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My own private basic income

opendemocracy.net

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Re: My own private basic income

#101

Post by beat »

imgabe wrote: post #42
opportune wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I couldn't disagree more. As a society (and this goes from a community to a global scale) we should make it a priority to give everyone the resources to meet their maximum potential. I don't mean that we should give everyone a million dollars to invest of their own. What I mean is that we should ensure that everyone gets provided with a good education and food/water/shelter, etc. The author specifically mentions the…

Well, what's going on in Qatar IS slavery for all intents and purposes. The workers are imported from southeast Asia, and their employer holds their passport, preventing them from leaving. In a free market people need to be able to have a choice to freely leave. Many of those workers would probably leave if they could.

Which is a pretty good deal for the owner class.

Re: My own private basic income

#102

Post by chimprich »

hartator wrote: post #37

I think it's awesome to make critics about how capitalism is bad by using Qatar where basically no freedom exists and everything is controlled by the state. Not even mentioning actual slavery.

You have quite a lot of freedom in Qatar if you have money and almost none if you do not.

Re: My own private basic income

#103

Post by urethrafranklin »

rrggrr wrote: post #82

Gosh. OP made me sad with his thesis. "1. For owners, work is optional." ... As an owner I wish this were true. For me and most owners I know work is mandatory, and its 60 hour weeks and a lot of sleepless nights. There is no safety net. There is no unemployment. I get no workman's compensation. I have no employment law protections. Its, as one HN comment said some time ago, "a suffering contest" a lot of the time. "…

Did you read the whole article? You totally whooshed on the meaning of owner.

Re: My own private basic income

#104

Post by URSpider94 »

nql wrote: post #77
patrickdavey wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Generally life is an IQ test and rewards those who make optimal choices WRT events in their life. Do you think that if you'd been born in a slum you would have a decent chance of winning in the IQ test & optimal choice events in your life? I would imagine that almost anyone reading these comments has been unbelievably fortunate to be born into relatively wealthy circumstances & had things like "books" around to hel…

Being born in a slum more than likely means that your parents failed the IQ test, which is a strong signal about your IQ.

That is completely untrue. When researchers have actually taken the time to do IQ testing in poor communities, they find a similar distribution of high and low IQ's as in the general population. There are a lot of 130 IQ people living in the slums.

Re: My own private basic income

#105

Post by mod »

wturner wrote: post #87
maerF0x0 wrote: post #6

> I lucked into money. The basic point is that he gets paid more whilst not doing more "work". For those whom "Work" is the only lever they use to convert into money, they see inequitable work:cash ratios as "unfair" (a morality statement). Market economies do not function on work, but on value. He did the same work in a high value scenario. A glass of water provided in the middle of a developed city is worthless and…

The world "value" is always confusing. Oprah Winfrey is a billionaire presumably because she is valued for her ability to interview people (she basically talks into a microphone for large sums of money). If she left society and shacked up in the woods tomorrow it wouldn't impact my life in the least. On the other hand, my garbage pickup person does harder work and makes a lot less, but if there was a garbage collecto…

The average citizen values YOUR garbage collector far less than they value Oprah.

They value their own, certainly, but that value is reflected by the enormous sums we collectively pay to have our garbage removed. The garbage industry is worth a lot more than Oprah.

You also pay (indirectly) your garbage worker a lot more than you pay (indirectly) Oprah, so things might be working out closer to how you value them than you'd expect.

Re: My own private basic income

#106

Post by mod »

Mz wrote: post #100
jhall1468 wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

TLDR Guy reads an interesting article that threatens his idea of success, incorrectly summarizes the article and resorts to personal attacks against the author. Sounds like threatening core beliefs makes you defensive, not really a good commentary on the article itself.

FYI: I am a woman. I am homeless. I get a lot of flak from people because I am not pro UBI when people seem to think I should be simply because I am homeless. Instead, I believe we need to view our current situation as The Second Industrial Revolution and do whatever the next evolutionary step is to make paid work a lighter burden while raising quality of living for the masses. I am pro gig work done right. Also, you…

> Also, your comment is basically a personal attack.

Isn't yours? (The first one)

He used your comment as a framework.

Re: My own private basic income

#107

Post by cookiecaper »

ktta wrote: post #99
rrggrr wrote: post #82

Gosh. OP made me sad with his thesis. "1. For owners, work is optional." ... As an owner I wish this were true. For me and most owners I know work is mandatory, and its 60 hour weeks and a lot of sleepless nights. There is no safety net. There is no unemployment. I get no workman's compensation. I have no employment law protections. Its, as one HN comment said some time ago, "a suffering contest" a lot of the time. "…

You are mixing together business owners and rentiers (property owners). Very different things. Property owners don't need to work 60-hour weeks unless they are the sole handyman for 100+ houses.

A lot of work goes into property ownership. There is an entire industry that exists to relieve property owners of that burden: property management companies.

The tradeoff is that if you use a property management company, most of the profit from your properties flows to them, because they don't work for free. There is also a non-negligible risk involved in moving your control of your assets over to a barely-interested third party.

Truly passive income is rare, and it always involves a dollar-and-cents tradeoff in how much profit and oversight you're willing to forfeit to others in exchange for open time.

Very few people are Scrooge McDucks with all the time in the world to swim around in a vault full of gold coins, and of those rare people who could, even fewer actually find that to be a worthwhile use of their time.

The key takeaway here is that everyone has got their problems and concerns, and in this competitive world, it is naive to assume that anyone can maintain their position without significant effort.

Re: My own private basic income

#108

Post by jonnycomputer »

MichaelRenor wrote: post #14

> My first big lucky break happened in 2009 when Georgetown University hired me as a philosophy professor on their campus in Qatar Apparently going to high school, studying and passing the SAT, applying and being accepted into university, studying, passing, and graduating university is just luck. Have we we reached peak luck yet? Is there nothing ever we can do to improve our circumstances and our lives? This is like…

The academic job market is so thin that the divide between people with good jobs and bad is often just that: luck.

Re: My own private basic income

#109

Post by Mz »

mod wrote: post #106
Mz wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FYI: I am a woman. I am homeless. I get a lot of flak from people because I am not pro UBI when people seem to think I should be simply because I am homeless. Instead, I believe we need to view our current situation as The Second Industrial Revolution and do whatever the next evolutionary step is to make paid work a lighter burden while raising quality of living for the masses. I am pro gig work done right. Also, you…

> Also, your comment is basically a personal attack. Isn't yours? (The first one) He used your comment as a framework.

Mine is a criticism of the actual article. The reply to mine is a personal attack against me, a member of this site. This is generally understood to be a violation of the site guidelines, though they don't explicitly say "no ad hominems."

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