161–170 of 446 posts
Well, that only works as long as many businesses don't do it.
See, business models tend to require people with jobs and money to spend. You can rip profits by catering to those still working if you automate your restaurant or supermarket first.
But it gets increasingly harder to make money for any businesses when those whose jobs got automated away get increasingly many.
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Set the income tax rate to 100 %, give an equal share of that money to every citizen. That should check all three boxes, shouldn't it?
Given just how poor the incentives wind up being, I think with current technology that it would be unlikely to tick the second box.
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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.
No, there are periods that are artistically more fruitful and interesting that others, and the history of art knows and documents several of them.
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Why would you expect inflation? All sane UBI proposals don't create money, they just move money from rich people to poor people. If you're a Friedman disciple, then "inflation is a monetary phenomenon" and we can stop there. If we're moving money from rich people to poor people, perhaps we'll see the prices of stuff rich people buy go down and the prices of stuff poor people buy go up. The vast majority of stuff poor…
There's inflation that the CPI tracks. And then there's inflation in a given sector, or product group. Basically inflation happens any time you shift the money supply around, be it with government regulation, or with economic booms or "gold rushes" (just look at what happened in the shale boom town economies). I can guarantee that there will be inflation in areas of the market that cater to poorer people. There is a…
Why would demand go up? Do you think these people are currently not eating and living in the streets?
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Why would you expect inflation? All sane UBI proposals don't create money, they just move money from rich people to poor people. If you're a Friedman disciple, then "inflation is a monetary phenomenon" and we can stop there. If we're moving money from rich people to poor people, perhaps we'll see the prices of stuff rich people buy go down and the prices of stuff poor people buy go up. The vast majority of stuff poor…
The problem with taking money from the rich and giving it to the poor is that you undermine riches' motivation. If you limit the prize, then you also limit amount of effort that one is willing to make to get it. Therefore, after UBI is introduced on mass scale we might see a slow but steady decline in economic activity: fewer new companies started, fewer investments made, riches focusing on tax evasion and moving the…
Once you get past a certain wealth level, money actually STOPS being a motivator, at least in the ways that it is for poorer people. Instead, it becomes more like a scorecard, to demonstrate to others your success. That desire to demonstrate your success will always be there, whether you tax the money or not.
> 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…
You kinda missed the whole point of the OP, which was, if people don't add value to a business, how will said valueless people put food on the table and participate in society?
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The problem with taking money from the rich and giving it to the poor is that you undermine riches' motivation. If you limit the prize, then you also limit amount of effort that one is willing to make to get it. Therefore, after UBI is introduced on mass scale we might see a slow but steady decline in economic activity: fewer new companies started, fewer investments made, riches focusing on tax evasion and moving the…
Riches' motivation to do what? Continually hoard resources? The problem of hoarding, tax evasion, and generally just theft from society disguised as "innovation tax" is the problem that already exists. You're not reducing economic activity, you're just taking economic output and putting it where it deserves to go.
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Look, no matter how much you tax the wealthy, you always have a positive derivative -- the more money you make, the more you take home. I really can't see anyone making a rational decision to work less hard because the tax rate is too high, within reason. The other thing that becomes blindingly clear when you live somewhere like Silicon Valley is that wealth is logarithmic. If you take home a million dollars a year h…
>I really can't see anyone making a rational decision to work less hard because the tax rate is too high, within reason. I really think people do. Two years ago I had to work 250 hours in December to get a 25k bonus. At ~40% taxation, I felt it was worth it. I probably wouldn't at 65%. That is a pretty extreme case, but well off people turn down work if it isn't lucrative enough. Plus, if you are taxing investments,…
Yes it is. As long as the 30% of the proceeds are higher than the proceeds of the best alternative use of your money.
> This is why world wide, capital is taxed fairly lightly.
This is wrong. It is taxed fairly lightly because it is mobile. Tax it too much and it just moves abroad.
> 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…
> On the other hand, the fancy waiter will make recommendations. Will tell you about other things, and is generally part of the ambiance and experience of eating out. I only need the waiter to tell me this because I have no idea what the food with end up looking like. Just put pictures of items on the menu. Problem solved. Now it get to order what looks best.
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Big companies get blindsided by new tech all the time. Think IBM vs Microsoft.
More accurate to say "Big companies have traditionally been blind sided by new tech..." I'm not aware of any major example of this since the introduction of the iPhone.