Why we should all have a basic income - <AUTHOR> https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2017/01/why-we-should-all-have-a-basic-income/ <comment><USER4> During Brexit, people in job-starved areas of UK were reported as resentful for receiving handouts. They wanted gainful employment and their dignity back. You could have corporations foot the bill for basic income and people with certain values would still not want it. The image of being a breadwinner is so deeply instilled in some people that for them not being that, triggers mid- life-crisis: a depression, sense of meaningless existence, addiction, etc. Employment's bigger role is not just to provide income, but to keep people's minds busy and balance dopamine and add more meaning in their life. We have to provide solutions for all of the pieces of the puzzle if we want rapid automation.

<comment><USER5> Creating jobs is one thing, but creating meaningful jobs is something completely different.

In communistic days in eastern europe, everyone was employed, but most people had a lousy job, that involved very little effort.

The first time i came to the US, i got the same feeling, lots of meaningless jobs (lift boy, parking lot attendant, grocery store bag filler) that i didn't see in the Netherlands.

Are these meaningless jobs really better than universal basic income?

At least with UBI people can decide for themselves how they create a meaningful daily activity.

<comment><USER6> > _In communistic days in eastern europe, everyone was employed, but most > people had a lousy job, that involved very little effort._

I find this hard to believe. Why would a job "in communistic days" be different from, well, a job?

<comment><USER5> Because there was a job for everyone. Government had to create a job for everyone.

See: [http://www.crf-usa.org/bill-of-rights-in- action/bria-19-1-a-...](http://www.crf-usa.org/bill-of-rights-in- action/bria-19-1-a-life-under-communism-in-eastern-europe)

"In the workplace, almost everyone had a job. Wages,however, lagged far behind those in the Western democracies. A common joke was, "They pretend to pay us, and we pretend to work." But rents, goods, and services were far cheaper than in the West."

<comment><USER6> > _job for everyone_

You are implying that this was dictated by political rather than economical reasons, but that may be not entirely correct.

> _we pretend to work_

This is true - for some workers. Thing is, the Western society in not and has never been different in this regard. And, some of the "job creation" policies could exacerbate the problem even more.

<comment><USER5> Yes, some jobs are the same here.

The main question is: do you create a job because there's some work to be done, or do you create a job because somebody needs a job?

<comment><USER6> Do you have an evidence of the latter, or this is purely hypothetical? (An honest question.)

<comment><USER5> Common knowledge, see earlier link, some googling will easily give you more info.

Lots of older people in Easter Europe think communistic days were better and wish they could go back: state provided housing, education, healthcare and a job. Not great, but basic (as in basic income).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> If I had basic income, I would go back to study, get a PhD in Computer Science Majoring in AI/Machine learning and then I would try to do something meaningful with it. I am tired of doing pseudo-intellectual software 'engineering' tasks - I would like to use my intellect to tackle difficult problems instead of trivial problems like building UI components and managing databases. Unfortunately, I can't afford to go to back to uni right now.

I think that there are a lot of people in my position who are desperate for basic income. From a societal point of view, innovation would move quicker if people had more time to invest in themselves.

Unfortunately for me, right now, I just have two options if I want to buy myself some time to study:

\- Hope that one of the startups I work/worked for gets a big exit and that I can cash in and fund my studies.

\- Wait for retirement age before going back to uni (and hope that my brain still works OK at that age).

<comment><USER8> The fact that someone is paying you to do these jobs shows that the things you do _do_ have a lot value to someone (your boss, the company's customers etc.). So your existing job is far from being meaningless.

Instead of crying for a UBI you should better cry for people not to buy software that does "trivial stuff". If people were willing to spend a lot of money on software that does highly not-trivial stuff, there probably were a large demand for people that are able and willing to work on such things.

Markets are a democracy - everybody votes with his wallet.

<comment><USER7> If me and my colleagues were better educated and less stressed on average, we would introduce fewer bugs into the system and we would waste less time debugging issues that should never have existed in the first place. I guess I believe that education has a really good ROI.

<comment><USER8> > I guess I believe that education has a really good ROI.

Did you do a back of the napkin estimate for this? You also have to include the tuition fees and the opportunity cost of (probably) not working while you study on the debit side (thus no, i.e. lost, income). On the credit side the increased productivity/better job etc. Have you computed how many years it will take to reduce the computed debt (including opportunity cost)? I have not computed it, but I'd assume that it would take a hellish lot of time to even break even.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Almost everyone here seems to be discussing the economic challenges of UBI, but so far I haven't seen much mention of the political challenges. UBI is a completely unworkable concept in the U.S.A and likely many European countries as well. American citizens will be literally shooting eachother in the streets before they accept such a massive wealth redistribution mechanism, and that resistance will be mostly made up of the masses that could benefit from it, to say nothing of the powerful that will leverage the full extent of their influence to prevent their gains from being redistributed.

<comment><USER10> Americans do not trust that the government has their best interests in mind, ergo Americans do not want to have their money taken away from them to pay for government programs.

<comment><USER11> Like roads, air traffic control, sewers, clean water, etc., etc.?

<comment><USER10> You mean the roads which are crumbling ([http://www.infrastructurereportcard.org/road- infrastructure/](http://www.infrastructurereportcard.org/road- infrastructure/)), congested ATCs ([http://www.infrastructurereportcard.org/aviation/](http://www.infrastructurereportcard.org/aviation/)), and water systems with heavy metal contamination with our drinking water infrastructure nearing the end of its useful life ([http://www.infrastructurereportcard.org/water- infrastructure...](http://www.infrastructurereportcard.org/water- infrastructure/))?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> If everyone gets $1000 every month guaranteed for "basic needs", the prices for those basic needs will increase accordingly. And independently. So you'll end up spending that $1k on either housing, bills or food.

So you will still need a job if you want all three of those things, not sit around and contemplate what you should do with your life.

It's sort of like how the ACA raised the overall price of insurance.

Giving money/help selectively to those who need it right now (and can prove it, i.e. no job but looking for one) is still better than UBI.

Prove me wrong.

<comment><USER13> > Prove me wrong.

Ok here we go.

> If everyone gets $1000 every month guaranteed for "basic needs", the prices > for those basic needs will increase accordingly. And independently. So > you'll end up spending that $1k on either housing, bills or food.

They don't get $1000/month for "basic needs", they get $1000/month for _whatever they want_. It's completely unconditional.

Which means people wouldn't go out and buy twice as much food as they currently eat because they suddenly have a pile of money that can only be used for buying food. Unless they are currently starving, which hardly anyone in the US is, they would buy the same amount of food that they do now and there would be no inflation in the price of food.

And anything with the effect of increasing nominal housing prices without reducing the ability of people to buy housing is _excellent_ because it allows you to increase the housing stock without reducing nominal housing prices and causing existing homeowners to go underwater on their mortgages. In other words you can build more housing to cancel out the effect without NIMBYs fighting you and thus allow more people to own homes.

> It's sort of like how the ACA raised the overall price of insurance.

The primary driver of increasing insurance premiums wasn't the subsidy, it was the requirement that insurance companies take people with preexisting conditions. Suddenly a million sick people are making insurance claims who previously had no insurance, what did you think was going to happen to premiums?

> Giving money/help selectively to those who need it right now (and can prove > it, i.e. no job but looking for one) is still better than UBI.

Only if you want them to pretend to look for a job and never find one. And you want to create a poverty trap because actually taking a job doesn't actually increase the amount of money in their pocket because the government withdraws an equivalent amount of benefits.

<comment><USER12> > Suddenly a million sick people are making insurance claims who previously > had no insurance, what did you think was going to happen to premiums?

This is what I mean.

From a business point of view, suddenly everyone has an extra $1000.

They were buying stuff from you until now, there's no reason not to try to drive the price up to see how much more you can charge now.

If enough businesses will do that, it will reach a critical mass where the ones charging old prices are the idiots left behind.

So if literally everyone has an extra $1000, nobody has an extra $1000.

A bit different with insurance, since the government forced insurance companies to accept all these people, so they increased prices. I'll ignore the fact that they were still making enough profit to just accept the losses, because people are greedy and they will always want all the profit they can get.

<comment><USER14> So I get where you're going with this, but the businesses are still competing with one another in a free market.

So yes, you're right that if all the avocado farmers in California decided to engage in price fixing because they know that more money exists and that they can get it, they probably can. But it presupposes highly monopolistic behavior that doesn't seem very likely to work for most markets. Especially if it's easy to become an entrepreneur.

The business, after all, makes a profit as long as their price is above their cost. So unless their costs go up, competition keeps prices down.

Now, I think you're half right -- prices will go up, but it's not because of gouging by middlemen or traditional inflation. It will be because as people drop out of the labor market, the really undesirable jobs will become more costly to fill.

But that strikes me as a much more fair free market than what we have now. Yes, you will have to pay more to have your garbage picked up in front of your house. Why? Because as it turns out, you would much rather be doing whatever you do than deal with a thousand people's garbage. Maybe they should be getting paid more than you, in a voluntary free market.

So I imagine it will be sort-of inflation, but almost better described as a rebalancing of the economy. Jobs that humans can do much more easily than robots will get higher salaries. Jobs that are enjoyable get lower salaries. Overall, salary spread across jobs becomes much smaller.

But I don't think it's necessarily likely to be some kind of _overall_ inflation, it's a redistribution of wealth accomplished by simultaneous direct transfer of wealth through the UBI, in addition to a redistribution of power accomplished by allowing "Nothing" to be an option that employers have to compete against.

<comment><USER15> > But it presupposes highly monopolistic behavior that doesn't seem very > likely to work for most markets.

Higher education costs expanded to absorb the extra money from the student loans thrown at them, healthcare costs increased as more consumers started competing for a fixed supply of appointment slots, hospital beds and medical services.

<comment><USER13> > Higher education costs expanded to absorb the extra money from the student > loans thrown at them

That's because they're catastrophically stupid industry-specific interest rate subsidies. A dollar for tuition is then less expensive than a dollar for anything else, so everyone conspires to buy things with the cheap government money that isn't available when used for anything else. And that process is highly inefficient because it's basically a huge implicit fraud scheme to redirect subsidized student loan money to things that aren't strictly education, which no one can admit to out loud or explicitly negotiate for because it's illegal to use the money for that. Then it's, look how expensive "education" has become!

A UBI doesn't do that because it doesn't restrict what you can use the money for.

> healthcare costs increased as more consumers started competing for a fixed > supply of appointment slots, hospital beds and medical services.

In part this is the same thing (here is a huge pile of money that you can _only_ use for healthcare, now everyone go swamp the doctor's office at the same time). And the rest of it is temporary because no one knew the law was coming ahead of time so now we need some time to increase the supply of healthcare providers.

<comment><USER15> > because it's basically a huge implicit fraud scheme to redirect subsidized > student loan money to things that aren't strictly education, which no one > can admit to out loud or explicitly negotiate for

I agree, but how does showing up with a wad of cash instead of a check from a student loan agency increase your negotiating power? Large number of international students today (Chinese and Saudi until recently) paid cash and yet had little say on football teams, new administrative buildings or spending in general. The university system just goes out and borrows whatever it feels like, the debt service is added to expenses.

UBI also removes the advantage of centralized negotiating power that's beneficial in industries like healthcare. With Medicare or a private insurance company the $500 list price for doctor's exam can be negotiated down to $99. With UBI it's the consumer against doctor's office, whch historically did not play out well due to massive information disadvantage.

<comment><USER13> > I agree, but how does showing up with a wad of cash instead of a check from > a student loan agency increase your negotiating power?

Because cash you can spend somewhere else.

Suppose you _like_ football. If the money is "student loans" then you can spend it by attending a school with a big fancy college football stadium and subsidized tickets for students. If the the money is _cash_ then you can use it to go to that school instead of a less expensive one with no football stadium, or you can go to the less expensive school and use the money to buy NFL season tickets.

So when the money is student loans, people have only the first option and all the schools have to build big fancy football stadiums to attract students. But you can't do that on a per-student basis. And you can't directly buy college football tickets with student loan money but you can launder it through administration to subsidize them. So everybody who attends that school ends up paying for football even if all they really wanted was an education, and then people have to consider the quality of the school's football team when choosing schools instead of only the quality of their professors. It would have been better to have just let the students who like football use the money to buy NFL tickets.

And so on for twelve other categories of student loan money laundering colleges have to engage in to attract students.

> UBI also removes the advantage of centralized negotiating power that's > beneficial in industries like healthcare. With Medicare or a private > insurance company the $500 list price for doctor's exam can be negotiated > down to $99.

There is no reason you can't use your UBI money to buy private insurance.

And the only reason the list price for those things is $500 is that everybody knows the scam. The buyer for the insurance company wants to look like a great negotiator to his boss, so the doctor's office claims everything costs five times as much as they actually want and the buyer gets to look like a big hero for whacking it down so much.

And in general insurance makes things cost _more_ for the same reason colleges with fancy football stadiums are more expensive. People don't ask whether something is worth the cost when they're spending somebody else's money. If you're paying out of your own pocket, you ask if knowing the result of some test is _really_ worth $1200 of your money. If the insurance company is paying for it, you run _all_ the tests whether you need them or not.

<comment><USER16> About health costs, things will become _more_ expensive if every person has to negotiate for themselves. People who have a medical problem, want the problem fixed. They don't have the time or ability to find a good alternative. An insurance or government is in a much better position, because they have the time and expertise to shop for an alternative beforehand and make it an all or nothing proposition for the _producer_.

<comment><USER13> You're making the argument for medical licensing, not the argument for single payer. People don't know which doctors are quacks so the government has to step in. But money is a different question -- if we required doctors to provide prospective patients with a standardized price schedule it would be trivial for patients to see which doctor charges $100 and which charges $200.

If you have government or insurance pay for everything (and then pay everyone the same amount) the buyer _still_ doesn't know which doctor provides the best care, but now doctors have the incentive to provide no more than the bare minimum care because they aren't allowed to charge any more for better quality/convenience/atmosphere for the same procedure.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Capitalism is going away, no matter what, once we have massive unemployment due to automation. You think people are just going to accept starvation? Shit will get real, real fast. And most people aren't as articulate or reasonable as the people on this site. There will be massive violence. A better way to look at UBI is that it's not about giving poor people money. Its about keeping the fabric of society together and preventing revolutions.

<comment><USER18> "Capitalism is going away, no matter what, once we have massive unemployment due to automation"

No.

1)

The Industrial Revolution saw a considerably greater degree of automation than we are seeing now.

'Single Engines' replaced dozens of workers, some cases 100's.

Think 'weaving machine' vs. 'individual weavers'.

The 'automation' we have today is mostly 'soft' \- do you think MS Word actually replaced 'Secretaries'? Or was it a confluence of things, including the fact that we now have 'Executive Assistants' which do much more than Secretaries ever did.

And what happened during the Industrial Revolution? Wages rose! Unemployment never really went down.

You know all those 'servants' in 'Downton Abbey' \- the ultimately left to get _higher paying jobs_.

I should add - this had also a lot to do with the labour movement.

2)

The major source of 'job loss' in Industrialized countries is not 'automation' \- it's 'outsourcing' to India and China.

'Automation' has been going on in a very aggressive way for over 200 years - and yet we still have fairly low levels of unemployment.

Entire new sectors have developed: entertainment, professions, services. There were 5 channels in 1950 and now 500. There weren't many pro athletes in the 1900's - now their are tons - and massive industries around them. We didn't really provide much in terms of healthcare in 1900 - now maybe 20% of the economy is healthcare. Very few used to go to University, let alone finish highschool - now education is a massive industry.

There is always 'work' that can be done so long as we can improve each others lives.

So - the question of 'UBI' comes down to how we decided to spread the surpluses. Do we give some surpluses to those who are not directly contributing?

Hint: we already do. Especially in socialized countries - we give massive subsidies to non-working people: healthcare, parks, security, all sorts of other services. Power subsidies (electricity is subsidized here in Quebec). We just don't give them spending money.

I think UBI is an interesting idea, but a dangerous one as well.

I live in Montreal, many of the people in my neighbourhood are 'artists' \- photographers, actors - but really they all work full time in services.

You can get a 1/2 decent, small but respectable flat around here for $400 a month - and I don't mean grungy. It's entirely possible to live decently off $1K a month (remember healthcare is already paid for by other members of society).

I feel that with UBI - my neighbourhood would fall flat - because everyone would quit their service jobs (or work a lot less) - because they only need UBI + a little bit of extra cash - i.e. '1 day work weeks' \- I think would be the preferred mode of existence for vast numbers of the young people around here. They would live a 'very low materialism' style of living, and be happy with it.

I think a 'means tested' form of UBI (not really 'Universal' ...) instead of welfare would be better.

In America - a better idea than UBI might simply be to make sure that everyone has access to healthcare, in a slightly-more-socialized way. I don't mean 'single payer' \- but something. Having better healthcare for everyone would put people on a much more equal/fair footing - AND probably be good for the economy directly/indirectly. Solve that problem and you're already a huge step forward in trying to provide for better social outcomes.

<comment><USER19> _I feel that with UBI - my neighbourhood would fall flat - because everyone would quit their service jobs (or work a lot less)_

Could you explain why you mean by "fall flat"? Do you mean that the businesses that currently employ the service workers would close because they would be unable to find anyone to work for them? It seems likely that they'd need to increase the wages paid for unrewarding positions, but that this might be offset by the greater number of locals who can afford to patronize them.

 _I live in Montreal, many of the people in my neighbourhood are 'artists' \- photographers, actors - but really they all work full time in services._

 _' 1 day work weeks' \- I think would be the preferred mode of existence for vast numbers of the young people around here._

Presumably when you say "1 day work week", you do not include the time spent working on the projects personally important to these people? I view it as a strong positive that more young people would have more time to pursue their artistic interests, and presume they would do so. There may be negatives that should be carefully considered, but don't you see this as something we should strive for?

 _They would live a 'very low materialism' style of living, and be happy with it._

So more art gets created, the lifestyle is less materialic, and people are overall happier? And you are arguing against this idea? Would I be right to guess that you are not currently working a poorly paid job you hate in the service industry while trying to find time to pursue the art you love? I don't mean that last question as an actual attack, but I do wonder if your self- interest might be different than that of the majority of your neighbors.

<comment><USER18> "Could you explain why you mean by "fall flat"? Do you mean that the businesses that currently employ the service workers would close because they would be unable to find anyone to work for them? It seems likely that they'd need to increase the wages paid for unrewarding positions,"

No.

Coffee Shops etc. already run on pretty low margins -> they'd be out of business. Any business wherein labour is a significant input cost and where wages are low enough that people would quite - would shut down - and that's a lot of businesses.

"So more art gets created, the lifestyle is less materialic "

That's a choice we can make today - we don't need massive government intervention to make that decision for us.

It also means a significantly reduced output:

The value of the 'art' getting created is significantly lower than the 'service' they provide making coffee - or else that art would be getting created.

It's easy to prove: if their are were 'worth something' to you and I, we'd be buying it. We're not. But we will however hire them to make coffee for us.

"Would I be right to guess that you are not currently working a poorly paid job you hate in the service industry while trying to find time to pursue the art you love? I don't mean that last question as an actual attack, but I do wonder if your self-interest might be different than that of the majority of your neighbors."

I don't care what my neighbours 'aspirations' are.

It is not their right to take my money to pursue their aspirations.

If they want to make art that nobody wants to buy, that's fine by me, but I should not have to pay for their rent so they can do that.

They can serve coffee, get a better job, make better art that people want to buy - it's entirely their choice, they are entirely capable.

They can have whatever lifestyle they want to build for themselves.

If they are handicapped, or ill, that's another story, but otherwise, their life is their job, not mine.

<comment><USER19> _Coffee Shops etc. already run on pretty low margins - > they'd be out of business._

Possibly, assuming nothing else changes, and they can't raise their prices or automate so as to require less labor. But others are claiming that the problem with UBI is that all the prices would go up, presumably including those at the coffee shop. And if everyone in the neighborhood had another $1000 per month to spend, don't you think that at least some of the coffee shops would see increased business?

 _The value of the 'art' getting created is significantly lower than the 'service' they provide making coffee - or else that art would be getting created._

Maybe, but this bothers me in two ways.

First, it assumes only those with the surplus money to buy art are allowed to determine the value of art to society, and that those will the inability to pay for art have no say. Isn't it fair to allow these non-rich art lovers to democratically vote for policies that result in more art?

Second, it implies that the value of art can be completely judged by its market value of at the time it was created. The more creative geniuses we have serving coffee to rich folk, the fewer works of art we'll have in the future. Obviously most artists aren't geniuses, but I think this tradeoff at least merits some consideration.

 _if their are were 'worth something' to you and I, we'd be buying it. We're not. But we will however hire them to make coffee for us._

There is lots of art I appreciate and would like to encourage, but I don't have money to support it. I've never felt comfortable paying someone to make me hot beverages --- I'd much prefer self-service and greater automation.

 _I don 't care what my neighbours 'aspirations' are._

Perhaps that's the big difference in our views. I care tremendously about whether those sharing my society feel they are living fulfilling lives. UBI might not be the best way to accomplish this, but I guess I hadn't considered that you might not consider this to be a benefit.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> We changed the URL from [https://medium.com/world-economic-forum/why-we- should-all-ha...](https://medium.com/world-economic-forum/why-we-should-all- have-a-basic-income-7177d5b339ec), which points to this.

Although basic income is obviously a well-worn topic, this article seems a bit more substantive than average. So we'll try downweighting this thread less than we usually do for well-worn topics.

<comment><USER21> It's good to hear confirmation that you're doing this sort of thing. May I suggest surfacing this drag coefficient to the UI, so that people know what you've done?

It looks pretty sleazy when a young thread with high engagement (comments and upvotes) nonetheless slides to the second page.

<comment><USER20> That's just how HN works. Story rank is determined not only by upvotes and submission time, but by numerous other factors including active moderation. We're unlikely to publish all that because doing so would increase two bad things: attempts to game the site, and meta nitpicking. Those are bad in their own right _and_ eat up the resources we have for making HN better, so it's in the community interest to minimize them.

The approach we've taken re transparency on HN is not to make all the data public but rather to answer users' questions about how the site works or what's going on in specific cases. That seems to be the sweet spot.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Funny how all the proponents of a Universal 'Basic' Income aren't proposing instead to make every 'Basic' item 'Free'.

After all, if you believe their rhetoric, giving someone $500/mo should be the same as giving them free bread, eggs, milk, some clothes and some movie tickets.

I wonder why... Maybe, the reality is that over time our 'Basic' needs increase. In certain parts of the world shoes are still considered a luxury whereas in others, Nikes and Adidas are considered 'basic'. 50 years ago car ownership was a luxury even in most 'developed' nations, as were televisions. Now they're considered 'Basic'.

The reality is, the people touting UBI as a way forward suffer from having a thoroughly static and isolated view of the world. They fail to see that value creation is what's important, and drives society to further itself. As value creation goes up, the definition of 'basic' increases with it. I'm not for a minute advocating that the current system is anywhere near perfect - <USER2> wealthiest in our population are questionable value creators while at the same time there are value creators scraping by in the world so the way we reward people needs a rethink.

I don't profess to know how to solve the poverty crisis and I very much want it to be solved as a citizen of the world. What I do know is that the only way to do it will involve reforming education so that future generations are inspired to advance humankind and create value in the process.

<comment><USER23> >Funny how all the proponents of a Universal 'Basic' Income aren't proposing instead to make every 'Basic' item 'Free'.

>After all, if you believe their rhetoric, giving someone $500/mo should be the same as giving them free bread, eggs, milk, some clothes and some movie tickets.

It's not "funny", it's the core part of basic income that separates it from state-run socialism. Not making a determination about what is or isn't basic is one of the key points. You give a person their $500 each month and let them determine what it should be spent on. What is basic for one person may not be for another.

<comment><USER22> Go back to 1950s USA where average annual salary was just over $3000 - if I told you back then I'd give you $500 a month - almost twice the average salary where do you think we'd all be now? Would we be even here?

Now take your $500 a month and project forward another 50-60 years. What do you think it'll buy you then and why?

By picking a monetary amount - be it $50, $500 or $1000 it IS absolutely making a determination about what's basic. And its doing it based on the living standards and cost of living of today. That's a large part of why its so flawed.

<comment><USER24> It seems to me it'd have to be specified as a formula based on the "poverty threshold" and "inflation." I really can't imagine just throwing out a number and expecting it to be unchanged for decades.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I'm wondering what effect good virtual reality with a Metaverse as described in Snowcrash and Ready Player One will have on society. There is a potential that a large percentage of people will be happy with their virtual life even if they are poor in real life (as soon as the virtual reality is good enough to spend pretty much all of your time there).

<comment><USER26> We're already seeing this effect, no goggles necessary:

[http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/ct-video-games- jobs-e...](http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/ct-video-games-jobs- emploment-20160923-story.html)

"Happiness has gone up for this group, despite employment percentages having fallen"

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> "How we live is so different from how we ought to live that he who studies what ought to be done rather than what is done will learn the way to his downfall rather than to his preservation." ― Niccolò Machiavelli 1469 - <USER3>

Even if UBI was proven to be a net gain to society, implementation is highly unlikely.

This is less about technology/economics and more about human nature, which has not changed much over the last 500 years.

<comment><USER28> > human nature, which has not changed much over the last 500 years

Let's be clear that "human nature" is relatively stable, but the "cultures" that sit atop are much more capricious-- slowly changing in different ways to fit the same human desires.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> As the author of this article, I suggest reading this one next if your concern is inflation:

[https://medium.com/basic-income/wouldnt-unconditional- basic-...](https://medium.com/basic-income/wouldnt-unconditional-basic-income- just-cause-massive-inflation-fe71d69f15e7)

If you have another question check here:

[http://www.scottsantens.com/basic-income- faq](http://www.scottsantens.com/basic-income-faq)

</comment><comment><USER30> I think a basic income is a dangerous and bad idea.

If we expect the wealthy class to give their money to the masses to fund their survival, the masses would become functionally dependent on that transfer continuing. At which point the wealthy class would have incredible power over the masses.

Asking for a basic income is like asking to go to prison for the free food. It is not a good idea to become dependent on others with such different interests.

Instead, I advocate the development of open source automation solutions that provide everything necessary for human survival. Open source machines can be manufactured by any corporation and purchased by groups who would then own the means of their own survival.

A basic income becomes a source of leverage for moneyed interests to get their way. But if we all own the machines that support our survival, we can choose for ourselves when we work and when we study to better ourselves.

I've written about this recently, here: [http://tlalexander.com/machine/](http://tlalexander.com/machine/)

</comment><comment><USER31> It would certainly be nice if startups were ramen-profitable by default :)

<comment><USER32> Disagree. I've tried some really bad ideas that rightfully died very quickly. The world doesn't need more junk that no one needs or wants, whether that be plastic or digital.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Automation will not reduce overall jobs same way industrialization did not do that. Automation will create more jobs in services instead. Basic income is crazy socialist dream that was tested in communism already and it failed.

<comment><USER34> Basic income is very different than traditional communism in that it keeps with the basic capitalist infrastructure.

In fact, basic income is much more capitalistic than existing social safety net systems because it maintains the assumption that if disadvantaged people are actors in the market, that the overall system will be more efficient than specific government-specified handouts.

Really the question underlying basic income and safety nets in general is to what extent every citizen in a modern society should have access to goods, regardless of their contribution. Once society has decided how much access such citizens should have, welfare vs basic income becomes a question of efficiency and optimization as opposed to ideology.

As for automation not reducing overall jobs--as someone who works in automation I don't see how it will magically create more service jobs. There are few jobs today that employ large numbers of people that are not in danger of being replaced by automation--and the whole point of automation and efficiency is to minimize the number of people required to maintain the system. I do think service jobs become the way people become gainfully employed in an automation world, but that society will need to expand its definition of what is a job worthy of recompense--for example someone could decide to become an artist, and actually have that be a renumerative profession.

<comment><USER35> >Really the question underlying basic income and safety nets in general is to what extent every citizen in a modern society should have access to goods, regardless of their contribution

Absolutely this. And if we're honest with ourselves - if someone will die for want of something relatively cheap that the state can easily provide (like food, water, shelter, or antibiotics), can you really justify condemning them to death because they can't afford it? Sure, you want to encourage people to contribute to society, but do you _really_ want that encouragement to be the threat of annihilation?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> When I was 3 years old, my dad bought a brand new house in a brand new suburb. It was 3 bedrooms, 1.5 baths, etc. For its era, it was a very solidly middle class or upper middle class house and he had 3/4 of the price of the house in the bank. The house cost $16k. He had $12k in the bank. It was a LOT of money when I was 3 years old. It is not a lot of money today.

A $1000/month sounds like a lot now. But the minute you issue UBI, it will spur inflation and the value of that $1000 will immediately be less than it is now. This is a problem faced by every single welfare or aid program the world over: It takes no time for whatever figures you came up with to be out of date and for your program to not be accomplishing its intended goals.

I have written about this before (for example: [http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/2015/09/it-was- obsol...](http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/2015/09/it-was-obsolete- before-we-opened.html)) and I expect to write about this more. The UBI is a bad solution to the problem. We have faced this problem before in the form of the Industrial Revolution and we invented the 40 hour work week. It helped distribute work more fairly. We need similar solutions today. Turning most people into sheeple and charity cases merely because they are not rich is a terrible, terrible idea.

<comment><USER37> I think most proponents of UBI agree that the value should be tied to inflation, updated on a regular schedule (I advocate monthly). This would guarantee that UBI doesn't go "out of date".

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> I'm adding to the the discussion cause we have very smart people here with very good assessments on what the implications are for basic income. I had to chime in to clear some of the speculation on the arguments brought forward. I'm not for or against basic income at the moment but I want to make sure we are all on the same page on what inflation is and the basics of economics.

Inflation is simply the influx of money that causes the "value" of ALL goods/services to increase. This is due to the increase of the money supply which decreases the value of the currency. I emphasize that it is the value of ALL goods/services not just one or a large number of sectors. When we see prices rise up in goods and services in one area it isn't inflation because it is in one area of the economy.

Another misunderstood axiom of economics is that a market is based on finite resources. If goods in one area of the market increase then somewhere else across the economy the value of goods and services decrease. Now the misinterpretation of inflation and price hikes happen due to one variable, time. The time it takes for price hikes in one area to affect another is what gives the perception of inflation. But when the value of groceries significantly increases then I assure you people are going to eat out less. It just takes time for the sectors to affect on one another.

</comment><comment><USER39> This article seems really out of touch, and anybody mentioning the 'UBI' experiment in Manitoba Canada as a success or in a positive light I can hardly trust about the experiments I haven't read about. When we Canadians did an experiment it failed!

<comment><USER40> If it's a failure, this isn't widely known. Links?

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> Who is "we"? Who is "all"? Does this include migrants and undocumented aliens who do the dangerous jobs for low pay with no labor protections or civil rights? Or would they be excluded from the basic income? If they are excluded, and have no rights, but continue to perform the dirty jobs while the rest of "us" relax and benefit from their labor, how is that different from the system of chattel plantation slavery?

<comment><USER42> Slavery involves no pay and being unable to leave under threat of violence. Undocumented workers are paid and are free to leave. Indeed, many people are actively asking them to leave.

I take your point, but it's not slavery. A basic income isn't meant to preclude anyone from working. If it existed and undocumented workers were removed, those jobs would have to pay a wage sufficient to entice someone who doesn't need them for survival, or we'd have to go without those services.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> As a payor of six digits of taxes, this sounds expensive and likely to be taken advantage of by the lazy.

When I grew up my basic income was something called "wages," for which I worked to earn.

Someone has to fund shit like this. Handouts do not promote self help, but the opposite: dependence on the government. Is that something to be proud about?

<comment><USER44> I find this attitude dismissive. It's easy for those of us who are very successful financially to internalize an attitude that we got wealth because we deserve it, because we tried hard. It's nice to believe the things which allow us to pat ourselves on the back and not need to be bothered with anything like "research" or "trying it out."

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> EconTalk has a recent episode on basic income [0]. The guest is against basic income but the debate is interesting.

[0] [http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2017/01/michael_munger_3.ht...](http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2017/01/michael_munger_3.html)

<comment><USER46> My interpretation of that episode was that the guest was largely _for_ UBI, so long as it replaced many of the current safety net / welfare programs (it is simpler to administer, doesn't require large bureaucracies to verify eligibility, and doesn't dis-incentivize people from getting a job and working their way up as do disability, unemployment insurance, section 8, food stamps, etc).

My interpretation was that the host wasn't sold on the idea nor on the low estimated tax increases required to fund a UBI (IIRC the guest stated 3-10% increases in income taxes and the host speculated more like 20+%).

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> Here is the same author in 2014 attempting to explain how basic income won't lead to massive inflation:

 _[https://medium.com/basic-income/wouldnt-unconditional- basic-...](https://medium.com/basic-income/wouldnt-unconditional-basic-income- just-cause-massive-inflation-fe71d69f15e7#.ajika83kp*)

>>>_It would not be new money, just money shifted from one location to another. This means that the value of each dollar has not changed. The dollar itself has only changed hands.*

There is no sure fire way to _reduce_ the value of a dollar then to redistribute it to people that didn't work for it. The fact that you have to work for the dollar is the thing that gives the dollar value.

<comment><USER48> "The fact that you have to work for the dollar is the thing that gives the dollar value."

Wait, so then how does inheritance work? Like, your grandmother worked for it, but you just snowboard all year long. What am I missing here?

<comment><USER49> Money can be thought of as a claim check on labor. You work doing something valuable and get money. You spend some and save some. What you have saved/invested and not spent and passed on to someone else still has value.

In the snowboarder's case, someone worked for that money and gifted it to them. Totally consistent if you don't overly focus on the " _YOU_ have to work for it" but rather " _SOMEONE_ has to work for it"

<comment><USER50> right. so i work, pay taxes and those get distributed to my neighbor's UBI. what i have passed on to someone else still has value.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm a big fan of Thomas Piketty's idea of a progressive global tax on wealth.

I think that the root cause of a lot of the financial stress that many people are feeling right now is the result of having too many people leeching off of passive income from their investments/wealth (derived from work they did 30 years ago) and not actually contributing anything new to society.

These wealthy people have become parasites.

Right now, if I build an office building and I rent it out to people; assuming that I manage to stay afloat during the first few years, the passive income that I will later generate from that investment will probably keep coming in for the rest of my life... Even worse than that; when I die, my children would be able to keep getting the free passive income; they could just sit there and consume stuff (make others work for them) without working themselves; without contributing anything new to society.

There is a point when you have to stop paying these passive earners. We're already doing it when it comes to patents/copyrights (In many countries, copyrights expire after 70 years or so... Patents generally expire sooner than that) - We need to either extend this notion of 'expiry' to ALL property rights OR at the very least tax that wealth. Why should regular property be treated any differently than intellectual property?

Right now, what we have is crony capitalism. If we wanted to have proper capitalism; companies like Ford, GM, Toyota... would all have to pay royalties to the descendants of the people who invented the wheel and also to all the descendants of the people who discovered iron ore, etc... That would be fair - Actually, doing this would probably have the same effect as passive income since probably every human has at least one person in their ancestry who made a major contribution to mankind (why don't they get royalties for that?).

When you put it into context, the rules of our current flavor of capitalism just seem ridiculously arbitrary.

I think that a progressive global tax on wealth combined with basic income would be a perfect way to average out the unfairness of the system without damaging the capitalist incentive structure.

<comment><USER51> What you've described is close to Georgism, which holds that people should only be able to own wealth they produce themselves by their own labor, and that wealth from 'rent seeking' (land rents, natural resources, natural monopolies) should belong to everyone.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgism)

<comment><USER7> That sounds great.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> The first graphic is geniusly deceptive:

"See, we take a little bit from everyone, shuffle it around a bit and return it back to everyone. Hooray!"

When it reality, the actual result is the red section loses dots which just go blue green and yellow groups.

<comment><USER53> I particularly like the way they don't put an earnings scale on the second graph to show that it implies _everyone earning more than about $40k per year has less money than before_.

Now try telling someone on $50k in the Bay Area that their net tax increase is mostly going to go to people not receiving any welfare at the moment, most probably because they don't actually need the money enough to even think of registering as looking for work...

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> I have such trouble with basic income discussions because it is such an ill- defined term it is basically meaningless. Like here in the US, UBI _with_ social-security/medicare is a massively different thing than UBI _instead of_ social-security/medicare. So massively different that it's just two completely different subjects, arguments, things.

They should just be named differently so we know what we're talking about - otherwise you have people agreeing they love it when the actually massively disagree, or other people saying they hate it on grounds other than what was suggested.

</comment><comment><USER55> Country A has pure UBI. Country B has "almost UBI" where, in order to receive payments, the person must have documented proof of 3 hours per week of at least one of: volunteer work, education as a student, or teaching a class. In this scenario, I would expect country B's economy to dominate country A's economy because in order to get your check you have to work with other people (volunteer), make yourself better (student), or make others better (teach).

</comment><comment><USER56> bad idea. totally unworkable. this will create a class of dependent poor people. It will also create a working class who slaves away to provide for those who refuse to work.

<comment><USER57> There already is a class of dependent poor people. Most of them have jobs.

<comment><USER58> Not to mention the class of dependent rich people.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER59> It has been 0 days since hacker news argued about basic income without any new data.

</comment><comment><USER60> I'm glad basic income is getting a lot of discussion, but it's important to realize we are still pretty early in the process of automation taking over more jobs than people can innovate. Technology has been making entire industries/classes of workers obsolete for centuries, and the economy has always adjusted.

In this next push, it _looks_ like it will be different because AI/machine labor is so 'general,' but in reality, the pressure it will first exert on physical labor sectors will create more opportunity for a human economy based on social value and services (i.e. waiters in nice restaurants, artists, musicians, writers, inventors, chiropractors, etc.), as well as those requiring a combination of intelligence/education/creativity, like most of HN. There will likely be an increased prevalence of security guards, managers, and techs overseeing machines, and it will force people to take on skills (which they are fully capable of) that do not involve pure manual labor/doing what they're told. And of course, it's a longer time frame between 'pretty general' physical automation and 'sentient super-intelligence' replacing scientists, engineers, business leaders, and of course, the politicians who will never let themselves be replaced.

But when we do start to have the impetus for a basic income, say ten years from now, let's make sure it starts off basic, because there will always be jobs of some sort that you can get to supplement your income, and they will probably be increasingly social in value. Not enough to rent out a nice one bedroom apartment in Manhattan, but enough to get by if you're willing to go without nice amenities, get roommates and not live in an expensive downtown area. Until virtually every job can be automated and we are all servants to a mechanical society, there needs to be incentive/reward to working.

</comment><comment><USER61> Merely a way to control people. It's dishonest to pretend that it's for everyone, the first thing that will happen if you wrong the power structure is it will withdraw funding.

Not that I am particularly worried, this will never happen in the United States. China on the other hand, I bet they would love to tie this to their human scoring system.

<comment><USER24> "...if you wrong the power structure is it will withdraw funding."

I have the same fear, that this would be a tool used to encourage conformance. If not initially, then in time. Even in the US (but as you say, we're not likely to adopt basic income in the US.)

One would hope, however, that this would become a basic right, and not one that can be revoked for any reason whatsoever, even criminal convictions (perhaps especially criminal convictions.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER62> According to very quick Web searches, $1000 is about 80% of the median personal income in the usa. I calculated the same rate for India and it comes to ₹2751 per month based on a median income of $616 per annum.

If I were to get ₹2751 extra every month, it wouldn't make a difference for me at all. In fact, my monthly expenses are 10x this amount and I'm only spending less than 50% of my income.

So this measure surely isn't meant to have any effect on people like me. I would imagine it's a similar calculation for most people on this website. For this reason alone, we are very badly positioned to react in an emotional manner. The only decisions that should be taken should be taken on the basis of trials and hard statistics. Otherwise the "free money for slackers" sentiment is too strong when it may not be the truth.

</comment><comment><USER63> A basic income wont solve any problems in a sustainable way as long as governments exist: [https://blog.kareldonk.com/governments-and-basic-income- why-...](https://blog.kareldonk.com/governments-and-basic-income-why-they- dont-go-together/)

</comment><comment><USER64> It seems to me that basic income could make me either (1) fall victim to depression, addiction, or some other mental disorder, or (2) find a _hard problem_ to work on which keeps me occupied and satisfied for a lifetime.

<comment><USER65> Or an easy problem. Or any problem. Or social work. Or volunteer-ism. Or cycling. Or wandering the streets of your city. Honestly the work based culture has dulled the creativity people to such an extent that they can't think of anything outside of work. Or maybe human males are wired for this sort of thing. I dunno.

The reason people become drug addicts or alcoholics is that it's painful to be outside of the social culture. And work is the social culture of our time. It's the only thing that makes people feel relevant. We need to invent alternative forms of feeling relevant.

<comment><USER64> By 'hard' problem I mean that it has depth, not that it's unpleasant. A stream of easy problems _could_ work but it's less reliable because when there's a dry spell then outcome (1) will be scratching at the door.

"We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard" \-- JFK

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER66> I wonder what effect an enacted basic income in the USA would have on immigration. UBI is going to be life or death in a vastly automated world, so we mind as well figure out how to solve the side issues of implementation.

</comment><comment><USER67> > The Cloward–Piven strategy is a political strategy outlined in 1966 by > American sociologists and political activists Richard Cloward and Frances > Fox Piven that called for overloading the U.S. public welfare system in > order to precipitate a crisis that would lead to a replacement of the > welfare system with a national system of "a guaranteed annual income and > thus an end to poverty".

[https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Cloward%E2%80%93Piven_strategy](https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Cloward%E2%80%93Piven_strategy)

</comment><comment><USER68> UBI is inefficient--taxing someone and then giving them money. NIT (negative income tax) makes more sense and can actually have the same effect as UBI depending on the slabs.

<comment><USER69> [http://overweeninggeneralist.blogspot.com/2011/08/universal-...](http://overweeninggeneralist.blogspot.com/2011/08/universal- basic-income-ubi-vs-negative.html)

<comment><USER68> Those are good points, but there are ways to fix that.

There's no reason why NIT needs to involve large amounts of paperwork. NIT only involves income, so a person simply needs to give their income (unlike taxes, which are much more complicated).

The NIT would presumably have a minimum amount given even if you earn 0$. That amount can be given to everybody can't do the paperwork. Then, the amount remaining above that can be distributed as a NIT.

Basically, give UBI to people who can't do the paperwork to cover them. The rest can use NIT.

The time lag is not a necessary property of the tax system. The NIT can be done on a monthly basis.

Anyways, this is just an implementation issue. Either way they both redistribute money.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> You never know, UBI may turn out to be a good thing: it may result in creating a healthy shortage of the workforce, which may lead to a more efficient economy overall.

</comment><comment><USER70> One thing I haven't seen discussed. Would we need some sort of population control with UBI? Even if robots produce all basic necessities for human life, the earth cannot sustain unrestricted population growth, which is a possibility.

I don't know it's true, but I've heard of stories in Brazil where women in certain towns have many kids so they can collect additional welfare benefits for each kid.

</comment><comment><USER71> Politically, you would have to need guarantees against double dipping (constitutional amendment outlawing all other forms of distribution - welfare, food stamps). That's the problem with all the ideas like this...maybe they would be better, but you have to get from here to there. The transitions are almost always untenable and more complex than imagined (see healthcare)

Would be better to find something incremental.

</comment><comment><USER72> It's a cool idea but the problem is that people that sell goods will raise their prices knowing that everyone has more disposable income.

So the cost of life will raise and the people will have the same relative expenses (practically as poor) but without any fallback system this time around.

So unless UBI is coupled with strict pricing regulations, it's a scam.

</comment><comment><USER73> How do the people who support this scheme plan to get around Say's Law? All of the wealth that this "income" can demand still has to be produced by someone. Is this just going to be open theft of wealth with printed money or open theft of wealth to be distributed as money somehow?

</comment><comment><USER74> I have a serious question for folks who support UBI: what is stopping you from getting started now and helping your neighbors?

Why not just cut out the middle-man (government bureaucracy) and provide someone with a monthly income from your own pocket?

This could be accomplished by individuals with high income (like many here), or by voluntarily pooling your money together.

<comment><USER74> And before downvoting me, this is what ycombinator is trying at a private institutional level: [https://blog.ycombinator.com/basic- income/](https://blog.ycombinator.com/basic-income/)

<comment><USER75> That's a research project, not a sustainable program. The putative benefits of UBI would only apply if it successfully takes the place of the "safety net" of programs already enacted.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER76> UBI should provide impetus to intrinsic motivation [http://researchnews.osu.edu/archive/inmotiv.htm](http://researchnews.osu.edu/archive/inmotiv.htm)

</comment><comment><USER77> Lots of conversation here but we already know how to deal with this; let's run a test and see what happens. Just like they are doing in Utrecht in the Netherlands.

If it looks good we can roll it out a bit more.

</comment><comment><USER78> UBI is attempting to cloak itself in free market rhetoric, but it's bullshit.

Yes it may "incentivize" some individuals to work, but only by disincentivizing others. It takes money from top wealth producers, discouraging their labor, and gives it to people who aren't producing as much wealth, effectively subsidizing unproductive work. This will make everyone poorer in the long run.

The struggling artist meme is an appeal to emotion. The struggling artists and entrepreneurs are struggling for a reason -- the market does not want their goods or services! They should fail as quickly as possible, not continue to drag on producing things people don't want.

I'll concede that the welfare state has perverse incentives which trap people in poverty, but there are better ways to address it other than doubling down on the mother of all wealth redistribution schemes.

<comment><USER17> You're right about the wealth producers!

We need a 100% inheritance tax! That way the wealth isn't going to people who didn't produce it!

Then you redistribute that money to schools and training programs and small businesses to give opportunities to anyone to become a wealth producer!

This improves the entire human race and not just the rich trust fund babies who haven't produced anything in their lives.

I'm totally with you on this.

<comment><USER79> Your comment makes an excellent point. If our economy really was organized around incentivizing production, there are many things we could do to that end. In addition to a 100% inheritance tax, we could also surely implement policies that discouraged most types of rent-seeking and the passive growth of wealth that has allowed the richest in our country to become even richer without having to produce anything.

<comment><USER13> Except that an inheritance tax creates a large disincentive for people with children to create wealth, when passing that wealth on to their progeny is their motivation for creating it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER80> A better idea is making minimum wage match the poverty line. We already habe UBI for seniors and tbe disabled, and it works great.

<comment><USER46> Problem #1: Minimum wage locks some people out of the workforce. If you aren't disabled, but your skills don't rise the value of 2x of the minimum wage (wage + payroll taxes + benefits), then you are locked out of finding any legal work. If you start to raise the minimum wage much higher than it already is, you will start to make some forms or work and some industries economically unfeasible.

Problem #2: Disability most definitely does not "work great". If you take disability, you can be charged with a felony for every seeking work again. It is a side-track to poverty for the remainder of your life, despite the fact that you may be re-employable at some time in the future (possibly due to innovations in technology or changes in the workforce). Additionally, despite the name of the program, not everyone who accepts "disability" (SSDI) is incapable of working. After trade deals like NAFTA, there is a structural change in some industries and regions that qualifies workers in that industry (usually ones where the trade deal is expected to offshore jobs) for "disability" even though their body and mind are perfectly capable of working again. It would be better to give them a UBI-like program which doesn't dis- incentivize them to permanently leave the workforce.

We have safety nets like "Section 8" (housing vouchers), "Food stamps" (grocery vouchers), unemployment insurance (UBI-like fixed payments), but each of these is a step function. As soon as you get a job that pays above the cut- off range, you lose the benefits and can have a net loss in purchasing power. A UBI to replace these programs is superior because there would no longer be a penalty for finding a job or making above the cut-off.

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> >>>Basic income guarantees you a monthly starting salary above the poverty line for the rest of your life

If the poverty line stayed constant, basic income is a no-brainer. But basic income makes the cost of goods rise. Demand for goods increases, but supply diminishes. Nobody will do the crap jobs without higher pay, raising the price of everything. Basic income is impossible.

<comment><USER25> What about machines doing most of the jobs so there are only a few jobs left? The value the machines generate would be enough to generate the basic income. Why is it impossible?

<comment><USER81> So, I, programmer, will be forced to work 12 hours per day to keep robots firmware up to date, while everybody else will enjoy free ride? Sorry, it will not work: I will chose free ride too.

Why not just decrease number of working hours to say 2 per day, but for everybody, instead?

<comment><USER82> Alternatively - under UBI - you may decide to work 6 hours per day, and enjoy the earned income in addition to the regular Basic Income payment, all the while knowing that you can leave (or switch employer) any time without fear of destitution.

<comment><USER83> You would still face the same issue since, you make more money you may have a nicer apartment or house. You would then still be trapped in that job to maintain your chosen lifestyle.

<comment><USER84> Yes but that is entirely your choice. If you want the freedom to leave a job on a whim then you likely are not going to be spending money on a home that is too expensive to live in without working.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER76> There is only 1 apple for 5 persons.

Person 0 has 0 dollars;

Person 1 has 1 dollars;

Person 2 has 2 dollars;

Person 3 has 3 dollars;

Person 4 has 4 dollars;

What is the price of apple?

</comment><comment><USER76> I'd suggest unconditional free universal health care;

</comment><comment><USER85> income is the result of work if you get paid without work someone else is working for that since machines aren't there yet... I don't agree.

</comment><comment><USER86> I think maybe money, as a technology has reached its limitation. UBI is a patch to a broken system.

</comment><comment><USER87> Because what could possibly go wrong with making more people dependent on the government?

<comment><USER75> So how do you commute to work in the morning anyway? Stop using public infrastructure and suckling at the taxpayer's teat.

<comment><USER87> I dont commute to work in the morning, I work from home :). To address what I think is your point there is a difference between a road I pay taxes for and use/can as compared to giving money to an individual that you gain nothing from.

Also to me its not about taxes etc, its about the shift it would bring and the ramifications of having the government issue such a huge amount of money.

<comment><USER75> The government already issues this amount of money. It's just inefficiently distributed through individual and corporate welfare subsidies. A UBI would replace nearly all of that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER88> Who pays for it?

</comment><comment><USER89> the biggest problem i see is now i want to raise my prices to get more of that UBI pie

</comment><comment><USER90> This will never happen in the US. You will have to move out of the country to a different country that institutes a UBI if you are looking for something like this (which I think is a good idea)

</comment><comment><USER91> This would be awesome. i'd quit working and rely on others to produce goods and services for me. If I needed extra income I'd just play poker.

</comment><comment><USER92> It would work for a certain period of time until inflation catches up.

You could keep raising the basic income to keep pace, but it would require raising it more every time and sooner than the last time (exponential). Inflation can be quite damaging because not everything inflates at the same rate. For example salaries are pretty slow to inflate compared to the prices for things like gas or food. This is why a mason could afford to buy a car outright on their salary in the 1950s but almost everyone needs an auto loan to buy a car today.

You could try to stop inflation using price controls but this almost always leads to supply shortages. For an example look at rent ceilings in NYC, or the way grocery stores functioned in eastern bloc socialist countries. They had plenty of cash and prices were very cheap but there was nothing on the shelves to buy.

tl;dr Basic income would just create a new $0 mark.

<comment><USER93> My hunch is that costs of services will increase while consumables remain flat. Australia has a complex minimum wage system, but 20 AUD is typical and on the order of 15 USD. The result is that services such house cleaners, laundromats and car detailing are order 3 times expensive as in the US, however produce and imported goods (Australia continues to systematically kill off its domestic manufacturing capability) are more or less comparable with US prices.

Maybe its just a SV thing, but having my (share) house maintained by an army of Latinos for a fraction of my income makes me feel incredibly uneasy. The other one that gets me are the car washes along El Camino where white people drink coffee as their cars are tended to by Latinos.

Basic income will kill businesses that rely on cheap labour, as suddenly incremental incentive to work will be minimal at $9/hour (why work only to double my anual income?). To restore the incentive wages will also need to rise, and the net result will be more expensive services accessed by a smaller percentage of the highest earners.

<comment><USER40> I think that depends on how unpleasant the job is. Doubling your income sounds pretty good, actually.

On the margin, basic income gives people a bit more freedom to make their own choices. I think the price for services in Silicon Valley would go up, but I suspect more because people can take basic income with them when moving somewhere cheaper. With the extra money, low wage/low cost places are likely to become more popular.</comment></comment></comment>


JooJoo responds to TechCrunch lawsuit over who owns touchscreen tablet - <AUTHOR> http://venturebeat.com/2009/12/17/joojoo-responds-to-techcrunch-lawsuit/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Venturebeat+%28VentureBeat%29&utm_content=Google+Reader <comment><USER2> > "Fusion Garage is now working with another top tier ODM [That's an original > design manufacturer] to develop a completely new board and mechanical layout > that is the basis for the joojoo. To state, as the lawsuit and accompanying > blog post do, that Fusion Garage's JooJoo is based on any Pegatron IP is > false.

This is not parsable into logic. Either the device they say they are just about to ship exists, or they are working with a new ODM and haven't yet developed the new guts. They can't be doing both.

Since they have said they are working with a new manufacturer, it also implies that they couldn't work with the old one (likely due to IP violations).

This is starting to smell like the Chernobyl fish market a week after the town was evacuated.</comment>


Wow signal - <AUTHOR> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wow!_signal <comment><USER2> "In 2012, on the 35th anniversary of the Wow! signal, Arecibo Observatory beamed a response from humanity, containing 10,000 Twitter messages"

Oh, man, what will they think of us now? Couldn't we have sent Beethoven's Ninth Symphony and similar content?

<comment><USER3> What's more ridiculous is the assumption that other life forms may somehow understand the messages we send them in our own language. It's so preposterous I don't even know where to begin.

<comment><USER4> What do you suppose we beam to them other than our codified way of communicating? You can only hope they could potentially decipher it to grok some meaning.

<comment><USER3> How can they even hope to decipher something which is language/culture based ? We even hard a seriously hard time to understand egyptian hieroglyphs (on Earth! From a culture we knew of from many other texts in Antiquity!) until we found a stone where the text was translated into something intelligible. If they have no reference, all communication we send them will seem like garbage to them. Assuming anything else would be foolish.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5>
      Scientists say that if the signal came from
      extraterrestrials, they are likely to be an extremely
      advanced civilization, as the signal would have required a
      2.2-gigawatt transmitter, vastly more powerful than any on
      Earth.

What if we inadvertently witnessed the climactic end of two rival civilizations as they unleashed massive energy weapons upon each other, due to some kind of political unraveling of a dangerous arms race?

That would certainly explain the intensity, brevity and lack of repitition for this particular signal?

One might expect residual evidence of destructive forces at work, such as a debris field or hot gas clouds, but that assumes that the weapons are of a conventional nature we might readily understand.

<comment><USER6> Would not explain narrow spectrum nor uniform intensity of the signal.

<comment><USER5> Consider that a specific communications channel for a civilization/culture- specific technology were being jammed, as part of a hostile operation.

<comment><USER7> Interstellar DDoS?

<comment><USER8> My theory is that it encoded the uploaded consciousness of their best minds, along with a compelling argument that the only way to escape our gravity well is to upload our minds via a multigigawatt transmitter, along with instructions on how to build one (except those instructions won't work unless we propagate their signal). It might drive our civilization to the brink of our resource capacity to undertake this project, but it's the only way to propagate ourselves and survive, so what choice would we have?

<comment><USER5> You can't upload consciousness. At best, all you can upload is a representation of personality and memories.

<comment><USER9> If one created a physical substrate that neurons could transmit to and from, then embedded it in the brain, you could create consciousness in that substrate. A primitive analogue of this has been done where they attach electrodes to the tongue and fired them in a pattern suggestive of a video feed, eventually the brain started to understand it as another 'sense'.

Should one start brain-interacting directly with a substrate, the substrate could be powered independently and persist after separation. If separation occurred after natural death of the host, you could say that it 'uploaded' it's consciousness to the substrate.

<comment><USER5> That's just a replay attack. The consciousness is still bound to the cells. No new, unique information is generated without the presence of the cells.

The term "uploaded" is being subjected to special semantics in this case. Consciousness is not transferred over to the receiver by the act of transmitting a signal.

If I make a telephone call, and leave a voicemail message, the answering machine does not get up and walk around. Even a sufficiently advanced voicemail recorder would only be an interpretation of artifact left behind by a creature, and not the original being.

<comment><USER9> But if the substrate had artificial neurons, that could do everything normal neurons could, then it's plausible that consciousness could copy everything over. At that point, the only thing binding consciousness is the 'idea' that it belongs to the cells.

If you separated them before the host dies, then you'd have copied the consciousness into the substrate, and they would exist separately until you reattached it.

Wait until the host dies, then the consciousness would experience that death yet still persist. It would carry on experiencing through whatever senses the substrate offers.

Notice that it's not just a signal being transferred, it's the actual mechanics of consciousness, neurons firing and communicating. When the substrate, connected to the brain, communicates, it's just as if you added brain cells. So it's not just a signal, it's actual thought.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> And more importantly - will they be looking? We are only looking at small portion of the sky at a time. At the same time in order to send messages to other stars powerful telescopes need to be utilized. You can't simply build a telescope per star with a planet that is thought to contain life and broadcast all the time.

Thus, if civilization is not capable to monitor all of the sky at the same time with low powered telescopes and quickly point high powered telescopes when something interesting is detected, there is extremely small chance that it would be able to communicate effectively. That is retransmitting the signal to the same star is worth inherently less when compared to trying to transmit to a new star.

If interstellar travel is not viable, what we would want to do is transmit wikipedia[0] to all stars that could contain life. Traveling time for information would be long enough that we can't expect confirmation or two way communication. So what you would want to do is make a really powerful telescope beaming wikipedia to one star at a time (or many telescopes transmitting to different stars). Idea is - you do not want to repeat yourself. If you sent information once, and it have not been received, you would not want to try again for a long while. That is due to the fact that chance that civilization would develop that can listen to your signals in relatively short amount of time is unlikely. So I would say that if this is logic transmitting civilization would use then a signal would not be repeated for thousands of years.

While writing this I though of algorithm that might work better to maximize amount of civilizations you reach. This would require a relatively stable space transmitter, or series of coordinated ground transmitters:

1\. Pick a set of stars S that potentially can support advanced civilization and are located closely in a region of space (so you do not have to reposition telescope a lot).

2\. Start sending signals primer signals to stars. For signal S[x], temporal difference between S[x] and S[x+1] would a set amount shorter than temporal distance between S[x-1] and S[x]. Primer signals are short and cheap, transmitting entire Wikipedia should take way longer (Weeks, months, maybe years?).

3\. Once time between primer signals reaches some threshold start transmitting data set.

Idea is that this will give advanced civilization potentially listening a chance to prepare to receive full transmission, while avoiding costly repeats of big data set.

[0] Wikipedia is chosen as sufficiently large volume of knowledge about human civilization that we would potentially want to transmit.

<comment><USER10> Trying to notify intelligent life that we exist has a high probability of being the worst idea in all of human history, because there's a high probability that there will be no more human history after we meet them.

But radio emissions swiftly degrade after not too long of a distance, so unless we build some kind of extremely high-powered transmitter then any scheme like this is doomed to failure. Luckily.

<comment><USER8> That conjecture is much less certain than it is portrayed. Let's say we found a civilization of oyster-like creatures on a oceanic moon of a gas giant planet of a nearby star. Are we really going to go that far for a raw bar?

"Conquering" stellar civilizations only happens in space operas.

<comment><USER11> The fact that your first thought is about the feasibility of eating aliens lends tonnes of support to the idea that it's in the aliens' best interest to wipe us out.

<comment><USER8> It looks like the greater danger is the inability to spot satire. They'll come and and prank us and we'll humorlessly launch nukes on them.

<comment><USER12> Almost did a spit take while reading that first sentence, thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> As far as I understand this article, there's no reason to believe that the signal was of constant amplitude, only that it hit Big Ear's detection threshold when we pointed directly at it. So it could have been something super non-uniform and noisy, which would make the intelligent origin seem less likely. But whatever it was, it was super loud.

Also: why haven't we built a dedicated radio telescope to just watch that spot all the time? Surely this is the biggest lead generated by the SETI program so far?

<comment><USER14> The bandwidth was extremely narrow, 10kHz. That means it wasn't non-uniform, nor noisy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> There's a Skeptoid episode about the WoW Signal:

[http://skeptoid.com/episodes/4342](http://skeptoid.com/episodes/4342)

The podcast starts with: _" It was August 15, 1977, when astronomer Jerry Ehman was examining data coming from Ohio State University's radio telescope, which was engaged in listening for signals from deep space, hoping to find something of intelligent origin. In a moment that's since become one of the most famous events in astronomy, he saw a sequence of six characters on the printout — 6EQUJ5 — which caught his attention. So much so, in fact, that he circled the text, and wrote "Wow!" in the margin.

It was, apparently, a signal from outer space. It came from the direction of Sagittarius. The strength of the signal was represented by the digits 0-9 and the letters A-Z, a scale of 36 levels of intensity, rising with 6EQ and falling with UJ5, a near-perfect bell curve of signal strength spread over 72 seconds. All speculation and hype aside, Wow! remains the strongest candidate ever detected for an alien radio transmission."_

</comment><comment><USER7> Being into radio, this is one of my favorite stories.

A great line from the article: _" drawing vast conclusions from half-vast data"_. Would all HN stories avoid this as well.

</comment><comment><USER16> My pet hypothesis: with the vast scale of the universe and the light-speed limitation, when it comes to potential conversational partners, the universe selects in favor of _extremely_ long-lived life-forms (possibly "artificial"). Such life forms would be only be interested in interacting on highly protracted time scales; think "Space Ents". Given also that sending signals into deep space is extremely expensive and energy will always be finite, communication with new worlds is sought only rarely, perhaps one targeted ping per world every 10,000 years, each an attempt to start a dialogue to be carried out laboriously over millions of years.

<comment><USER17> I have two hypotheses, both untestable (and therefore worthless):

1\. The distance between stars is too huge, so there has to be a trick to beating it easily, like FTL travel or wormholes, because otherwise it's just crap.

2\. If any supervillains want to destroy the universe, they're too late: it's already been done, and this is all that's left.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I read this article every so often when I remember about it. So fascinating.

Yet something we will probably never know the truth about.

<comment><USER19> I just love little stories like this. Can you imagine the emotion in the room? What it was like to see the characters and wonder WTF?

Then thinking was it an error? Did something go wrong? Is E.T. on its way?

Awesome!

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Someone with better #'s can correct me please, but:

With so many emitting bodies in the universe, wouldn't we expect to receive the complete works of shakespeare from ~1 remote body/month?

I mean, you could find the "WOW" signal in PI somewhere too, right?

<comment><USER21> > With so many emitting bodies in the universe, wouldn't we expect to receive > the complete works of shakespeare from ~1 remote body/month?

Wikipedia ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Observable_universe#Matter_con...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Observable_universe#Matter_content_.E2.80.94_number_of_atoms)) says we have around 10^80 hydrogen atoms in the observable universe. That's a huge number, but there are 10^80 different decimal numbers with 80 digits alone. Shakespeare's works are considerably longer.

<comment><USER22> Firstly the observable universe is nothing compared to the whole universe.

Secondly what the above comment means is that with so many bodies emitting some thing random for such a long period of time. You are inevitable bound to notice something that you could make some meaning of.

And yes the 'WOW' signal is present some where in Pi.

<comment><USER23> Something you make meaning of yes, probably. The complete works of Shakespeare, no, probably not.

And no, that's not necessarily true with regards to Pi.

<comment><USER21> Depends on whether Pi is a normal-enough number. ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normal_number](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normal_number))

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Its the 2012 equivalent of beaming an episode of Jerry Springer to aliens...

<comment><USER25> I'm just going to post what everyone was thinking when they saw the headline. [http://i.imgur.com/BNDIpy3.jpg](http://i.imgur.com/BNDIpy3.jpg)

<comment><USER26> So $\exp^{-x^2}$.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> in the middle of so many 1, 3 and 2s, to see a 6EQUJ5 plus a 6 and a 7 is sure a "Wow signal"!</comment>


Canada's NSA admits to 'incidentally' spying on own citizens - <AUTHOR> http://www.dailydot.com/news/canada-nsa-csec-cse-incidentally-tracking-own-citizens

<comment><USER2> "incidentally" means "not wittingly" in Canadianese.</comment>


State board concedes it violated free speech rights of red-light camera critic - <AUTHOR> http://www.oregonlive.com/portland/index.ssf/2017/12/state_board_concedes_it_violat.html <comment><AUTHOR> This is the case regarding whether someone could call themselves an "engineer" without going through some kind of licensure process, to which the answer turns out to be "yes, of course".</comment>


Cheap and Nasty - <AUTHOR> http://unprotocols.org/blog:9

<comment><USER2> I was at a startup in 94/95 where we made something a lot like protocol buffers, with a multi-platform, multi-language (Java / C++ / COM) API on top of it. Was very friendly -- very JSON-like -- and worked really well, up to tens of thousands of messages a second through then developer-class Pentium boxes.

I think you can still go fast without being nasty. Whether there is money in it is another question.

</comment><comment><USER3> Another real-world example: SMTP vs QMTP (<http://cr.yp.to/proto/qmtp.txt>). IMHO, saving space by packing bits is not really so important anymore since nearly every link has high-bandwidth. Reducing latency by reducing round-trips is huge though.

</comment><comment><USER4> Something is wrong with the styling of that page. In Chrome, Firefox and IE the first few paragraphs overlap some of the panels on the right, making it very unreadable.

<comment><USER5> Indeed - but when I clicked the Readability button (it's a FF addon) the site was easy to read.

<comment><USER6> Also available as a bookmarklet for other browsers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I wonder what ASN.1 is then?

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abstract_Syntax_Notation_One>

<comment><USER8> Anything from completely brain-damaged (XER) over cheap (GSER or BER, depending on whether you want widely-used or human-readable) to nasty (PER) depending on what encoding rules you use.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How does TikTok/IG build video filters/story editor? - <AUTHOR> Is there open source software that they use to start with, or does creating filters/video effects/story editors require to be built from scratch? If so, is there a special skill set required for this and does it require a large team or can it be done by a few people? <comment><USER2> You could use MLT ([https://www.mltframework.org/](https://www.mltframework.org/)) as programmable video editor it works perfectly for this scenario.</comment>


Bad news for AT&T and Comcast: Calif. Senate panel OKs net neutrality bill - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/04/nations-toughest-net-neutrality-bill-passes-california-senate-committee/ <comment><USER2> This bill honestly seems pretty well put together. I was wary when I read it went beyond the FCC's regulations wrt zero-rating, but apparently that's actually allowed as long as the zero-rating is application-agnostic, which sounds good for that quaint old-fashioned free market competition.

<comment><USER3> So T-Mobile's binge-on would be acceptable?

<comment><USER4> Did the (2015-17) net neutrality regulations even apply to mobile providers?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> > Wiener said he negotiated amendments with the committee that kept "all key > provisions of the bill intact."

Anybody know how close to the truth this is? It sounds a bit less likely than I would hope.

<comment><USER6> I don't have time atm, but you can check yourself! Compare versions of the bill over time using the official CA Legislative Information site: [https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billVersionsCompare...](https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billVersionsCompareClient.xhtml?bill_id=201720180SB822)

<comment><USER5> Whoa I didn't know about that functionality, thank you!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I think it's funny: AT&T: Oh you don't need to do this, silly we're already compliant...no please don't...we mean it, we'll be good... --- if it was something they plan on enforcing anyways, why fight it so damn hard?

</comment><comment><USER8> To my eye Internet services look like interstate commerce and therefore would be the jurisdiction of the federal government. I'd appreciate it if someone with a little expertise could explain how the law works in this regard.

<comment><USER9> I buy transit from the ISP to my apartment. This is entirely within a local government zone, let alone the state.

<comment><USER10> There's a famous Supreme Court case [1] in which a law that regulates how much wheat a farmer may _keep for himself_ was determined to affect interstate commerce, and therefore be within the province of federal law.

Though this case was cited negatively by the Supreme Court many years later, it is still regularly cited in briefs — including by lawyers on both sides of the recent Obamacare cases.

So just because something seems local doesn't mean it couldn't fall within the Commerce Clause powers, as interpreted by the Supreme Court.

1: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wickard_v._Filburn](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wickard_v._Filburn)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> As CA Comcast customer, I was really hoping for this. Of course, Republicans can't be mad at this, right? State's rights, and all.

<comment><USER12> I was under the impression that the 2015 net neutrality policies more or less had bipartisan support. What changed in the interim?

<comment><USER13> Republicans realized that internet giants are now in charge of determining what is true or false in the world but are run by a bunch of teenagers that are probably liberal hippies and cable companies are run by reliable Republican megadonors so lets give cable companies the ability to extort rents from those internet companies and hobble them to eliminate that threat.

<comment><USER14>
      reliable Republican megadonors

_All_ of the telecommunications giants contributed more to Democrats than Republicans in the 2016 election cycle.

<comment><USER11> There is no doubt both parties are influenced by the money given to them, but maybe Democrats got more money because they needed to be moved farther from their natural position (toward that which the telecoms wanted).</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>