Can AI be contained? When has containing technology ever happened?
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Unseen 10 months, 3 weeks ago.
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@Enco
Universal basic income (UBI) is a government program where every adult citizen receives a set amount of money regularly to alleviate poverty and replace other need-based social programs that require greater bureaucratic involvement. (from a Google search)
So, while it would generally alleviate the most destitute sort of poverty, its other purpose is to obviate a lot of the existing and expensive welfare overhead. So, where would the money for it come from? Well, in some part from the bureaucratic overhead no longer spent on the existing welfare programs, deciding who qualifies for how much and applying a wide variety of complicated standards and rules.
$1000/mo won’t do much to alleviate a lot of people’s poverty. I think $2000/mo is more realistic.
You seem to think that the money would be thrown into a black hole. Realistically, the money would either be spent on goods and services or would be saved, adding to the money banks could use to lend money, activities well known to generate taxes.
If UBI is too expensive, there’s always the option of tinkering with the “U” by bringing in some sort of a means test eliminating people wealthy enough that the additional income would hardly be noticed or would make little difference. We could also switch to value added taxation to bring in more money.
Anyway, any objection to it is beside the point without a specific proposal to consider.
One thing is for certain, automation will continue to eliminate jobs and we can’t just take the displaced earners out back and shoot them in the head.
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This reply was modified 11 months ago by Unseen.
Unseen,
Unless you mean something like living involves work (counting eating, breathing, shitting, shouting out orders to servants, for example), OF COURSE people can avoid work by having others do work for them.
This is not evading the necessity for work in producing life’s necessities. This is just delegating the work to someone else via division of labor.
If these people doing the work are willing, paid workers, then the one who hired them has to earn money to pay the workers and thus still has to work.
And if these people doing the work are enslaved, unpaid workers, then the slaver is still dependent on work to produce life’s necessities and also has to prevent the slaves from slowing production, sabotage, escape, and uprising to rightly kill the slaver.
There is simply no getting out of work alive, so it’s best to find work that’s gainful, enjoyable and makes you invaluable. And it’s best to have a free society where pursuit of that work and where keeping it’s fruits is possible.
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This reply was modified 11 months ago by
TheEncogitationer. Reason: Needed addendum
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This reply was modified 11 months ago by TheEncogitationer. Reason: Spelling
Unseen,
Universal basic income (UBI) is a government program where every adult citizen receives a set amount of money regularly to alleviate poverty and replace other need-based social programs that require greater bureaucratic involvement. (from a Google search)
So, while it would generally alleviate the most destitute sort of poverty, its other purpose is to obviate a lot of the existing and expensive welfare overhead. So, where would the money for it come from? Well, in some part from the bureaucratic overhead no longer spent on the existing welfare programs, deciding who qualifies for how much and applying a wide variety of complicated standards and rules.
Again, before bureaucrats would willfully give up their jobs and not “go postal” (or “go civil servant?”) those bureaucrats would have to be paid U.B.I. equalling their existing salaries, their pensions which are 85-100 percent of their salaries, plus the U.B.I. that everyone else gets. So, right off the bat, U.B.I. would create a class who is “More Equal Than Others.”
$1000/mo won’t do much to alleviate a lot of people’s poverty. I think $2000/mo is more realistic.
Some people as is can get $60,000 a year in government benefits, and it is easily done if they turn non-use of contraception and foster care into a racket. There are whole swaths of Mormon Country whose main industry is sucking the the teat of taxpayers both State and Federal.
And since there are people who already get more government benefits than $2000/month in U.B.I., the proponents of U.B.I., like the proponents of Social Security, are lying even before the program starts.
You seem to think that the money would be thrown into a black hole. Realistically, the money would either be spent on goods and services or would be saved, adding to the money banks could use to lend money, activities well known to generate taxes.
People on U.B.I. would spend a whole lot on crap that they wouldn’t otherwise pay for with money they earned. When that happens, that creates economic bubbles, which either slowly deflate or, more likely, burst.
If UBI is too expensive, there’s always the option of tinkering with the “U” by bringing in some sort of a means test eliminating people wealthy enough that the additional income would hardly be noticed or would make little difference. We could also switch to value added taxation to bring in more money.
Again, that would mean “Some Are More Equal Than Others” and you would have to hire more bureaucrats to do the means-testing and you’ve thus negated one of the professed goals of U.B.I.
And Value-Added Taxation, where products are taxed at every stage of production, from the raw materials, to the raising or manufacture, to the warehousing, to the distribution, to the retail outlet, to the consumer…on top of property taxes, income taxes, sales taxes, tariffs, excise taxes,estate taxes, and any others I forgot? That would be a sure way to start a tax revolution.
Anyway, any objection to it is beside the point without a specific proposal to consider.
One thing is for certain, automation will continue to eliminate jobs and we can’t just take the displaced earners out back and shoot them in the head.
Here’s my idea for Universal Basic Income: Everybody offer a good or service that other people in the marketplace are willing to buy and at a mutually agreed-upon price. Government in this scenario would only be there to prohibit force and fraud and not to restrict “Capitalist acts between consenting adults” with licensure and regulations, and would keep taxation to the barest minimum. Oh, and government would not pick winners and losers with bailouts or trick laws. Everybody lives or dies by their own efforts.
It’s Universal, it’s Basic, and it will earn you Income beyond your wild wildest dreams, just as it always has to the degree it has ever been tried.
And it will work even with AI, since AI still requires programming and maintenance and the professionals who do so still require goods and services from other humans.
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This reply was modified 11 months ago by TheEncogitationer. Reason: Addendum
Jake,
The analogy to our forbears or primitive or subsistence humans is inapposite. Of course they had to work! But there was a division of labor that was more equitable. There was a more communal ethos. The individual was beholden to the group and vice versa. Equating work then with work now is misleading.
🎶”Can it be that it was all so simple then?
Or has time rewritten every line?…”🎶You’ve not only gone full Howard Zinn-y Commie, but full John Zerzan-y Anarcho-Primitive-ie and full Bob Black-y Anti-Work-ie.
Well, Bob Black wasn’t against the work of the Taxpayers of Fuckin’ New Fuckin’ York who had to pay for his welfare. And John Zerzan’s “Anarchist” Modest Proposals would require massive Totalitarian power to carry out and would lead to the extermination of much of the human species. Him and The Turner Diaries author William Pierce could have shared a lot of notes together.
The idea that the silverback could monopolize 99 percent of the assets while sitting on his royal ass is untrue.
Of course not. The entrepreneur works 40 hours a week plus any other 20 or 30 hours on top of that. They work hard so their workers don’t have to.
And of all entrepreneurs, the inventor probably works the hardest of them all, first spending money on building a prototype, then spending to do a patent search for prior art, then filing for a patent, then once getting a patent spending the fees to maintain it for a mere 12 years (versus a Copyright for authors that lasts the author’s lifetime plus 50 years.) Then the inventor has to find a competant manufacturer, then promote and market the invention, all with no guarantee of breaking even, much less profitting or succeeding. Invention is a necessity for economic and scientific progress, yet it is a muthah of an absolute dog’s life in the best of circumstances.
I am not going expand on the various cultural/secular/religious ethics and how they have changed the simple and satisfying life of our forbears. We go once around the merry go round. It is worth exploring whether this is the best of all possible worlds.
As Steven Pinker put it, the Optimist is the one who says the world can always be better and the Pessimist says this is “the best of all possible worlds” like Voltaire’s Pangloss, who was in fact a Pessimist in Voltaire’s story Candide.
But no Optimist grounded in Objective Reality thinks a better world can be achieved without work.
Or you can stay entrenched in an ideology and feel good about working some shit job one third of your waking hours and just getting by while some tiny fraction of humans sit on their expansive ass and monopolize the lion’s share of wealth.
Look, I’m not the one with acolyte followers on YouTube, much less acolyte followers on YouTube who refer to me as “the friendly Charles Manson.” So if I were you, I would be very circumspect about throwing around terms like “ideology” and “dogma.” 😁
No matter what I earn, I make all I need for my needs and wants and try to save at least a little whenever possible. No matter whether the top 1% are Millionaires of the Eighteenth Century, Billionaires of the Twentieth Century, Trillionaires of the Twenty-First Century, or Quadrillionaires of the future, I am not worse off because of any of their changing numbers or changing faces. In fact, I am and everyone else is better off because of the science, technology, and new goods and services they invest in and produce.
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This reply was modified 11 months ago by TheEncogitationer. Reason: Addendums for clarity
Unseen,
As I said, objections are irrelevant without a specific proposal to object to. Once a specific proposal is made, specific objections would follow and perhaps adjustments and accommodations made to meet them.
The mere and whole premise of government taxing or inflating the currency to pay people to merely exist is objectionable. No quibbling about the details of specifics is required, although those can make it more objectionable.
You talk like taxes are bad. They are a transaction like any other. In other words, what benefit are you buying with your taxes?
Taxation is a transaction like an armed highwayman holding up a stagecoach and yelling: “Stand and deliver!” It is an initiation of coercion. Whether the highwayman gives you things you didn’t ask for doesn’t change that. Don’t believe it? Don’t pay your taxes, then do as the kids say and Fuck Around and Find Out.
Those “transactions” of taxation are why both businesses and workers alike move away from higher taxed jurisdictions like New York and California to jurisdictions with lower or even no taxes of specific kinds such as Nevada or New Hampshire. And they do it globally by moving from Socialist hellholes like Venezuela to places in the Caribbean or Switzerland, Monoco, or Luxembourg where their money is treated right.
I think that most people, aware of how inadequate our private for profit healthcare system is, would gladly pay increased taxes, for example, partly financed by the ridiculously high healthcare premiums they can stop paying. (Those premiums, BYT, are high in part because of the back office staff, resources, square footage, and shenanigans required to make insurance claims.)
You are aware, I hope, that the #1 cause of bankruptcies in the U.S. is unbearable medical expenses.
And if we ended restrictions upon health care like: Certificates Of Need for hospitals; bans of advertising of drug and procedure prices; bans on medical practice across State lines; “The War On (Some) Drugs;” bans on selling organs, stem-crll research, and cloning; along with many other restrictions, health care would be much more affordable. Then we wouldn’t need third-party payers of any kind for all but accidents or specialty policies for professionals who use specific body parts in their trade.
Your own UBI is just a sad perpetuation of the unsatisfactory situation we have now, which leaves many children poor and leaves the American public worse off economically than people in other First World countries.
What I propose wouldn’t leave this nation deeper in debt, with a weakened Dollar versus other currencies, and plagued with more product and labor shortages, skyrocketing prices, homelessness, crime, and urban decay.
Work and trade: It works every time if set free to do so.
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This reply was modified 11 months ago by TheEncogitationer.
Unseen,
I’ve addressed the bulk of the purposes for U.B.I. above and showed how U.B.I. doesn’t achieve them. As for the first and the last, U.B.I. wouldn’t relieve poverty if it raises the costs of goods and services through taxation and inflation of the currency. It just raises the bar for what the poverty level would be after prices have risen.
Also, as the COVID-19 pandemic demonstrated, people get pretty physically and mentally ill when they can’t work and can’t get treatment because the world became a one-note symphony whose only note was COVID-19.
As for your faith in competition to lower the cost of healthcare, do explain how a person of average wealth and income (which they may have lost due to their health issue) is going to get a heart or liver through competitive bidding? That makes no sense at all, especially when the organ may go to someone with a lower prospect of an ultimately successful outcome.
Point to one place, one country anywhere on earth where pure capitalism has been used to drive healthcare costs to rock bottom, making them affordable to virtually everyone.
Here’s one answer to your question.
According to Peter Jawarski, the United States, Germany, Austria, Hungary, and Czechia are only 5 percent of the world’s population, yet provide 90 percent of the world’s supply of plasma, and they do this with only a fraction of their citizenry who donate plasma.
The reason these few nations with a small percentage of the world’s population produce so much plasma is because in these nations, plasma donations are a Free-Market commodity for which donors get compensation by clinics.
All other nations, notably British Commonwealth nations, ban compensation for plasma for silly ethical reasons and obsolete WHO guidelines, yet they have no ethical problem buying plasma imported from the U.S., and the nations with the bans use their citizens tax dollars to pay for the plasma.
If these other nations also legalized paid plasma donation, they could fulfill their own plama needs at a lower cost and save their taxpayers money.
Also, treating plasma as a Free-Market commodity would save the medical costs from illness and conditions untreated due to plasma shortage.
For more details, see here:
If we don’t want shortages, we should pay blood plasma donors
PETER JAWORSKI
CONTRIBUTED TO THE GLOBE AND MAIL
PUBLISHED JULY 4, 2019
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/article-theres-a-way-to-avoid-blood-plasma-shortages-pay-donors/Bloody Well Pay Them: The Case for Voluntary Remunerated Plasma Collections
By PETER JAWORSKI
JUNE 14, 2020Bloody Well Pay Them: The Case for Voluntary Remunerated Plasma Collections
And if a Free-Market in plasma can increase the supply and decrease medical costs, so also could a Free-Market in blood, bone marrow, insulin, stem cells, tissues and organs.
Mr. Jaworski also addresses safety concerns by pointing to new standard techniques of insuring purity and quality.
And it doesn’t stop there. Drugs and procedures could also be cheaper if the supply wasn’t restricted with laws unrelated to safety such as Prohibition, prescriptions, and Certificates Of Need, and demand wasn’t boosted with third-party payment.
Free-Market Capitalism in medicine is waiting and ready when you are.
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This reply was modified 10 months, 4 weeks ago by TheEncogitationer. Reason: Spelling
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