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Create value for others and don’t worry about the returns

geohot.github.io

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Re: Create value for others and don’t worry about the returns

#461

Post by maybewhenthesun »

imtringued wrote: post #205
maybewhenthesun wrote: post #151

Earlier 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…

>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 wher…

>I'm not sure this is stupid

Ok, I meant to say: it feels a bit stupid. I hope the rest of my post show that I actually don't think it's stupid.

Re: Create value for others and don’t worry about the returns

#462

Post by maybewhenthesun »

mike_hearn wrote: post #187
flammafex wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Guess we'll starve then. Good luck dealing with hundreds of millions of hungry angry people.

The idea you're suggesting here is 19th century era Marxism, and isn't based on historical or economic realities. There has never been a famine caused by new technologies creating unemployment, and food security is much higher now than at any other time in the past.

> There has never been a famine caused by new technologies creating unemployment

That's a bold statement. And depending on how you define famine it might even be true-ish. But I'm quite certain most poor people in the 1920s would disagree with you.

Which is why we got the russian revolution and both world wards at that time. All 3 were partially caused by 19th century industralisation creating an poor, hungry underclass.

Re: Create value for others and don’t worry about the returns

#463

Post by maybewhenthesun »

fragmede wrote: post #195
mike_hearn wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I'll come out and get kicked out of communism club to say that I don't support UBI on the basic fact that money is exchanged for goods and services is just so foundational that I can't support UBI. I think everybody should have a roof over their heads and 3 square meals a day, but UBI isn't the way to get there.

> money is exchanged for goods and services is just so foundational

it is in all large societies. That's true. But it is not in most small primitive societies. SO it's not like a law of nature, but more that we haven't found a system that works as well for large groups.

The trouble is that capitalism also has it's problems, and they're getting exacerbated by technological advancements. If you automate everything at a certain point there's just nothing to do for a large part of the population. And at that point the system stops working.

In science fiction we would get the 'post scarcity society', but nobody knows how that should work.

The UBI systems I've seen proposed that just might work are a sort of golden middle between those two. Not that different from the current welfare system we have in NL, but taking out the stress factor and stigma of receiving welfare.

Re: Create value for others and don’t worry about the returns

#464

Post by AnthonyMouse »

zozbot234 wrote: post #272
TonyStr wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Curious, how would this affect the production of things that have long supply chains, or require lots of manual labor? There are many things that require labor, like plumbing, irrigation, farming, transportation, brick firing, steel production, etc. where the product is either an intermediary step, or otherwise contributes to something that the worker doesn't themself benefit from. Who would create my car, computer,…

The cost of these things would simply rise until people are willing to either produce them, or obviate the need for that production (such as by increasing automation in that particular sector).

I feel like a lot of people have the impression of a UBI that it would mean no one would have paid jobs anymore. It's primary advantage is that it removes the perverse incentive of the existing needs-based assistance system to not work (or not work more) because if you do you lose your benefits. Which doesn't exist if the payment is unconditional rather than conditional on not making [more] money.

But the amount would be something in the nature of $12,000/year. Is that actually a disincentive to work that would cause no one to take a paid job anymore? Only if no one wants a lifestyle that costs more than $12,000/year.

Re: Create value for others and don’t worry about the returns

#465

Post by swed420 »

zozbot234 wrote: post #454
rfwhyte wrote: post #443

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Capitalism rewards those who CAPTURE the most value, not those who create it. Capitalism at its core is a system of expropriating the value of labor by those with capital who themselves create absolutely nothing.

Capital allocation is a serious job with very real consequences. The decision of how many AI datacenters should be built, to take an an unusually topical example, is one of capital allocation. Central planning is not a viable solution, it has failed everywhere it's been tried.

> Central planning is not a viable solution, it has failed everywhere it's been tried.

Laughs in chinese

(and yes I'm aware they use instances of capitalism. The difference is they have hard checks in place)

Re: Create value for others and don’t worry about the returns

#466

Post by AnthonyMouse »

mlrtime wrote: post #219
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> wouldn't UBI, even if coupled to actually producing _something_ will lead to a lot of useless stuff being made? The general premise of a UBI is that it's unconditional. If you tried to say someone is required to produce something without specifying what it is, they'll produce whatever is the easiest thing to produce, which will naturally be useless if they otherwise wouldn't have produced anything because the only…

>Those things would tend to be useful because at least the author found them to be and there's a decent chance they're not unique in the world. If you e.g. make an app just because you want to use it yourself, maybe someone else wants to use it too. This seems reasonable on it's surface, however for anyone that is tried to start a business, or sell anything, there is a big gap here. The gap between creating something…

> The gap between creating something useful (an app) and the ability to sell or market it is HUGE. That gap is the difference between useful or not.

Most of that gap is the difference between making it and selling it. To sell it you need payment processing, customer service now that customers are paying and expect you to resolve their billing problems etc., marketing sufficient to get enough initial users to cover development costs now that you're trying to turn a profit, accounting and tax remittance now that you're taking money, etc.

That stuff isn't required if you make it for yourself and then post it on the internet for anyone else to use for free.

Re: Create value for others and don’t worry about the returns

#467

Post by deaux »

mike_hearn wrote: post #226
deaux wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Even if governments were perfect at ID verification it wouldn't change the argument above, right? Being perfect at verifying UBI eligibility would require a large government infrastructure, just like today, so you can't claim that the U part makes it super cheap to administer. But no government is close to perfect. Here are some examples for your edification. The UK doesn't even know how many people are living there,…

None of these include a mention of meaningful economic impact.

> Being perfect at verifying UBI eligibility would require a large government infrastructure, just like today, so you can't claim that the U part makes it super cheap to administer.

It's already in place regardless of UBI, so it doesn't add meaningful costs.

Of course it's never going to be perfect, absolutely nothing is. Why even mention that? What matters is the impact of it being imperfect.

Compare it to the impacts of tax evasion, or wage theft, and they'll be completely negligible.

Re: Create value for others and don’t worry about the returns

#468

Post by nine_k »

simianwords wrote: post #70
nine_k wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What useless things?

Partake in war

If you do not partake in a war when a war is waged against you, you lose, and you either get subdued, or perish altogether. This is why pacifism for some part of a society is only possible when another part of the society is willing and capable of using lethal force to defend the society as a whole.

Due to this, it's important to always have sufficient quantities of very efficient weapons, exactly so that you would never have to put them to use.

Re: Create value for others and don’t worry about the returns

#469

Post by sifar »

DangitBobby wrote: post #367
devsda wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If anything it seems to promote rent seekers by telling you - stick to your lane and don't complain. I.e. the caste system I was wondering if that would come up and HN delivers without fail. Anyway, you are free to interpret it as you see fit. The guidance was for someone who was struggling with a moral dillema on facing relatives in war and undecided over action. It is not a diktat to work or provide unquestion la…

What is the point of a job if not the results? How can you be responsible for your actions but not the consequences of your actions?

The point is worrying about results creates anxiety that takes away your focus from doing the job which results is lower performance -> subpar results - it is a recursive spiral. Also results are not "wholly" under our control. Hence avoid worrying about the results "while" doing it.

The final result of any action depends on a lot of external factors for e.g. one might develop a product, but whether it succeeds or not depends on other players, economy, luck and host of other factors that one does not control or know. This feeds into the first point about not worrying about the results.

Re: Create value for others and don’t worry about the returns

#470

Post by foxglacier »

cardanome wrote: post #362
keiferski wrote: post #318

As is often the case, the title is a bit misleading and implies a universality that I don’t think the author intended. He is specifically talking about AI, and saying (in my understanding) that you shouldn’t worry too much about whether your specific thing will be overwritten by AI, as long as you focus on actually creating true, real value with your work. I agree with that completely and can see it happening in my o…

The problem is that with generative AI, I have no means of protecting my work from being stolen. It does not matter what license I put up. It doesn't even matter if I make it publicly available or not. LLMs have been trained on pirated material, they don't even have the decency to buy a copy. Even if I show my project to no one and just have a private repo on Github the code might still be used to train LLMs. Your GP…

> Your GPL licensed library? Yeah, we used claude to rewrite it and released it under MIT.

Good. "You" made the world a better place at the expense of "me", the rent-seeking GPL author. I can go suck it if nobody wants my equivalent product with a worse license anymore. How do people not get this? If AI enables somebody to reproduce somebody else's hard labor much more cheaply, then it should do so instead of holding everyone else to ransom just because some self-entitled programmer wants to prevent competition when he's falling behind the market.

If you're a programmer, you have no moral right to complain about that because it's also the whole point of computer software. To do things more cheaply - ie to make somebody else's work worthless.

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