Guaranteed minimum income is: sustainable, sufficient for basic life necessities, can be implemented for the current population levels. Choose two. It is as inevitable as CAP theorem.
[citation needed]
If only economics was this simple!
Guaranteed Minimum What?
21–30 of 446 posts
Re: Guaranteed Minimum What?
#22> Humans are agressively being eliminated from as many business models as possible. Well that's true, where they don't add value. What's the difference between the case of getting movie tickets and your waiter at a fancy restaurant? One of them is practically a useless annoyance, and the other one is part of the experience. Someone in a movie box isn't going to tell you about the movie, or have a conversation about i…
> Someone in a movie box isn't going to tell you about the movie, or have a conversation about it with you. They are there to take the most basic info (movie, time) and money, and give you a ticket. It's also always done thru a thick bit of glass that makes communication sometimes difficult if not painful.
This has not been my experience at all. People who work at theaters get discounted, if not free, tickets to movies and have often watched the featured movies themselves. They get to see how often people walk out, ask for a refund or praise a film. They can relate to your tastes and make recommendations based off of them. They can tell you if a movie isn't a great date flick and suggest another.
> Honestly, do we really like interacting with the people with minimum wage jobs? Not really. Most people seem to prefer the automated checkout, ordering on their phone, etc.
Speak for yourself. There is nothing more aggravating to me than self-checkout, it is slow, it is often buggy and I don't like having to scan, punch in codes and bag things myself. I hate having to wait for a manager's approval to apply a coupon or finish checkout because the machine decided I did something wrong and won't let me fix it.
Hell is having $20 a machine won't accept.
I prefer being able to speak with the people who are going to submit or prepare my order, because I can ask questions or customize what I want. I cannot do that with an app or touch screen menu.
> Most of these people also are not thrilled about their jobs and be lazy, or do a bad job
Again, speak for your own experiences.
Re: Guaranteed Minimum What?
#23Guaranteed minimum income is: sustainable, sufficient for basic life necessities, can be implemented for the current population levels. Choose two. It is as inevitable as CAP theorem.
What do you base this on? Is there some theoretical limit to productivity?
There are real limits to everything, because the universe has a finite mass and volume. But, that doesn't mean that it is not possible to engineer a working UBI.
Re: Guaranteed Minimum What?
#24That is a pretty well presented argument for mass unemployment. But it suffers from all such arguments in that is extrapolates "today" into "tomorrow" without acknowledging that there are literally billions of variables at work. A simple example of the challenges this sort of reasoning present; assume you're a being that perceives time very slowly, perhaps your lifetime is a mere 100 milliseconds rather than 100 year…
I take your point about the myopia in this article, but as humans, we spend all day extrapolating on the limited information we see. We cross the street on the assumption that no rock will fall out of the sky and hit us. Do we know there isn't a rock flying in at that moment? No, but we weren't hit in the entire lifetime preceding that moment. So we cross the street. Or another example: It's 2007 and my home's value is double what it was last year. And it's been that way for the past few years. Of course it will continue this way forever. And so on. We can only consider the variables we are able to account for. You can't go into a state of inaction because you haven't considered all of the variables. You'll never do anything if that were the case.
Articles of this nature help to illustrate that the problem exists. Before we can focus on the "transition" support, we have to acknowledge and agree that there is, in fact, a problem. You might know there is an impending shift because we witness it (and create it) within the tech bubble, but the world at large is just coming to learn that change is coming. Kiosks at the movie theater are a natural extension of existing technology. It doesn't change the world. It's part of the process, but it's so minute that we don't consider there used to be 3 ticket sellers where there is only one now. It's the slow burn of progress before the inevitable shift that will come quickly and won't be entirely understood until after the fact. And as you said, we don't know what is coming, exactly, so how can we describe the solutions now?
Truthfully, from your example, I take it to mean that you are facing the same problem every employer has: finding skilled labor. It's the case now and it will be the case in the future. These are the inefficiencies of a market-based economy. They present opportunities for those who can capitalize on them. Those plumbers should be charging more.
Re: Guaranteed Minimum What?
#25The early adopters will be the largest companies with the most to gain from improvements in efficiency. This pattern is actually the one I'm worried about the most. New tech is giving outsize advantage to the major players across almost every industry, who can afford to invest in creating internal teams for these big new technologies. I see this in every industry I encounter. The middle class worker lost out over the…
There is a counterbalancing force, which is hard to see going away, which is that larger companies have a harder time seeing which way the wind is blowing and getting ahead of the curve. They make decisions slowly, and tend to be wary about investing in risky things that might pull resources away from their existing profit centers. They have something to defend, so they're anchored to past decisions in a way smaller nimbler companies aren't.
Re: Guaranteed Minimum What?
#26> Humans are agressively being eliminated from as many business models as possible. Well that's true, where they don't add value. What's the difference between the case of getting movie tickets and your waiter at a fancy restaurant? One of them is practically a useless annoyance, and the other one is part of the experience. Someone in a movie box isn't going to tell you about the movie, or have a conversation about i…
When I worked in the movie box, that was not at all true. People would come in and ask about the movie. How long was it, whether it was any good, should they see another one instead? We gave them real answers. Just because you have a minimum wage job doesn't mean you're a bump on a log. If you've lost sight of the value of basic human interaction with anyone not baked into your caste, I pity you, even if you are in t…
I would find this super annoying while waiting in line to buy tickets.
If that's a service that makes sense to have theaters can always keep it. One staffed line for people that want to chit chat and automated kiosks for people like me who just want to buy a ticket.
Re: Guaranteed Minimum What?
#27The early adopters will be the largest companies with the most to gain from improvements in efficiency. This pattern is actually the one I'm worried about the most. New tech is giving outsize advantage to the major players across almost every industry, who can afford to invest in creating internal teams for these big new technologies. I see this in every industry I encounter. The middle class worker lost out over the…
> New tech is giving outsize advantage to the major players across almost every industry, who can afford to invest in creating internal teams for these big new technologies.
Oohh, this very much.
Inside Amazon warehouses, there are tens of thousands of employees called 'Pickers'. They walk around with these handscanners with 300x300 pixel screens that tell them where to go and what item to get next.
For two years, my job was to make the UX of that application a little bit faster. Not the order to pick the items (another team) not the decision of which shipments should be processed next (also different team) or which items should be picked by which picker (you guessed it- a different team). Just the UX for the 0.9MP of screen space in front of the user.
Labour costs for that job are in the hundreds of millions per year, so any team that made a 1% improvement to overall efficiency would be covering its own costs a many times over. And we did.
Amazon can afford to get those small 1% gains multiple times per year, but for smaller companies the gains wouldn't pay for the costs. If they want to beat Amazon, they'll need to find a very big win that Amazon didn't see first. The only company I can think of that did that was Kiva Robotics- wait, it's called Amazon Robotics now.
Re: Guaranteed Minimum What?
#28>> I noticed iPads on the tables They're tablets, from Ziosk. iPad is the Kleenex of this generation. I rather like those, nothing like paying (and leaving) when I want instead of trying to track down the waiter for 20 minutes
Yeah, those are the best of both worlds when you're not dining at an upscale place. Don't have to use cash, don't have to wait for them to complete two round trips just to leave. I never understand why waiters don't give me a chance to hand them the card immediately when they drop the check. I don't need to sit with it for 10 minutes, especially after it took 10 minutes to flag you down for it. Years ago I was a wait…
They drop the check out of courtesy.
On occasion—if I've been in a hurry, for example—I've gotten my card out once done eating and had it ready to hand to the server when they bring the check.
Re: Guaranteed Minimum What?
#29This is one of my favourite blogs. The author is able to extract thought-provoking stories and insights from very unlikely places. The heavy use of photos is no doubt an important part of the formula. Most of the photo essays fall outside of HN's typical interests, though.
I linked to some of my favourite entries here:
Re: Guaranteed Minimum What?
#30> Humans are agressively being eliminated from as many business models as possible. Well that's true, where they don't add value. What's the difference between the case of getting movie tickets and your waiter at a fancy restaurant? One of them is practically a useless annoyance, and the other one is part of the experience. Someone in a movie box isn't going to tell you about the movie, or have a conversation about i…
When I worked in the movie box, that was not at all true. People would come in and ask about the movie. How long was it, whether it was any good, should they see another one instead? We gave them real answers. Just because you have a minimum wage job doesn't mean you're a bump on a log. If you've lost sight of the value of basic human interaction with anyone not baked into your caste, I pity you, even if you are in t…
> 99% of movies today are crap
Survivorship bias. They always have been.