I've been overweight in my life and I hate it. You know how I lost weight and kept if off? I ate healthier, I walk a lot (to the grocery store, for example). US grocery stores have all the same healthy foods as every other country. You can eat healthy at restaurants too, if you must.
It's just people don't. There's nothing inehrently bad about food in the US. We at eat too much and don't exericse (walk). Now, if you'll look at all the other countries joining us in this because it isn't a US thing anymore.
You've added all these extra explanations (corn syrup, antibiotics, growth hormones) but it really isn't that complicated. BTW, I'm sure if you ate konbini foods every day in Japan and didn't exercise enough you'd get fat, too. There's nothing different about that food than a lot of junk/fast food in the US, it's just the Japanese seem to walk a lot more and I don't know how many people only eat out of 7/11.
> There's nothing inehrently bad about food in the US
Except that sugar (or more often, corn syrup) is added to everything.
Just as a small example: most regular people don't have the time to bake their own bread or make their own spaghetti sauce from scratch, so they get both from the store. However, in the US, unlike most European countries (and probably the rest of the world), both have tons of added sugar and/or corn syrup. This is true for most foods in the US, and while it's certainly possible to eat healthy, it's a lot harder to do so here.
> and don't exericse (walk)
A big part of this, too, is that not only are most areas in the US not designed to be walking-accessible, but I daresay most are designed to be openly hostile to pedestrians. Added bonus: in the case where you do happen to live in a walking-friendly area, you still can't send your kids out to walk around, lest you invite visits from CPS.
That isn't to say people in the US can't be doing more than they are to get healthy, but arguing it's no more difficult to stay in shape in the US versus other parts of the world is at best self-delusion.
I appreciate that there is a significant chunk of people that are like this, but I think if you really believe the 40% number or anything like it, you're giving yourself a false worldview.
The majority of people aren't racist nor do they have a problem with government helping them out. What was happening (are you referencing 2024?) in 2024 and today was a government saying the economy was fine when it is not. When that happens, people are going to pick the person that isn't in power, who says they are going to fix it, even if they aren't. "It's the economy stupid". People care about their own well-being above pretty much everything else most of the time.
I don't think putting this on racism or anything else (though it is a smaller factor) helps, it's just rhetoric. 40% of the people in the US aren't dedicateed racists, they are, however, in working groups that the government has ignored for decades.
> if you really believe the 40% number or anything like it, you're giving yourself a false worldview.
> The majority of people aren't racist nor do they have a problem with government
helping them out.
40% is ....not a majority
the current POTUS has a 37% approval rating and this is considered to be historically low, due to wars, corruption, etc.
but even with all of that corruption and failure, 37% of surveyed adults, *still approve*. This includes his frequent, deeply racist tirades on Twitter. They approve!
But it's not even approaching 40%, nor did I tie the two together. If you think the 33% of people who voted from Trump did it because they are racist you are wrong. Some did, a lot that wasn't their primary concern. It's viewing pepole wrong to think that.
Yes, I've talked to Trump voters and I know people who aren't especially strong Trump supporters that voted for him because the economy was shit. Their reasoning wasn't racism. There is a huge chunk where that is their reasoning, sure.
Once again, if you think it's 40% of 33%, you're wrong. Not everybody who voted for Trump is a racist, it's just not how people work.
Voters don't pay attention to or they justify their votes. That doesn't mean they are inherently racist, it means they don't care enough about politics or they care about other issues to the point where they either aren't aware of it or they excuse it away. People pay attention to or remember a lot less about politics than that blog posts suggests.
The majority of people are seeing a variety of headlines from news sources they may not trust (for good reason and bad) and remember a few events over the year, some have such a strong attachment to party that that's the defining thing above all that they're voting for. They're being propagandized and lied to as part of a political campiagn. That they are making the I'd argue wrong choice does not mean they are racist or even intend to be. That racism isn't the defining thing for the majority of them.
It goes back to the original claim, I still think it's obvious that most people aren't voting for a guy because racism. That's inverting how people operate, which is seeing their own needs as the center of the world. If you're unemployed and hurting for money and you are racist, what is your primary motivation for voting? It's probably to get you a job because that's the fastest path to improving your life. But that's presupposing a lot of people are racist, and living around Trump voters, or knowing Trump voters that are minorities, something else is happening other than racism.
I don't think individuals care more about other people than they do themselves. Some people are that spiteful but the majority of people are not because they cannot afford to be.
I don't mean to over argue this but I think it's important that we understand people as they understand themselves.
Well - the fact that they don't pay attention (or lack critical thinking skills and a baseline reasonable education) is a large part of the problem.
But - with a person like POTUS - and those he surrounds himself with, they will throw every possible promise to get the votes - but, each of those issues are only part of their overall agenda and platform. When they got called-out on controversial issues, they outright lied about knowing about things like "Project 2025" during the last election cycle.
Choosing to live in ignorance - or abstaining from voting is accepting that agenda and platform, regardless.
Yes, but I'd argue those people are victims as much as anybody else. To truly be ignorant is to not know, and if you are in a situation where you've never been trained to need to know or you simply don't know there's another world out there, that's not a choice, that's a situation you've been placed in.
You have to win these people to fix the system. Casting them as hateful rubes only voting because they are racist is wrong, not on a moral level but on an intellectual one. We've got large chunks of of the country that haven't been effectively educated for decades, no wonder they are ignorant.
For the record, I choose not to vote not because I accept Trump's racism but I think a valid way of signaling you are not happy with either party (but especially Trumpsim) is to not engage in the system. If the system isn't offering better it isn't the people at fault, it is the system. Non-votes are as valid as any other. If I vote for a process that I believe is fraudulent, that politician will see that as an indicator they have some kind of mandate (see Bush in 2004). I'm not giving it to them, it's the job of either party to be better not to just not be worse.
The Dems must be better and the biggest part of that to me is to engage and understand working class people and not do what they did in 2024 and say everything is fine because it wasn't and it certainly isn't today (and that's Trump's fault). I was never especially leftist but as I've grown older I think the economy is the biggst driver of artificial divides. When people hurt, they look for others to blame. If both parties (or either) were genuinely focused on helping the poor to get a foot up, a lot of this discourse wouldn't be happening. I hate Trumpism but I don't think the corporatism that has captured the Democratic party is much better.
It's really a problem of the system, being forced into an artificial duopoly. If you want to lose me further by saying I'm choosing that platform by not voting, then you're just further disengaging people and I argue you're choosing not to understand my posittion. You need the "racists" and the non-voters to win.
> 40% of the people in the US would rather starve to death themselves than live in a world where people they hate for their skin color get anything without toiling for it.
Do we truly believe that's 40% of people in the US? 33% of US voters even voted for him, so you're saying it's pretty much all of them and another 7%. I just don't see it, it's rhetoric and it's not helpful because if your goal is to win over the people that need to be won over, you can't call them racists when they really aren't.
It's a misshaped worldview formed in bubbles. People don't work that way because you're literally assuming that their hate for somebody else overrides their own well-being. Their actions might end up with that result, but I've interacted with enough people from all over the spectrum to know that imagining that many people have that much hate is just wrong. People care about themselves first and foremost, it's a necessity.
If people had jobs, a lot of of this division would disappear but the govt for years has treated low income workers as people that don't matter and can just be displaced without any answers. It's whey the Democratic party which was traditionally the working class party has struggled against Trumpism, because he pretends to care.
(back from my two hour Hacker News ban - "make sure all the tempban knobs are turned to the max for that zzzeek guy"
look this is the thing with racism - racism to the degree "races" are fit (randomly, or forcibly) into different ethnic / cultural / etc categories (e.g. "in-groups" and "out groups") is largely, due to the in-group/out-group differential, a natural tendency in humans that has to be actively worked against (hence the term "anti-racism"). Nobody who has grown up in modern society with extreme separation of "races" / cultures into disparate groups can really say "oh I'm not a racist" amongst people who study this at an anthropoligical, sociological, or evolutionary level, biases towards those in societally placed in "out groups" have to be critically challenged on a regular basis.
This is why it's not enough to be some MAGA who says, "oh Im not a racist! i just agree with trump's policy", they of course have no idea how their words and actions are linked to racism because they've never looked at it (and by my experience with Trump voters, they angrily, adamantly refuse to even look at contrarian evidence to their belief systems if you try to show them, much less have the critical thinking skills to actually understand them). They are marinating in distrust and contempt of "the other" (if you know me in RL I'll introduce you to people who wont listen to a single fact you give them if it was not on FOX news).
> People care about themselves first and foremost, it's a necessity.
they care about their in-group. Countries like those in Scandanavia have developed very deep social welfare systems largely because of their history (now being challenged by immigration) of being culturally homogeneous meant that everyone trusted each other implicitly and had no issue with their government dollars being used to help their neighbors [1] (this is a really interesting article btw). A diverse society has a steeper hill to climb in establishing social trust between different cultural / ethnic groups.
A president could literally shout Korean slurs all day long (I'm Korean) and get a Nazi symbol tattooed on his forehead, and if he continued to do a good job of policymaking I would approve in that poll, though hate the guy. This is what you are not understanding about Trump voters. We really don't care if Trump is racist at all. But that's not because we are racist ourselves. That's just not relevant to the political platform. If he starts passing racist policies, that's bad, but otherwise we don't give a shit.
Leftists, on the other hand, are very highly concerned with the moral purity of their candidates, even above their political efficacy. I don't understand it myself.
> Since Trump returned to office in January last year, Pete Hegseth, the rumbustious defense secretary who has made it his mission to remake a military ethos he denounced as “woke”, has fired or forcibly retired 24 generals and senior commanders, with no performance-related reason given.
> About 60% have been Black or female, an approach seemingly driven by the administration’s proclaimed onslaught against “DEI [diversity, equity and inclusion] hires”.
so..it's not "racist" when it's "oh all those Black men and women are obviously DEI hires", is that the logic?
60% of any cohort being "black or female" sounds like the population average or below. 50% of people are female, and more than 10% in the USA are black. A random selection of citizens would likely turn up as 60%+ black or female.
I'm not saying this firing wasn't statistically suspect, since I don't know the demographics of that cohort, but I'm guessing based on this misleading phrasing and the lack of information about the cohort that it wasn't.
this is upper military leadership. Black individuals account for 6.5%-9% of general officers/admirals, senior female leaders (colonels, generals, and admirals) represent less than 5% of all senior military leadership.
> 60% of any cohort being "black or female" sounds like the population average or below.
doing the math this means a Black or female senior military leader has 8.5-11 times higher chance of being fired by Pete Hegseth compared to a white male counterpart
That seems bad! But at the end of the day it is not bad enough to warrant voting for the other side's policies. I choose conservative policy with some likely *ist firings thrown in over the alternative, for now. Fwiw I voted Obama; the Democrats can win me back, they just haven't.
I think we're gonna see some def Democratic gains because the economy is shit and that's how voting always happens.
The only argument I was making is it's no where near 40% of people that are voting for somebody cause they're racist. If you believe that then you're not going to see the world accurately. It's not how people work.
But it goes back to my main point, Dem gains won't be what they should be because politics are a very vague and murky thing and people make all kinds of justifications for why they vote for their person. See the stat where most people rate Congress poorly but their Congressperson highly. It's not racism, it's that politics are inherently pretty stupid.
It doesn't take responsibility. The defining theme seems to be their political views. She says the reason she was uninvited from a talk is not at all the given reason (political) that the reason she directly links to is. She's either dishonest or just unaware. The fact that she posted this here and won't respond to anything tells me she knows that it is indeed her past and political views that are harming her reputation but she either won't reject them or cannot because she holds them.
She's asking for money to fly private and live in a nice neighborhood in one of the more expensive places in the world. She has a massive ego, saying that donating to her does more for open source than anything else. She cites issue after issue she's had with people including governments saying she hasn't paid taxes. Sometimes when nobody likes you it is because something you are doing, and this post doesn't do any soul-searching. None of this registers to you?
I almost don't want to post this because I've posted twice here and I don't wan to come off as a Justine-hater, but I truly don't get how you don't read this in th epost.
The fundamental tension here is between pre-Christian and post-Christian worldview. Are you allowed to be great, or do you have to apologize for your greatness? Justine refuses to apologize, which is the cardinal sin. And yet she does not fully own it, but leans into the oppression thing. Hence, the post lands with neither side.
Yarvin believes in a world where the upper class (monarchy) runs everything. It's a pretty controversial take to support them from somebody who themselves has faced discrimination. I think Justine might be out of touch with people who aren't well off.
She seems to do some trolling (but it isn't obvious because she won't address) it where she even made statements which seemed like they were in support of slavery back in 2012. She's brilliant but controversial and I'm sure being trans doesn't help with people rejecting her for no reason either.
> Yarvin believes in a world where the upper class ... runs everything.
Plenty of people believe that, if perhaps only in a descriptive sense. Given the constraints of human social organization, it's just very difficult to not have a world where some kind of restricted social elite (that people may of course rotate in and out of, allowing for some kind of social mobility) is running things. Especially if we're even less comfortable with the main realistic alternative to social hierarchy, namely open markets.
Even self-proclaimed anarchists have long acknowledged that 'the tyranny of structurelessness' is a thing: trying to remove structure just makes it less readable and overt; it doesn't make it go away.
> Even self-proclaimed anarchists have long acknowledged that 'the tyranny of structurelessness' is a thing
structure and hierarchy are two very different things. you can have elected leaders who manage the day to day problems and a popular vote on all the important issues. of course its hard to implement in practice but it is possible. the reasons our society is elitist are economic inequality and different social connections but they only have real power when the people cant decide directly. if there was a federal ballot prop system america would look very different
A federal ballot prop system would be completely unworkable, which is why it was not made part of the Constitution. It would just increase opaque agenda-setting power compared to the present system, and the overall outcome would be even worse.
Upper class carries a heavy implication of nepotism with minimal social class mobility.
This is quite distinct from, say, a government of elected policy debaters submitting bills to a body of elected law passers that are part of a silo separate from the the silo's of military, civil enforcement, policy enactment (merit based civil service), etc.
The later is a hierarchy but not a class based one (assuming sufficient widespread education and social support).
Some of the reactions to this are slightly unfair because it looks like Justine (who I'm not familiar with) supported Moldbug in 2014. It was only in around 2020 when Yarvin sold out, did a 180 in his views, and became a Trumpist; in the early 2010s, he would write long posts about how populism inevitably leads to fascism, any entity who wants power cannot ever be trusted with it, etc. His political views back then were far weirder than what people probably think - e.g. he thought a dictator needs to be simultaneously secure and yet overseen by a board of directors with power to replace the dictator, using some galaxy-brained setup I don't really understand.
Hence, recommending Curtis Yarvin in 2014 is rather eyebrow-raising but a very different thing from recommending him now.
It’s hardly a 180 to go from supporting a dictator in general to picking one in particular. Yarvin is the kind of reactionary who appealed to to the kind of person who intellectualized themselves out of understanding what reactionary politics leads to. When it led to that it was easier to say that Yarvin sold out and changed rather than reckon with the fact that no course change happened.
> Some of the reactions to this are slightly unfair because ... in 2014. It was only in around 2020...
I think you're wrong about Yarvin changing, but let's say you're right for a moment. Do you know what's easy to do between then and now? Say, "That was an error. I regret it." Do you know what hasn't been done between then and now? Yeah.
I feel like it is a very great privilege to be able to post this to Hacker News, soliciting donations. I was out of work for the longest time (thankfully, I finally found some). I too have disadvantages, I have a few mental disorders which make living not the easiest and the world is not made for people who are different in any way. I've contributed to HN in the past, have plenty of stuff on Github but I do not have the access to be able to ask people to pay my way. I realize that my output is a fraction of Justine's but there are very few people who can post a blog post soliciting donations on the top of such a major site. It just feels very, very personal, and it is.
I realize that it takes great courage to do what Justine does, the world is not fair to trans people or many other groups. I want her to be safe and happy. I have however, observed Justine make some pretty careless remarks about homeless people or you can Google her views on slavery or various political individuals and they're not great. They are views that hurt people. I've noticed in past threads these are brought up but she does not address them, which strikes me as lacking the courage that she usually has.
Justine, can you clarify some of the views you've had over the years so that people who donate to you feel like they are not supporting somebody who might not hold the same views for other groups of people that are in danger?
> I've noticed in past threads these are brought up but she does not address them, which strikes me as lacking the courage that she usually has.
The reason is a massive ego problem they refuse to address. Reading this difficult to follow rant also reveals they no clue what it means to be humble.
I don't think people have to be humble if they are proud of what they have produced and get recognition to validate them. I am much more concerned by her holding views that are in favor of hurting others.
I feel like it is a very great privilege to be able to post this to Hacker News, soliciting donations.
Just curious -- are you implying that this is exempted from the rules because the poster is famous? I'm not familiar with any HN rule that forbids "soliciting donations", but also it's been a minute since I looked them up.
As a culture, HN strongly dislikes people who post their own stuff outside of ShowHN. Justine herself acknowledges in the post that she is able get away with things on the site that the majority are not allowed.
There is absolutely some form of creation there. The most basic models now are just prompts but somebody has to prompt them, there is a human being there prompting the song and then deciding to share it (a form of curation).
I'd imagine these will get more and more granular to where you're not just prompting but you are gradually building up songs and at that point I'd be surprised if people were still making this argument.
These things don't exist without human interventio.n
Some form of creation, maybe. In the same sense that choosing what restaurant to go to and what to order is an act of creation. Going ahead and declaring yourself the chef is, however, ridiculous.
to where you're not just prompting but you are gradually building up songs
There's indeed a huge difference between asking the AI to just generate something with a short and generic prompt, and directing it far more specifically. To use the dragon tattoo analogy, it's the difference between asking for "a dragon tattoo" and precisely specifying exactly what type of dragon, what pose, colours, any other adornments, etc.
That's a very gatekeepy standard for something which has for all of history been a subjective thing. What I think will fall by the wayside are dogmatic takes like these.
If I gen up then curate a bunch of tracks into a concept album, why is that not art?
People generally listen to music because they enjoy it. Is it because somebody is on the other end? I mean it's possible, but I think just liking the song is just as much if not more important.
You pretty regularly see comments by people that say they enjoy a song until they find out it was generated. That tells me it's not about the music but about something they believe about generated music.
Why do you suggest that people generating music aren't listening to it?
> That tells me it's not about the music but about something they believe about generated music.
Or it's something they know, namely there being nobody at the other end.
By your logic, a love letter you get from a real person and one that was generated would be the same thing, because "only the words should matter". To me it doesn't make sense to say that about music in precisely the same sense I assume you agree it wouldn't make sense about a love letter.
> Why do you suggest that people generating music aren't listening to it?
Because it's possible, and considering the vast amounts that get generated, a mathematical certainty that it does happen. Whereas people who compose music actually hearing what they compose, or if they're deaf, they experience it some other way. That is also a certainty.
Why this push to somehow "overcome" that? Why can't generated stuff be for people who like it, and the people who don't like it say that once, and that's the end of the discussion and simply gets respected as boundaries humans set for themselves?
> Or it's something they know, namely there being nobody at the other end.
But until they were told otherwise, they did not know and did not care.
> Why this push to somehow "overcome" that? Why can't generated stuff be for people who like it, and the people who don't like it say that once, and that's the end of the discussion and simply gets respected as boundaries humans set for themselves?
I'm not sure. I think it's close-minded but I understand and can respect the feeling. What I don't respect is when people start saying that people who like this music are somehow listening to something less human or other variatations that you can see in this very thread. For some reason, we as humans care about this, though you're right, we should just be able to accept both sides.
If you lost your $60,000 a year job due to this, do you really believe a basic income funded by it will make up that loss? It won't. Basic income in the US is usually proposed at $12k per year, which would add another $3 trillion to the budget. Do you think you can even get that just taxing these companies? I don't.
People who bring up basic income need to get serious about the numbers involved because I never see it. It's not a realistic solution.
People complain UBI doesn’t make mathematical sense doesn’t realize our current economy doesn’t make mathematical sense either. All this prosperity we in the developed world get comes at the cost of extracting wealth from the rest of the world and all government taking on ever more debt.
The modern (social or economic) history of China, Europe, Russia, UK, US are all good case studies. In aggregate, I think they underscore the reality of the system. Every year we now have high profile people coming out of the system screaming about how insane it is: bankers, traders, politicians, military intelligence. If you had to boil it down to a single book debunking late 20th century pax Americana international macro-economics, it's hard to go past Confessions of an Economic Hitman, although not written formally. I've personally had chapter one verified by an Indonesian diplomat. Alternatively, take the quippy summary of a world-recognized capitalist, George Soros: Classical economics is based on a false analogy with Newtonian physics.
Fair warning: I’m quite ignorant in terms of economics, so this is a naïve way of looking at it.
The question that always pops up for me when it comes to UBI applied to the current capitalist system: even if you did actually come up with the money somehow (which is a pretty huge if as you say), once everyone has X “base money” per month, doesn’t that mean the cost of living (specifically renting) will rise to match this new “base”?
The cost of living would certainly rise somewhat but the point is that UBI is redistributive: the same absolute amount to everyone raises low incomes by a larger percentage than high incomes. Long term effects are hard to predict but in the short term it would mean the poor doing slightly better while the middle class is slightly worse off. The non-working (owning) class would be mostly unaffected as assets are insulated from inflation.
Another factor to consider is that putting more money in the hands of people in need of <thing> means producing <thing> becomes more profitable and thus more investment and resources are directed towards <thing>. If we assume the economy works the way the proponents of capitalism say it does, this should eventually drive the cost of living back down.
But personally I think the biggest benefit of UBI would be the reduction in number of people who are desperate enough to accept work – both legal and illegal – that is unfairly compensated, inhumane and/or immoral. The existence of that class of people is the driving force behind many societal problems. Exorbitant amounts of resources are wasted treating the symptoms of those problems instead of fixing the root cause.
And even if you did get the 60k and never can find work again are you gonna be happy about the next door neighbor working for 120k and getting his 60k on top?
All the proposals I’ve seen would set the marginal tax rate on the 120 so high that his earnings would end up more like 40k from the 120k job and then he gets his 60. So, still some benefit to working, but a very progressive tax rate on higher earnings. Not sure I agree with this, but that is what I’ve seen.
Your neighbor would get $60K UBI but their tax bill would go up by $80K because the government needs tax revenue to pay the UBI.
For high levels of UBI it’s not possible to get all of the necessary tax revenue from taxing billionaires or corporations or other simplistic ideas that sound good unless you do math.
I mean the numbers. 12k per year is peanuts. You cannot live off that and to do it we'd be nearly doubling the budget (that's old data, it's probably not that portion of the budget anymore).
That 12k doesn't include healthcare, it doesn't include a lot of things. It's basically ensuring that people live well below poverty level, and for what? I just don't get how the numbers work, even if it was politically feasible.
I'd much rather have free healthcare and other amenities other countries have. Here in the US if you lose your job there is virtually nothing between you and the streets besides family and friends.
I'm facing this right now. I cannot get a job in tech which means restarting my career. Getting a job right now is not easy in any field especially not in anything like a living wage. If I did not have my parents I would be on the streets right now, thankfully I don't have a mortgage or anything like that. I'm not sure how much $12k per year would really help, it certainly wouldn't pay for housing.
Oh, yeah $12k would not do it. For a UBI to work we would have to shift a significant portion of the concentrated wealth. I too was laid off long enough ago that by now I would be in a bad spot without help, also no mortgage or anything, and I don't travel or go out much. UBI of any degree would do something, but it would have to be much higher than $12k to tread water just due to rent alone. Aside from UBI we would likely need to decouple housing from profit, it has the same problem as healthcare. Demand for it is inelastic to a certain degree, everyone needs somewhere to live.
> do you really believe a basic income funded by it will make up that loss? It won't.
Almost definitionally it would. If society is saving a bunch of money on all that saved labor, that extra value is still there, it just needs to be appropriately redistributed
This is one of the most horrifying comments I've ever read on this website. It's practically a dare to engage in civil war or violent revolution. People fundamentally experience life as relative - as changes. You can't "deprogram" intrinsic human nature. You can just wait 80 years for everybody who's not used to the new hell to die.
24k puts you near poverty level. $1k per month will cover food expenses, it won't cover transport, shelter, and certainly not medical. On 12k per year you have enough money for food and praying that an emergency doesn't happen. It's hard enough living on 40k, and I'm not even in a place where costs are expensive.
UBI will never happen in the US so it's a pointless argument. Americans will have plenty of pawn shops and short-term loan services to help them, though.
How is not wanting to live in poverty using the poor as a foil? How is it hypocritical/fake to care about people who are in situations that I don't want to be in? Isn't that just logical?
> $12k a year is plenty. You’ve just been raised above your natural standard
I get where you're coming from. But this is politically unworkable, and for good reason. If AI increases productivity, that means more wealth, which means living standards should go up.
> $12k a year is plenty. You’ve just been raised above your natural standard
> I get where you're coming from.
You do? Have you priced out health insurance lately? I have. Insurance on HealthCare.gov for my partner and I would be $1700/month for what amounts to catastrophic coverage. It had around a $20k deductible and covered nothing other than an annual physical prior to hitting the deductible.
With $2k/month to work with between us, I guess we have to somehow find a place to live and eat on the remaining $300 as we pay for our functionally worthless health insurance since there is no way in hell we could afford to pay the deductible.
Their numbers are wrong. But their fundamental argument, I believe, is degrowth. That we are living beyond our means and need to lower our expectations of living standards to live sustainability. It's a philosophically-appealing argument. It's also wrong, unless you're comfortable with the inevitable violence and likely population destruction that would need to ensue from an honest degrowth agenda.
Just as hyperloop was designed as a techbro pie in the sky notion to kill high speed rail, basic income as an idea is designed to kill more realistic attempts to shore up welfare, e.g.
* A job guarantee like we had during the great depression
* Lowering retirement age
* Raise minimum wage
* Expanding medicare to everyone
It's worth remembering that if AI really can do everyone's jobs then it'll be wildly deflationary so there's no need to worry about pesky government spending on this stuff or paying people more. Spend spend spend, baby!
Ah youre worried it cant do that? Maybe it is mostly smoke and mirrors then.
The historic origins of UBI are from political parties that wanted most of those same things, too, especially raising the minimum wage and expanding medicare to everyone.
A strong minimum wage makes UBI more attractive. More people will want jobs in addition to UBI. UBI is also seen as a market force to naturally drive minimum wage up, because UBI offers workers more choices: more opportunities to build a startup or take a sabbatical instead of work 40 hours. The labor market has to compete with that "opportunity cost" in ways it doesn't need to care about today. It would increase liquidity in the labor market and in terms going all the way back to even Adam Smith, make the market more free. Wages would better reflect demand for the work if laborers had more choices at more times in their lives where and how much to work.
Medicare for Everyone and Universal Health Care make UBI simpler. Health risk is always going to be variable and insurance-like risk pooling will always be a good idea for society to defray costs in bad years from surpluses in good ones and defray costs from unhealthy people by considering how many people are kept healthy. UBI could be designed to try cover much of health care, but it is never going to be as efficient as a pooled single payer. If a country already has Universal Health Case, the conversations about UBI get a lot simpler. It is a lot easier to sell it is a flat universal grant. Your health care can be provided by a complex risk pool and smart accountants doing a lot of smart math on your behalf. Your UBI can be just a flat number. Simpler: you can think about how you spend your UBI without having to consider your predicted health outcomes in that period of time. UBI's flat universal value can be set on benchmarks that don't need need complex amortization schedules and risk analysis.
The Canadian Social Credit Party, formed to espouse UBI was one of the keys to building Canada's Universal Health Care and their priority was that first, then UBI. That still seems the best priority order to me.
So the problem with 3 out of 4 of your challenges is that, right now, it means young people need to work more to achieve them. Money is an issue, but money by itself cannot solve it, it really needs to be backed with more people working. That's not going to happen, in fact, less people will work.
So without AI, the path forward is obvious: those 3 will become worse. Lowering retirement age, raising minimum wage, and expanding medicare won't happen without AI. They can't.
We already are reasonably close to a job guarantee. If unemployed people would accept any job, unemployment would drop by a lot. Not to zero, obviously, but a lot. Unemployment is also pretty low by historical standards, so fixing unemployment with a job guarantee can't fix much. We'll need something else.
> It's worth remembering that if AI really can do everyone's jobs then it'll be hyperdeflationary so no need to worry about pesky government spending on this stuff.
So yeah, I disagree. If you're going to assume AI will just jump to how capable it'll be 100 years from now, then you need to think a bit deeper. What AI effectively does, it provides capital-based labor. You buy a robot. Robot costs a lot, but operational expenses are marginal, energy and (maybe) "tokens". Add solar power, and let's say local AI becomes a thing, at least for normal robots, and you need nothing other than the initial cost of the robot.
Okay, so this will mean everything can be staffed with tens of thousands of these robots. Remote mine? No problem. 500 robots in your house? Why not. Cleaning very large facilities? Not a problem. Farm hundreds of square kilometers? Fine. Dig a canal to avoid the strait of Hormuz and just do it with shovels? Let's get to it. AI can be a universal machine that can do anything labor can achieve.
Obviously AI will massively increase the output of the economy, and people will figure out what to do with that, as people will want a shitload of things done. Which means the problem you're identifying will be trivial to solve, and we'll figure something out.
> Obviously AI will massively increase the output of the economy, and people will figure out what to do with that, as people will want a shitload of things done. Which means the problem you're identifying will be trivial to solve, and we'll figure something out.
Historically, that "we'll figure something out" has usually meant the economical wipeout of large parts of the population, sooner or later followed either by some epidemic event or other "act of god" (like fires) that was a consequence of squalor and poverty, or by some sort of war to thin out the herd.
I'd prefer if history would not repeat itself for once.
> Historically, that "we'll figure something out" has usually meant the economical wipeout of ...
Uh, historically everything has usually meant the economical wipeout of large parts of the population. It still means that in most third world countries. Economic power is not the huge differentiator here.
Job guarantees and higher minimum wages are just UBI with extra steps, while lowering retirement age is just conditional UBI by another name. If you're giving people more money in exchange for nothing (or nothing of any value to anyone, as in the case of a job guarantee), it's effectively indistinguishable from UBI.
"When our grandparents built the hoover dam, the lincoln tunnel and the triborough bridge with a job guarantee that was just money for nothing - UBI with extra steps."
^ this would be an accurate representation of your opinion then?
That job guarantees exceptionally produce useful things doesn't mean that they don't overwhelmingly produce useless things, or things that are more expensive than they're worth.
> doesn't mean that they don't overwhelmingly produce useless things, or things that are more expensive than they're worth
One could say the same thing about all the little art projects a hypothetical society on UBI might busy itself making. The pertinent difference seems to be one about scale and co-ordination. Job guarantees say we work together–through a centralised power–to build big things. Handing everyone cash leans more towards arts and crafts and consumption.
>Job guarantees say we work together–through a centralised power–to build big things. Handing everyone cash leans more towards arts and crafts and consumption.
Creating busywork doesn't strike me as a particularly worthwhile endeavor, compared to idleness.
> the Hoover dam is also not the typical example of the kinds of projects guaranteed job programs generate
NASA arguably ran its post-Apollo pre-Artemis period as a jobs program. Again, there will be waste. But there will also be waste with UBI. My suspicion is peoples’ tendency towards purposelessness will exceed bureaucrats’ tendency towards uselessness. That’s a loose hypothesis. But in its balance lies which system is more competitive (and satisfying).
>My suspicion is peoples’ tendency towards purposelessness will exceed bureaucrats’ tendency towards uselessness.
The question we need to answer is, given infinite labor (limited over time, but unlimited given unlimited time) is there infinite meaningful work that a government can allocate it to? Eventually you will have built all the dams, tunnels, and bridges that you can usefully build. Historically what tends to happen is that work that isn't strictly necessary gets allocated. Roads that are fine get repaved, etc. I don't see how needlessly wasting energy and resources is better than paying people to spend their time however they see fit.
Like the post above says that there are multiple issues at play with AI. The same can be said about universal income.
The pay levels are not comparable because you are also recompensed with time. You may choose to spend your time in a number of ways that you find rewarding that also reduce your expenses. Making your own meals, clothes, furniture, beer, wine etc. There are a lot of people who would enjoy doing these things but are too time poor to do so.
Your expenses also reduce by the amount you must spend in order to make yourself available to work. Travel, work clothes, medical certificates when sick. You can spend a lot in order to be paid.
If you want a world with a reasonable distribution of income levels. It stands to reason that those receiving more right now should receive less. Certainly, the absolute wealthiest should reduce the most, but on a global scale, it is hard to defend that those in the top 10% of incomes should retain their position.
The proposal for how much a universal income should pay is a variable to be argued itself. I can certainly see it being argued for at a lower level than ultimately desired since something is better than none.
In a sense the end state of a universal income in an equitable world would be remarkably simple. The income available divided by the world's population,
Those reviving more than their share now may not be happy about it, but I'm not sure they have a right to their larger portion either.
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