471–478 of 478 posts
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Necessities get made because there's someone to buy them. Only 5% of people are employed in agriculture and 15% in manufacturing. 80% of working people could do nothing and we'd still be fine when it comes to necessities. And we don't even have peak automation.
Could we perhaps include medical care in the necessities don't you think?
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Could we perhaps include medical care in the necessities don't you think?
And educational workers and cleaners.
I think people working in agriculture and in the industry includes people who clean there.
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That is something I've found over the years with traveling. You watch a bunch of travel videos and think the place you're visiting is going to be so different but its just the same overcast sky and ocean and washed out color palette as home. Once you remove all the filters, color correction, and drone shots from influencer travel videos a lot of places look the same IRL.
I like the walking videos with minimal editing. They feel more genuine and I get to see places I'll never get to see in person.
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Funnily enough, I live a couple of minutes walk from this spot, I guess you are nearby? HDBs can look a bit samey, but that photo does a bit of a disservice to Singapore. There are also quite lovely HDBs as well: https://thehoneycombers.com/singapore/unique-hdb-blocks-desi... And of course the surrounding area there is pretty amazing, loads of green spaces and wildlife on your doorstep. A large part of this video was…
It is a good place to live. I was just comparing how climate can make a place okay/fine versus not okay/depressing. You mentioned greenery: I'm a bit up north (Malaysia) and it's plenty green here too. Though that's more due to the area climate than anything they are doing (i.e., Dubai can't match that no matter how hard they try).
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Yes, that's how a lot of Singapore looks like. It's an HDB car park. But your picture of the Soviet Union is perhaps a bit too rosy. I'm not sure why you'd be depressed? It's a picture of a construction site in a car park. Sure, I'd love having the car infrastructure being less front and centre, too. But otherwise it's fine.
> I'm not sure why you'd be depressed? I was saying I'd be depressed or it would be depressing, in Singapore. What I was saying is that if you match that place with a grey sky, in cold climate with slow rain, that will be the definition of depression (at least for me).
Slow rain is also rather rare: mostly it's either sunny or it pours.
For the occasional few weeks I like to escape Singapore. And I'm currently rather enjoying a cold and wet and grey London winter. No need for sunscreen, hurrah!
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You can make cool shit without having to do the work of productizing and monetizing it
Yes, and a magic fairy creates the economic value that funds the UBI
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Failing -> homeless and starving is a failure mode at the level of the individual. That’s not good, but failure modes of the entire structure are higher priority and the two don’t really compare apples to apples. Capitalism (absent corruption) is actually sort of cleverly recursive there because financial destitution by definition cannot affect producers of vital goods, because the act of producing vital goods is pre…
"Absent corruption" is doing a lot of heavy lifting in your statement. The idea that the system can't fail raises the question what do you consider failure, and what do you consider corruption" If prices increase and wages don't keep up with them, an increasing number of people become squeezed by their environment. This is a slow event, sure, but enough drops can fill a bucket. The fallout from this pressure on the g…
If we positively mandate full reserve free banking with no central bank and no state issued currency, that would eliminate I think all of the banking corruption I have in mind. I’m not sure about usury under the classical definition, if we run into problems still that might have to go too (though I do see downsides to innovation because loans are like crack cocaine for innovation, complete with the overdose deaths).
Lobbying is more difficult to make illegal because influence is much more nuanced than first-order* banking and influence will route around basically any protections given enough time. But today we don’t even try to make it illegal. Perhaps a meta-scheme where the lobbying rules periodically change according to some secret sequence could disrupt things enough to make it difficult to route around.
* First order in the sense that much of the complexity comes from playing with the primitives we have today and not from the primitives themselves, and the primitives I prefer are much clunkier to play with.