Basic income

u cld create an enforcement agency and pay $7 an hour

if this plan paid $15 it wld have more promise but u wld still be failing to help a lot of ppl who need it the most and failing to address the more profound underlying problems

Serious minimum wage increases ($15 and inflation indexing) are the thin end of the wedge imo, it's a pretty palatable populist message across demos that working full-time should pay you enough to survive. (Demonstrably so, it's passing in cities and by ballot initiative in lotsa places.) Get people on board with that and "not working at all should pay you and your family enough to thrive" starts seeming more attainable and attractive.

Uber for Welfare
Uber for Welfare
Uber for Welfare
Uber for Welfare
Uber for Welfare

also the idea that service jobs are less vulnerable to automation is demonstrably ludicrous, Uber is gonna be all robots within a decade and I don't know why every McDonald's isn't taking orders exclusively on iPads already.

Uber for Welfare
Uber for Welfare
Uber for Welfare
Uber for Welfare
Uber for Welfare

― karla jay vespers, Friday, March 4, 2016 12:06 PM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Uber for Welfare
Uber for Welfare
Uber for Welfare
Uber for Welfare
Uber for Welfare

Prob should post on the AI thread too...

https://medium.com/basic-income/deep-learning-is-going-to-teach-us-all-the-lesson-of-our-lives-jobs-are-for-machines-7c6442e37a49

Very simply, think of Go as Super Ultra Mega Chess.

computers still cant be poker haha idiots

This article was written on a crowdfunded monthly basic income. If you found value in this article, you can support it along with all my advocacy for basic income with a monthly patron pledge of $1+.

LOL

what do you guys think of the idea of making basic income a loan (albeit one that is never expected to be paid back, but if you hit the lotto or something, people will look at you weird if you don't)?

don't really see why that's necessary but if it helps it to happen sooner by being framed that way then sure whatever

if you hit the lotto you'll start net paying into BI fund with your taxes

i think framing it as a loan makes it easier for people with means to forego it -- thinking of it as a free money kind of makes you automatically a chump for not taking it.

idk about loans but all welfare can be framed as insurance for unborn babies

Anyone with sufficient means would pay the whole value of basic income back in taxes. Like a negative income tax is one bandied-about way of implementing a basic income.

Why not have them pay that whole value in taxes as a given, but not take the distribution if they don't need it?

Part of the strategic value in the Basic Income agenda is its universality. Anyone who works for a living could find themselves un- or under-employed any given year, or want to take unpaid leave, or whatever. Even if someone with a $250,000 annual income would pay the whole value of a $35,000 Basic Income in income tax, they should get their check on the 1st of each month like everyone else. Anyone who doesn't have to work for a living won't really care how it's structured.

Universality would help lessen the stigma as well

wouldn't universality be satisfied by it (the loan) being available to anyone and everyone? wouldn't there be less stigma as a loan (vs what would perceived to be a handout)?

no

i dunno, i always get a little twinge of anxiety when getting free samples at costco.

its extremely essential to the whole concept that everyone just get a check, these are the type of programs that succeed in the usa, im saying this as if this is something that has any chance of happening in the near future

There are several convincing arguments that a simple check cut to every citizen of the United States in the wake of the financial crisis would have been far far more effective than QE at stimulating the economy

I don't know about the US but in Germany you could start paying every adult EUR 1000 a month *right now*, without raising any taxes, by dismantling the evaluation bureaucracy for the unemployed (Hartz IV), which is broken anyway. But, everyone seems to believe that people would quit their job immediately if you gave them free money. And by "everyone" I mean bullheaded rural protestant fundamentalists.

oh u have those too?

somehow tying the arguments for UBI to the inevitable robot takeover of all work just seems to taint it with even extra fringiness. I may have to start distancing myself if the techno-utopians start seriously adopting basic income as a plank. it's like when frat boys started liking techno

no one tell tom abt edm

'robots/AIs taking our jobs' is a dumb or at least overhyped reason to be pro-UBI imo however some degree collective economic anxiety is a necessary condition for it being implemented politically. welfare is unpopular because people who pay into it don't see themselves as ever potentially being beneficiaries. the middle and upper middle classes who will pay for it need to feel that they may actually someday need it, so it becomes like insurance. or we lift the wreath of false consciousness and shed all individualism, whichever comes first

imo robots taking jobs is untrue in the sense that machines have been taking jobs for ~150 years and there have always been new jobs for people to do, but robots taking jobs is true in the sense that they disrupt stable jobs and toss ppl out mid career into an uncertain world where they are often poorer than they were before, if robots started taking jobs faster than ever before then it really cld add up to some sort of calamity even if its not the end of work

yeah like obviously the computer revolution and automation in manufacturing displaced a lot of people, but didn't create enough widespread economic anxiety for a mass popular movement for universal social insurance. the next automation wave would have to an order of magnitude larger, and technology-wise they are really far away from getting robots to do the stuff people in rich countries do now. also part of me wonders like, if they just hadn't named it Machine Learning, would people be so freaked out? it conjurs the image of a machine that actually learns stuff when it's just clever statistics

werent you arguing that the majority of 'the stuff ppl in rich countries do now' is economically unnecessary garbage? i mean theres a whole host of automation that hasnt happened not because its technologically impossible but because its not economically (or sometimes in the case of high-prestige white collar work culturally) practical. i mean i think the real fear for workers shouldnt be machines getting smarter, its machines getting cheaper

machines getting sexier imo

haha i read that post and remembered there was a spike jonze (?) movie about a guy that wanted to fuck his iphone and just started laughing out loud. the future man, crazy

they don't know how to make a robot that can fold a t-shirt in less than 36 hours or walk up a flight of stairs or cut hair and those problems are considered exponentially more complicated than getting a computer to add two numbers together or to repeatedly insert identical pieces of metal into each other. humans just come pre-programmed to know how to do these things (thx God!) but even our genius engineers don't know how to teach a robot how to do it

i mean there's no point for us to speculate on the future of technology except that it's amusing but in terms of automation we've already picked a lot of the low-hanging fruit and the next automation revolution is far away, not necessarily in terms of years but like conceptually, computationally. best hope for UBI is economic stagnation not technological singularity IMO

tbh maybe the outsourcing/min-maxing of efficiency will take place in the government someday and we'll outsource taxes/welfare processing to a northern european company that just institutes it for us

xpost

Actually there have been a string of tech breakthroughs in the past three years meaning that all the t-shirt-folding/truckdriving jobs are gonna be wiped out in the next 15. Like: you're right about this set of qualitatively different automation problems, but it just so happens that many of those nuts finally got cracked in the past 24 mos or so.

all future productivity gains will be offset by ppl spending more time on facebook, its defacto basic income only you have to goto a place called "a job" everyday, once there u go on facebook

werent you arguing that the majority of 'the stuff ppl in rich countries do now' is economically unnecessary garbage? i mean theres a whole host of automation that hasnt happened not because its technologically impossible but because its not economically (or sometimes in the case of high-prestige white collar work culturally) practical. i mean i think the real fear for workers shouldnt be machines getting smarter, its machines getting cheaper

― extremely online (Lamp), Thursday, March 17, 2016 11:50 AM (18 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

can't remember when the last time we talked about this stuff was but probably before i had a white collar corporate job. i do think if the CEOs were badass enough they could make a big investment in labor-saving technology and have my whole dept run by like 5 people with PhDs instead of 100 people with BComs punching away at excel spreadsheets with their two index fingers.

reminds me of when i was a kid watching back to the future ii, there's this scene where the doc has built a rube goldberg style contraption with like conveyor belts and springboards that cooks him breakfast. i asked my dad why we don't have technology like that yet, and he said we could if we wanted to it's just stupid to build a machine to make you breakfast because it's easy to make breakfast, which seemed really deep and wise to me at the time

that was back to the future the original

ive heard this theory that many white collar workers are just larping their jobs but idk corporations love to fire ppl if they cld get away with it they prob wld

xp actually i think it was part three when they're in the wild west

Actually there have been a string of tech breakthroughs in the past three years meaning that all the t-shirt-folding/truckdriving jobs are gonna be wiped out in the next 15. Like: you're right about this set of qualitatively different automation problems, but it just so happens that many of those nuts finally got cracked in the past 24 mos or so.

― sean gramophone, Thursday, March 17, 2016 12:11 PM (5 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

cool if true (link?) but i feel like you could have read an article like this every 6 months in WiReD for the past 20 years, just easy for journalists to hyberbolate about this stuff and obvs we eat it up

ive heard this theory that many white collar workers are just larping their jobs but idk corporations love to fire ppl if they cld get away with it they prob wld

― lag∞n, Thursday, March 17, 2016 12:19 PM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yeah david graeber 'bullshit jobs' is the one that gets cited. i mean, the people i work with are def working their butts and creating value (well other than me who is posting about this to ilx LOL) it's more like could the company make a big investment to replace them with a combo of smarter ppl + machines/computers? personally i think yes but then you could counter with: then why didn't they, if it would increase their profits? and idk what to say to that

there are only so many smarter ppl and theyre extremely hard to identity

v true

ive heard this theory that many many white collar workers are just larping their jobs

for 5 years i have edited a weekly video series where entrepeneurs and CEOs give speeches to business students and im convinced upper management spends most of their time justifying their salaries. i'm sure they are "producing value" in the abstract or fiscal sense but yeah they mostly produce entertainment for their financial peers.

everyone wants a slice of the pie is why things aren't 100% automated

ive heard this theory that many white collar workers are just larping their jobs but idk corporations love to fire ppl if they cld get away with it they prob wld

its not actually that easy to fire lots of people! i probably have a particularly jaundiced view of this because finding inefficiencies in back office processes was my job for awhile but theres just insane amounts of unnecessary labor happening in firms. stuff like loan-processing or insurance claims or w/e - lots of ppl employed doing not very productive work that are deeply entrenched and hard to fire. like i can think of entire departments i wouldve just fired that firms kept for various politcal/cultural reasons

I think a lot of white collar jobs tend towards significant stretches of larping in between brief periods of solving actually difficult problems and creating value / avoiding disaster / minimizing disruption. the problem is from an organization's macro view of itself it's very, very difficult to figure out which is which or which are the right kind of educated people you need at what time.

a comparison could probably be made to modern air travel i.e. you got a three person crew, who knows which one or two of those are totally necessary or even if they ever will be on like 99% of flights, and then one day boom Qantas Flight 32