Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

GitHub should charge everyone $1 more per month to fund open source

blog.greg.technology

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

341–350 of 352 posts

Re: GitHub should charge everyone $1 more per month to fund open source

#341

Post by somenameforme »

locknitpicker wrote: post #250
somenameforme wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This sounds like it'd be one of the many ideas that sounds great on paper but in reality just creates an even greater stratification in society. I think you're completely correct that in many places, particularly higher end - people would come together to keep the place looking great, possibly even better since you get to 'own' it on some ways. But on the other hand in many 'urban' neighborhoods, there's far less mot…

> But on the other hand in many 'urban' neighborhoods, there's far less motivation to take care of things - and once you remove the external actors going in there to do what little they already do, these places would fall into an even more pitiful state very rapidly. You're letting your prejudice get in the way of making a rational argument. There is no difference between what you chose to call "urban" and any other…

This is rather a tangent but I spent years living in these areas. Have you ever wondered why it seems so many people who grew in these sort of places tend to have seemingly so much less 'empathy' for them than those who grew up e.g. upper middle class? You are probably seeing things through a foreign perspective where you assume everybody is, more or less, like you and so these awful differences must be caused by reparable externalities. You probably imagine that if you were granted infinite power, you could create a utopia.

But what you learn living in these areas for years is that no - not everybody is like you, or even remotely like it. There are a significant number of people who are simply broken and beyond repair. It reminds me of this video [1] which is from a minister of the UAE speaking on a perfect analog. The one thing I'd certainly agree with you about is that prejudice is bad, but the direction of one's prejudice, good or bad, matters not. We should always form our opinions based on reality, and not ideals.

[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s0jIKBhUDeA

Re: GitHub should charge everyone $1 more per month to fund open source

#342

Post by godshatter »

locknitpicker wrote: post #251
john-h-k wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There are many many creative, caring people that are motivated to create things or care for each other for the sake of it Very true. In a UBU world I have no doubt we’d have many exciting libraries, lots of pottery, and many books. But I’ve never met anyone passionate about collecting bins, development of accounting tooling, or pricing of phone insurance. You need rewards to allocate people effectively, because “pa…

> But I’ve never met anyone passionate about collecting bins, development of accounting tooling, or pricing of phone insurance. You need rewards to allocate people effectively, because “passion” is random and not related to what people actually need You're making the mistake of conflating UBI with "no one works anymore". This is a silly mistake to make. It's like believing that providing a universal healthcare servic…

My main objection to UBI: won't landlords, grocery stores, power companies and the like simply raise their prices to suck up that money that everyone is guaranteed to have now until it ultimately doesn't cover basic needs like it was designed to do? Maybe I'm being too pessimistic.

Re: GitHub should charge everyone $1 more per month to fund open source

#344

Post by godshatter »

keybored wrote: post #145
pixelready wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is the piece so many that are stuck in the hustle culture mindset miss, and why they are so quick to dismiss anything like UBI or a strong social safety net that might “reduce people’s motivation”. There are many many creative, caring people that are motivated to create things or care for each other for the sake of it, not for some financial reward. Imagine the incredible programs, websites, games, craft…

UBI is an idea from another money-centric ideology, namely “libertarianism”. It’s not an idea for fostering creativity. It’s an idea for dealing with less employable dependents of society, while the true dependents (parasitic capitalists) take the real spoils of industrialized productivity.

Doesn't UBI come from taxes? I can't reconcile the idea of welfare for everyone resonating very well with any of the libertarians I know. Personal charity, sure, absolutely, but not government controlled payouts to people, even if that includes everyone. They would probably consider it better than the current welfare system with all it's bureaucracy, but that's as positive a response as I can expect.

Most libertarians I know (and I consider myself an on and off libertarian as I learn more about it) want the government to stick to making sure people's rights aren't being trodden upon and otherwise leave us alone.

Re: GitHub should charge everyone $1 more per month to fund open source

#345

Post by SunlitCat »

lesuorac wrote: post #298
zigzag312 wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems like you are making same binary assumption that people either work or they don't. The important question is probably how well/hard do people work. Lower productivity means people that work produce less so prices rise. Many make mistake thinking only about having money, but forget the supply part of the equation. If productivity is lower, there are literally less things available to everyone . And these equation…

Most work is worthless for progress though. No matter how many janitors, cooks, etc you have you'll never invent a rocket. Most hard working people are just doing societal plumbing not inventing. So losing a bunch of them won't impact the technological advancement of your society. But, I still think there's a flawed premise here. Loosing a janitor to UBI means that they can occasionally help their friend with rocketr…

> So losing a bunch of them won't impact the technological advancement of your society.

This reminds me of Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide, where a civilization decides that phone sanitizers are useless, until removing them quietly collapses everything else. Declaring work “non-essential to progress” usually just means we don’t understand its role.

Re: GitHub should charge everyone $1 more per month to fund open source

#347

Post by lesuorac »

zigzag312 wrote: post #307
lesuorac wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most work is worthless for progress though. No matter how many janitors, cooks, etc you have you'll never invent a rocket. Most hard working people are just doing societal plumbing not inventing. So losing a bunch of them won't impact the technological advancement of your society. But, I still think there's a flawed premise here. Loosing a janitor to UBI means that they can occasionally help their friend with rocketr…

But knowledge and academic research and industry R&D are key for progress though. All of which require hard work. You also don't balance equations in your examples. Your janitor goes to help a friend with rocketry, which seems like a net gain, but someone else now needs to stop helping a friend to replace that janitor's position. Otherwise researches at that facility where janitor had worked will have to do janitor's…

> Otherwise researches at that facility where janitor had worked will have to do janitor's work instead of doing their own.

Or facilities optimize to produce less trash so they can handle the newer trash load with less staff instead of paying extra.

> The price of food and of housing everybody would be dirt cheap ... then it will be very very cheap in an ideal free market.

We don't live in an ideal free market.

Food is extremely cheap to the point that the USG (effectively) sets price floors which prevents it from falling further. People do live on $3/day.

SROs not in say NYC are cheap as well. Everybody trying to live in the same major cities will never be cheap.

> Why would we need UBI then?

Activation Energy - Many people have no choice to work a dead-end or low-paying job because they cannot afford to take a break to find higher paying work more suited to their skills.

Opportunity Cost - The geologist example from above where you need to hide information from others so you don't suffer.

Societal unrest - Literally right now there's a president in the US whose base is upset about how the technological progress was not shared with them to the point they want to throw away any current advantages to go backwards in time.

Re: GitHub should charge everyone $1 more per month to fund open source

#348

Post by zigzag312 »

lesuorac wrote: post #347
zigzag312 wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But knowledge and academic research and industry R&D are key for progress though. All of which require hard work. You also don't balance equations in your examples. Your janitor goes to help a friend with rocketry, which seems like a net gain, but someone else now needs to stop helping a friend to replace that janitor's position. Otherwise researches at that facility where janitor had worked will have to do janitor's…

> Otherwise researches at that facility where janitor had worked will have to do janitor's work instead of doing their own. Or facilities optimize to produce less trash so they can handle the newer trash load with less staff instead of paying extra. > The price of food and of housing everybody would be dirt cheap ... then it will be very very cheap in an ideal free market. We don't live in an ideal free market. Food…

> Or facilities optimize to produce less trash so they can handle the newer trash load with less staff instead of paying extra.

You are breaking the principle of keep all other conditions constant. If it's possible to optimize, why didn't they do it before? They were already motivated to maximize profits. Optimization is also an additional work which you are conveniently ignoring.

> Food is extremely cheap to the point that the USG (effectively) sets price floors which prevents it from falling further. People do live on $3/day.

Food prices sometimes fall below costs because agriculture is volatile. It's not proof that food is inherently "extremely cheap" to produce. Also, absolute prices cannot be easily compared between countries and low quality food has negative health effects.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/food-expenditure-share-gd...

> Activation Energy - Many people have no choice to work a dead-end or low-paying job because they cannot afford to take a break to find higher paying work more suited to their skills.

If basic needs are so cheap that UBI can cover it, then doing low-paying job part time should also cover these basic needs. Something in your logic is not adding up.

> Opportunity Cost - The geologist example from above where you need to hide information from others so you don't suffer.

Opportunity cost is the loss of other alternatives when one alternative is chosen. Geologists not needing to hide information, because they don't need that money to survive is opportunity cost how? And even with UBI they would still benefit, if they get that additional money.

> Societal unrest - Literally right now there's a president in the US whose base is upset about how the technological progress was not shared with them to the point they want to throw away any current advantages to go backwards in time.

UBI fixes that issue how exactly?

Re: GitHub should charge everyone $1 more per month to fund open source

#349

Post by lesuorac »

zigzag312 wrote: post #348
lesuorac wrote: post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Otherwise researches at that facility where janitor had worked will have to do janitor's work instead of doing their own. Or facilities optimize to produce less trash so they can handle the newer trash load with less staff instead of paying extra. > The price of food and of housing everybody would be dirt cheap ... then it will be very very cheap in an ideal free market. We don't live in an ideal free market. Food…

> Or facilities optimize to produce less trash so they can handle the newer trash load with less staff instead of paying extra. You are breaking the principle of keep all other conditions constant. If it's possible to optimize, why didn't they do it before? They were already motivated to maximize profits. Optimization is also an additional work which you are conveniently ignoring. > Food is extremely cheap to the poi…

> You are breaking the principle of keep all other conditions constant.

We've added a change; of course the world will change! But yeah sure if we introduce UBI and hold the rest of the world the same then UBI will have an unobservable effect.

> If it's possible to optimize, why didn't they do it before?

I mean people aren't actually rational so there's a million angles there. However, the cost of a janitor is going to go up with UBI as the opportunity cost has increased.

> then doing low-paying job part time should also cover these basic needs. Something in your logic is not adding up.

No, I just don't think you understand the world around you. Have you never heard of remote nomads? Plenty of people work full-time for parts of the year or part-time all of the year.

> Geologists not needing to hide information, because they don't need that money to survive is opportunity cost how?

Giving the information away for free costs you the money that you could've gotten for charging for it. When you need that money to survive then you have to restrict access. When you don't then you're able to volunteer it.

Re: GitHub should charge everyone $1 more per month to fund open source

#350

Post by zigzag312 »

lesuorac wrote: post #349
zigzag312 wrote: post #348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Or facilities optimize to produce less trash so they can handle the newer trash load with less staff instead of paying extra. You are breaking the principle of keep all other conditions constant. If it's possible to optimize, why didn't they do it before? They were already motivated to maximize profits. Optimization is also an additional work which you are conveniently ignoring. > Food is extremely cheap to the poi…

> You are breaking the principle of keep all other conditions constant. We've added a change; of course the world will change! But yeah sure if we introduce UBI and hold the rest of the world the same then UBI will have an unobservable effect. > If it's possible to optimize, why didn't they do it before? I mean people aren't actually rational so there's a million angles there. However, the cost of a janitor is going…

If we want to have any meaningful debate on what effect something has, we need to try to separate what are the reactions/side effects caused by it and to try to avoid additional confounding changes that were not caused by it. Trying to undo the negative side effect you don't like by, for example, introducing new technological innovations, or in your case a new optimization even though there is no increase in anything that would help do develop this new optimization, is making a confounding change.

While speculating what might happen in some particular cases can be fun, the real questions that need to be answered are regarding the macroeconomic effects of UBI. Starting with what % of GDP will be needed for UBI that will cover all the basic needs (food, housing, healthcare, etc.)? And then focus, not just on what few good Samaritans might do, but on how households, firms, and governments would respond at scale: labor supply, wages and prices, inflationary pressure, taxes, effects on productivity, growth, etc.

But I think our discussion has run its course. While we clearly have different opinions, it was still fun and I hope we both learned something. Be well!

Post reply on HN