skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If we made it voluntary, almost no one would volunteer, certainly not enough to be viable. Taxation and the rule of law aren't opt-in for the same reason.
The problem is that we don't know how many people have no interest in working at all at any salary. Some people would choose to not work than to get paid 62k a year at a job they hate. People who oppose UBI are afraid that no one will fill jobs that they think are essential.
I think we should at least first acknowledge that media outlets are by default competitors to and biased against tech platforms. They're not some neutral third parties passively reporting news / opinion as things unfold with old fashioned journalistic integrity.

Vice is generally okay, so I'd give them the benefit of the doubt, but think twice before you subscribe to any opinion that the NYTimes / Vox et. al. have about tech.
But GDP isn't a natural resource, it is an artificial number extracted from insanely complex valuation of fiat currency, debt, policy, and subjective worth, all of which are subject to geopolitics and whims.

I completely agree that nature eventually puts an end to exponential growth, but I don't see how it puts an end to exponential wealth.
Or they have to improve the working conditions on those jobs. Garbage workers have been treated poorly for a long time, and so have meat-packing workers, and Amazon fulfillment workers, and other "sucky jobs." If those workers have access to UBI they will have significantly more bargaining power in the workplace and would be less beholden to their employers for daily lives.
The best, debatable (I'd say yes,) but definitely not the only one.
So what’s the exact math on this? About 209 million adults in the US times 12k a year, so $2.5 trillion. The current tax revenues look like it’s about $3.3 trillion per year.

I don’t think there’s enough people in the top 5% to get the amount needed without literally taxing them into oblivion. We’d need corporate taxes to pull this off, and those bastards cleverly hang out in tax havens, and I wonder how much more clever they’d be willing to get once we tax them more.

I’d love for it work.
As us engineers like to say, the goal is to automate ourselves out of a job.
What is so bad about reduced "work"? Maybe people who are currently working at stupid, unnecessary jobs will make art and poetry and music. Or maybe invent cool things. Or maybe just relax and learn about themselves.

I have never understood this obsession with 100% employment.
You’re right that a UBI effectively vastly increases the power a government could wield over its citizens.

One of the most important sets of principles the US founders relied on were the facts that power corrupts, that it (unfortunately) has to be wielded by someone in a governing sense, and that the best ways to keep government from becoming corrupt and abusive are to (a) limit its power to that which is essential for rule-of-law, representative government; and (b) divide that power among different people who have checks and balances on each others’ power.

Therefore it seems to me that a UBI is likely not a good idea because it vastly increases government’s power.

Note that the US government already wields a ton of power not explicitly granted by the constitution in the form of federal grants...
And how do you legislate for this? After a certain threshold of data collected you fall into a category that needs to be broken up?

It's not a binary offline / online business. Retailers are a mix of both, with some, like Walmart, quickly expanding their online presence as well.
man isn’t fighting the brutality of nature. man is struggling to overcome the brutality of man.

nature is what we are. life is a beautiful struggle of a dance when we exist within that flow.
I haven't listened to those lately, but I don't recall them calling for a UBI. Didn't they redistribute it back to the carbon taxpayers?
What happens if it works? Surely UBI funding should not be linked to a crisis?
Arrow has two possible formats - a stream based one where the first block is the schema/metadata followed by data blocks (ie record batches), and a file based one where the schema is also stored at the end, along with the index locations of each batch (this also allows random access): https://arrow.apache.org/docs/format/Columnar.html#ipc-strea... vs https://arrow.apache.org/docs/format/Columnar.html#ipc-file-...
If everything is automated, there would be no repair jobs as robots would self-repair.
a lot of assumptions made here.

let me put it this way:

if garbage person labor shortage is a blocker, i will personally sign up for 1 day per week garbage duty. if that’s the cost to pay for a more equitable society, why not leave the keyboard for a day and perform that noble and necessary duty. i’m sure i’m not the only person on HN who feels this way.

the world isn’t all bad. it’s getting better. but it only gets better insofar as we ourselves become better. it is this striving towards higher harmony that propels us forward.
This seems to be the case in Scandinavia with broad basic health care. In at least one country median earners pay 60% tax IIRC. https://files.taxfoundation.org/legacy/docs/Progressivity%20...
It could be a temperature thing too. Sweden is for most time considered cold vs Syria is a desert type clime, no?

Would that make a difference? I am wondering too.
Novel blood test could greatly improve diagnosis of Alzheimer’s
Yeah, the carbon tax is just equally distributed back to everyone. Just like UBI.
Here's how to use them in VSCode https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/languages/json#_json-sche...
Yes, distorting job markets is one of the goals. For example, driving up wages for unpleasant jobs is a good thing.
I always took that theory as more about how rich people stay rich & grow richer, as opposed to why poor people are poor.
The elephants in the room are the extremely cheap labor that already undermines the legit goods and services:

- extremely cheap prison labor
- undocumented laborers who have (almost) no legal rights and who take difficult jobs
- ex-cons who have to pay a portion of their wages to employers who are willing to hire them
- jobs where wages must be subsidized by government programs (eg. WalMart encourages their lowest paid workers to sign up for SNAP)

UBI is nice, but the markets are already distorted and without addressing these issues, UBI just distorts the markets more.

That said, even if we can't address these issues, I'm happy to support modernizing the American (federal, state, and county) welfare programs -- including giving recipients the option of taking the cash value.
So, no garbage men?
You make an assumption that more money will fix that. When again its the opposite.

The fact is suicide rates are higher in wealthier neighborhoods and in richer countries.

https://business.time.com/2012/11/08/why-suicides-are-more-c...

Not to mention the fact that you believe giving more money to someone who is addicted to alcohol or drugs will be better instead of worse. The only thing you've given them is money money to buy alcohol and drugs with no extra motivation or responsibility so they'd stop doing those things.
OK my project is open source. I have zero stars, zero downloads, and zero users.

How much do I get paid?

Zero? But I wrote open source code that solves a real problem. It's open source. I should deserve to get paid. Because open source software.

I don't think your funding model works.
"It's hard to find a rational excuse for not doing it."

Just the opposite, it's hard to find any rationality for doing it at all.

If a 'carbon tax' is really just going towards reducing carbon, but not going into R&D for carbon reducing technologies, then it's probably just as efficient to simply limit carbon use in a variety of areas. Taking vast amounts of money from businesses is an indirect way to stimulate R&D on such things.

The simultaneous effect of severely limiting productivity, with a gigantic wealth transfer to those at the lower end of the economic spectrum, would be a 'double inflation whammy'.

A more extreme version would be: "No more cars or busses, and by the way, we're now going to grab your wealth and transfer it over to those people over there"

It's best to consider them as separate activities.

Solve the climate problem with effective technology and regulation, solve inequality by getting people into the workplace and by helping to more evenly distribute surpluses.

In particular, low interest rates are causing massive inequality in wealth due to home appreciation, which is absurd.
“There would be some inflation”

Which serves as a reason to regularly increase the amount.

“UBI doesn't make people not want to work at all“

Speak for yourself. Work is a means to an end. I have no desire to work if basic income takes care of my basic necessities. I have no intrinsic desire to get up every day at the same time and do what my employer tells me to do. And to be clear, when I say work I mean the necessity of doing things in exchange for money. Cultivating my garden, writing software nobody uses, or music nobody pays for, isn’t what I mean by work.
This makes me wonder if it would be useful if you had it generate a representation of the sentence diagram / phrase structure grammar of the question before the monologue.
IANAL. I am just saying that some employment contracts forbid side work. I imagine many companies would prefer not to get in the middle of that, and so might be reluctant to pay people for work done in interviews.
Reducing the number of hours/jobs that people currently work would reduce the labor supply and wages would rise (Econ 101). I don't see how these "consequences" are a bad thing.

Furthermore, "unforeseen consequences" are effects that we don't know will happen because they lie beyond our ability to predict them. There will always be unforeseen consequences of any major policy decision.
ISP anti-trust should break vertical integration. Have one set of companies laying cable, and then selling commodity bandwidth to another set of customer facing providers.

Similar to South Korea's very efficient internet system.
As a rich person I am happy to pay for UBI as it lowers the likelihood that I will be the victim of a possibly violent crime by someone with not enough to lose. The one modification I’d make is that a violent felony conviction docks 5 years of UBI and a second conviction nixes them permanently.
This is an interesting angle I never considered. I think that a lot of us are seeing UBI as a flat rate everyone gets.

I never thought of it evolving into different levels for different categories of people.
My head was getting dizzy and had to stop mid way. People were smart enough to create animations but not sensitive enough to know whether it is too much.
OP here - I love this idea!

I also think most environmental problems can be solved with a tax on the product doing the damage, that pays for the cost of undoing the damage.
Shouldn't you guys be riding high on your Nobel Prizes resulting from your last major breakthrough[1] that shook up the world? With that kind of track record, you should have no problems getting funding.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19423784
5G iPhone might not arrive in September
Exactly. The exceed money from UBI will create more demands thus more jobs will be created. The jobs will be much more `meaningful` than those empty, bureaucratic jobs created by a central entity. Isn't it the basis of capitalism?
I'm not entirely decided on this matter myself, but I'll take the position.

One reason to include the rich in UBI is that it reduces administrative overheads. If it's means-tested, that means monitoring, investigating and ultimately punishing the poor. Why bother?
A change in perspective gives you idea of how the system work. The system isn't broken. Any system you don't understand probably seems problem.

Like how people call the US government broken. When it was meant for the very beginning to mangle federal power. The only thing broken about that system is federal power isn't more limited. But a lot of people call that system broken.
Yeah like, wtf is the point of technological innovation if we're still working like crazy?
LuaJIT 1.x was also an enormous disappointment so it’s a bit perplexing that the PHP team would try something which probably sucks.
>so all goods and services that require said "dirty job" in the supply chain will go up in price. This eventually negates the UBI benefits, because the level of UBI no longer can sustain purchases of all the goods and services that it originally could due to the increases in prices.

Isn't this the same argument that's used to argue against increasing the minimum wage? "if you increased the minimum wage, then the costs will go up for those businesses hiring minimum wage workers, making the goods more expensive for those workers, and canceling everything out!". But empirical evidence has shown this has not been the case[1]. Because of this, I'm wary of any hand-wavy arguments like these that just mention some effects without attempting to quantify the magnitude of those effects.

[1] random result: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:CBO_Projected_Effect...
> Or are you saying if you once had money for these things, it's impossible to ever be poor again?

I’m saying actual poor people never had that stuff to begin with. What you consider ‘poor’ is nowhere near actual poverty.
I probably wouldn't have asked Google why they took down a post on Twitter...
Particles-bg – A lightweight JavaScript library for creating particles
But that’s exactly what he’s saying. The crappy jobs will have to pay more in order to attract people, and in order to compensate for the increase in labor costs, the cost of garbage collection goes up.

Basically, increased labor costs drives up cost of goods (inflation), which offsets the benefit of the UBI in the first place.
Apparently we're not reading the same comment. In this example, the rich person pays cash for the 20-pack and probably earns interest on the savings. They have no need to pay interest on a loan. The poor person pays cash for the 2-pack and then pays again next month, and maybe takes out a payday loan to afford the rent after they have to call in sick, and there's your high APR. This is not a benefit. What am I misunderstanding?
I don't see how this would really work. A carbon tax in an ideal situation is just a consumption tax. This means that it's the consumer that pays it. Rich people don't eat more food nor do they drive dozens of cars at once. If we want this carbon tax to offset our greenhouse emissions then that means it will necessarily disproportionately impact poor people.

And then you want to turn around and pay that money back to people as UBI? It'll be a slight redistribution of wealth from the wealthy to the poor and that's it. It won't fulfill the role of a UBI.

In an unideal world it will just be gamed to all hell instead. Also, good luck getting people to swallow a doubling of their tax bill even if you give it back.
The cost of litigating to suppress details could be less than the cost of LifeLabs potential exposure to a class action suit because of what could potentially be construed as negligence in their IT security practices. They're not just psycho jerks for fighting it, it could just be part of their fiduciary duty.

The risk to them is, IMO, the standard of security and privacy governance within the public sector is much higher than pretty much any other institution I've seen, so in comparison, showing that a private company did not meet that standard would be trivial. However, the question of what kind of diligence was done on the original contract (or not) could blow up, since every mandatory risk assessment (if completed) done on it would have raised this breach possibility and recommended controls to mitigate it.

I was livid when I read about the breach as it's precisely the kind of incident every single security and privacy analyst who has ever advised the public service has used as a baseline scenario. It fell out of the news cycle I think because it was so bad it crossed the line into discrediting institutions, which isn't done in mainstream Canada.

The party in power whose minister approved this contract has been out of power for 3+ years, so politically for them it's just wastewater under the bridge, but as a legacy, this breach was in the realm of worst case scenario. For the sake of popular trust in the health system in general, the root cause analysis should be seen through.
Wait a minute, you now have to do all your work on a laptop? For 8 hours a day? That sounds like pure hell.
As the SouthPark villagers say: They took 'er jerbs!
> democratically planned economy

Sounds like an absolute nightmare on anything but the most local scale.

Think about the number of economic decisions made daily by individuals in a free-market economy. That’s many orders of magnitude more than the number of decisions that could be made by a democratically elected group of representatives at the federal level, even if assisted by computer systems. And that’s not even considering secondary effects.

Command economies have been tried many times and have never worked well. Beyond a certain limit, the larger the scale the more colossal the failure. The USSR was only able to go as long as it did because Stalin was shipping trainloads of grain out of the Ukraine leaving millions of people starving.

EDIT: Video of a grocery store in Moscow, USSR, 1989: https://youtu.be/jWTGsUyv8IE
American households own $98 trillion in net worth. Averages to about $340,000 per person. And this is just household wealth. So yes there is enough money out there.
> It seems like there are too many entrenched players to make this a reality unfortunately.

Wrong we have the internet, ideas and people can become popular in a matter of days. Grassroots movements have a lot of potential
Everything is fundamentally flawed so it doesn’t say much to state it.

But personally I think the open source model has been wildly successful.

Before open source you needed to get a job working for a company to see any really cool code.

Now you can see and play with a world class version of almost anything: a world class OS, a world class 3D rendering engine, a world class video editor... it’s awesome.
Because we are not living in an era of such abundance that we have the liberty to do that.

Do the math: 300M people, $2k/mo, 12mo/yr is 7.2 trillion dollars. Even to first order that is unaffordable, and that’s without factoring in that UBI would decimate the tax base that’s supposed to support it, or the consumer price inflation that would result in that $2k not going as far as you’d expect.
Where did the figure of $2k a month come from?

UBI proposals typically set the value at just enough to live on, or what someone who successfully claims unemployment + housing benefit would be given. At that level, the extra cost of UBI is because it's paid to non-claiming dependants, but there are savings from dismantling the bureaucracy which decides who is entitled to unemployment benefit and investigates fraudulent benefit claims, so it would be close to revenue neutral, so net tax rates shouldn't change much.

Assuming the revenue source is income tax, those already working would, on average, have their higher gross tax rates offset by receipt of UBI. There are other sources of taxation, e.g. corporation tax and a tax on land so a proportion could be taken from those.
Giving everyone the same amount is symbolically useful, because it's a way in which all citizens are equal. Everyone gets the same amount and what can be fairer than that?

But, practically, anything a UBI plan gives you can be undone with an equal and opposite tax. The net effect after taxes is what matters and it's going to redistribute money or there's no point in doing it. Some people pay more taxes than others and raising the top income tax rate is enough to ensure that the wealthy don't benefit.

It can be made exactly equivalent to a negative income tax.
Yes! I love this tool, and it's open source too! Only took me ~15 minutes to create the main diagram in the article and it came out looking great.

Watermark is optional, but I kept it because I appreciate someone took the time to make a high quality diagram tool and still open sourced it.
I'll do it. Building robots sounds dope. I'd imagine a good chunk of people on HN would love to live in a post scarcity society where they can spend their time building and repairing robots.
That would assume wealthy groups in america start businesses are higher rates than all other groups. But poor immigrants with no safety net what so ever start businesses at a much higher rate.
Not sure if this is directly answering your question, but UBI doesn't mean that everyone spends money the same way. One person might put that money towards their kids' education, another towards household groceries, and another towards higher rent.
As I recall, if you paid more carbon tax you got more back. That is not, I think, how UBI is supposed to work (e.g., those paying more taxes don't get a higher UBI).
"Likely hoping for something similar"? Is this just naivete? As many other comments here point out, there are zero sources that suggest anything close to a majority of HK protesters want independence, let alone HKers overall.
Is this the replacement for classic 6xx Roombas with DIN remote port?
Forgot to mention this earlier, but two other related areas that you might find worth studying are:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_physics

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_network_analysis
Carbon taxes tend to be regressive. Using a regressive tax to fund "ubi" sounds cunningly evil. Are you familiar with the yellow jacket protests in France?
I believe GP is arguing it's unethical to charge money for distributing abandonware.
You make some interesting points here, but I think your logic is fundamentally limited. There are alternative, imaginative ways to solve this problem that don't necessarily involve capital. In _The Dispossessed_ by Ursula K. LeGuin, for example, able-bodied workers are required to perform essential work like agricultural work and other "dirty jobs". Much like we conscript people in times or war, we could do the same with regards to needed work that isn't getting done.
The overwhelming majority of the population is not grey tribe. Yes, abstracting fundamental social functions onto universal, non-ideological bases is a Good Idea in theory, but the reality is the majority of people don't learn Esperanto or participate in the Cult of the Supreme Being. There are very real switching costs that often exceed the supposed advantages sought out and the end result often pales in comparison to the original, both in substance and meaning, and fails accordingly.

If you think another attempt would be successful, that you, or another cadre of well-intentioned reformers, can successfully inoculate a society with an abstracted ethical code that mandates returning evil with good, embracing the martyring of oneself for truth, total pacifism, etc. on a purely logical basis, by all means go ahead and give it your best shot. Until then, I'm going to loudly proclaim that Chesterton's fence should be returned to its field.