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I'm going to work full-time on free software

drewdevault.com

251–260 of 292 posts

Re: I'm going to work full-time on free software

#251

My best argument for UBI is, “I’d love to be able to work on F/OSS full time.” Kudos for making it a reality. It may be scratching a personal itch, but the positive externalities to society are real.

I don't think UBI is a good approach to this particular case.

The F/OSS developer support case seems like a perfect candidate for a microtransaction-funded model. The kind of thing cryptocurrency enables, where one can passively receive as little as fractions of cents from a pool of millions of people without any transaction costs.

We just need to integrate the solutions better.

F/OSS developers work hard and provide value to many people. If there were a way for me to automate a tiny monthly donation to the projects I most use in Debian, without involving credit cards or routing numbers or other personally identifying information, where 100% of the contribution reached the intended people, I'd already be doing it. The kernel, Xorg, vim, firefox, screen/tmux, systemd, all these things would be on my list, and I doubt I'm alone here.

The distributions should be working on this problem. Forget 'popcon', give me an integrated solution to distribute cryptocurrency from a wallet I occasionally top up somehow to the developers and package maintainers I implicitly love.

Re: I'm going to work full-time on free software

#252
post #193
post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sorry but 1), 2) and 3) are ridiculous. What are you basing those assumptions on ? I don't see how any of these points relate to UBI. Why would we be obligated to provide welfare to people who spend their allowance on things other than food and healthcare ? 4) is a very good point. We don't actually know what keeps our civilization running. UBI assumes that people have a natural drive to be productive, but we got…

With respect to 1,2,3. People make some pretty bad decisions. And people like to trick other people into making bad decision. I didn't think this was controversial. Why is this relevant to UBI? One of the benefits of UBI is that it allows us to get rid of the welfare system. However, if people are tricked into giving away their money OR if they spend all of their money on non-food items, we now have to decide if they…

As you say, there will be cases like this. Laws can provide for them to be declared incompetent and to appoint a guardian who would be responsible for distributing their UBI funds. If it’s necessary to institutionalize them, their UBI would go to that institution for the duration.

Re: I'm going to work full-time on free software

#254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe. In a world of increasing automation (explosive in the last 15 years) there's not much value in training for anything less than medicine or engineering. And US has 30 million flipping burgers. When that's automated too, there's not many that could retrain to be engineers. And we don't need 30M more engineers anyway. That's why UBI is a hot topic. Its a way out of a collapse.

Automation has not been explosive in the last 15 years, I'm not sure why you think this. Productivity growth (the measure of increasing automation) has been the lowest its been in decades, see here: https://www.zerohedge.com/sites/default/files/images/user330... As for whether we need 30 million engineers, thats entirely up to what we want to be as a society. If you don't think we can come up with engineering work fo…

Not a good measure, because so many are reduced to service industries. Factory automation has been a headlong rush to automation for decades.

We're down 5M factory jobs since 2000, to something like 13M. And the rest are slated to go as automation becomes cheaper. When factories 'come back' from overseas, its only because now automation is even cheaper than foreign labor.

Re: I'm going to work full-time on free software

#255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course they are basic. Many people live on social security, pensions. And they're a segment of the population. To study the result of a population receiving a BI, there's plenty of data.

> Of course they are basic. Which of them completely displaces means-tested welfare to provide the support floor for all who are in the eligible population. Social Security doesn't. Pensions don't. Being idly rich might, I suppose, in that that is just “living of capital” but ignoring all the people who don't have a lot to live on. > And they're a segment of the population. To study the result of a population receivi…

and yet folks are studying UBI already by supplying individuals with a basic income and measuring their behavior. Including YC.

You can't of course study the impact on the economy, but you can surely understand how people change with the UBI.

Re: I'm going to work full-time on free software

#256
post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe. In a world of increasing automation (explosive in the last 15 years) there's not much value in training for anything less than medicine or engineering. And US has 30 million flipping burgers. When that's automated too, there's not many that could retrain to be engineers. And we don't need 30M more engineers anyway. That's why UBI is a hot topic. Its a way out of a collapse.

A magnitude lower- its 3 actually: https://www.statista.com/statistics/196630/number-of-employe... Less than I would of thought- considering it used to be a rite of passage for many teenagers.

That's just fast-food. How about stocker, register operator, shoe store salespeople etc.

Re: I'm going to work full-time on free software

#257
post #224

My best argument for UBI is, “I’d love to be able to work on F/OSS full time.” Kudos for making it a reality. It may be scratching a personal itch, but the positive externalities to society are real.

Who would be a garbage man or do construction with UBI?

People who didn't like being poor.

I find it weird that on HN of all places, so many posters think that all other people would enjoy being poor.

Re: I'm going to work full-time on free software

#258
post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A redistribution scheme is inherently unfair. All systems of tax, benefits, and even property rights are redistribution schemes, including the recent tax cut, which was a redistribution upwards in the income/wealth scale. Redistribution is always relative to the previous state of societal wealth and resource distribution. There is no set point of "fairness". > Subsidized housing creates artificial housing demand Wh…

> including the recent tax cut, which was a redistribution upwards in the income/wealth scale. The net result of a tax cut, even if applied unevenly, would be less redistribution, by definition, not more. > What exactly is "artificial housing demand"? Supply and demand. Everyone obviously can't afford to pay $1 million in rent per month, thus market rents are substantially lower. Government intervention is creating a…

> The net result of a tax cut, even if applied unevenly, would be less redistribution, by definition, not more.

You are leaving out what follows tax cuts, which is the cutting of government services to the poor. That's where the upward redistribution would in the near term. That might have happened if the political winds were blowing in a different direction this past November.

For now, those disproportionate tax cuts for the wealthy are being paid for with record national debt, which will be borne by the non wealthy of a future generation.

Yours is the same logic that lauded the tax cut for giving a secretary a $1.50/week after tax pay increase, a boast which was then retracted in apparent shame:

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/03/us/politics/paul-ryan-twe...

> The market has an answer for this. It's just going to raise prices in those more desirable areas.

As will tax cuts.

Re: I'm going to work full-time on free software

#259
post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bullshit jobs problem is entirely caused by labour being too cheap in turn caused by the only now industrializing third world. Same with poor working conditions. If the corporations had to pay the full cost of employing people without the option to subsidize it witch cheap Chinese labour, they would long had to get rid of most bullshit jobs (some inefficiency is of course unavoidable) and make work much better organi…

No. Bullshit jobs are the consequence of markets being short-sighted optimization systems, with goals only partially aligned with human values. It's quite easy to make money in ways other than delivering socially valuable things; in fact, many of the most profitable jobs and endeavours are precisely that.

I would say those are two different things, but they are generally both bullshit. One is menial jobs with no future, essentially lost potential. The other is taking a position in something rather than do something, like middle managers. I know it isn't popular to talk about, but they are both a factor of inequality. You need to have economic equality to have distinction in merit. Otherwise merit for all intents an purposes comes second to economic success or failure. Of course that isn't absolute. But still a huge factor.

Re: I'm going to work full-time on free software

#260
post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who would be a garbage man or do construction with UBI?

I see this argument occasionally and it always blows my mind that people think there are careers that literally no one wants to do. With hundreds of millions of people suddenly free to do what they want to do, you're going to find a ton that will do every little job imaginable. That said, UBI and working aren't mutually exclusive. It seems entirely reasonable to assume there will still be people working lower-end job…

Somebody suggesting nobody would want to do construction is probably more indicative of a person who has never had the privilege of ever building anything in their life, rather than any statement of reality. However, absolutely awful examples aside - I do think he is correct that there are plenty of jobs that indeed nobody would want to do. Toilets don't clean themselves, and won't reliably be doing so anytime in the foreseeable future. There's no fulfillment mopping up piss from somebody who thought it'd be fun to urinate all over something, just because it's not theirs.

Of course you're right that we'd see pay go up for these jobs as a result, but I think the thing that many don't consider is how relatively little money there is to go around. This is masked by scale. We see billions and think of just enormous amounts of money, yet that's of course less than $3 per American. That of course means the even more unimaginable trillion dollars is merely $3000 per American. We have so many people that it can be difficult to really intuitively grasp.

So one of the most important numbers here is the GDP per capita. The GDP being the total market value of absolutely everything produced within a nation over a set period of time. This is what makes GDP per capita so interesting. It tells us how much money each and every person would receive if the market value of absolutely every single good or service was split completely equally. And in the US it's shockingly less than $60,000.

With an absolutely huge motivation to overproduce everything imaginable, and a countless array of artificial demand being created and sated, our GDP is still less than $60k. That's not a particularly huge amount of money! And while we could debate to what degree, I think nobody would disagree that an UBI would depress overall production. So we're not even going to be getting to that $60k point, and probably not even particularly close to it.

And this amount of money needs to be used to provide a livable stipend to each and every person, and then also account for 100% of the market driven economic success for each and every individual. I'm sure you can see the problem. Exactly how much money is our janitor supposed to be earning? And where does this money come from? You have to keep in mind that when we talk about this money that represents a share of access to a finite set of resources. In other words you can't just go above this number and call it debt - the resources that such "money" (as it would become at that point) would represent literally do not exist. It'd be like in a world of 100 with a total of 5 cars telling each and every person that they can have a car. It just doesn't work.

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