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/r/antiwork: A tragedy of sanewashing and social gentrification

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Re: /r/antiwork: A tragedy of sanewashing and social gentrification

#511

Post by atom_arranger »

themaninthedark wrote: post #350
bloaf wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you give someone a fish, they starve after a day. Teach someone to fish and they can eat + sell the fish. But if I make a fish-catching machine to catch fish for everyone, does everyone eat, or does everyone starve? UBI is essentially a means of ensuring that in a world where the robots catch all the fish, people can still afford to buy a fish.

I am against UBI because I think we aren't there just yet with technology but I do agree that we need a way to ensure that "everyone can eat" when the time comes. Right now we also need to look at how we can provide job for those who are affected by automation and not just say that the coal miners need "learn to code" and move. Edit to add: We have some industries that are highly automated, ie. semiconductor manufact…

We could at least be experimenting, maybe implement a $100/month UBI in one state, see how it affects their productivity/health/budget, consider trying other numbers in other locations.

Re: /r/antiwork: A tragedy of sanewashing and social gentrification

#512

Post by citrin_ru »

totony wrote: post #376
wonderwonder wrote: post #328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So we are going to raise taxes on the middle class to give free money to people that choose not to work? Every single family would then do a calculation to see if its worth the second earner working or if they make more just staying home and getting a UBI. I would not be ok going to work to pay people that have decided that they are fine living on the UBI and don't want to work anymore. Seems like a pretty antagonist…

>So we are going to raise taxes on the middle class to give free money to people that choose not to work? 1. UBI aims to streamline redistribution of wealth and remove a lot of bureaucracy around it, reducing a lot of the cost of the current system 2. Why the middle class specifically? Upper class could shoulder most of the costs (if there are) easily >I would not be ok going to work to pay people that have decided t…

> Why the middle class specifically? Upper class could shoulder most of the costs

Reach people have disproportionate political influence so the can carve some exemptions for themselves and they have resources to exploit unintentionally created loopholes. Middle class typically have no ways to avoid taxes.

Re: /r/antiwork: A tragedy of sanewashing and social gentrification

#513

Post by Cthulhu_ »

quirino wrote: post #321
wonderwonder wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am not trying to disagree at all, in fact I think we very much need to do more for the poorest among us, especially the kids. Where does that 30k come from though? For 300 million people, that's 9 trillion dollars a year, ~half of GDP. Inflation would be out of control, essentially Venezuela / Zimbabwe levels.

This might be solved by a Negative Income Tax [1]: > In economics, a negative income tax (NIT) is a system which reverses the direction in which tax is paid for incomes below a certain level; in other words, earners above that level pay money to the state while earners below it receive money. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_income_tax Edit: I'm not economically literate enough to say I fully support this,…

A system like this exists in many countries already, except it's framed differently; in my own country, if you're below a certain income level, you are entitled to stipends to help pay for rent, health insurance, child (day) care and probably some other things. It's a socialist support system, and it's framed in a way that doesn't make 'the rich' feel like they are paying 'the poor'.

Of course, there's a huge administrative overhead involved as well, plus there's a big case going on now of people falsely being accused of defrauding the system because some department got rewarded for finding fraudsters, or whatever the issue was. It financially ruined many people because they went from getting a bit of money to help make ends meet, to getting charged €30,000 or more in back pay and fines.

Re: /r/antiwork: A tragedy of sanewashing and social gentrification

#514

Post by Cthulhu_ »

GameOfFrowns wrote: post #390
seaourfreed wrote: post #362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This doesn't say where the money comes from.

> This doesn't say where the money comes from. Taxing the middle class.

The middle class has been decimated by various economic policies.

Re: /r/antiwork: A tragedy of sanewashing and social gentrification

#515

Post by TraceWoodgrains »

aww_dang wrote: post #505
JSavageOne wrote: post #156

I remember stumbling upon /r/antiwork a few years ago and being so happy I'd stumbled upon a thriving movement that so effectively criticized one of the core principles of society that everyone takes for granted - that everyone must effectively sell their labor to someone else (unless they're rich enough to opt out, or clever enough to create some business or invest their way out). To me anti-work is the recognition…

>...similar to Hacker News in comment quality (which has also lowered significantly). I watched the site devolve... Imagine if HN could have pro-free market articles in the same volume as submissions like this. Every day there's a submission from Jacobin, The Guardian or something truly partisan (some might say deranged) like this Medium write up. Yet, laissez-faire articles are immediately flagged. The comments fill…

Hm? Would you mind expanding on why and how you feel my piece is hyperpartisan? I'm neither a leftist nor particularly sympathetic to them; my own economic preferences usually lie pretty firmly in the neoliberal camp. Your comment seems to be calling my piece a "communist diatribe", and I'm struggling to see where you got that impression.

Re: /r/antiwork: A tragedy of sanewashing and social gentrification

#516

Post by dopidopHN »

wonderwonder wrote: post #507
totony wrote: post #502

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is hyperbole. Removing loopholes and taxing the top 5% more will not destroy society. Just like taxing the middle class didn't make them stop working, or made them work shitty jobs just to not pay taxes.

Sure, but we were specifically talking about a 100% wealth rax scenario. Very likely not a realistic scenario

It actually happened not that long ago, in the US.

And the country did not collapsed. It actually entered a era or unparalleled prosperity ( but that had little to do with taxes )

In 1945 tax rate was around 90% IIRC

Honest question : you do understand that a 100% tax rate means that 100% of revenu are taxed correct. ( as opposed to 100% are taken by the state ). Of those 100% only a percentage of it is actually “lost”.

Sorry if it’s obvious but the catastrophic scenario you are describing seems to correspond to “let’s take all the rich folks money, all of it”

Source on high historical tax rate in the US around 1950 https://teachinghistory.org/history-content/ask-a-historian/...

Re: /r/antiwork: A tragedy of sanewashing and social gentrification

#517

Post by TraceWoodgrains »

ChrisArchitect wrote: post #477

only opened this to find out what the hell sanewashing is. Still not sure/can't find a clear definition. Use real words in titles. (like, even urbandictionary entries acceptable of course)

I did link the original piece coining the term and quote the specific definition given. I think that's a sufficient standard to meet when introducing an unfamiliar term.

Re: /r/antiwork: A tragedy of sanewashing and social gentrification

#518

Post by unmole »

jdkjs wrote: post #85
zqfm wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to love the 4chan-style contrarian attitude until, in high school people I knew were killed in Iraq. Then I started to realize that those kinds of nihilist attitudes have real-world consequences. Since then, that attitude has become mainstream (or perhaps just my awareness of it) and following has been a constant trail of death and misery. I can't not take it seriously anymore when my friends and loved ones ar…

As far as I can tell, 4chan is vehemently against the current neoliberal wars. They laughed their asses off at the US abandoning Afghanistan and are questioning why the NATO has to be in Ukraine at all. Perhaps I misunderstood your tone.

> 4chan is vehemently against the current neoliberal wars.

I'm sorry, what exactly makes the current wars neoliberal?

Re: /r/antiwork: A tragedy of sanewashing and social gentrification

#519

Post by relaxing »

nybble41 wrote: post #509
relaxing wrote: post #499

Earlier quoted context omitted.

UBI doesn’t mean every expenditure suddenly becomes out of pocket. The sensible move would be to keep disability, etc. as a form of insurance where costs are spread across the populace.

> The sensible move would be to keep disability, etc. as a form of insurance where costs are spread across the populace. And now you're back where you started—you haven't eliminated these need-based programs at all, or reduced the bureaucracy. You've just added the UBI as an extra expense.

It’s not at all or nothing proposition. Your employer probably pays you a salary and offers you disability insurance too.

Re: /r/antiwork: A tragedy of sanewashing and social gentrification

#520

Post by loceng »

nradov wrote: post #400
loceng wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Automation technology has allowed a machine to create 100,000s to millions of a product with very little input from a human to put in the raw resources into it. GDP grows instantly by at least 13% (in the US) if doing a $1,000/month UBI, for example. Etc. Andrew Yang has looked into this a lot - his last two books: “The War On Normal People: The Truth About America's Disappearing Jobs and Why Universal Basic Income I…

This is nonsense completely disconnected from reality. Sure we could increase GDP in nominal dollar terms by 13% or 130% or any arbitrary number by just printing more dollars but inflation doesn't make us wealthier. At some point someone has to actually make things. Most forms of resource extraction, farming, and manufacturing are still quite labor intensive. The dilettantes who believe that automation will save us f…

Have you ever invested in yourself and did you become more valuable to yourself, to the people around you, etc?

And do you think people who are struggling to just survive, who are constantly stressed (which causes mental health issues, poor decision making, and long-term dis-ease progression) will become more productive to society, become more valuable/useful to society if their basic needs are covered - and that people will become less counter-productive (which has a cost too)?

What makes you think people who get UBI also aren't going to want to work? People being lazy isn't attractive.

The logic that people think people given money won't work doesn't fit because billionaires still keep working; yes, some people won't work, but better they don't work than go into crime and hurt society - and then cost society even more if they're caught and we have to pay for them to be in jail.

Dilettantes, neat word - it seems like you're the one who's under-studied in this area though - you seem to have all-or-nothing thinking as well, while catastrophizing while not working from first principles; I am certain you could create a system to efficiently clean a conveyor belt in a mushroom packing plant: high pressure air/water washers, robotic arms that can target specific areas (like how robotic arms move around material to then weld vehicles together, etc) - perhaps requiring innovation on the conveyor belt technology itself.

Have you ever searched for self-washing mushroom packing plant conveyor belt? Maybe someone's already developing/developed one?

What I think is the greatest about automating as much as possible is that that means we free up more time for humans to be creative, to develop themselves and their mind and knowledge, to raise healthy families, to build and strengthen community, etc.

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