181–190 of 446 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Perhaps it's a matter of trusting the person behind the counter over your smartphone.
Why trust one random person (who may not have even seen the movie you are interested in, share your preferences, or be particular insightful) when you can have the aggregate wisdom of everyone who has seen the movie and cared enough to rate it?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If many of those people don't have money to "put food on the table and participate in society" who will be able to pay any business for anything?
People who can participate (those with the skills necessary to manage more complex systems as he states in his blog post). The scary part is it looks like wealth will be increasingly concentrated, and more and more people will fall to a level where what we consider basic needs in modern society (food, shelter, education and health care) will no longer be attainable. As the author points out, "it will be messy": Those…
A diminishing pool of people to pay for stuff, not only hurts businesses profits, but also diminishes the pool of rich people (who make their money off of selling products, houses, services, etc to the masses).
I realize that UBI is a very popular position on HN, so I am hoping someone here has given this more thought and can comment. My problem with UBI is that all tests to date look great, but have only been done on a micro level. The fundamental issue I would like addressed is the macro scale inflation you would expect when redistributing trillions of dollars without commensurate economic value being created directly. Mo…
Most western social democracies already have an overlapping network of benefit systems that are essentially a patchwork UBI in disguise. The system is designed not to go without food and shelter, but the exact mechanism varies depending on what population group you belong to. There's assistance for the temporary unemployed, for students, for people with disabilities, people with long-term illnesses, etc. There's pens…
Most western social democracies publish the data on costs of running departments and numbers of working age people in employment or receiving each type of subsidy, so we know that the admin costs are negligible compared with the cost of paying a living subsidy to an enormous number of working age people who aren't claiming disability or unemployment benefits, generally because they don't need the money enough to take the steps necessary to claim it.
That 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…
> Technology shifts however have not resulted in a 'net loss' of employment opportunities when looked at in the full view, ever. This rebuttal suffers from the same problem, it extrapolates "yesterday" into "tomorrow". A computer isn't the same sort of thing as a steam-powered mill or a printing press. A robot isn't a tractor. When we create machines that are simply better at work than humans both physically and ment…
To give an example for you to think about, the machine gun eliminated more jobs for infantry than we have for cashiers. As veterans came home from WW II and 'mustered out' we provided the GI bill to train them in skills other than soldering. This provided an economy that transitioned a standard army to one tenth its previous size.
On the social justice side I am totally in favor of, and have advocated for, using tax payer money to provide the education and training to anyone who needs it to take a job that could use them. An example of how that has fallen down and needs our help was that the VA will not pay for veterans to learn to code[1]. That is a problem we can do something about.
What I categorically reject is the notion that there is any solid reasoning for trying to artificially create jobs that happen to meet existing skill sets. My favorite example of that failing spectacularly was the railroad union concession of having people work on trains in jobs that were no longer necessary[2].
[1] https://backchannel.com/thousands-of-veterans-want-to-learn-...
[2] http://www.coyoteblog.com/coyote_blog/2005/08/great_moments_...
> 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…
> 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?
Is it rough when (for example) shipping crates put a bunch of longshoremen out of a job, when they are in their 50s and too old to easily retrain? Sure. But how many people now not only enjoy (as customers) the benefits that Amazon provides, but also enjoy the employment benefits of a massively expanded global market?
On the other hand, the alternatives are harsher: as the population grows and people resist the very innovation that could create new markets, unemployment will grow. For all the problems we have in the US, providing low unemployment is not one.
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Housing, Education, Healthcare are supply limited and pretty important to the poor and UBI doesn't fix that.
There is no law of economics that says the latter two have to be supply limited, to the grotesque extent that they are. I'll give you housing though. One of the reasons housing is expensive, though, is because it is closely tied to job opportunities.
Public spending on infrastructure and services raises land values, as parks, police, and fire departments make locations more attractive to live in. This subsidizes landholders and allows them to charge higher rent whenever these services are paid for by a tax on labor rather than a tax on land.
With a land value tax, landholders have to privately invest in improving the private property on their land, such as expanding the supply of housing units, in order to increase their profits. Without a land value tax, landholders can earn greater rent and profit without actually privately investing in improving their property. They simply have to lobby for higher public spending paid for via taxes on income or consumption and then they can raise rents without competing to improve their supply.
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> 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.
Good grief. Ordering food by appearance is like deciding music is good because the artist has purple hair or a painting is beautiful because the canvas smells like cotton.
To put it another way, when you walked into the restaurant you committed to paying a premium for one sensory experience or another. Why not the visual?
> 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…
Hah, yeah right. Boy is the author gonna be surprised when those jobs get automated too.