This is a trap for engineers.
If you don't worry about the returns, you won't get any.
There are circumstances where that is fine. Be sure you're in one of them first.
Create value for others and don’t worry about the returns
201–210 of 496 posts
Re: Create value for others and don’t worry about the returns
#202Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wish that argument was trivially true. Yet we see tons of disadvantaged people working the real tough jobs helping the elderly or sick and they are getting precious little in return. And to a lesser degree, I have been doing nothing but providing value. All my projects are free/libre, yet returns have not come my way at all. In fact people who could make returns come my way, for example by offering me a job that I…
The "real tough jobs" pay little because the marginal job of that kind does not really create that much value. That in turn happens because the most disadvantaged tend to crowd into these jobs, to the neglect of other, more value-creating activities - yet another issue that might be handily addressed by UBI.
Yet these were the "essential workers" during the pandemic. Not the VCs, not the hedge fund managers, not the industrialists or bankers or rich housewives.
And all they got for their efforts were applauds.
Reality is that without their work all our societies would have failed and fallen.
Almost any common folks agrees that for example nurses aren't paid enough.
The real issue is that our "valuation" scheme is controlled by the wealthy not by the people and the only metric is what makes the rich richer.
Re: Create value for others and don’t worry about the returns
#203> Always has been, and if you paid attention in CS class, you know the limits of those things. I don't remember ever learning a theorem stating that computers cannot surpass humans.
I remember P vs NP
Re: Create value for others and don’t worry about the returns
#204Earlier quoted context omitted.
Geohot is a smart dude. But here I think he misses the forest for the trees. He has a point, certainly. But while he is harping about the U part of ubi, he's completely ignoring the B part. UBI is meant to provide some basic income so people don't starve. It's just an optimization of welfare programs where you have a ton of bureaucracy and make people jump through endless hoops and cause them endless amounts of stres…
Someone needs to make a website explaining why UBI doesn't work conceptually because this comes up over and over again on HN. You cannot make UBI work from money saved by removing means testing. Even UBI is a welfare scheme and would require significant bureaucratic hoop jumping to check that a person claiming it isn't: • Dead • Non-citizen • Already claiming it under a different name/bank account/etc • In prison • M…
In the UK a lot of that is solved by using the NI number that everyone has to have to work, claim benefits, get a state pension, or pay tax.
For people who are employed it could be done by existing systems already used to calculate tax (which is deducted automatically by employers here so the systems to do calculations exist).
Self-employed people already have to register with HMRC.
For the rest it is a far, far simpler than the requirements of the benefits system and less prone to fraud.
> You cannot make UBI work from money saved by removing means testing.
No one claims it can be made to work using ONLY money saved from means testing. Something like removing means tested benefits together with lowering tax thresholds could work though.
Re: Create value for others and don’t worry about the returns
#205Earlier quoted context omitted.
https://geohot.github.io/blog/jekyll/update/2026/02/27/the-i... from the same author
Geohot is a smart dude. But here I think he misses the forest for the trees. He has a point, certainly. But while he is harping about the U part of ubi, he's completely ignoring the B part. UBI is meant to provide some basic income so people don't starve. It's just an optimization of welfare programs where you have a ton of bureaucracy and make people jump through endless hoops and cause them endless amounts of stres…
>Yes, that's a bit stupid for the people first paying taxes and then getting them right back again minus overhead costs, but if you think about it: that's what happens now too, only less efficient (in the netherlands, that is) so you pay even more overhead.
I'm not sure this is stupid. I think the people against the negative income tax system are kind of stupid. Like, the best place to apply the welfare rules is where all other complicated rules about income are made: the tax office (IRS). If you decide that for whatever reason you really really want people receiving welfare to be second class citizens, you'd go out of your way and build a separate welfare office, where all the work the tax office is doing gets to be duplicated for no reason other than so you as a working class citizen can pay even more money to be angry at the second class citizens.
Overall, it sounds kind of stupid. You build a bureaucracy that designates people as a special class, so that this special class is difficult to escape from, since if everyone was a continuous recipient of welfare, there would be no second class and "escape" would merely be progression through the simple passage of time.
The dumbest arguments I've seen are extremely cranky and boil down to rich people becoming net beneficiaries of CO2 dividends, because they spent tens of thousands of dollars on EVs, heat pumps, cycling, insulation, solar panels, etc so they can get 100% of an annual 100€ CO2 dividend. Like, giving 100€ to even a single rich person is such a horrific crime, that it's better if everyone else, who actually needs it, should get less than the 100€ even if that reduction will result in hundreds of millions of € being diverted away from people who actually need the money to compensate their CO2 taxes.
Re: Create value for others and don’t worry about the returns
#206Earlier quoted context omitted.
Geohot is a smart dude. But here I think he misses the forest for the trees. He has a point, certainly. But while he is harping about the U part of ubi, he's completely ignoring the B part. UBI is meant to provide some basic income so people don't starve. It's just an optimization of welfare programs where you have a ton of bureaucracy and make people jump through endless hoops and cause them endless amounts of stres…
Someone needs to make a website explaining why UBI doesn't work conceptually because this comes up over and over again on HN. You cannot make UBI work from money saved by removing means testing. Even UBI is a welfare scheme and would require significant bureaucratic hoop jumping to check that a person claiming it isn't: • Dead • Non-citizen • Already claiming it under a different name/bank account/etc • In prison • M…
UBI in the form of CO2 dividends works extremely well. Be more creative about the potential applications of the pay out mechanism.
Re: Create value for others and don’t worry about the returns
#207Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The UK can't afford anything even close to this. It can't even afford the theoretically non-universal benefits schemes it has: it has massive government debt and deficits because its economy doesn't generate enough wealth, I'm fairly certain its economy generates more wealth per capita than at any point in the past, and this is the general consensus. If you believe it doesn't, please explain how, as it goes against…
I didn't say otherwise. It generates more wealth now than in the past and that is still far from sufficient for its government to afford its current levels of welfare spending.
You did imply it, that in the past the same welfare was affordable that now no longer is, because its economy apparently doesn't generate enough wealth.
Re: Create value for others and don’t worry about the returns
#208Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is a complete non-issue in basically every wealthy country bar potentially the US, all five things you named are already known to the government at all times. They also apply the exact same way to any other scheme, there's nothing new about it.
Quite a few governments have trouble verifying identity reliably. But to the extent they can do it, it's because there are lots of people employed to do so. The UBI thesis outline above is that you can find the money to pay for it by eliminating all those job roles from the government, so you can't use their existence to justify UBI as affordable.
Let's look at other wealthy countries with large economies.
Germany, Japan, UK, France, Italy, Canada, Spain, Australia, South Korea, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Taiwan..
Which of these have trouble verifying identity reliably, to the extent that it would be a meaningful obstacle to UBI?
Re: Create value for others and don’t worry about the returns
#209> Always has been, and if you paid attention in CS class, you know the limits of those things. I don't remember ever learning a theorem stating that computers cannot surpass humans.
Haha that's not what the post (or the post it links to) says. Every CS student should know there's no free lunch in search and optimization. There's tradeoffs between random search, evolutionary algorithms, and convex optimization. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_free_lunch_in_search_and_op... There's an AI "smell" to things that are generated. Why is that? Mode collapse is impossible to see from a small number of s…
I know for a fact StanleyNickels™ have surpassed, nay, exceeded SchruteBucks™
Re: Create value for others and don’t worry about the returns
#210Earlier quoted context omitted.
Forget UBI and AI. They are distractions. Today it's very unclear that even just existing welfare schemes are sustainable. Political parties can buy votes with welfare and they do, so it's an unstable configuration. Europe is full of countries with this problem. A good example of a country in a downward spiral towards UBI hell is the UK. Around 25% of the working-age population now claim to be disabled, and around 10…
> The UK can't afford anything even close to this. It can't even afford the theoretically non-universal benefits schemes it has: it has massive government debt and deficits because its economy doesn't generate enough wealth, I'm fairly certain its economy generates more wealth per capita than at any point in the past, and this is the general consensus. If you believe it doesn't, please explain how, as it goes against…
My family household generates more wealth per capita than any time in it's history, but yet net savings is down. Do you know why? We spend it all on junk that we thin we'll make us happy but actually we become dependent on it.