Well success is either based entirely on luck or entirely on merit, and I'm sure we'll figure out which of the two it is real soon now.
My own private basic income
271–280 of 280 posts
Re: My own private basic income
#272I'm having a lot of fun lately thinking about everything in cryptotokens:
Everyone gets 3 basicMealTokens and 1 basicFun token.
However, in SF, there are only sfMealTokens which require 20 basicMealTokens.
In Vietnam, 1 vietnameseChickenPlatterToken is only half a basicMealToken.
Tech workers are paid in techWorkTokens which can be exchanged for 200 basicMealTokens each or 100 basicFunTokens, or 1/1000th of a Tesla token.
Token transfers have friction so it is advantageous to maintain a surplus of tokens most easily transferrable (least hops) to what you want.
To ease this, SF maintains a sfBasicToken and makes the market to transfer tokens from all over the world to sfBasicTokens. sfBasicTokens have an advantage in that you can pay for things easily instead of paying 67.34 redditStatusTokens.
Some old geezer is willing to sell his house for a legacy usdToken, a token so old it had a physical representation and no historical memory.
The basicFoodToken ideas doesn't pan out. SF starts giving out sfBasicFoodTokens instead. However large numbers of people realize an arbitrage mistake and live like kings in Thailand, taking advantage of the buying power of sfTokens due to the Thailand people wanting to make it big with their startup dreams in the Bay Area.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Re: My own private basic income
#273> 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…
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…
I think s/he's writing from the perspective of what is and you're writing from the perspective of what should be. You can both be right.
Re: My own private basic income
#274Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well, for example, even poor people can get antibiotics. Quite a few kings of old died from not having them.
Quite a few poor people still die from not having medical attention where a king would almost always have a personal physician at his side - a king of old would have a much higher chance of survival from a wound that would kill a modern poor person who couldn't afford medical care.
I don't think you can prove that assertion. The personal physician to the King of Olde would not know about Germ Theory, nor about the importance of basic hygiene and cleanliness. A modern poor person at least has a chance to learn about such things, and there is a significant number of people who provide medical care for free to those in need.
Re: My own private basic income
#275Earlier quoted context omitted.
When you get to the bottom of this kind of thinking, there's always some form of a just world fallacy. Despite the fact that the wealthy engineer circumstances to keep the poor in their diminished condition for their own profit, it's never "unfair" because of this foundational error. See also programmers thinking they're "highly paid" despite years of collusion by tech giants to reduce their salaries and capital owne…
The term "rent" in the phrase "rent-seeking" has nothing to do with the meaning of the term "rent" as payment pursuant to a lease. Rather, the phrase rent-seeking refers to seeking money without actually providing any economic value. It would be more accurate to view such payments as taxes (often levied by a private entity). Adam Smith categorizes income into profit, wages, and rent. Rent-seeking refers to the last o…
I might be misunderstanding, but it seems like the landlord's income would include economic rent as well as profit by this definition.
You might imagine a residential lease where you agree to perform maintenance and upkeep and pay property taxes in return for a reduction in the lease cost. But this wouldn't reduce your lease cost to $0 - you're still paying for the privilege of being allowed to live there, so doesn't this fall under the traditional definition of "economic rent"?
Re: My own private basic income
#276You'll all will talk and conclude absolutely nothing. IQ distribution is cancer and you're all getting confused with one another.
Re: My own private basic income
#277"We have a basic income – a permanently growing basic income – not just for life, but forever."
Eh? Nobody has ever had this, and nobody ever will.
Re: My own private basic income
#278> 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…
* Value is not just the price that someone pays for something. If I give a homeless person a laptop for free, that homeless person is receiving value despite it not being a non-monetary transaction. Garbage men are very valuable, but the full monetary amount of that value isn't necessarily paid for.
* It's possible that garbage collectors as a whole create more "value" than Oprah Winfrey. The difference is that the value created by garbage collectors is dispersed amongst millions of garbagemen and other people, while Oprah Winfrey gets to keep most of her value.
* There's an oversupply of people willing and able to pick up garbage relative to the supply of jobs. This puts downward pressure on the wages, ensuring that the compensation for their work is less than the true value generated.
Re: My own private basic income
#279Fantastic article.
Some takeaways:
* Our economic system claims to reward "work", but the reality is that it rewards ownership and extracting economic rents.
* Increasing value does not necessitate that being the result of one's "work". For example, land values rising are the result of other peoples' work (eg. neighboring properties, government policies, general economy). The landowner is compensated through the labor of others.
* Economic rents aren't taxed enough ("The business pays property taxes, but they average about $15 per house, per month – minuscule compared to the rent we make.")
* Labor is taxed too high relative to capital gains
* "Luck" plays a huge factor, and luck and hard work aren't mutually exclusive. If I'm born into a poor family in a ghetto, naturally I'm going to have less opportunities than being in an upper class family with enough funds to perpetually support me (eg. Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates)
* We need a Universal Basic Income, ideally funded by taxes on economic rent (eg. land value tax)
Our economic system is like a big game of monopoly where all the properties are already owned. You start off with whatever money/property you inherit from your parents, and have to work yourself up. Meanwhile, the rentiers are profiting off the backs of the laborers without doing anything. Sure it's possible to add "properties" to the board (ie. starting businesses), but that doesn't scale.
At least Monopoly had a UBI in the form of the $200 you get every time you pass "Go".
Re: My own private basic income
#280Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think it's painfully obvious that Oprah provides more value than one garbage man, so I don't see the disconnect. Also your above comment even says that "to the person paying them." I pay Oprah and the garbage man, respectively, what they're worth to me. I guess it hurts your feelings that Oprah has more value than your local garbage man, but it's just a fact. You can probably come up with the reasons yourself: pers…
I never said Oprah Doesn't provide more value than one garbage man. I am saying that I don't understand how a task that is literally needed for society to function is less valuable than one that is negligible for society to function and I don't understand why the person who does the more needed task is paid less than the person who does the negligible task. It's really a philosophical question about values but I thin…
I'm late here, but it's simple supply and demand. How much are you willing to pay to have your trash taken out? I'm guessing you won't pay 100k a year for yours. Someone will come and do it for far less. If nobody was willing to do it for less than 100k per house, you know what would happen? No, society wouldn't cease to function. People would take their own trash out. It's not hard, so it simply isn't worth billions of dollars.
I live in the middle of nowhere, don't have trash service, so I used to take it to the dump myself. Then my dad retired, and now I pay him a few bucks a month to take mine when he takes his. If this wasn't an option, I'd go back to doing it myself. This is why your local garbage man doesn't make as much money as Oprah. It's simple math and econ 101 supply and demand.