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Guaranteed Minimum What?

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Re: Guaranteed Minimum What?

#391

Post by LoSboccacc »

Taek wrote: post #202
justinator wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

A) most arent uneducated nor lazy

B) them would never compete with those that were on an "educated" job at an earlier age and can bring years experience to a company

C) will drive fields to regulation and red taping because noone likes a massive influx of lower waged competition

Re: Guaranteed Minimum What?

#392

Post by loup-vaillant »

qub1t wrote: post #354
loup-vaillant wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're looking at it with past-tinted glasses. This time is different, and the market won't solve it. Those newly opened industries have less people in them than the industries they replace. Mostly because our consumption doesn't increase as much as our efficiency does. Funny you mention Amazon. We enjoy their services, and they enjoy that expanded global market. And they do this by killing local businesses with thei…

50 years ago, who would have thought of search engine optimization as a job? Social media manager? Video game storyline writer? I'm not saying that people who are displaced will easily be able to retrain to a new job. They will have a rough time, and that's something we need to address as a society. But assuming that number of "jobs" for humans will decrease to zero is a big stretch. I think that even if we had robot…

> But assuming that number of "jobs" for humans will decrease to zero is a big stretch.

It seems to me the amount of available work is steadily decreasing right now. Perhaps not towards zero, but we don't have to lose that much to need substantial reform. Once you reach over 30% unemployment, you have a big problem already.

There's an easy way to increase the number of jobs though: share the existing ones by reducing the work-week. We could start by shaving off a few hours, perhaps as much as a full day (for a 4 day work-week). Then decrease it further to match progress in automation. Of course, we should keep the salaries at the same levels, lest machine owners will just get a bigger and bigger share of the pie, just because they had starting capital the other workers didn't.

Re: Guaranteed Minimum What?

#394

Post by ciconia »

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…

> Honestly, do we really like interacting with the people with minimum wage jobs? Not really.

It's sad how this socially destructive mindset has washed first over the US and then over the rest of the globe. The money religion has won.

I'm lucky to live in the French countryside, where solidarity is still a guiding principle for social interaction. The cinema in the closest town is run by a not-for-profit organisation, and the people who work there are volunteers (and tickets cost 3€ for adults). Likewise, our village feasts, meant to raise money for our small primary school, are organised by volunteers. Everyone contributes according to their abilities for the common good.

I'm not French and have only recently moved here, and I'm really impressed with the way people here take matters in their own hands and create social and economic value by volunteering.

Re: Guaranteed Minimum What?

#395

Post by fahadkhan »

atemerev wrote: post #374
fahadkhan wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The current population is growing. Evidently there is enough resources to population at this level (food, water, space, air, energy, etc). If production of resources is automated why can't resources distributed to sustain current population?

The bulk of costs of living in modern societies: rent/mortgage, healthcare and education. Can't be really automated in the near future, expected to cost even more as everything else becomes more automated.

I believe education is currently undergoing a similar transition that music and film and been through. At the end of Education will be cheaper. It already is a lot cheaper in some cases.

Health care is tougher, due to stricter regulations (rightly so) and reluctance from doctors but I think the transformation there is about to begin. Look at what is happening with (open source) prosthetics.

Prime reason for rent and mortgage that I can see is wealth generation and in a society where wealth is less important perhaps these will also decrease. You can see more and more interest in open source, not just in software but also other fields, is this a shift away from wealth accumulation?

From another angle, people are beginning build homes with recycled plastic and by 3D printing this hopefully will reduce build cost. And hopefully that will filter down to the end consumer.

Re: Guaranteed Minimum What?

#396

Post by crdoconnor »

prostoalex wrote: post #340
Eyas wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We should also work on better ways to equip society to have skills that are more "valuable" in the modern high-tech world, absolutely. The incompassioante charge made by the gp is still fair, I think: Saying these workers provide "no value" is too business-focused and incompassioante. Yes, these workers provide little value in terms of profit to the business, but looking at societal value at a larger scales, these jo…

> workers provide "no value" is too business-focused and incompassioante By creating the minimum wage floor the government enforces the notion of value creation. With hypothetical example of minimum wage set at $10 an hour everyone producing $10.01 worth of value within a 60-minute period gets to stay, everyone producing $9.99 and below gets to leave. Compare that to Asian societies where some companies have an [usua…

"Compare that to Asian societies where some companies have an [usually older] tea and coffee lady in the break room. The pay is usually next to non-existent - the lady is usually retired and has a variety of savings and a safety net. She doesn't do it for a paycheck, but she craves human contact, so helping out with tea and coffee while chatting to younger employees is fulfilling her social (but never financial) needs at that age."

When I used to live in Singapore I saw a lot of miserable looking hunchbacked old ladies and men cleaning food courts and they were for sure doing it for financial reasons:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-01-06/what-reti...

The worst part is the excuse - the country is staggeringly wealthy, vastly unequal and yet excuses itself with "we can't afford these pensions any more" because "we have fewer children and higher life expectancy", presuming that GDP growth has obviously been zero for the last 40 years and we just haven't noticed that the money actually is there.

Re: Guaranteed Minimum What?

#397

Post by douche »

taway_1212 wrote: post #382
ethbro wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I've quit my remote job for in-office for this very reason. The hell of constant noise and having to warm up seat for 8 hours (even when I can realistically concentrate on code for maybe 4-6) is better than the hell of sitting at home alone coding for months. I think... (I'm starting the in-office job in a couple weeks).

The in-office hell is worse.

Hell is other people.

Re: Guaranteed Minimum What?

#398

Post by douche »

1_2__3 wrote: post #124
dsacco wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was probably a nicer way to make that point without attacking the parent's awareness of "the value of basic human interaction." For what it's worth, I didn't infer any value judgement about caste in the comment.

I did and think the reply's tone was perfectly reasonable given the parent comment's dismissiveness. Yeah I do like interacting with people. Even "minimum wage workers" who last time I checked were still people.

That's fine. Some of us are already maxed out on our low budget of human interaction and craze cold, mechanical, impersonal efficiency. Dealing with error-prone, chatty human beings is not fun for some of us, when they simply serve as an obstacle to what we need.

Re: Guaranteed Minimum What?

#399

Post by rocqua »

rpearl wrote: post #106
haltingthoughts wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Housing, Education, Healthcare are supply limited and pretty important to the poor and UBI doesn't fix that.

Well, it's believed to be cheaper to house the homeless than to leave them on the streets. [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/03/25/housing-first-homel... ] And there's plenty of housing, just not really in places that are convenient to jobs. If you didn't need a job, that becomes less of a problem. So giving people enough money for a secure housing and food situation--somewhere, anywhere--strictly decreases suffer…

If you consider UBI as simply replacing jobs, that works.

However, the reason UBI works is because it allows people to spend their life doing things that are valuable but wouldn't make a living wage.

Re: Guaranteed Minimum What?

#400

Post by moxious »

taway_1212 wrote: post #390
moxious wrote: post #351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where is this money that is captured and not moving? Most invested dollars are still moving in one form or another. Invest in a company's bond, and they're using that money to build a factory.

If you buy stocks, you could argue that this money is not doing anything (except maybe the person who sold you the stock now has cash and is presumably doing something with it).

That's exactly what I'd argue. You can't show money tied up even in skyscraper investments since they generate rents. So where is all of this money that's just sitting there doing nothing?

So long as interest rates are > 0%, I think that's going to be a pretty rare situation.

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