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Guaranteed Minimum What?

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Re: Guaranteed Minimum What?

#431

Post by rubber_duck »

majormajor wrote: post #326
rubber_duck wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Different scale/complexity. You could hand-code waiters decision tree for recommendations and the possible choices end in ~hundreds. Personalized music suggestion has to pick from millions of choices and there's no straightforward algorithm behind it.

Re: Guaranteed Minimum What?

#432

Post by bitJericho »

prostoalex wrote: post #417
bitJericho wrote: post #387

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who haggles for anything besides cars in the us? Publish pricing and give estimates, shop around.

So to recap, the key to lowering prices in healthcare is (a) strip consumers of negotiating power (b) not try to haggle the prices down when providers consistently try to raise them?

Nobody is haggling the prices down. Prices are skyrocketing.

Re: Guaranteed Minimum What?

#433

Post by piinbinary »

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…

I wonder if a MMORPG with an economy could be used to simulate what happens.

Re: Guaranteed Minimum What?

#434

Post by imh »

nateberkopec wrote: post #133
bryanlarsen wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

MV = PQ. Money * Velocity = Price level * Quantity of goods and services. Friedman assumes the velocity of money is constant (good assumption), so really the only why you can cause inflation is to increase the supply of money, M. UBI increases the velocity of money by moving money from low-consumption, high-investment rich people to high-consumption, low-investment poor-to-middle-class people. Increase money velocity…

Would adopting UBI correspond to a one-time step increase in velocity that sits constant again afterwards?

Re: Guaranteed Minimum What?

#435

Post by prostoalex »

bitJericho wrote: post #432
prostoalex wrote: post #417

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So to recap, the key to lowering prices in healthcare is (a) strip consumers of negotiating power (b) not try to haggle the prices down when providers consistently try to raise them?

Nobody is haggling the prices down. Prices are skyrocketing.

Insurance companies do. But your proposal seems to do away with them in order to lower the prices. I am trying to understand the mechanism.

Re: Guaranteed Minimum What?

#436

Post by wvenable »

moxious wrote: post #351
wvenable wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think one of the biggest problems in the world right now is how much money is simply captured and not moving through the economy. A huge amount of money is sitting around adding very little economic value. Redistribute that money to people who will use it to consume products and services and you get a much more active economy.

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.

Apple has 250 billion dollars in cash -- they aren't building any factories with it. There might be greater need for factories if people had more disposable income to spend on things.

Re: Guaranteed Minimum What?

#437

Post by adrienne »

coldtea wrote: post #405
jfoutz wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My pick for year is 1878. I'd love to see your examples. But really, how do you quantify good? Taste is subjective. The original Transformers move is a great example. I didn't like it. but i believe 14 year old me would have absolutely loved it. It's similar to the statistics about Word users only use 5% of the functionality of Word. But everybody uses a different 5%. I guess if you want to go by money, i'm going to…

> But really, how do you quantify good? Taste is subjective. That's why I don't use random individual tastes as a measure, but informed (from decades of studying movies and moviemaking) and argued critiques (by movie critics, other directors, and everyone with similar expertise). The same way most will agree that Citizen Kane is a great movie, even if 16 year old John, from Buffalo, Indiana finds it "boring and gay".…

The word (and concept) you are looking for here is "intersubjectivity". For what it's worth. Intersubjectivity is what lets us reason about art, among other things.

Re: Guaranteed Minimum What?

#438

Post by nateberkopec »

imh wrote: post #434
nateberkopec wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

MV = PQ. Money * Velocity = Price level * Quantity of goods and services. Friedman assumes the velocity of money is constant (good assumption), so really the only why you can cause inflation is to increase the supply of money, M. UBI increases the velocity of money by moving money from low-consumption, high-investment rich people to high-consumption, low-investment poor-to-middle-class people. Increase money velocity…

Would adopting UBI correspond to a one-time step increase in velocity that sits constant again afterwards?

Probably, yes. But the question is how much of a bump in prices that translates to - how much of the UBI will it wipe out?

Re: Guaranteed Minimum What?

#439

Post by mabbo »

dexterdog wrote: post #53
mabbo wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> New tech is giving outsize advantage to the major players across almost every industry, who can afford to invest in creating internal teams for these big new technologies. Oohh, this very much. Inside Amazon warehouses, there are tens of thousands of employees called 'Pickers'. They walk around with these handscanners with 300x300 pixel screens that tell them where to go and what item to get next. For two years, my…

That's actually a .09MP screen. Makes it sound as pathetic as it is.

Oh God you're right.

300x300 pixel screen, IE 5.5, tiny tiny processor, 128MB of ram (64MB on the old ones).

The only advantage that thing had was that if you dropped it from a fourth story window, the device would be fine. I was told we had tested this to be sure.

Re: Guaranteed Minimum What?

#440

Post by spiralx »

jawns wrote: post #296
antisthenes wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, communism would cushion the displacement of workers. But that's not viable politically in many western countries.

What I'm proposing is not communism, where ownership is held by the state. In fact, what I'm proposing is starkly different. I'm proposing the direct ownership of automation technology/companies by the workers themselves, not by their government. This is in keeping with a political philosophy called distributism, which advocates for the widest possible (private) ownership of productive property. Proponents of distrib…

Socialism is literally where workers control the means of production themselves, and communism was the end-point where the state disappeared.
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