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Guaranteed Minimum What?

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321–330 of 446 posts

Re: Guaranteed Minimum What?

#321
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Productivity is usually value/worker or value/hour worked. There's no indication, as far as I'm aware, that value (inflation adjusted money) is a conserved quantity. In fact, most of the productivity increases are in industries where the value produced is not directly coupled to the resourced consumed. The software industry is a great example.

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.

Ok, but then the "process chain" needs to include the massive energy input from the sun.

Re: Guaranteed Minimum What?

#322
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Why trust the waiter over Yelp?

Because it takes more work to extract useful information from Yelp.

Re: Guaranteed Minimum What?

#323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Fair response. I guess it is probably both. Some businesses block, some just do not need the help at the going rate. And some just don't know they need it...

Yeah, it's a mix. I'm leading more toward block and dont know in your model but I steadily see some overpricing or underselling. Given the social aspects, I occasionally wonder how much underselling factors in where the people with valuable skills arent so good at selling them. That vs the companies' filters being too strong.

Re: Guaranteed Minimum What?

#324

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…

> 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. I sadly agree this is likely to happen. I really hope I'm proved wrong and we can all come together. To figure out a way to live in this world together, peacefully. The conspirac…

Well, the world is breeding new antibiotic-resistant bacteria at a terrific rate, and it's not clear that bioresearch will stay ahead in the race:

  https://phys.org/news/2017-05-strategy-ways-emerging-antibiotic-resistant.html
So your theory's prediction could also come about "naturally".

Re: Guaranteed Minimum What?

#326
post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What you are describing would be great for chain restaurants like Chile's or Olive Garden, but for something sufficiently high end the people involved really matter. If you shift your view up a few notches there are many places where real intelligence and dynamicness is required that we can't yet automated. Having a wine expert or a unique expert chef as part of the experience is part of high end dining. Consider one…

Figuring out suggestions based on preferences and given choices with so constrained options is an easy problem. The "expert" is there to sell you a story. Not that there's anything wrong with that - the story is a part of the experience that many people like - but let's not pretend it's a technical problem that's difficult to solve. I know a bunch of people who work in that buisines (my brother is a chef, gradeschool…

> Figuring out suggestions based on preferences and given choices with so constrained options is an easy problem.

Then why do Spotify and Netflix et al persist in identifying artists and songs I've heard of (because of obvious similarities to stuff I like) but have actively ignored (because of any of a number of reasons that don't boil down well into an algorithm), over and over and over again?

I still don't want to watch The Office, Netflix. I won't in another six months, either.

But I could tell a person why not, and they could factor that into their recommendations. It's like the difference between trusting Waze and trusting a local that says "even though the app says go another half mile then turn right, turning right here is way easier, since if you wait you'll have to then quickly make your way across three lanes of traffic in a hundred yards to make your left, and making the right here gives you more time to get over."

Re: Guaranteed Minimum What?

#327
post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Why is it that giving money to rich people increases their motivation, but giving money to poor people decreases their motivation? This "motivation" thing sure is hard to understand!

A possible explanation would be this:

People are on a continuum between "extremely lazy" and "extremely hard-working". I know that I would stop working if I had ten million dollars, even though I love programming, because I would prefer to read books all day long. Elon Musk, on the other hand, would probably not stop working even with ten billion dollars, because he is obsessed with creating stuff.

This suggests that most people will generally settle where they are content with what they're making. I know this is true for me (it would be easy for me to make twice what I'm making now, and ten times is achievable but would take a lot more effort than I'm willing to put in); from what I can tell, it's true for all the people I know.

Also, you're equivocating on the "giving money" expression. Giving $10 to a homeless person and to Elon Musk would probably not motivate either of them.

Re: Guaranteed Minimum What?

#328
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…

In my experience with these tablet ordering restaurants I suspect that they will also make the restaurant more money.

Often it is too hard to get a waiters attention to make multiple small additions after they have been around to take orders. With the tablet there is no barrier to you adding an extra drink or side.

Re: Guaranteed Minimum What?

#330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ubi does fix that. If ubi isn't enough to cover those then it's not high enough.

It's basically not possible to do that without making those things cheaper somehow. Convert the entire US federal budget to UBI and it is around 10k per person. Healthcare alone per person is already 9k. Housing is maybe another 5k. And this is before those things get more expensive as people consume more of them.

Most UBI schemes have an increasing tax rate so that you gradually get less money and once you're past a certain threshold, say $60k per year, you are paying the same in additional taxes as you're getting in UBI payments.

The net result is that you don't need to fund UBI payments for nearly the entire population.

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