Guaranteed Minimum What? • Hacker News Board

Re: Guaranteed Minimum What?

#301

Post by maxerickson » Sat, May 13, 2017, 1:59 AM UTC

danbruc wrote: post #162

dllthomas wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given just how poor the incentives wind up being, I think with current technology that it would be unlikely to tick the second box.

That is a general problem with universal basic income schemes. Unless technology and automation is advanced enough to provide goods and services for basics needs without requiring any labor at all, the scheme will fail in the worst case, i.e. everyone decides to stop working. And there is not much you can do against that, at best you can devise an incentive structure that makes it unlikely that you will hit the worst…

Plus a meteor might blow up the planet.

The unconditional in unconditional basic income has a softer meaning than you use; it mostly just means that the payments are made regardless of wealth and other income (of course in a large number of cases it would also be completely recovered by taxation).

Re: Guaranteed Minimum What?

#302

Post by dredmorbius » Sat, May 13, 2017, 1:59 AM UTC

dragonwriter wrote: post #271

dredmorbius wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not only is value a conserved quantity, but value must decrease on a full accounting, through the process chain. That's the 2nd law of thermodynamics. Corollary: accounting of costs, prices, and values is badly flawed.

> That's the 2nd law of thermodynamics. Thermodynamics does not address value.

I believe it does, though it's somewhat complicated. I'm working on that.

You might also want to consider Georgescu-Roegen.

https://redd.it/48rd02

Re: Guaranteed Minimum What?

#303

Post by dredmorbius » Sat, May 13, 2017, 2:01 AM UTC

ethbro wrote: post #261

dredmorbius wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are two distinct problems at play: 1. Workers whose contributions are undervalued. 2. Workers who cannot be trained or educated to provide high-value labour. These are both issues. (There are other categories: parents, caregivers, the disabled, sick, or handicapped, etc. But the two classifications above represent a major part of systemic failure of labour markets.)

3. Creating a hellish nightmare society where I am not afforded the opportunity to talk to a single random person in the going about of my average day. If you think the class gaps and problems of lack of cross-socioeconomic empathy are an issue now, wait until a middle class worker can go 24 hours without ever having to interact with anyone making less than them. "Raise taxes to fund foodstamps? Crazy! I hear the poo…

That's drifting significantly from the matter at consideration here.

Re: Guaranteed Minimum What?

#304

Post by tim333 » Sat, May 13, 2017, 2:23 AM UTC

redleggedfrog wrote: post #63

I hate to say this, and this is in no way a troll, but I believe the solution for this will eventually be to kill the poor. Not directly, at least I don't think, but through lack of health care, lack of shelter, lack of education, poor diet, use in waging war, incarceration, and probably once they get desperate and try and get theirs, being labelled terrorists. People who have money, and therefore power, in the Unite…

Killing the poor seems unlikely as it's against a long running trend of killing and abusing people becoming less acceptable and less done. See Steven Pinker's stuff for evidence.

I imagine it will go the other way with people having the right to food housing entertainment and the like. We'll quite likely end up like the landed gentry of the UK past - think Bertie Wooster - but with robot butlers and less land.

Re: Guaranteed Minimum What?

#305

Post by [deleted] » Sat, May 13, 2017, 2:27 AM UTC

justinator wrote: post #185

cbanek wrote: post #4

> 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 write as though you've never held a minimum wage job. Have some compassion for those people who are working hard for almost nothing. Sometimes, it isn't their first choice, or it's their only choice. I would suggest a better experience is had when you give respect to the (say) service industry worker you engage in a transaction with.

[deleted]

Re: Guaranteed Minimum What?

#306

Post by berberous » Sat, May 13, 2017, 2:41 AM UTC

paulddraper wrote: post #30

e_d_e_v wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's not true. The economics of movies and TV has shifted overtime. (What are the distribution avenues? What sort of projects get funded? Etc.)

Movies today are much more likely to be high budget, rehashed/sequels, most common denominator, etc.

TV, on the other hand, has been in a golden era for the past decade. Netflix/HBO/etc. has allowed lots of interesting more niche pieces to get produced.

Re: Guaranteed Minimum What?

#307

Post by abecedarius » Sat, May 13, 2017, 2:42 AM UTC

ryandrake wrote: post #224

cbanek wrote: post #4

> 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 don't see the distinction. With all due respect to waitstaff (it's a tough job), the function is just begging for automation. An order-and-payment-taking tablet embedded into the table would be so much more efficient: 1. No need to wait for staff to c…

More accessible to the hard of hearing, too. I hope this model takes off.

Re: Guaranteed Minimum What?

#308

Post by tim333 » Sat, May 13, 2017, 2:42 AM UTC

chris_va wrote: post #33

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…

Inflation or deflation is basically driven by the balance of goods and services available against money being spent. If your hairdresser say is full all the time you raise prices, if it's empty you give discounts.

At the moment if you handed everyone more cash without an increase in output you would get inflation.

If you took the money from the rich and gave it to the poor you might get some inflation in basic goods as the poor tend to spend their money while the rich invest it. Also possibly deflation in luxury condos. This probably isn't going to happen in a hurry due to politics.

If robots start producing a lot of goods and services then giving more money to people would not necessarily be inflationary and there would be more money spent but more goods and services also. Your hairdresser would have twice the customers but employ robo-haircutters rather than raise prices as it were. I could see something along these lines being gradually rolled out with the amount of basic income increasing as human labour became less necessary.

Re: Guaranteed Minimum What?

#309

Post by StephenConnell » Sat, May 13, 2017, 2:44 AM UTC

nickpsecurity wrote: post #264

Taek wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe we should be working on better ways to get the poor educated and integrated with modern society as opposed to making them dependent on jobs which take all of their time, don't pay nearly enough, and block any and all opportunity for a way out because there's no free time or disposable income.

Many people I know in low-wage jobs have either trade-skill jobs on the side or degrees in things like business (eg finance). The latter say they're under or overqualified for higher-paying position. I got the same overqualified stuff from all kinds of businesses out here, too. The businesses are systematically blocking talent.

Blocking talent? Or not in need of the talent offered at the price expected?

Re: Guaranteed Minimum What?

#310

Post by nickpsecurity » Sat, May 13, 2017, 2:47 AM UTC

StephenConnell wrote: post #309

nickpsecurity wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many people I know in low-wage jobs have either trade-skill jobs on the side or degrees in things like business (eg finance). The latter say they're under or overqualified for higher-paying position. I got the same overqualified stuff from all kinds of businesses out here, too. The businesses are systematically blocking talent.

Blocking talent? Or not in need of the talent offered at the price expected?

They say they need it. They often do need it to achieve their goals. Then they block everyone that can do it unless they'll do it for a ridiculously low amount. One so low that it seems to result in half-assed results in most IT work that cause them trouble down the line. They just can't afford that $10-20k for real production work.

That said, they can pay someone $1+ mil a year to let the people under him do all the work. Give executives raises. Pay for meetings in expensive hotels that could happen over the phone. Buy lavish furnishings for their buildings. So on and so forth. Don't buy into the idea that most of these companies are ultra-rational actors investing only what they need for the benefit of the company. Lots of politics, gaming the numbers, and people on top trying to move more money their way in most of them.