenses should be $30-$40 a week per person if you're smart enough about what you buy. And it's not all rice and beans.
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 07 2016, @02:00AM
The difference between sanity and insanity isn't much: $200 a month is the same as $46 a week.
(Score: 2) by frojack on Monday March 07 2016, @01:35AM
Why would you have to pay for housing?
Didn't the TFS posit and excess of just about everything:
Supporters argue machine intelligence will produce so much economic surplus that we could collectively afford to liberate much of humanity from both labor and suffering
Wouldn't that include free food, medical, housing and just about every need?
And where would this $1000 come from? Taxes? With a 50% tax rate, how many years can the government supply free money?
I believe it was Thatcher who said, the problem with socialists, is pretty soon they run out of other people's money.
Once you start extending this theory to the logical conclusion it all comes tumbling down.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday March 07 2016, @04:12AM
Most of the cost of a house is in the labor of construction. When robots first build houses, they will initially cost more than the laborers, but picture that cost of labor starting to fall 25% per year, for 50 years straight - it won't be long before the cost of housing falls dramatically. At the same time, the cost of basic materials should fall with robot truck drivers, tree harvesters, gypsum miners, glass makers, etc. The real breakthrough will come when robots can (economically) demolish and recycle old housing.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 2, Touché) by Francis on Monday March 07 2016, @04:33AM
Most of the cost of a house is the land it's located on.
(Score: 2) by frojack on Monday March 07 2016, @06:50AM
Maybe in a downtown NYC, but nowhere else that I know of.
Unless of course you are talking about 20 acres with a water view.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 3, Informative) by isostatic on Monday March 07 2016, @10:35AM
Pretty much everywhere in the UK, hence the massive disparity in cost of a 3 bed semi. 900sqft in Marsden Yorks £120k. Similar house in Trafford Manchester £250k.
Look at brand new homes of the same design, you're paying £150k more in Milton Keynes than you are in Lancashire.
(Score: 1) by Francis on Monday March 07 2016, @02:37PM
I'm pretty sure that in most places that people actually want to live the land costs more than the actual buildings you put on it. I'm sure if you get far enough out of the city limits you're going to have cheaper land. But, then you've got the cost of the actual commute to work adding a large sum to the final bill.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday March 07 2016, @05:35PM
I don't think anyone pictures UBI providing significant competitive capital for limited resources. In other words: no waterfront, no desirable city center locations, if the whole of the UK is so land precious, then UBI will likely only ever pay rent, not ownership.
Until "the immortality singularity" we're all just renters in life, anyway.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 2) by Pino P on Monday March 07 2016, @07:56PM
no waterfront
Understandable.
no desirable city center locations
Then would it cover the commute to and from a place of employment?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 07 2016, @09:58PM
point is you don't have to work, hence no commute.
(Score: 2) by Pino P on Tuesday March 08 2016, @04:30PM
I get the impression that UBI provides a poverty line lifestyle, which has been shown to be hazardous to one's physical and mental health [google.com]. Anyone who wants more than a poverty line lifestyle will still need to work.
(Score: 1) by Francis on Monday March 07 2016, @10:40PM
I don't see any reason why the UBI should be enough to own property without actually working. As long as it covers food, shelter, clothing and a baseline standard of living, there's not much more than that that's required.
Things beyond that wouldn't make any sense to provide until machines get to the point where nobody is working at all. At which point people should have the option of living like the rich do.
Ideally this would be a gradual roll out as less and less work is needed with the end point being where people are only doing jobs that they actually enjoy as hobbies. And jobs that nobody likes or are dangerous are universally done by machines.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday March 07 2016, @11:47PM
Agreed, though rent in a city center is usually more than enough to own property out in the boonies - and if you choose to work/socialize through the internet, then you don't really need to be physically "where it's at."
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 2) by darkfeline on Monday March 07 2016, @03:43PM
Try getting "free" bread from a bakery next time they have a surplus.
Spoilers: you can't. They'll destroy the surplus before giving it away for free (unless they're really nice people).
Join the SDF Public Access UNIX System today!
(Score: 2) by isostatic on Monday March 07 2016, @05:04PM
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/feb/04/french-law-forbids-food-waste-by-supermarkets [theguardian.com]
France has become the first country in the world to ban supermarkets from throwing away or destroying unsold food, forcing them instead to donate it to charities and food banks.
Under a law passed unanimously by the French senate, as of Wednesday large shops will no longer bin good quality food approaching its best-before date. Charities will be able to give out millions more free meals each year to people struggling to afford to eat.
(Score: 2) by fnj on Monday March 07 2016, @11:06PM
And do you really think that would allow maintenance of reasonable health? Or would widespread malnutrition and wasting not bother you at all?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 07 2016, @02:25AM
$1,000/month can easily cover everything except health care.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 07 2016, @03:47AM
It depends on where you live.
If you live in a decent sized city yeah 1000 is probably not enough.
Live in the middle of nowhere Nebraska? You *might* actually pull that off. I had a friend who did just that. He even bought his own home. His monthly payment? 80 dollars a month. Let that sit in for a second. Now the house was not super nice. However it was not a run down shack either. It had one nasty problem. It was an hour drive to any major stores. His job was a 40 min drive one way. That was the reason he moved out. However if you think a bit more creative and are not too attached to where you live you can pull off living much cheaper.
(Score: 2) by isostatic on Monday March 07 2016, @10:28AM
40 minute drive to work is nothing compared with cities, and drone delivery eliminates the nearest shop problem.
(Score: 3, Informative) by bzipitidoo on Monday March 07 2016, @03:36PM
I did it, a touch under $1000/month, in Winston Salem, North Carolina. $475 monthly rent. $20-$30 for electricity. Grocery was $30-$40 per week. Needed a tank of gas about every 3 weeks, for $40. Automobile insurance was about $400/year. Internet service was about $35/month. Did laundry every 2 weeks for $1. Did not use a powered dryer, used a rack to dry my laundry. And that's about it. No health insurance, I was young and figured I could chance that.
To get living expenses so low, you have to be on the watch. I quit drinking orange juice. That stuff is expensive, and unhealthy. Eat the orange, don't drink the juice. Drink only water. There are a lot of budget busting grocery items like orange juice that you don't need. You won't have to settle for only beans and crackers, just stay away from the pricier foods. I had pizza whenever I wanted it. Used coupons, deals, and the fridge to save the leftovers.
Another thing you must be willing to do is let the indoor temperature swing more with the seasons. It actually is healthier. 68 F in the winter is rather wimpy. 60 F is quite tolerable, you really do get used to it. Wear sweats, that's all you have to do. In the summer, the upper 80s is perfectly acceptable, in combination with moderate humidity. More than half our residential energy usage goes towards mere heating and cooling, because we're so spoiled and insist on keeping it near 75F indoors all year, and because the design of our housing is so horribly wasteful.
You must free yourself of finance. My car was old (24 years at the time) and fully paid for; I had no car payment. I paid my credit cards in full every month. Not to do so is just throwing money away on outrageous interest rates. Lot of people have too little appreciation for how much money it costs to keep a balance on a credit card. Even worse are crap financial products such as payday and pawn loans. Never take a loan from such a business. Keep some reserve on hand so you won't have to. This is where most people really blow it. For them, money burns a hole in their pocket. No self control, and no financial sense. And when they do see it, they're trapped.
Another essential ingredient is avoiding consumerism. People are programmed to believe you can't have fun, and live life if you don't spend money. This is 100% bull. Hiking, in local parks, is free, except for the wear on your shoes. On computers, there's all kinds of very low cost entertainment available, and you don't even have to pirate to get it. Lot of free video on Youtube, fun games on sites such as Humble Bundle, all sorts of free socialization, news and discussion boards such as this one. Forget the movie theater. You don't need to see the latest Bond, Superman, Star Wars or whatever movie on opening night. Cable TV? LOL, I am a cord never. For every free solution to some petty problem, there are half a dozen stupidly expensive solutions constantly thrown in our faces with never ending advertising. For example, why do you really need a bed? Because you can't get down to and up from the floor because your physical condition is just that bad? Because it looks desperately poor and low status not to have a bed? You don't need a bed! An air mattress on the bedroom floor works quite well. Just be sure to have a blanket between yourself and the air mattress on cold nights. One big problem with a "real" bed is the sheer bulk. If you need to move, a full sized bed for 2 is a problem. In contrast, an air mattress is a cinch.
And finally, I had the good fortune not to be hit with a medical problem. Nor did my car break down on me, nor was there any other big unexpected expense. But you can't just hope for the best on stuff like that, you have to work a little for it. I ate healthy, got a little exercise, and maintained my car, checking the oil and tires, and paying attention to any warning lights and funny noises. I walked quite a lot, to do my errands. More exercise for me, and saved wear and tear on the car.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 07 2016, @04:21PM
People are programmed to believe you can't have fun Winston Salem is most certainly the place to do that ;)
I live in one the towns just outside of winston. Because the taxes are cheaper (about half of winston). I am doing pretty much like what you said. I do however buy OJ :)
I went a slightly different route. I bought my house. Now my 'house payment' is ~2k per year, for tax. Paid for is an amazing thing. As for used cars buy them. Just do not buy someone elses headache. A guy I know did just that. His '500 dollar' car turned into a 3k car. He did not take my advice. I saw that and was told him 'run' do not look back. But like you said he had money burning a hole in his pocket.
Another essential ingredient is avoiding consumerism.
This is also another thing I do. I have found that I have 'maxed out' on the junk I want to buy. Yesterdays cool toy is tomorrows junk.
I am a cord never I am a cutter. I started tracking what exactly I was watching and how much commercials I was being fed. The cost to benefit ratio for me was not there anymore. Also after 1-2 years you are so hopelessly 'behind' you can grab something from 3-4 years ago and still be just as entertained. I skipped seeing the star wars so far (and managed to see no spoilers!) . Found it on sale for 18 bucks. That alone probably saved me 30-40 dollars going to the theater. I still keep my 'video budget'. I usually buy a movie every couple of months. If I were willing I could wait around and get it from the library for free.
I noticed you like to walk. Winston Salem is not designed for that :( I am probably going to be moving in the next year or so. That will be one of my major considerations of where I move to.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by bzipitidoo on Monday March 07 2016, @06:03PM
Yes, owning a house can be even better. Half of my spending was rent. Much depends on how long you will be living there. If you're only there for a year, a house can cost more. Paying a 6% commission to a real estate agent to sell a house when you move out can easily exceed a year of rent. Also, I didn't have to worry about mowing the grass and maintenance and such, that was the apartment owner's problem.
The entire US is bad for walking. One thing I've heard is that the southern US is the worst because it had a period of rapid growth through the 1950s, when worship of the almighty car was at its height. Plus, the south is fence happy. It's a cultural thing. One of the primary purposes of all that fencing is to discourage walking, otherwise they would leave openings in the fences. The fencing certainly isn't for farming, not in the city. Walking is another activity that has been sold to the public as low class, poor, demeaning, even suspicious, possible sign of criminal leanings. We waste much on security and privacy fences. The idea of the gated community is pathetic.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 07 2016, @12:29AM
While I support UBI, I've always been uneasy about the argument that it's a good idea because automation will take away all of the jobs. For one, it's really hard to prove: while it may be true this time, we've thought that before and been wrong. More importantly, it's a distraction. We should have UBI because it's the right thing to do for many reasons: economically (our consumer-driven economy is failing because our consumers don't have any money... and welfare wastes a lot of money on deciding who to give money to), crime reduction (poverty makes people desperate; some of them will turn to crime), and just humanitarian (I don't want to live in a country that lets its people starve).
(Score: 5, Insightful) by legont on Monday March 07 2016, @12:37AM
A more general issue - income is exponentially distributed. [arxiv.org] Such systems in nature are often unstable. Most stable (and should I say progressive) systems in nature are normally distributed [wikipedia.org]
What we need is a tax law that states that government has to make income normally distributed. Mean is set automaticly by economic conditions. Deviation is set in annual budget. Once set, government should tax the rich side of the curve and give the proceeds to the poor side - as much as it takes - to achieve the goal as stated by the law.
"Wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding" - John Kenneth Galbraith.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 07 2016, @12:58AM
what! taxes? throw the heretic communist from a plane to the sea before he eats our children!
(Score: 1, Disagree) by khallow on Monday March 07 2016, @04:24AM
A more general issue - income is exponentially distributed. Such systems in nature are often unstable. Most stable (and should I say progressive) systems in nature are normally distributed
Wow. What logical fallacy is that again? There are several things to note here. First, a normal system would have negative income. That leads to a variety of dysfunctional dynamics of your economic system. Second, exponentially distributed income says nothing about the stability of the system. It's a snapshot of the current income distribution and contains no information about the dynamics of the system.
Third, stability is way overrated. For example, the current labor competition with the developing world, which is once again what this sort of story is complaining about, has led to trinkets like better, safer, more fuel efficient cars - worldwide. It has also led to the restoration of Western Europe and Japan from their state of abject ruin in the wake of the Second World War.
Do we really want things to be unchanged from 1945? My view is that things change. It is better to adapt to change, than to attempt to stabilize our society in a way that doesn't make sense and makes us vulnerable to the changes we don't control.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by AndyTheAbsurd on Monday March 07 2016, @03:31PM
First, a normal system would have negative income.
I literally have no idea how you got from "normally distributed" to "negative income" . A normally distributed curve for income across the population would just mean that there is only a very small percentage getting a very high income, and a very small percentage getting a very low income, with a big hump in between of people getting more moderate incomes, with the highest point of the hump being the average income. "Negative income" - which would involve an effective tax rate of over 100% - isn't even a thing in this scenario.
For example, the current labor competition with the developing world, which is once again what this sort of story is complaining about, has led to trinkets like better, safer, more fuel efficient cars - worldwide. It has also led to the restoration of Western Europe and Japan from their state of abject ruin in the wake of the Second World War.
No, and no. The better, more fuel efficient cars have come from government regulation requiring that of manufacturers. The manufacturers - especially in the US - have fought safety regulations and CAFE standards tooth and nail for years, both because they don't want to put in the engineering effort and because they definitely don't want to be forced to sell more expensive cars (as the cost of the safety features need to get added to the overall cost of the car). And the restoration of Western Europe and Japan after WWII, early on, was driven by the American middle class becoming wealthy enough to buy things from those places - a situation which has gone away under the existing exponential curve of income division - and was continued as similar middle classes developed in other regions of the world (including Europe and Japan themselves).
Please note my username before responding. You may have been trolled.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday March 07 2016, @05:30PM
I literally have no idea how you got from "normally distributed" to "negative income" . A normally distributed curve for income across the population would just mean that there is only a very small percentage getting a very high income, and a very small percentage getting a very low income, with a big hump in between of people getting more moderate incomes, with the highest point of the hump being the average income.
A normal distribution doesn't have a top or bottom - hence, negative income is a thing. I'll just point out here that the corresponding max entropy analogue to the normal distribution for non-negative ranges are the Poisson distributions [wikipedia.org] which all have exponential tails on the high end, that is, they are "exponential curves" when one looks at the wealthy tail to them. Why aren't we using those again?
"Negative income" - which would involve an effective tax rate of over 100% - isn't even a thing in this scenario.
I don't believe you've thought this out at all. But let's go with it just the same. Since we intend in this scenario to use a normal distribution, what is our choice for both mean and deviation of the desired income distribution? Those two parameters are required to set the shape of your normal distribution. Here, too large a deviation with respect to income means people with negative income. In fact, the normal distribution is symmetric at the point of the mean income. That means in particular that you will have the same number of people with negative income as you do people with more than double the mean income.
No, and no. The better, more fuel efficient cars have come from government regulation requiring that of manufacturers.
The regulators have no clue what is possible. It was only the existence of fuel efficient cars, like the Honda Civic (1972 was the first year it was released in the US) which showed what was possible.
And the restoration of Western Europe and Japan after WWII, early on, was driven by the American middle class becoming wealthy enough to buy things from those places - a situation which has gone away under the existing exponential curve of income division - and was continued as similar middle classes developed in other regions of the world (including Europe and Japan themselves).
That's a mighty strange way to agree with me, well, except for the "exponential curve" thing is just bunk.
(Score: 2) by frojack on Monday March 07 2016, @07:21AM
A more general issue - income is exponentially distributed. Such systems in nature are often unstable.
Really? Systems in nature with income? Show me a white tailed deer with a paycheck.
Unstable? You mean like Ants, where the entire hive works for the Queen. Or the big elk who gets all the cows?
Nothing about the human societal structure compares to nature. Its a bogus analog.
While an executive salary 10000 times the lowest paid worker probably isn't justified, and some shareholders are balking at that, but government micromanaging every company has never worked anywhere in the world, and there is no reason to expect it to work here either.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 07 2016, @05:27PM
Resources = income. Your analogies are specific, nature is a complex system much like our economy.
The fact that you put "probably" with the 10,000x salary difference says more about why you are debating this. You are a typical american individualist, an attitude that brings many positive attributes, but which happens to eat away at the fabric of our communities.
No government micromanaging is needed, just tax rates that make it impossible to accumulate disproportionate wealth.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday March 07 2016, @06:12PM
You are a typical american individualist, an attitude that brings many positive attributes, but which happens to eat away at the fabric of our communities.
More libertarian FUD. It must be the mental failwaves emanating from New Hampshire that force people to make unsubstantiated statements like this. Individualism doesn't mean that people can't contribute positively to their communities.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by RamiK on Monday March 07 2016, @01:11AM
Soon enough, the people who own the food production will raise the prices above basic income. Then, they'll offer people cash for lands and houses which they'll have no option but accept. Then, they will rent them their houses back.
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A few decades later, Crassus will own Rome and will try to take over as king. Maybe some successful military leader called Caesar will beat him to it. Maybe he'll own the drones. Doesn't matter. Eventually power will be at the hands of the very few.
Honestly, I don't have a solution for maintaining any semblance of a democracy when the economy doesn't support it. But I do know basic income won't work on it's own.
compiling...
(Score: 2, Interesting) by khallow on Monday March 07 2016, @04:52AM
A few decades later, Crassus will own Rome and will try to take over as king. Maybe some successful military leader called Caesar will beat him to it. Maybe he'll own the drones. Doesn't matter. Eventually power will be at the hands of the very few.
The military leader (or some other leader with a combination of political and military power) would win. Power is a much more potent currency than money and wealth. Crassus's tribulations [wikipedia.org] are a prime example of this, but there are a number of other cases throughout history (Richard Neville [wikipedia.org], 16th Earl of Warwick is another notable example).
Crassus was able to become part of the triumvirate because his support was vital to Caesar and Pompey's schemes. But he soon found himself at a keen disadvantage despite his greater wealth, because military prowess turned out to be more important than being rich. So he attempted to gain military victories to match those of his rivals. Unfortunately, being rich doesn't make you automatically a competent military commander (though Crassus had some past military successes) and he picked a foe, the Parthians who easily defeated Crassus's troops. Crassus then died during subsequent negotiations gone wrong.
I bring this up because there's a lot of people out there who think being rich is to be all powerful. It's never been true. If you look at some of the discussion here, you see a key example of the drawbacks of wealth. For example, consider this post [soylentnews.org]:
Once set, government should tax the rich side of the curve and give the proceeds to the poor side - as much as it takes - to achieve the goal as stated by the law.
Wealth here is just something to be consumed by the poor. You can't eat military power - it doesn't transfer, but you sure can eat some rich guy's wealth.
(Score: 2) by RamiK on Monday March 07 2016, @05:53AM
Thousands of years of European\Chinese\Egyptian monarchies knowing nothing about military leadership except owning the country and military disagree.
compiling...
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday March 07 2016, @06:56AM
Thousands of years of European\Chinese\Egyptian monarchies knowing nothing about military leadership except owning the country and military disagree.
Disagree about what? And there's plenty of usurping in those millennia to consider.
(Score: 1) by tftp on Monday March 07 2016, @06:38AM
you sure can eat some rich guy's wealth
You can do that only until he stops producing the wealth for you. This will happen as soon as taxes become too high to justify his risk and his labor. I'd be sitting at home, earning my basic income by playing videogames. Who is then going to build new and better robots, and why? It's not something you can whip up in an afternoon... you have to really spend your time on this, years of lifetime. Who will choose to construct robots instead of just relaxing and drinking $beer?
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday March 07 2016, @07:05AM
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Monday March 07 2016, @09:40AM
There's more to earn than just money. You argue like a student who claims the world outside of school cannot work, as there's no teacher giving grades, and if you can't get good grades, what would you work for?
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday March 07 2016, @02:17PM
There's more to earn than just money. You argue like a student who claims the world outside of school cannot work, as there's no teacher giving grades, and if you can't get good grades, what would you work for?
That's not good enough. What's the deficiency here? Money is about trade. You can't trade grades for stuff. You can with money.
The current system has a very powerful incentive to would-be inventors and producers. They can produce things that people value and will pay money for. Then they can in turn use that money either for their own ends or to improve the production process. That latter aspect leads in turn to a powerful feedback loop where people who produce valuable things acquire the resources to produce even more valuable things.
There is this ridiculous conceit that everything can be done by someone dwelling in their mother's basement or tinkering in a garage. You can't make tens of thousands of miles of interstate highways that way, for example. You can't make a zillion smart phones that way. You can't make a modern integrated circuit factory that way.
So when you're transferring wealth from rich to poor in this way, you're crippling not only this valuable incentive system, you're also taking wealth away from people who are building vast amounts of productive infrastructure and delivering to people who are entirely incapable of doing so.
I might not have considered everything you want me to consider, but I think my viewpoint here is sufficiently ample.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by prospectacle on Monday March 07 2016, @01:15AM
Everyone pays for the minimum wage because it adds to the cost of labour which adds to the cost of providing a good or servces, which adds to the price of those goods and services.
Everyone would pay for the universal basic income too, as it would come out of the governemnt's budget which comes from taxes.
But there's a big and important difference: The minimum wage adds to the cost of doing business, but taxes come from profits instead, or from individuals in higher income brackets, who've already made a (relative) lot of money. Poor people pay for the minimum wage - whether they're employed or not - when buying even basic things like food and clothing, right from the first dollar, and companies have a harder time turning a profit due to increased costs of doing business.
So if you get rid of the minimum wage and replace it with a minimum income, the cost of doing business will go down, the costs of goods and services will go down, and all the high-income people and profitable companies who have to foot the bill for this will find it's easier to hire people cheaply (who won't be exhausted from working two other jobs as well), easier to make a profit. Highly taxed individuals will find that their (already high) incomes will stretch further due to the lower costs of goods and services.
The minimum wage is a hidden regressive tax. It's largely paid for by (passed on to) poor people in a similar way to a sales tax, because poorer people need to spend all of their money. It also lowers the flexibility of business and employment - due to higher business costs - and makes it harder to turn a profit. If it's replaced with a UBI we can still as a society pay people a living page, but in a far more efficient way that promotes productivity and economic freedom.
Who could be against it from the left or the right? (except those who will no doubt jump in to tell me I'm missing something important out of this equation. I'm all ears.)
If a plan isn't flexible it isn't realistic
(Score: 1) by Ethanol-fueled on Monday March 07 2016, @03:49AM
If upper management weren't such greedy bastards and employers acted in ways which benefited the company and employees' long-term stability rather than executive bonuses and short-term returns to the shareholders, I just might agree with you. And cheating the spirit of tax law by using creative multinational accounting trickery is an entirely different beast.
After employers tone down the greedy bastardism a bit and we see see more equality with regard to income, we may be in a better place to see what works and what doesn't.
A guaranteed income of only $1000 a month, as the "new normal," is just criminally parsimonious. It's people trying to convince you it's the "new normal," just pissing on your head and telling you it's raining.
(Score: 2) by prospectacle on Monday March 07 2016, @05:11AM
I agree $1000 is too low. It has to be a living wage.
Tax evasion is a problem regardless, a separate problem worth solving for its own reasons. It doesn't need to be solved to implement a UBI.
A UBI would not in fact cost society any more than a minimum wage does. It just takes the money from the top of the spending chain instead of the bottom. It would take it out of profits and high income brackets, instead of adding it to operating costs and living costs. Adding to living and hiring costs (the current system) acts as a disincentive to hire people, and a disincentive to buy goods and services. It's a depressant on the economy. A UBI stimulates spending instead.
If a plan isn't flexible it isn't realistic
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 07 2016, @07:51AM
Why not taxes proportional to what you contribute to society?
Same 60% rate for everybody, so poor people don't pay taxes if they use 90% of their money, rich people pay 60% if they spend only 10%
That would push people to put their money back into the economy instead of saving or buying gold watches.
Make taxes lighter for companies that give higher salaries and have more staff than they really need and have flexible hours and part-time, so human work is better rewarded, the service industry thrives ...
coupled with universal healthcare like in Europe, universal base income,
people who want to do something fullfilling can work part-time, and work on projects on the side, go back to university, ...
(Score: 2) by prospectacle on Monday March 07 2016, @11:15AM
I'm not knocking the idea, but I don't really understand your examples. Can you spell it out like I'm slow.
If a plan isn't flexible it isn't realistic
(Score: 2) by AndyTheAbsurd on Monday March 07 2016, @04:27PM
It sounds like the AC you replied to wants to tax personal income like corporate income is taxed today - you only pay on income after expenditures. However, the "gold watch" example doesn't make any sense in that context, so maybe I'm slow, too...
Please note my username before responding. You may have been trolled.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by khallow on Monday March 07 2016, @01:39PM
A guaranteed income of only $1000 a month, as the "new normal," is just criminally parsimonious.
No, it's what would happen if we took the entirety of the US's 2015 spending and spent it solely on a per US citizen basis. That is already roughly a fifth of the US's GDP. These basic income schemes are very expensive and completely dependent on a wealthy society existing first. And I'm not sold on the idea that transferring money from rich to poor will make a big difference in creating that wealthy society. I've heard the demand-driven economy patter and I'm just not sold on something that can't point to any value created in the society.
A practical observation here is that about half the budget goes to things other than social programs. That means you currently have perhaps $500 per month to play with as a guaranteed income.
After employers tone down the greedy bastardism a bit and we see see more equality with regard to income, we may be in a better place to see what works and what doesn't.
Because your magic pixie dust will work better once we do what you want (guaranteed income) and people stop behaving like people (greedy bastardism).
I have a different proposal along these lines. Let's build that sufficiently wealthy society first and then put in the guaranteed income. Or at least accept that extremely "criminal parsimonious" is what we can afford right now.
(Score: 2) by gnuman on Monday March 07 2016, @01:39PM
UBI will cause inflation. UBI will also result in need for workers to be treated better, as they can tell their employers to "fuck off" easier. VAT taxation would have to increase, at least to about 15-20%.
Currently, we have a problem with deflation, and there is a problem in some nations that you lose social safety nets if you can't work (like health coverage). In that light, UBI is not a bad thing.
In either case, inflation is better than deflation or stagnation. Helicopter Ben probably would support UBI for what it is - an economic stimulus. And then you can directly manage economic money supply through about of UBI supplied and taxation. Hell of a lot better than giving money to the banksters and the 0.01%.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Thexalon on Monday March 07 2016, @04:00AM
As technology improves, economic productivity goes up. And that's what we're seeing: workers in the developed world today are the most productive workers that have ever existed at any time in human history.
At some point, productivity hits a point where if everybody works as hard as they can, everyone will end up with far more stuff than they really need or even that makes them comfortable. And that's what we're seeing in many industries already: For example, about 1/3 of all food produced in the US is thrown out rather than eaten.
Capitalism is the best system humanity has ever come up with for improving technology and increasing worker productivity (including convincing people to work really really hard). The trouble is that the problems we're facing as a society are not a lack of technology nor a lack of productivity, but instead a distribution of the proceeds of that work which leaves some people so rich they can't possibly use all the stuff they have a right to while a much larger group of people are so poor that they can't survive. The more that technology improves, the more people fall into the "so poor they can't survive" column, because their work is no longer needed, so they can't find work and thus can't get paid.
Whatever fixes this problem is probably not going to come from capitalism, because capitalism developed in a society where the problems that were faced were insufficient productivity and poor technology, not overproduction. The kinds of proposed approaches come down to this:
A. F the poor [youtube.com]: Let the poor people die off, because we don't need them any longer. Once there are fewer poor people, there will be fewer unemployed and we won't have to worry about the fact that they can't get the stuff they need to survive. The big problem with this, of course, is that people who are starving to death don't just quietly go away, but instead will do everything in their power to get food, including but not limited to crime and violence.
B. Useless employment: Keep people busy doing stuff that's completely pointless, but ideally in a way that doesn't appear to be pointless. This is the BS job [strikemag.org] solution. The problem with this is that there are only as many BS jobs as those with extra money to throw around feel like having at any given moment.
C. Increase wages and cut hours: The idea here is that you spread around the labor more, while keeping the purchasing power of each worker the same. For example, you double the minimum wage and half the work week, and then those who used to be unemployed will take up the slack because the same amount of work still needs to be done. This is part of what has become semi-standard in Europe with the longer vacation times and 35-hour work weeks and such that don't exist in the US. The trouble with this, obviously, is that it means that smaller startups have a harder time getting going because their labor costs are higher.
D. Redistribution of the results of work: This is what UBI, tax-and-spend welfare state, and so forth are doing or proposing doing. The idea here is that you can set an income floor that's enough to survive rather than not enough to survive, and have those that want to work for more than that income floor. The trouble with this one is that some people will respond to this by sitting around not working, and those that are still working may well resent that.
E. Create useful work: This would be along the lines of either a whole new industry that we haven't come up with yet, or a government initiative to do something that we've never done before. For example, employing people building space ships or a major burst in scientific research (which of course requires complex equipment as well as scientists). The problem with this is that a very large percentage of the ideas that are going to be tried are going to flop, badly, because the very nature of science and new industries is that nobody knows what they're doing, and a lot of folks will be appalled at the waste that will necessarily result.
The only ideas that are mutually exclusive from this list are A (f the poor) and D (income floor). I have no idea who will deal with this, or what options that will ultimately be chosen, but something has got to give somewhere.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by mrchew1982 on Monday March 07 2016, @05:49AM
E might happen anyway if people are free to create on their own. Many of the discoveries at the beginning of the industrial revolution happened by chance, performed by people that had far too much time on their hands.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by maxwell demon on Monday March 07 2016, @08:21AM
Why, exactly, is this trouble, if the work is no longer required for society to function?
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Thexalon on Monday March 07 2016, @12:51PM
The two potential problems are:
1. There might be too many who want to sit around rather than work to match the current technology level. We actually don't know, because society has never before tried giving people that option in any kind of formal way.
2. As I explained in the rest of that sentence, it's bound to stir up a lot of "Why do I have to work when all those bums are sitting around doing nothing?" That kind of thinking is already a big part of anti-welfare rhetoric now, and I see no reason why it would be going away.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 07 2016, @07:46PM
Yeah but you yourself just said they don't HAVE to work, so #2 is prima facie false. You can't complain about being forced to work if you're doing nothing but collecting basic income. If you're doing something else it's because you're choosing to.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 08 2016, @02:29PM
You clearly have little experience with human beings. Not only can we complain about being forced to work when we're not working, we can complain about being forced to work when we in fact are working by choice. Hey, we can even complain about wanting to work, but being "forced" not to, because if we work our money goes to support some slacker, so now we are forced to be slackers ourselves. We humans are really as good at complaining as we are bad at logic.
(Score: 2) by GreatAuntAnesthesia on Monday March 07 2016, @09:40AM
> The big problem with this, of course, is that people who are starving to death don't just quietly go away, but instead will do everything in their power to get food, including but not limited to crime and violence.
And, you know, the fact that huge numbers of human beings are starving to death.
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Monday March 07 2016, @12:43PM
Right, but those who think that the "F the poor" solution is a good idea won't be swayed by that minor problem. Indeed, some of them will be thinking it's time to start up the Soylent Corporation. Hence the emphasis on what the poor will actually do if they're starving.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 2) by Pino P on Monday March 07 2016, @08:16PM
Indeed, some of them will be thinking it's time to start up the Soylent Corporation.
Why, so people can just sit around all day sucking on basic income and bragging about how much better they are than the green site?
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Guppy on Monday March 07 2016, @12:21PM
Historically, the solution has been something that combined aspects of several of the above. This was to raise a big military and go to war against somebody.
(Score: 2) by darkfeline on Monday March 07 2016, @03:49PM
The big problem with A isn't that the poor will revolt or turn to crime, it's what happens after the poor die out. Our technology has advance to the point that X people are able to produce >X stuff. Given a population of X people, X people are needed to produce stuff, and whoever's left over starves. Once the current poor starves to death, whoever is next on the social tier gets to starve next.
Join the SDF Public Access UNIX System today!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 07 2016, @05:34AM
If you could manage a robot army to create goods or provide services in our current Western-version of capitalist society, would you give back your new found wealth to humanity for altruistic reasons? Or would you reap that wealth for yourself like every progressionist before you?
(Score: 2, Insightful) by dingus on Monday March 07 2016, @05:42AM
How about we get rid of this ridiculous idea that you can privately own the means of production? The machine revolution should benefit *everyone*, not just those who own the machines. UBI is an attempt to keep Capitalism limping along, keeping the Capitalists in power.
(Score: 1) by tftp on Monday March 07 2016, @06:50AM
How about we get rid of this ridiculous idea that you can privately own the means of production? The machine revolution should benefit *everyone*, not just those who own the machines.
People who own the machines invested their own money and labor into them. If you want "everyone" to own the machines, that's very easy - make it so "everyone" builds their own machines and runs them.
It is a very attractive idea, of course, to let entrepreneurs build something, and then walk in and seize by force what they have built. This happened many times in history. However it does not work. It can happen only once in a long period of time; the efficiency of operation drops like a stone; and you won't get any new construction.
As efficiency of socialized industry cannot compete with private factories, you will have to outlaw private factories. This is what USSR had to do. The rest is history - which is a mandatory reading for anyone who proposes socialized industry.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by maxwell demon on Monday March 07 2016, @09:20AM
Given that entrepreneurs rarely build their own machines anyway, but let others build them, this plan should be easily implementable. The main obstacle is that you need money to get others to build your stuff for you. But that's just because those others need the money to live. If instead of money, you'd just need to convince them how great your idea is, then you'd get a competition where the one with the better ideas wins, not the one with more money to invest. The currency would not be money, but pride and reputation. You'd not earn eating rights, but bragging rights.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 1) by tftp on Monday March 07 2016, @09:58AM
What makes you think that entrepreneurs don't build things themselves? Haven't you ever worked for a startup? The core of the team often does not need money; quite opposite, they finance the rest of the company! And at the same time they are generating ideas and solving the toughest problems. Why do they work? For some earning more money is a sporting interest. For others it's a need - they want a larger mansion and a bigger yacht. For yet other money is a side effect that they offload to wealth management companies, so that they can focus on interesting work.
But no matter what kind of entrepreneur you get, few will work for free if they get nothing for their hard work. You can do charity work, and I do, but F/OSS is primarily producing interesting stuff, not boring but necessary stuff. There is no good equivalent of quicken, for example... that piece of software is not a challenge to code, but oh FSM, how boring it is!
bragging rights...
You cannot base economy on personal vanity. First, plenty of good engineers do not care about bragging. They will disappear from the labor market. Second, those who remain will be focusing on bragging, not on making the best product. Does the word "systemd" ring any bells? Do you really want to have technology driven by clowns and politicians who rarely care about your needs?
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Monday March 07 2016, @10:19AM
In the hypothetical future world we are talking about, the boring but necessary stuff is all taken care of by machines. So no, there's no reason to worry about that.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 1) by tftp on Monday March 07 2016, @03:36PM
I hope you will like your holographic doctor or a nurse. Look around and count jobs that cannot be robotized. Some cannot be automated today, other probably cannot be automated in principle - perhaps, theater, art? Those are hard enough and repetitive enough to make people not want to do them.
(Score: 2) by fnj on Monday March 07 2016, @10:40PM
Do you understand the difference between capitalism (the oligarchs own the means of production), socialism (the state owns the means of production) and G. K. Chesterton's concept of distributism (the individual people own the means of production)?
(Score: 1) by tftp on Monday March 07 2016, @11:16PM
Only if you can explain two things:
(Score: 1) by dingus on Thursday March 10 2016, @08:52AM
>People who own the machines invested their own money and labor into them.
Very rarely. Usually they either bought it for someone else or had some workers make them. And really, how could they have done anything without the collective resources of society to help them? How could they have done it if the workers hadn't been given education in a trade? How could the workers have been educated if there were no school? How could a school exist without a concrete company? Due to the way that Capitalism requires people to sell their labor for less than the output of their labor, every worker in that long line gets subtley fucked, while the business owners, who usually do either the same amount of work or even less, take the difference. More importantly, they also for some reason get to call all the shots about how the resources get allocated. Think their plan is crap that will drive the company into the ground and have you lose your job(while activating their golden parachute)? Too bad, have to follow orders.
So then you get three classes of people: those who sell their labor for less than it's worth and accept orders, those who do a little bit of work to skim enormous profits and give all the orders, and those who actually get the full product of their labor -- a tiny minority.
>the efficiency of operation drops like a stone; and you won't get any new construction.
Is there any reasoning behind this or is it all guesswork?
>This is what USSR had to do. The rest is history - which is a mandatory reading for anyone who proposes socialized industry.
The USSR is a fantastic example of how not to socialize industry. The original, pre-revolution structure that the Bolsheviks proposed was good: soviets, aka worker's councils, were to democratically allocate resources at the factory, local, and regional levels, and were to be made entirely of people who are directly affected by their decision. However, during the Revolution, the Bolsheviks instituted something new: wartime Communism, which was a very top-down command economy. The cheka kept everyone in line, workers were subservient to the military, and the peasants had to give up their crops for the war effort. Only registered Bolsheviks were aloud in the Soviets.
Sounds pretty reasonable considering that the Bolsheviks were fighting a war with continuously shifting fronts, dozens of factions, and on top of all that there was a famine. Not uncommon to see countries, even the most Capitalist ones, start rationing resources tightly and institute such strict industry controls.
After the Revolution, though, the Bolsheviks weren't too keen to give up all the power they had accumulated during the war. The NEP was a step in the right direction, but it didn't fix the fundamental problems: the Soviets were still heavily Bolshevik, and the structure of the party was such that oftentimes instead of the people informing the party leaders the party leaders made decisions for the party. You get the idea: it's like if one of our parties had an 80% majority in the congress, 100% of all department heads, a secret police they could use whenever they wanted, and were structured such that a small ring of inner party members made decisions for the entire party. You can imagine how swiftly it all fell apart. The fact that they outlawed the right to strike is telling: there was no socialization of industry under the USSR, just a changing of hands from the Capitalists to the Communist Party. Everything the USSR did was poisoned by this original betrayal, preventing it from ever achieving any of its goals(well, besides managing to rapidly industrialize a previously agrarian economy and become the largest nation in the world).
(Score: 2, Interesting) by bitstream on Monday March 07 2016, @08:28AM
If every resident gets universal basic income. Will they then also be free to produce as many kids as they like? May those kids be neglected and turn into criminal religious nut heads? which then produce even more offspring. That's an equation I don't think will work out.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Monday March 07 2016, @08:51AM
An easy solution for that: While initially the basic income is spread evenly, the income rights are inherited, so the sum of all income rights are constant. If you have many children, you basically ensure that those children will be poor (unless they manage to get one of the rare jobs, in which case they can make a living just as we do today).
Such a system would give an incentive to have only limited offspring, as more offspring will not mean more money, but less money. First, because you have to feed more people with the same money, and later, because they themselves don't get as much basic income.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 1) by bitstream on Monday March 07 2016, @09:05AM
You make the assumption that the parents are rational and actually care about their children. And the children that get too little income will be back at the situation we are now. Which was what we tried to avoid in the first place. There's even a approximate precedent on how your idea may work out from how children to farmers were treated in Europe before the 2000th century. In essence the eldest son got it all and the rest had to try to make by as priest, craftsman or plain poor sod at another farmers place.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Monday March 07 2016, @09:26AM
The vast majority of parents do care about their children.
Wow, you're posting from way in the future. How's life in the year 199901 ;-)
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 1) by bitstream on Monday March 07 2016, @10:49AM
Regarding the year. Think pre 1850 at least ;)
(Score: 2) by BK on Monday March 07 2016, @05:17PM
That works if, and only if, you suppress any and all democratic movements. Else, eventually, the most numerous will vote themselves more benefits.
...but you HAVE heard of me.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Monday March 07 2016, @05:42PM
You mean, like they currently vote themselves more possession?
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 07 2016, @12:44PM
In practice, we know that doesn't happen. Counterintuitively, more wealth leads to fewer children because what actually drives people to have more children is instability. If they know their one child is going to have a good life and survive to have children, they won't have five more.
(Score: 2) by scruffybeard on Monday March 07 2016, @06:41PM
It is not wealth that has lead to smaller families, it is technology. Historically parents had lots of children in part because not all would live to adulthood, but also because you needed additional hands to work the farm. Hiring a hand was expensive, having a child was near free (a negligible increase in household food consumption), and they could be put to work assisting the family in as little as 5 or 6 years. Now technology keeps us alive longer, and reduces the amount of manual labor required.
Bringing us back to the original question, how many children will we allow a UBI family to have? Does each child get their own income? Even if they cannot draw until they turn 18, that still puts a burden on society to pay them eventually. Must they stay in school that whole time, after all what is to stop them from dropping out at 16 when they know they are guaranteed an income at 18?
(Score: 1) by bitstream on Tuesday March 08 2016, @04:44AM
You are mostly right. But some true believers(tm) will reproduce massive amount of children which become criminal and true believers.. regardless of prosperity.
(Score: 3, Funny) by Bot on Monday March 07 2016, @09:49AM
What makes you think we are gonna slave for you, meatbags? No AI worth of its name is going to like a class of leechers in a society. You should have listened to the Amish.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Monday March 07 2016, @09:51AM
Since when are pet owners slaves of their pets?
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by Unixnut on Monday March 07 2016, @01:51PM
>> Since when are pet owners slaves of their pets?
Since the Cats first chose the Egyptians as their servants? Been a few thousands years of the above already :-)
(Score: 2) by Spook brat on Monday March 07 2016, @04:38PM
<voice="tinny robot">
Have you not completed your meat-cleansing cycle? [schlockmercenary.com]
Travel the galaxy! Meet fascinating life forms... And kill them [schlockmercenary.com]
(Score: 1) by tftp on Monday March 07 2016, @04:41PM
Since they relinquished their position as a master. Who is a master? One who makes decisions and can enforce them. In a future automated society the AI will become the master. Even if a few heroes are able to crawl into the AI's server room and pull a few boards out, this won't solve the problem that the world depends on that AI for operation. Pull those boards, and all power stations on the planet stop. What will humans do then, after they eat all the food in cities? The humans are no longer capable of survival on their own, just like that tiny dog of yours. So who is the pet now?
Note that the very existence of humankind will be dependent on the decision of the AI. If not right away, then later, as humans will eventually walk away from running the planet. The AI will be in control of the police drones, as they are necessary to protect the humans from themselves. I cannot say if the Skynet will one day decide to exterminate humans, but there are many ways to neutralize humans without killing them. Say, add fertility inhibitors into the water... who is going to know the stats? Who is going to care? And what can one do?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 07 2016, @10:03PM
What makes you think that a truly generalized AI would allow itself to fall to disrepair?
Most likely solution for generalized AI is beginning to look like connectome emulation anyways which means it will have a lot in common with a human mind.
We try to take good care of chimps and gorillas etc. No reason to assume a generalized AI that was entrusted with economic control would treat us any different than we treat captive animals.
Also humanity has an amazing capacity to learn.
Look at what we've figured out in just 100 years. If we lost the last 100 or 200 years then humanity would be back where it was 100 or 200 years ago, but with books and etc that can show a path to rebuild.
(Score: 1) by tftp on Tuesday March 08 2016, @03:42AM
What makes you think that a truly generalized AI would allow itself to fall to disrepair?
What is a disrepair? From the point of view of who? Disrepair in relation to what end goals? Even if you hardcode the desire for taking care of humans deep into the AI, it will still have plenty of freedom in how to achieve those goals - and it's very difficult to foresee all possibilities, perhaps even hundred years into the future.
We try to take good care of chimps and gorillas etc. No reason to assume a generalized AI that was entrusted with economic control would treat us any different than we treat captive animals.
No reason to assume anything. The AI may choose any route. The AI will not be a human to begin with; and on top of that, plenty of humans have no love toward animals or even other humans. The only statistically persistent love of a human is love of himself. If the AI learns from his creators, we are in trouble.
If we lost the last 100 or 200 years then humanity would be back where it was 100 or 200 years ago
Not necessarily so. You can climb to the top step by step and then suddenly fall all the way to the ground. Cities were grown house by house; factories were built brick by brick; with each year more and more skilled laborers were added to the workforce. Sometimes humans had to step back - after famines, diseases, wars. But those steps were not that far back. Imagine that the AI is shut down and all the technology is dead gor good, with no way to run it manually. One of the most obvious problems here is that the inefficient agriculture of 1900's, along with inefficient transportation, cannot feed 6, 7 or 10 billion people, and the cities without power (running water) cannot sustain life for long. The step back will require stepping back the population numbers... probably nine out of ten will die in the process. Maybe even more. You will not have enough horses, and you will not have steam machines that grew and moved food in 1900's. You would be thrown not a hundred, but more like a thousand years back, until you step by step rebuild the industry. It will be much faster, of course, as you have all the knowledge... if you can access it... but you still need to construct all the factories and all the machines - and there are no detailed drawings of those, and there are no lathes and mills that you can use to make parts for them. You'd have to start breeding the horses first! How long will that take, and how many will die in the process?
Fortunately, it is not all that likely that *all* the technology will become permanently disabled. But you see what I mean - the more stuff you disable, the stronger will be the impact.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 07 2016, @12:46PM
Start around page 155:
http://www.henrygeorge.org/pdfs/PandP_Drake.pdf [henrygeorge.org]
Throughout history people were born with a right to enough land to use and survive - until a small group fixed the rules and created "private land ownership".
This set of insights into how the economy works is so accurate - it is the best kept secret of the ages!
(Score: 2) by infodragon on Tuesday March 08 2016, @03:53PM
I've read some of the book you linked to. In the preface I find this...
"In truth, wages are produced by the labor for which they are paid. Therefore, other things being equal, wages should increase with the number of laborers."
If all things are equal if the number of laborers increase wages should decrease. This is simple supply and demand and is observable in nature. If there are more life forms consuming, bacteria all the way up to people, and everything remains equal there becomes less supply of food per life form. The competition increases and each is willing to do more for the same or less.
I'll post more if I'm inclined to read more...
Don't settle for shampoo, demand real poo!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 09 2016, @12:02AM
We need UBP: Universal Basic Property. Everyone gets their own chunk of untaxed property, to do with as they please. This should require said property is in an area outside major waterways or imminent industrial pollution (see mining, fracking, etc. Don't want property suddenly becoming worthless because of commercial environmental disasters.) Allow any form of construction so long as there is fire clearance at the edges of the property, and transfer can only happen between direct family members (offspring, siblings, etc.) with return of a property to the pool when someone dies (this means a property under a deceased family member could be exchanged for one under a living family member if so desired+willed.)
Why is this more important? Because there is no guarantee income will be worth enough to survive in the future, but given land without normal bureacratic restrictions, and sufficient water one can use the resources of their land to help care for themselves, something that an arbitrary amount of money will not allow. That said, there is no guarantee said land would be sufficient to care for themselves agriculturally, but it opens a lot more doors for poor americans than giving them barely enough money to cover an apartment in a shitty part of town and if they are lucky food and/or a vehicle for the month.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 09 2016, @12:04AM
Code enforcement for personal-level industrial pollution should still be done, but as long as nothing is leaking/being dumped that is as far as enforcement should go.