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Basic income plan clearly rejected by Swiss voters

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Re: Basic income plan clearly rejected by Swiss voters

#271

Post by tremon »

alkonaut wrote: post #263
s3nnyy wrote: post #37

Switzerland is the only country in the world that implements direct democracy. You can really feel the difference to the rest of Europe. Swiss more often than not stand behind decisions made by their government. When talking about their politicians, the Swiss say "WE decided that ..." whereas e.g., Germans say: "THEY decided that ..." If you look for a coding job in Europe, Zurich is a great place to live and is the…

The story of Switzerland's direct democracy is exaggerated. There is no such thing as a complete direct democracy, even if a few individual questions are decided by popular vote. The only questions you can decide by referendum is things that either have no budgetary consequences or things that set a long term political direction (join the EU, basic income, ...). Anything that has a shorter horizon needs to be tightly…

What are you talking about? Giving every Swiss a basic income definitely has budgetary consequences...

Re: Basic income plan clearly rejected by Swiss voters

#272

Post by gruez »

etatoby wrote: post #217
rs999gti wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> waste money on renting How is renting wasting money? Are you not living in the unit? You're gaining 100% benefit by paying rent and receiving a roof over your head. You must mean a waste by losing out on building equity? That's a crap shoot in itself. A hot housing market and equity can go into the toilet at anytime due to very irrational market conditions. Look at the housing markets of Las Vegas or Miami for exam…

It's very simple actually. Consider, for brevity, a mortgage where the monthly or yearly payment, including taxes, is equal to the rent you would be paying for the same place. Then live in the place and go about your life for several years, until the mortgage is paid for. Option 1, you took the mortgage. Now you own a house and you are not due any more payments. You can keep living there and use the excess income for…

>Consider, for brevity, a mortgage where the monthly or yearly payment, including taxes, is equal to the rent you would be paying for the same place.

That's hardly always true

Re: Basic income plan clearly rejected by Swiss voters

#273

Post by jdhzzz »

ZeroFries wrote: post #247
trgn wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That would be the best of city living (practical, all amenities in walking distance, low maintenance, social), and the best of rural living (bucolic, silent, spacious, reserved). It's much better to separate it out than try to combine it in one suburban house.

How do you account for all the wasted space when the houses aren't in use? The extra costs?

Airbnb

Re: Basic income plan clearly rejected by Swiss voters

#274

Post by yummyfajitas »

raverbashing wrote: post #239
yummyfajitas wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A better analogy would be that I adopt a cat and threaten people with violence for adopting the other cats. I didn't say an employer must hire all (or any) anyone. I just said that if a Canadian is willing to pay a Tamil to cook her food, we shouldn't threaten these people with violence to prevent them from engaging in this peaceful trade. In any case, taking as a given your previous premises (that unfair protectioni…

I think it's so funny that you're implying I'm racist, but I guess that's what happens when they are firmly rooted in their biased convictions I'll just add that as a note, Canadians are the worse case of "I'm not racist, but" that I've ever seen. Canadian immigration process is severely biased towards things like education level, criminal background and language knowledge. So unfair, right?!

I'm not implying your racist. I suspect you aren't.

I'm just pointing out that you don't seem to have a rational reason not to be - your reasoning supports racism just as well as nationalism. This simply means your position is unreasoned - merely a collection of arbitrary views held together by emotion, tribalism, mood affiliation and similar things. That's all.

If you dispute this diagnosis, can you state a principled reason to oppose violence against blacks economically competing with whites, but support violence against Indians economically competing with Americans?

Re: Basic income plan clearly rejected by Swiss voters

#275

Post by CuriousSkeptic »

areyoucrazy wrote: post #184

Why is Basic Income such a popular topic on Hacker News?

It would be very interesting to see a through analysis of that :)

Some candidates:

- Open Source, and other forms of commons based production

We are allready comfortable with separating economic value created, from economic incentives to create. Commons based peer production, as Bekler calls it, is less apparent in other areas of the economy.

- Open Minded Systems thinking

I guess, as mostly engineers, we have a natural tendency to approach things as a systems engineering problem. Assuming basic income makes sense from that angle, perhaps were more likely to identify it as such.

- Front row seats to the future

We have a privileged position in seeing where the world I heading wrt technology and its consequences. Thus were probably a few steps ahead in predicting the social issues to be solved in the future.

Re: Basic income plan clearly rejected by Swiss voters

#276

Post by rm999 »

funkyy wrote: post #145
akerro wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As already mentioned, you're ignoring a fact that even by working there for 10 years, it's close to impossible to buy a part of land and build a house anywhere near a city. Land and house prices are too high to stay there for live. It's only profitable to live there, make savings and buy 2-3 houses in Uk/Germany for it. Like two of my co-workers did.

Or you can buy studio in the city and huge farm house with land 1 hour drive away... Then weekends spend in your farm house and weekdays in your studio... It would be close enough to pop in in week days also. 1 hour drive aint bad.

I know a couple people in NYC who do something like this. It works fine for two smallish niche groups: well-off childless couples who prefer not to spend much time in their city, or very well-off couples with children.

Single people don't want to spend their weekends alone in a farmhouse, and 3+ person families don't want to live the bulk of their time in a studio apartment. Meanwhile, that 300-500k dollar farmhouse could put your kids through private school or good colleges.

Re: Basic income plan clearly rejected by Swiss voters

#277

Post by Mithaldu »

tremon wrote: post #271
alkonaut wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The story of Switzerland's direct democracy is exaggerated. There is no such thing as a complete direct democracy, even if a few individual questions are decided by popular vote. The only questions you can decide by referendum is things that either have no budgetary consequences or things that set a long term political direction (join the EU, basic income, ...). Anything that has a shorter horizon needs to be tightly…

What are you talking about? Giving every Swiss a basic income definitely has budgetary consequences...

There was no actual complete proposal for how to do it. The vote was on whether to look into implementing it.

Re: Basic income plan clearly rejected by Swiss voters

#278

Post by yummyfajitas »

raverbashing wrote: post #252
yummyfajitas wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If enough local people engage in political activism or other cultural activities, then those attributes may also change. Those changes may be displeasing to people who favor the original values. Therefore, should we also ban political activism? If not, why not? I'm assuming nothing about cultural attributes. I'm simply not understanding why the use of violence to preserve certain statistical distributions of cultural…

> I'm simply not understanding why the use of violence to preserve certain statistical distributions of cultural attributes is justified morally. So what you're saying is that people in Syria should not resist the invasion by ISIS. Or that French people should have not resisted the Nazi invasion

Of course they should resist the use of violence by others.

I'm merely suggesting the French shouldn't violently resist people coming to France and peacefully selling weinershnitzel and saurkraut to people who enjoy these things.

Re: Basic income plan clearly rejected by Swiss voters

#279

Post by JumpCrisscross »

ZoeZoeBee wrote: post #237
illumen wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

""" I wonder if you think that pro-immigration movements can be inflamed, reflexive, unthinking and possibly offensive? Actually they do not need to be because there's been a fait accompli in that at least one million immigrants have entered Germany on the basis of what appears to be the say-so of one woman. Discussion is over! This isn't the context for a rebuttal of your suggestion that unfounded accusations abound…

A few things. 1) Sweden has been importing North African and Middle Eastern people's since the early 1970s in a concerted effort to shore up their Demographic issues. https://swedenreport.org/immigration-3/ 2) Sweden made it a crime to question the Immigration Policies of the Government. http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/4972/sweden-free-speech 3) The last time they reported rapes by nationalities those born in a for…

Provide sources, for both your statistics and the chain of causation between them, and learn what "fascist" means.

Re: Basic income plan clearly rejected by Swiss voters

#280

Post by Latty »

zo1 wrote: post #96
alva wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Out of interest, why is populistic commonly used as a pejorative? It seems to be the best friend of democracy.

Because democracy and "people voting" are all fine and dandy until the outcome is one you don't like. So "populist" gets thrown out when the outcome is the majority deciding on something that is seen as "wrong", but popular. It's quite a disconnect from the definitions themselves. As most people think democracy means "everyone get's a say, and the leading opinion is the one that the ruling-body should take". On the o…

I mean, we have to recognise that democracy can, and (in some cases) does, produce bad results (to a given definition of bad). For democracy to truly work, people need to vote based on more than just something being good for them. If you are not a slave, slavery probably benefits you (again, this can be argued against, but at least in a short term simple view of things), etc...

Generally the term seems to be used by people worried about knee-jerk reactionary voting, "it's what I want, therefore force everyone to do it", or "it's good for me, so yes, even if it is bad for others".

> In the Brexit vote, the vote-stay side is trying to use fear

Both sides are using fear almost exclusively. The in side claim the economy will collapse without the EU, the out side claim it's doomed if we stay in, and these are hardly the only examples - the out side shamelessly perpetuates the 'all immigrants are criminal freeloaders who want to take over' that is basically pure racism, the in side will gladly paint anyone who wants to leave as a racist.

It's really terrible, and is hardly surprising - the exact same thing happened in the AV referendum, where the two major parties (who use AV internally) came out with what was essentially 'you are too stupid for AV, stick with nice simple FPtP'.

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