skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think a question many of us in this thread are asking ourselves is, would this work in the U.S. and the OP made a comment relevant to this point.
What the UBI proponents are really simultaneously suggesting, is total regulation of all aspects of life and economy - which is a necessary consequence, as you've noted given the obvious outcomes of UBI.

If you give everyone UBI, dramatically boosting incomes, in order to achieve the desired net gains in quality of life for the lower classes you will have to drastically increase the regulation of all prices, all assets, all economy, all consumer activity, all production in order to attempt to control the negative consequences of UBI. This attempt will fail horrifically, resulting in catastrophic destruction to the economy.

We've already solved the quality of life problems that UBI claims to solve: countries like Finland, Germany, Austria, Denmark, Japan, Australia, Sweden, Canada solved it to a large degree long ago, entirely without UBI. They have relatively extraordinary standards of living, and have made extraordinary progress over the last half century. We already know how to do it, we already have something that works, and we should be focused on improving that further. At its best UBI is entirely unnecessary.
Interesting, I had never heard of the Digital Advertising Alliance.

History here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AdChoices
And here: https://medium.com/golden-data/what-is-the-digital-advertisi...
> In an unideal world it will just be gamed to all hell instead.

I suspect that as the carbon tax incidence of certain groups changes over time they (or others) will lobby for commensurate changes in UBI (or any other similar compensation schemes).

The result will be that both measures will be rendered ineffective.
Show HN: SheetSQL – A Node.js Library to Make Google Spreadsheet as a Database
"But not all people who invest in startups will be that lucky."

Purchasing a widget from a company is not investing. Cut the bullshit.

Customers don't have the commensurate upside.

It's kind of wild that Google is pulling this kind of shit when they are getting grilled about whether the us should take a more expansive view of antitrust.

They ruined an independent product because they wanted the people that made it to work on their shit instead.
Taxes on casinos directly funding the gambling regulatory board.
You seem to be assuming that there's a simple, one directional causal relationship between "is smart" and "has money" (and also that people who are more intelligent somehow deserve more comfortable lives). Consider that things other than inherent intelligence might be making poor people spend money on junk food and lottery tickets.
Both the FSF and Conservancy do pay people to code and do other technical work.
Nope. JET achieved Q~0.7 in 1997[1],and that hasn't been beat since. In 1998, JT-60 would have gotten Q~1.2, had they put deuterium-tritium fuel [2] (but it wasn't built for that).

You might be thinking of some news from NIF. In 2013, they sorta claimed to have reached ignition, but that was only by moving the goal-posts.[3]

ITER is not by any means a test of an economical or scalable reactor -- it's still at the stage of a science experiment.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joint_European_Torus
[2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JT-60
[3]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Ignition_Facility#Bre...
Looking at that list it seems in the majority of countries it is really, really hard, if not impossible to own firearms.
> Why give free money to everyone?

Because it's simpler and avoids duplicating effort, since the means testing is rolled into the tax system, and avoids perverse consequences, since with a single payment system you don't end up with a combination that has greater than 1:1 reductions in benefits without outside income for some recipients at some income levels.

> Milton Friedman long ago proposed a negative income tax to replace means-tested welfare programs.

A negative income tax is, in terms of who gets what payment, exactly equivalent to a UBI funded by a progressive income tax.

A monthly UBI with the usual annual income tax filing and reconciliation payment/refund is a better mechanism than simply rolling the UBI into the income tax calculation and annual reconciliation, though.

> I do think people radically underestimate the unforeseen consequences of a free guaranteed income, even if it was low. I’d be willing to live as a poor person if that meant not having to work.

I think people like you overestimate it, because they ignore the well-established effects of general deprivation and voracious human wants. They may also overestimate their own tolerance for non-work, as do many people leading up to retirement.

> I’d be willing to live as a poor person if that meant not having to work.

Some people would. But many more people would also be willing to work a little bit more for a little bit more, which UBI makes easier than existing means-tested programs.

And many people who initially would reduce work for the novelty of leisure would turn around later and work to have the things they couldn't afford on the basic stipend.

> I definitely would choose not to work or work less if that money came free from government. If I got free money I wouldn’t increase spending, I would reduce work.

Unless you are the poorest of the poor, that outcome isn't actually contrary to the design or problematic.
UBI is Communism Lite. Very likely ends badly, as voters seek to increase UBI to infinity. Politicians will get reelected on the basis of how much they're willing to increase UBI. Probably causes a currency crisis as well. Unfortunately the Silicon Valley crowd seems to be beholden to this flawed idea. Voters and politicians will not restrain themselves if this tool is made available.
But that's not really TypeScript's main approach, is it? When I think of TypeScript I think of the inline colon annotations, not the external files. Those are just a bridge for legacy code.
I think that's a real effect.

Intuitively I would imagine a lot more people save 0% (or close to 0%) of their income than save 50% of their income, I would also expect a lot more people to save or overspend 3% of their income than overspend or save 25% of their income.
I agree.

I bet everyone reading this has at one time or another met someone who is completely incapable of managing money at even simple levels. Or thinking ahead even. Not everyone can wisely use XX a month. Or even eat with it. Then what?

The fixation on money is a little nearsighted imo. It didn't always exist. It's just a tool for determining access to good and services. What if everyone could get a healthy meal and a clean safe place to sleep at any time and a shower and some net access or whatever is deemed necessary. Would that cost less or more then UBI?

(I still think some form of UBI might be a good idea for the present, just, we should think bigger and outside of the current economic stack for the long term.)
> "Even the most hardcore anti-capitalists have to give respect to how the combination of capitalism and technology has worked to lift most of the world out poverty and provided us with the security and comfort only kings enjoyed just a few century’s ago."

I really don't have to. The best tools in software are free and open source, and if I contrast that with the tools which aren't it's really obvious that there are externalities from competition i.e. anti-cooperation. You also need an explanation for progress in communist countries besides "they would have been better off with capitalism." Maybe, but the premise is that capitalism is the reason for "comfort only kings enjoyed just a few centuries ago"...or one century ago in Russia. Research, engineering and trade are some of the real reasons for rapid growth.

A big problem with UBI is that it gives up on dealing with concentration of wealth and power into the hands of a few ceos, often for no benefit to anyone else. This is especially true of the version of UBI with a funding model like Andrew Yang proposes. I think a better path forward for "capitalism 2.0" is to require companies give much more stock equity to employees - all employees, including low wage and contractor. An extreme option would be to force every company to reform as a coop. And neither of these are mutually exclusive with UBI.
"Loss leader" means losing money one one product in order to get people to show up who buy more of something else. How do you imagine Microsoft's costs for paying a ~3% credit card fee and hosting a ~50MB app are going to exceed 5%? Also, what's the other product they intend to make money on supposed to be?

You can't attract people to the store with low fees and then raise them later or they'd just leave as soon as you do. Unless you would require them to use Microsoft's store and no other, but then you could just do that from the outset, except that it'd leave you with the same sort of antitrust scrutiny that Apple should be under for doing the same thing.
I agree wholeheartedly and have considered this a lot. I've wondered if it could be a thing for people to start doing this for their (most important) blog posts, but I suppose it is in some way exclusionary—to participate you no longer have to simply present your thoughts clearly, but to have the confidence and competence to narrate it, too, or have the money to pay for someone else to do it.
Implementations vary, but the most efficient design is to tax carbon as far upstream as possible (e.g. oil refineries), rather than at the manufacturer or household level. So, it’s not a direct tax on consumers the way a sales tax is. In theory, this cost is then passed on down the chain in the form of higher prices for carbon intensive products and processes.

A carbon tax is overwhelmingly considered to be the most efficient solution by economists for Econ101 reasons—pricing negative externalities (correcting a market failure is more efficient than doing nothing), and enabling competition and comparative advantage (more efficient than command-and-control policies).

The idea of taxing things we want less of is known as a Pigouvian tax, by the way—and it’s considered a no-brainer even by the most conservative economists (e.g. Mankiw).

> good luck getting people to swallow a doubling of their tax bill even if you give it back.

Not so! Public opinion on climate change has shifted dramatically in the last several years. This poll from last year (and from a top Republican pollster to boot) found that people support a carbon-tax-and-dividend policy 4-to-1. 75% of GOP voters (!) under age 40 support this type of policy. Read all of the results, they are remarkable. It’s a winner in the eyes of both economists and the public. https://www.clcouncil.org/media/Luntz-Carbon-Dividends-Polli...
So... you're jealous that the winner of a lottery got the money without merit and therefore oppose providing subsistence income to poor people?

Intelligence and wealth are correlated, but not nearly as cleanly as you think. More importantly, taste for the various vices of life are not at all correlated with intelligence. Except maybe positively.

Desperation is the key ingredient to participation in lotteries. I realized this when an entire cohort of mathematics phd candidates at a top program bought lottery tickets. They understood the odds. They also made 20K/yr and faced the worst job market in a century. Desperation with basically zero meaningful opportunity cost. What are they going to do, invest it? They aren't even invested in fucking social security after 6 years of 80 hour weeks.
https://pinboard.in/ (pinboard.io is apparently someone else's and up for sale - if it's yours, nicely done;)
reducing poverty reduces crime, i would think
I am at loss for words here. These kinds of argument can be made for anything.

Most countries require masks and seatbelts, so what? It doesn't make it the right choice.

Most countries don't allow to eat dogs, so what? It doesn't make it the right choice.

Most countries don't allow to kill man, so what? It doesn't make it the right choice.

I'm just giving a taste of your own medicine.
A person should be allowed to dream sometimes, how freaking cool would this be. A block hole right in our neighbourhood, even closer than Alpha Centauri. Just imagine what kind of things can be learned from studying it.
Any protection that makes sense would use a real encryption mechanism, not an obfuscation like UEFI. The "secret" for UEFI SecureBoot is embedded in the "secured" system, so it is already in the wild (i.e. outside of the brain of the user) - not a secret at all.

So I believe that a meaningful modern security setting would be based on some dm-crypt/luks ciphered storage and a passphrase to unlock it.
That money has to come from some where. If you're paying janitors more and they're no more productive than before, someone else is making less.
> Why give free money to everyone? Clearly a rich person doesn’t need a monthly check from government...

The problem is that a small loophole or exception paves the way for larger exceptions, and so on, which continues until the original concept is gutted and bleeds out to the status quo
"I want smart people to have more money"

Why? Shouldn't it be "people who have a more positive impact on society should have more money"?

Being smart isn't anything, it's like being tall. You got it because you were born with it.

Also, what about those who weren't born "smart"? Should society just tell them "tough luck"? Shouldn't we think about everyone and how they will all do in our future, more perfect country/world?
Transportation I could see, but for other things like food I just like the idea of making people choose how they want to spend their credits, if for no other reason than to remind them that scarcity still exists.

Having a grocery store with a "take what you want" policy feels like it won't last long
This is the point right here.

Every reaction to UBI discussions immediately assume UBI is trying to replace all income, which is very much not the idea.

It's a floor for society.
Compare to your competitors. I've worked for a place that charges about as much, but people line up to buy it because their competitors charge ten times more.

If you have no competition, your competitor is whatever hack the client is doing. In many business applications, that's hiring qualified people to gather the data, enter it, process it, upload it.

In your case, it might be a feature your clients are building themselves. $1000 might be about 20 man hours. If they're spending that much per month on it, it's an easy buy.
> I have no desire to work if basic income takes care of my basic necessities.

It is widely observed that many people work far more than is necessary to supply their basic necessities, because people's desires don't tend to end with those needs.

You may have quite limited desires, but there is no evidence that that is true of humans generally.
You don’t need unlimited resources for unlimited growth. Inventing more valuable uses of existing resources is enough.

For example, in many countries, per capita energy usage is decreasing as GDP per capita increases, because of more energy efficient tech.
Here's the specs on it: https://store.irobot.com/default/root/irobot-root-rt0/RT0002...

Basically:

1. Capacitive touch zones (basically buttons?)

2. Bumpers

3. Light-sensors

4. Gyroscope

5. Accelerometer

6. Two wheels with encoders

7. Piezoelectric speaker and a couple lights

Not very interesting. It can wander around some with very minimal feedback. It can't communicate, it can't sense many parts of its environment, since its only ability to act is really its two wheels it can't interact outside of wiggling and some beeps and boops.
not exactly what you’re saying but:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_socialism
Because we have certain shared values, including that folks shouldn’t starve to death due to lack of work.

The United States already supports millions of citizens via a backdoor welfare: disability. This simply takes away the corruption and bureaucracy and gives it to everyone.
It doesn't, I was replying to the comment that assumes that a property tax wouldn't hurt the poor because middle class is infinitely closer to being poor than they are being rich and this type of tax would hurt those people the most thereby causing them to fall into poverty.
If it's a company of 6 people who have one engineer hired full time to build and maintain the feature, it's cheap.
Best Workplaces for Innovators
Sure, but how the economy works is not explained. It's basically that first contact was made, humans realized they weren't alone, so war, poverty and money ended within 50 years, somehow. I'm sure it helps to have transporters, replicators and computers approaching AGI. But how everything inside the Federation just works is not discussed. I guess everyone just naturally wants to do what works out for society, somehow.
To correct this slightly, a carbon tax changes the relative price of goods (rather than a consumption tax, which is typically flat). The primary industries affected tend to be industrial, rather than than consumption based (e.g. energy, freight, mining, and smelting).
What would be fantastic is if this service scaled contributions across projects whose code you are actually using in your repos.

Minor nitpick: I don't think a badge is really considered virtue signaling because you've already put your wallet where your mouth is.
> This is why retailers generally require you to use the same method of payment to get your refund.

This is for AML, not because of fee refunds.
One thing of interest, I was very recently contacted by USPS, did a user interview with them and was subsequently put in touch with an account representative. That feels like a positive change.

On the other hand, our packages (all sent via Priority Mail which is supposed to be 2-3 business days though has changed to 2-4 business days) have been getting delayed recently and in some cases taking as long as 14 days.
Thoughts on the Antitrust Hearings
Sorry, I forgot that typical grub.cfg contains the root partition's UUID (and at least historically, the partition device node). While it is possible to configure GRUB to scan for a root partition rather than using a UUID, this is less secure (eg, GRUB residing on your hard drive could then accidentally select your root partition residing on a USB stick containing Linux live media).

Good point that in general, the operating system vendor does not know the grub.cfg on an installed system, and that an attacker with direct access to the ESP can modify the files that are present there.

A static grub.cfg that selects "the Linux root partition is the first partition on the device on which this GRUB bootloader is installed on" would work. I don't believe GRUB supports this kind of behavior (maybe it should). It seems worthwhile and possible to design a mechanism where a simple grub.cfg can be signed by the operating system vendor. Disabling the ability to arbitrarily modify kernel boot options on a general purpose operating system is not a big deal, and could be mitigated with extra GRUB boot menu items.
You don't get paid unless someone adds you to their sponsor pool. If no one knows about your thing, you don't get paid. Am I misunderstanding your question?
UBI isn't (necessarily or even generally) isn't generally communist (in the strict sense). I'd argue it's a bit of practical captitaliasm, game theory style --- rising tides lift all boats?

You can keep your big boat - let's make sure everyone's got some way to stay afloat?

And not because it's "good" - though maybe it is - but because the ecosystem is healthier/better for it...
Yes, that is an apt description of a reduction in income inequality, i.e. the intended effect.
The hypothesis that we are in stagnation is flawed since it looks only at the lower socioeconomic levels in the developed countries. What happened with globalization is that the lowest socioeconomic levels in other parts of the world were lifted from poverty. So the world as a whole hasn’t stagnated.

Because of the transfer of labor to the developing world, you had stagnation for the lower and middle class in the developed world. You see the same pattern everywhere in the developed world: Japan, Europe, United States, etc... It is only the end of capitalism 1.0 if you look just there.

Automation may eventually destroy jobs but probably more will be in those developing countries. The developed countries have already partly transitioned into service economies (especially anything that is low skilled and can’t be done elsewhere).

Some developed countries seem to have de facto UBI to cope with this stagnation. However some countries have been in a malaise for decades with no real signs of uptick. This would also counter the hypothesis that plain UBI would lead to greater productivity.

I think that there needs to be much greater emphasis on supporting learning and doing (not necessarily in a university setting) to develop the greatest resource (human potential). We just need to keep leveling up.
Macroeconomics 101 shows that public welfare creates a demand floor, reducing the severity of recessions and lessens the boom bust of the business cycle.
> Why give free money to everyone?

Two major reasons.

The principled reason is that it is, well, universal. If you're a citizen, you get certain rights and responsibilities, end of story.

A more realist perspective notes that historically, if you make a program for the poor, it becomes a poor program (underfunded). A scheme it is more likely to succeed the more people who buy in to it. (Notice how the ACA is becoming more popular over time? Or look at Social Security vs. SNAP.)

> I definitely would choose not to work

I think people both pro- and con- are not really thinking through how this would play out in reality. Income, wealth, type of work and social status are intimately linked, especially so in the US.

There will immediately be some slur for people who choose not to work that will probably replace the "your momma's on welfare"-type crap. Lots of people's shallow, status driven dating rules will expand to exclude the voluntarily-unemployed. It will become obvious that there's a very low glass-ceiling over their heads that limits them in all sorts of ways. It will also become harder to crawl out of over time, both for individuals who don't maintain useful skills, and as a social class, because that's how humans act.

Some people will of course choose that life. But I think it will be a lot less appealing than you think.
The point of UBI is not to reduce the economic output of smart people. In fact, in some sense it could improve since bright minds could reasonably deal with loss of income while pursuing entrepreneurial endeavors. Think of all the smart people wasting their life in a do-nothing job for security that we could liberate to follow through on their best ideas.

At the same time not smart people or disadvantaged won't be ignored or fall through the cracks. Over time as productivity rises through automation we can ramp up the UBI and make sure all human life is valued and give people real opportunity. Even with a UBI that doesn't require you to work to live doesn't preclude a capitalist persuit of resources to make your most grand ideas come true. Let's just make sure we tax externalized cost appropriately.

Will some smart people choose to not work eventually? Sure, but if our automation can support them, who cares?

I think Yang came up with an eloquent phrase for this - UBI is capitalism that doesn't start at 0.
Were these cases people who would otherwise have engaged in some creative endeavour (music, programming, art, tinkering, whatever)? Or were they otherwise engaged in menial repetitive jobs that should probably be automated anyway?

If the latter, what's wrong with them watching Netflix? We don't need every human to work.

Also if I gained a perpetual stipend that covered my basic needs, you bet I'd take a couple of months off just to relax and recuperate. Inside three months I'd be going insane from boredom and start building things again for the fun of it. And I bet they'd be better things, too.