The way I see it, we already have that world, with capitalism functioning as a filter.
I worked my ass off to reach financial independence, now I'm dedicating the rest of my life towards helping other people.
I've proven to be capable of using the system to a degree where I can do whatever I want, which allows me the freedom to help other people full time.
It's not a perfect system, but I doubt UBI will be much better. At least capitalism filters out many of the people who shouldn't be helping others.
Helping those in need isn't something everyone should be doing. Not every needy person should be helped and helping others in desperate need incurs a mental cost that's not easy to carry.
Why should any single person carry the weight of the person in desperate need? UBI + healthcare implies that there’s a social safety net that creates an entire network of people to carry this weight. I don’t have a clue if any implementations would successfully do this but to just throw people in desperate need to the wolves is inhumane.
I don't think people would prosper under such a system. Free health care, yes, free education, yes. Retirement for all, take care of the disabled, yes.
But in my opinion, in today's society, if you take away the need for people to struggle (which UBI will do) they often end up in a worse mental and physical shape than if you make them suffer a bit. Just the way natural selection programmed us. "All basic needs are met <- conserve energy".
I can imagine a educational system where we prepare our children from childhood for UBI and it will work.
But given how rudimentary most education still is I don't see that happen anytime soon. Maybe in 100 years.
>But in my opinion, in today's society, if you take away the need for people to struggle (which UBI will do) they often end up in a worse mental and physical shape than if you make them suffer a bit.
This is exactly the opposite of how people actually work people excel when given support and opportunity to grow. Adversity especially insofar as fear of basic needs being met isn't inspiring it's stunting.
Anything else is a basic dysfunction in understanding people fed by survivorship bias. Imagine if you met someone who was sure that plant growth was maximized by periodically holding a lighter to one or another of the leaves because all the surviving plants had gone through that. Your understanding is every bit as ridiculous.
We can find sufficient challenge and adversity as we need to move us in our own selves, relationships, and field of endeavor.
> people excel when given support and opportunity to grow.
Some people do. Many don't, they'll take that support and rest on it. Plenty of European Countries have UBI for all intents and purposes (free health care, housing, utilities, enough cash money for everything else including entertainment and communication).
People don't excel, and plenty don't bother to contribute, because it's not necessary.
> We can find sufficient challenge and adversity as we need to move us in our own selves, relationships, and field of endeavor.
You're looking at a tiny subset of people that wouldn't stop working (but maybe work on different things) if they won the lottery, and extrapolate from them on to the general population. Not everybody is like that. Any solutions that pretend that they are will fail.
I don't think people having their basic needs met is in any way equivalent to winning the lottery. When you win the lottery you can have anything financially that you like for the rest of your life or until you blow all your money. With UBI you can have a minimalistic life devoid of most luxury or ease.
The kind of person who doesn't bother to contribute is probably the kind of person who would be contributing by making fries or checking you out at walmart. These contributions can be replaced by automation and nothing of value will be lost meanwhile some portion of the people will use their time that would have been thrown away at walmart to actually contribute.
If 90% of the team at walmart was replaced by robots and 10% found more meaningful ways to contribute it would be a net gain.
> You're looking at a tiny subset of people that wouldn't stop working (but maybe work on different things) if they won the lottery, and extrapolate from them on to the general population. Not everybody is like that. Any solutions that pretend that they are will fail.
If you offered most people a poverty wage of 2k monthly and netflix and the opportunity to earn 2k + whatever they could earn in addition doing something with their life 90% would chose the latter given the option especially if free education were available to get from A to B. Most people want to feel their life is meaningful. If you don't understand that then you don't understand people in the slightest.
If UBI is what you’re hung up on I think there’s a lot of Americans that would gladly take free education, healthcare, and retirement. Healthcare shouldn’t be a thing people should struggle through.
Much of that “desperate need” is created, or worsened, by capitalism.¹
It isn't just a matter of “working hard”. Say you're a brilliantly capable developer for three months out of every year, have around four months of chronic pain and bad mental health unpredictably breaking up the remaining time. Unless you're wealthy, capitalism doesn't let you get to a situation where your bad mental health doesn't disrupt that five month stretch where you could be doing worthwhile things – even if you would make enough money in those three months to support yourself, when most of it's going into paying off the debt you got into because you lost your job and had to eat, it's difficult to do so.
Think this is a bit much? Okay, how about this: you're in jail on suspicion of committing some crime or other. This lasts 1½ weeks, before they realise that no, actually, you weren't guilty. But in the meantime, you've lost your job, and without the savings you'd usually gather prior to job-hopping… what then?
You might've worked really, really hard to get where you are. For many, working really, really hard simply isn't enough.
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¹: “Capitalism” here is shorthand for “society being structured under the assumption that capitalism is a fully-general ideal solution for allocating all resources, and there are only a handful of narrow examples where it makes sense to do something else”. There's nothing inherent to capitalism that causes these things, any more than a chainsaw is responsible for felled trees. But this is pedantry, so I kept it out of the first sentence.
> I worked my ass off to reach financial independence
This is a false pursuit, and in a sense a vacuous statement.
You are never independent of society around you. You are in constant need of others doing that invisible and visible labor - in production and in services - to maintain your way of life.
It's only with Capitalism being the way it is that you need to "work your ass off" to not be financially dependent on your parents, or at the risk of a crisis and collapse upon losing your job etc.
Not really capitalism's fault. Regulatory capture, weak laws that let that happen, government corruption, lobbying laws and other things are more to blame.
The USA was still a capitalist society when the American dream was alive and well with a thriving middle class. Meanwhile nations with planned economies, abolished land ownership and worker owned means of production were starving and seeing general iniquity.
Now those protections that gave us a thriving middle class and general economic prosperity have been largely gutted and our government generally subverted.
My point is, the ills of a country are likely the cause of governmental failings and destabilization exploited by the ruling class of the system to entrench themselves and expand their interests at the expense of the general public, regardless of what that that system is. It can happen to any system of governance paired with any economic system.
I think we should be cleaning our government up and taking that power back, but that by putting the blame squarely on capitalism you're missing the forest for the trees. The problem is allowing whatever naturally formed ruling class in an economic and or political ecosystem from concentrating too much power, and potentially resources [1], in the first place.
[1] Though I'm skeptical of this but in so much as resources equate to power maybe it's necessary.
Completely agreed. I see too many people jumping on the "Capitalism is the root of all evil" bandwagon too easily without critical thought. Like you, I see our current problems arising due to the usual historical culprits of corruption and shifting balance of power within a system of government. All systems of government are subject to these forces and while it's true our current system is clogged with crap, it's not capitalism we should be blaming.
I disagree that pursuing financial independence is a false pursuit.
"Financial independence" != "independence from the society". No one claims to be independent of the society. One just does not have to earn money anymore.
I agree that money are worthless without places to spend them and someone producing stuff to buy. This does not make financial independence less useful though.
There are so many programming languages out there, as a hiring manager it’s not uncommon for me to see resumes with languages I’ve never heard of and probably don’t care much about. The cheat code just depends on how it has been inserted into the resume.
If I threw out every resume with some weird quirk, spelling or grammar issue, layout problem, etc. I’d probably never hire anyone
> some weird quirk, spelling or grammar issue, layout problem
I don't dock points for layout issues (unless they say they have experience in front-end work...), but spelling and grammar is exactly what you should be getting right in an resume. I don't meant to say I would be unreasonable pedant about the use of prepositions, and I'd probably overlook an MS Office autocorrect (like how Excel always changes "HSA" to "HAS", grrr) - and small mistakes must never invalidate someone immediately - but it means I'm going to be in the session with a dim view of the candidate until and unless they demonstrate otherwise.
That said, recruiters and agencies do edit resumes - so if something seems off with a resume (e.g. "20 years experience with Rust") then I do have a policy of directly contacting the candidate with the resume attached and asking them to verify that this is the resume they wrote. It's also why I sign my own resume PDF with my AATL certificate and mention that fact when I get to contact the hiring manager (e.g. "oh hey, did you have a chance review my signed resume? if it wasn't a signed PDF please let me know, thanks!)
>Also, you can't really "manage" your boss if he/she is gaslighting you. This is a criminal offense (or should be, depending on where you live) and must be punished accordingly.
It scares me that you can write these things without realizing the consequences and without being downvoted or having your comment removed.
"He/she said something that makes me doubt my reality, I want criminal prosecution." The level of policing that would take, is just unimaginable. The only societies that have come anywhere near this level of state control are East Germany, the Soviet Union and China. Your view would be a lot worse than those all together.
How about you just quit and find another boss and then we don't have to completely overhaul our society in a way we know doesn't work.
You probably never experienced it. Or, maybe you would like to gaslight the others? Do you realize that the desire to just remove my words shows who you really are?
How the prosecution of gaslighting makes us closer to authoritarian countries? To countries where abuse of others is the main policy? You're talking nonsense, saying that white is black and vice versa.
The prosecution of gaslighting doesn't require full state control. Gaslighting involves lies, hidden threats, and other offenses. All of this can be proved in court, in theory.
ETH302 was not operated by a US airline. There's a reason why I'll blindly get on a US major and make more checks and be more choosey about boarding airliners operated by countries with far looser training standards.
Even prior to 2013, you could be an SIC ("first officer") for a US operator with just 250 hour minimums required then by the ATP certificate. Colgan Air 3407 ended that.
At some point, I tried this as an experiment. Instead of doing things myself, I tried to hire people to do it for me.
I tried a few different things, data labeling, custom sewing work, custom car modifications.
Turns out that the work was either done badly when it came to fairly common tasks or people refused to outright do it when it was custom work. I've seen the same thing when I looked at what happened when friends hired others.
Maybe there's a point where you have enough money to hire highly qualified people. But I doubt it's anywhere below $10M net worth. Below that you're just not likely to start handing out $150 per hour for what I would consider fairly standard yard or other work. At least I'm not.
Or maybe the trick is to hire a supervisor as well. So first you hire someone to do the work and then you hire someone to supervise it. Unless of course the supervisor also does a bad job. But then I can hire a supervisor for the supervisor.
Most likely I just wasn't good enough in the hiring process. So I probably should have hired someone to do the hiring for me. But what if I hired the wrong person, because I'm not good at hiring?
Now I'm sitting on piles of money and I'm still doing everything myself.
Finding good help is exceptionally difficult. It's gotten to the point where I pretty much do everything myself. What wealth I've accumulated has gone into tools, equipment, and leasing shop space. In the last decade I've found less than 5 people whom I would rely on to do what they've told me they're going to do, whether I'm paying them or not.
It's gotten to the point now where I've learned carpentry to make my own custom furniture because I can't find anyone who will do the job decently locally. I do most of my home repairs DIY, because finding a competent contractor that shows up on time, won't cut corners, lie to me, and actually finishes the job is basically impossible. I did all of the work building my race car and I do all my basic car maintenance myself. Even for a job as simple as an oil change, I can't trust common chain stores.
If anything, the "gig economy" has made this situation worse, not better. There's so many people who will put up a Facebook page and advertise themselves as doing some service, and really they're just half-assing it for a what is effectively a fat paycheck for their level of effort and care. There's SO MUCH apathy in the world, so many people that just don't give a shit about the quality of their work in anything they do in life. Finding other people that actually care about doing it /right/, is nearly impossible. Mostly because when I do find those people, they're usually also wealthy and in a different line of work. Turns out, being focused on doing things correctly the first time is valued enough to be a path to wealth, in and of itself.
My brother is a 'proper' carpenter and sadly struggles to find people like you.
People seek him out because of his skill, but then upon being told that it might be £600 for interior door to be made, or more, suddenly want him to fit a store bought one. His daily rate is low, but a lot of rich people still don't want to pay for a job to be done properly.
Quite sad to see people buying amazing historic houses and then filling them with ready made fittings, after tearing out the old hand made stuff.
I recently renovated two rooms in my house and took out the mid-grade carpet that the builders had put in and installed real hard wood flooring. I wanted proper trim in the room and I hired a trim carpenter. What I ended up with was pre-made trim from Home Depot and mitered corners. I hired someone who claimed to be a carpenter, and charged a carpenters rate, expecting, at minimum, that the corners were coped rather than mitered. I own a VERY nice sliding compound miter saw in my wood shop, and I could have very easily taken pre-made trim from the home store and mitered the corners myself, I hired someone who claimed to be an expert with the expectation of hand-coped corners, because that's a skill I don't have.
Just one of several instances where I found out that local carpenters weren't real carpenters. If you only know how to use power tools and have a pickup truck to get materials at the home store, you're not a carpenter, you're a handy-man. A carpenter should be able to work wood by hand. I aspire to gain those skills myself, and at some point I'll probably re-do the sad work that was done previously. At least they caulked and painted the caulk-line. At some point I plan to install crown moulding, but at this point I've decided I won't do it until I can make it myself.
When you say historic buildings, I suppose (hope) you don’t mean listed ones, since they’d be breaking the law? Regardless, it’s a crying shame what people have ripped out of even very ordinary Victorian and Edwardian houses. Decorative mouldings, cast iron fireplaces, original doors, geometric tiling.
He lives in Portugal, where the rules are different especially for those restoring farm houses and villas that have fallen into disrepair, but even in the UK people get rid of amazing Victorian features in houses there aren't listed.
As he likes to make things properly, he rarely takes the 'fitting' jobs - and keeps and restores anything he removes. Someone else usually wants it.
The sad fact is that a bespoke wardrobe costs good money, as do hand made window friends, but they should last for years, centuries even.
I have the exact same problem. It’s impossible to find competent labor that is willing to do what they’re told.
I want my baby’s laundry hand washed.
I want the towels to be dried in low heat.
I want to use wooden spoons on my expensive enamel pans.
Instead housekeepers routinely disobey and then lie about it. And a home chef is unrepentant about scratching my pans with metal utensils. They just don’t care. If it were their own things they would put more thought and labor into it.
I have to get on my hands and knees to scrub the floor after some recalcitrant $70/hour pair of maids refuse to do anything more than wipe the grime back and forth with a swiferjet.
Just earlier this year, I was quoted $795 to run a thermostat wire 10 feet, no drilling required.
Task Rabbit has people charging north of $80/hr for simple yard work (leaf collection, bush trimming, super standard stuff that a teenager could do).
Sure, I could gamble with a cheap contractor, but if they do something badly, it's going to cost 2x as much to redo it properly.
I honestly don't know if I'll ever reach a net worth where I'm comfortable paying people more per hour than my own job, with the possible exception of doctors.
I’ve found that hiring anyone to do anything custom one off as an individual is extremely hard as you pointed out. You are much better off knowing someone in the business who will do it for you as a favor or recommend someone to do it. So I guess it comes down to connections or relationships and if you’re a typical well off transplant in a big city connections to blue collar workers are typically very lacking.
it mostly comes down to recommendations though. you shouldn’t expect to find good help immediately. the gig economy platforms make it seem like it, but its not the case.
> Or maybe the trick is to hire a supervisor as well. So first you hire someone to do the work and then you hire someone to supervise it.
That‘s traditionally what the gentry used to to do. They had a butler managing the drivers/grooms/groundskeepers and other outdoor staff and maybe valets (reporting to the male head of the household) and if they could afford it also a housekeeper to manage cooks/maids/cleaners (reporting to the lady of the house). Plus tutor/governess as direct reports.
Thus is the power of relationships, which often goes undervalued in quantitative analysis. For a one-off job, you could pick the most skilled person in whatever trade to do it for you, with unlimited budget $X, and still be unhappy with the results. Because there is no relationship.
Whereas, if you pick someone who your friend uses regularly, by comparison, your job is no longer work $X to the tradesman but the sum total of $X plus ALL the future business from your friend, who will leave if the tradesman does you wrong.
150/hr for fairly standard yard work? Shit, I used to do 'fairly standard' yard work for a twentieth of that. Or do you mean hiring an entire team of people at that rate?
The era of asking for cookies has already become a thing of the past for me, it's gone the way of autoplaying videos, advertisements, tracking cookies and paywalls. All things to look back on with a feeling of nostalgia.
>For that matter, Arduino seems to somehow have stayed profitable in spite of getting murdered from every angle by the clones.
The clones are fine for simple stuff. But they really cut every corner possible, so even the chip is counterfeit, which means it doesn't behave like a real Arduino does. Deep sleep will use 1000x as much current on some clones compared to a real Arduino, for example.
You really can't only use clones. You have to develop/test on real Arduino hardware, then deploy to clones. Because the clones aren't reliable in their behavior.
>I didn't read all their math but I expect their final result to be off by a factor of 2-5x.
I looked at their parts list and it's obvious they aren't serious. CPU is missing, memory is missing, SAS to SATA cables, but no SAS controller, no mounting for the system board. Low effort at best.
That wasn't on that page when I opened it, you think I'd miss that? They were reading the comments here and updated the page after I wrote the comment.
The price was $4700 something, now it's $4945.
They simply smooth over it with this:
"So we will be using a rig cost of $4500 in our spreadsheet."
That way their overall math doesn't change. Should get banned for doing things like that. These guys are up to no good.
I worked my ass off to reach financial independence, now I'm dedicating the rest of my life towards helping other people.
I've proven to be capable of using the system to a degree where I can do whatever I want, which allows me the freedom to help other people full time.
It's not a perfect system, but I doubt UBI will be much better. At least capitalism filters out many of the people who shouldn't be helping others.
Helping those in need isn't something everyone should be doing. Not every needy person should be helped and helping others in desperate need incurs a mental cost that's not easy to carry.