Ask HN: What are some things you learnt from a game that changed your life?

Doom has thought me how to navigate a city with nothing but a paper map :).

I thought GPS had rendered this skill obsolete, until I found myself in a foreign country with a non-working smartphone one day.

Rutger Bregman has a book called Utopia for Realists.

Quite a few successful studies on UBI - people become more productive, get better education, wean themselves off of addiction. It is an overall better investment than pretty much any other program - including because it doesn’t carry thenoverhead of controlling how money gets spent.

It is cheaper to provide UBI than not.

I mean, the only downfall to this is that the fundamental resources you speak of “shelter, water, food...” in a game are infinite duplications of the same model with no “cost”.

In the real world, that stuff isn’t an unlimited, instantaneous resource. Someone has to build that shelter, farm that food, etc.

In order for this to work, we would need to find free labor... that hasn’t worked so well historically. And sure, you could say technology could fill these labor needs to fundamentally reduce the cost of basic resources to zero, but I don’t think that’s really possible either in practice (the robot maker needs some incentive to make the robots that are providing these free services).

Further, you start replacing fundamental tasks with technology and you begin to remove the opportunity for tasks to better your life (like in the game) because technology isn’t just niche applicable generally.

IMO: It works if you ignore the premise that the game represents a complicated issue in the most simplistic way. But as soon as you put some economics to it, it breaks down super fast.

> At first there was a time when people were free, they could grow what they wanted and live how they wanted nobody gave a damn because you cannot tell me what to do with my life.

When exactly was that? Because you know, humans are apes. And we don't observe any apes, any monkeys, any primates which are free from their societal norms. So when exactly were humans (or any other kind of ape) entirely free? Before our ancestors even evolved into monkeys?

> Say a tiger wanted to claim an area and feed itself and be self sufficient he could do it.

Unless other, stronger tiger decided otherwise.

And why are you choosing non-social animal to compare to social one? If you want a big cat then pick lion for comparison. Because lions gather into prides (and not without reasons).

> 1. It allows people to do nothing. People who are able should work. People who can't, we can help. But it shouldn't be an abusable system where one can simply say "I can't work" and no questions are asked. Everybody in society can't just say "I don't want to work" -- everything would fall apart if we did that.

This is GP's entire point. Given the freedom to choose what to do, "do nothing" is not a common choice. In a world where everyone has the option to say, "I don't want to work", most won't actually say that, especially in the long term.

> In the interest of fairness, then, all who are able should contribute.

Why fairness? The system we have now is incredibly unfair. UBI would at least provide more fairness by removing wage slavery.

Points 2 and 3 are about trivial implementation details:

2. Addictions are already putting people in poverty, and the best solution is recovery from those addictions. That recovery requires access to healthcare.

3. Children are people who can't really manage finances yet, so it's pretty obvious that their caretakers would be recipient to their income. People aren't having that many children, and wealthier parents tend to have significantly fewer children than parents who experience poverty. Remember you were a child once, too.

4. Of course people who are working will earn more than they have to pay in taxes. It will look like less than they make today if you don't include their universal basic income, but it will be entirely (by definition) disposable income.

4. There's no need to keep people honest in the first place. That's a key feature. You can only cheat social security if you aren't entitled to it, and literally everyone is entitled to UBI.

> I don't think UBI would result in mass unemployment but I do think we'd have a good number of people at the bottom doing absolutely nothing productive with their lives.

Prove it. I don't see any evidence to support that conclusion, and I see a wealth of evidence that contradicts it.

The reality is that most people don't need to be working in the first place. Right now, half of the wealth in the US is concentrated to only 50 individuals, yet most of the rest of us aren't experiencing scarcity. Those who are don't choose to out of laziness.