skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> We all (those of us over 35) assumed that as they industrialised, they would gradually become democratic (in the sense of elections but also of human rights and rule of law).

I think this was more like a willful delusion on the part of the supporters of such a theory. Either knowingly--so they exploit China's labor force and resources--or unknowingly--because they'd drank the cool aid offered by those trying to profit off of China.

I think we should flip the whole thing. Why would China democratize? If the rest of the world is okay with China's authoritarianism and continues to engage with China economically, why exactly shouldn't they just continue acting as they do. How much longer would apartheid have continued in South Africa, if international pressure didn't mount against it? I honestly don't know the answer to that question, but it's not some guarantee that it would have gone away, just as it's no guarantee that China will democratize. If we truly want China to democratize, we should engage with them economically with that as a _stipulation_ in some form or another. If we don't make such a stipulation, we should stop acting surprised that China does not change its system and instead accept that we are just there to economically exploit the country and that these dreams only exist to convince the rest of the world that it's acting morally even if it clearly is not.
Konsole in 2020
What’s the difference between a teacher and a mentor?
Most proposals don't give UBI to dependents. You get UBI when you are no longer the obligation of someone else because then you are truly on your own.

It is important not to inadvertently incentivize those without the financial means to raise kids to have them. Its better for their mental health, society as a whole, and the children if they economically prosper first and reproduce later.
Setting things straight about the Job Guarantee
People make this argument whenever there's a discussion of raising the minimum wage, and guess what? It's thoroughly disproven every time.
After burning myself by overworking for almost a decade with out break, I recently got a 3 months break. Got laid off, thanks to COVID and it showed me the value of leisure. I was so stressed out I didn't felt like working at all. I am the kind of person who used to spend the weekends on the latest js framework or some new language features. I simply dropped everything for almost the whole time. Read a lot of non-fiction. Did lot of physical activity like swimming and running. Spend most of the time listening to podcasts while learning to bake.

This gave me a new perspective on the leisure time, which I didn't had before. Now that I am slowly getting back to work I want to make leisure an active part of my routine. It is going to be tricky but at least I will try to continue my swims & runs.
Whether you fund UBI through printing or not is unrelated to the function of banks. Society still needs to divert extra cash to people who are extra productive with ideas and businesses. But how do you know how much extra money to give to whom? You make a dedicated layer in society who's sole function and incentive structure is to distribute that money to those most likely to use it best and name it "banks".
> Imagine an 18th century town with two widget makers...

TIL from this article that physical widgets pre-date digital ones.
I have the same behavior here (MB Pro 13'', Catalina). But additionally I also experience that the scroll direction left to right is inverted. I have to scroll left so that the spreadsheet scrolls right and vice versa.

Not so top to bottom.
> But here’s what companies with superior products do. Win. They don’t complain that their opponent isn’t playing fair.

Sure let me just distribute pirated copies of MS Office, and expect not to get sued by MS, because "Companies with superior products win. They don't complain."
This would fail with any project that uses NPM.
Often compared to bikes. Also I have heard of it, so non-zero. ;) No, I don't have numbers. My point was strictly that with a stolen bike you're out of luck. Also because insurance is mandatory for cars, people usually take this addon that will have them pay for your stolen car. For bikes again it's complicated...
I don’t think this is legally possible, since Amazon is the merchant of record. That implies all sorts of reporting and retention requirements (for taxes, anti-money laundering, etc.).
To "qualify" you basically have to come in to the office and claim that you have problems paying your bills or finding a job. So in all practical meanings, it is exactly like UBI, there is no reason to think that if the name itself would change, there would be any difference in the outcome.
A nice side effect of UBI is that this scenario you describe, plus the hundreds of other undesirable jobs that people are forced to do now to have shelter that thus subsidize their real costs would be hugely pressured to automate them.

In a UBI economy the economic pressure to get self driving trucks would be an order of magnitude greater, creating financial incentives for Google et al to pour more money into AI research to achieve it because the market value is so much greater when truckers are demanding much higher pay to justify the labor when they have a choice in it.

The same would apply to an automated garbage truck that can use CV to scan refuse and collect it via a standardized bucket system rather than having two impoverished desperate humans cling to the back of the truck being paid dirt to do one of the most dangerous jobs in the country.

UBI would probably be the most beneficial policy to spur the R&D that gets us to singularity the fastest.
ubi doesn't automatically mean that you get a flat increase. there are models where it is modelled with taxes in mind. so simplified. if you had nothing before you know have $1000. if you had $2000 before it stays. if you had $3000 before it goes down to $2500. so sure if you just stupidly add $1000 that wouldn't work
Google’s Sundar Pichai grilled over ‘destroying anonymity on the internet’
Huawei becomes world's No. 1 smartphone company for first time
In October, 1953, I coined the word 'software.' (1995)
No one reads the manual as a conclusion is belied by the use of brown M&Ms as a canary - if no one read the manual then it would not be useful to have a canary because no one would read it and then everyone would have to check stuff to make sure it worked before performing themselves and there be an extra charge to venues for this check.

The fact that some people do not read makes a canary useful. I guess the title making a rhetorical point just flips my logic sensor.
The Virtue of Being Wrong: What Stoicism Teaches Us About Welcoming Refutation
Some people die in car accidents. Let's not make it worse and give everyone a car.
If you make "laws to cut down interest rates", two things happen.

1. The normal lenders discontinue lending, either by choice or by bankruptcy.

2. The blackmarket lenders fill the gap. Mafia loans are not good for society. The nature of the blackmarket, without access to legal remedy, is that there will be violence.
Yes. Any exclusivity would be in the attention spans of voters. One feels like one can only pick one battle at a time.
That’s consumer trust, which is certainly high. I’d be interested in how much companies trust amazon, that number might be very different. Both groups can have wildly different experiences with the same company, and there are a lot more consumers than there are companies ready to sell on amazon.

The original question here was not “does amazon provide a bad service to consumers”, but rather “does amazon abuse their data to compete unfairly”. Only companies would know that, end consumers won’t know why the amazon basics product exits, only if it arrives on time.
I'm also wondering about how the amount will be set in practice. Assume UBI is introduced now and set at $1000 per month. In 20 years, $1000 per month will probably not be enough for a basic income, so the amount would have to be raised somehow. Will it be rules-based? Or will it be subject to the same political fights as the minimum wage currently?
Universal basic income is not compatible with open borders. This is the main reason the left struggles with promoting it.
How about Universal Basic Employment? Drop minimum wage to $5/hour, and everyone gets and extra $20 x 30 hours a week if they hit minimum employment.

This would aim at efficient production, and have the side effect of efficient consumption.

1. Better Service - economics keep pushing the service quality bar lower as humans are an expensive way to satisfy customers. We do better with a human bagging your groceries than having you bag your own groceries and pay for an idle human.

2. Experience Ladders - people being interested in their own careers leads to more experienced people. For example, a corner store might hire someone to create a promotion if its cheap enough. The person hired might become good at it.

3. Crazy Startups - with survival being possible, people can start a company at high risk, hiring their friends at a cut rate. If it fails, they can give up and work for their friends.
> A UBI paid for with a carbon tax

I feel like this conflates two issues, and politics should be conducted in all the clarity it can get. Also a carbon tax should probably be used to support the planet, e.g. sustainability projects.
Tech has also consolidated significantly.

- Facebook has acquired 86 companies, most of them small startups. They famously own Instagram, Whatsapp and Oculus, as well as Giphy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitio...

- Alphabet has made 236 acquisitions. They own Youtube and Doubleclick which are massive. Android, Maps, Docs and many other Google products came from acquisitions. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitio...
Author here, the code will be open source in 2 ~ 3 months.
and how much would they pay at the border?
so do you currently volunteer your time for social work (or any other work for which there is a shortage of people due to low pay and hard to perform)?

Even if you _would_ do as you have proposed above, most people won't. A labour shortage is still likely the result, esp. if said labour is not high paying, but the doing of which is still relatively important to a functioning society.

I'm not against UBI - i would want it, even if it means a higher tax! But i just don't see how it is implementable atm, and also whether there are any negative consequences.

The unemployment benefits that have been paid out in the USA so far has many talking about how it is a disincentive to go back to work - because they are paid more than their original job. I can't see how this won't be the same under a UBI system - so the only way for a worker to _do_ work they wouldn't ordinarily do is to pay more!
I’m not really concerned about the first two, because they all apply to any low income. UBI will not–and is not intended to–remove relative poverty.

The third is a potential issue, but the question is whether it will be an improvement over what happens now; i.e. many don’t get the chance to administer their own funds or even have them administered on their behalf, we just skip straight to “it’s all on you”. A credible UBI would likely require a massive expansion of redistribution, because we spend so little on poverty relief today. True poverty relief would require giving people a lot of money, and that is by definition very expensive.

The fundamental issue I see with UBI in 2020 is that it must ultimately be paid for with massive productivity gains (in the face of many hard structural challenges), with no real evidence of where they will come from.
It is communism 2.0. We don't need this.
>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 reject this premise, because it is not true. Extreme poverty is a different topic (and also defined at below $2 a day), but overall, poverty is not decreasing, it's just leveling out.[1]

In a way this is what the neoliberal vision of UBI does, so I guess that's pertinent to the thread even.

[1]: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/jan/29/bill-g...
Objects in a PDF are specified in points, which is a physical measure (1/72 of an inch, or 0.3528 mm).
I don't get UBI. If everyone in my town gets 100€/month on top of their regular income, how will that not drive all rents/mortgages 100€/month up?

I think there are more options for Capitalism 2.0 that can be explored:
- Make healthcare fully free for everyone (e.g. including dental, eyes, etc.)
- Make university education and evening courses free for everyone
- Disclose compensation company-wide: This would likely also fix the gender salary gap, since women could compare their compensation to "that d00d that does nothing all day".
I understand its purpose as a canary. I'm just questioning the idea of "cancelling the entire concert at the full expense of the promoter" which seems false.
Steve Jobs talks about GPT-3 in Sweden (1985)
One good example would be writing a multi-threaded dictionary compression program. Dictionary compression is quite simple, you simply need to encode a bunch of strings to a series of integers and construct a dictionary that can perform the inverse mapping. The main trick is that you need a shared mutable dictionary to store the current list of string to integer mappings.

Doing this with an actor model would be tricky to the point of impossible. Sending a message to the common "dictionary" actor is much, much, much less efficient than just holding the corresponding sharded lock.
This is a weird comment to make when people are simultaneously discussing how the rich have the state do what they need - corruption, lobbying, regulatory capture, tax breaks, interest-free loans...

It shifts the power from employers to the state, not to the employees, the state then merely allows the former employees to play a little.
Heavy Metal - Metal - HardRock - Soft Rock - Rock Astley
Apple does not keep the 30% commission on a refund
> To look at it this way, most dangerous nuclear plant is the one that does not get built, as it will be for significant part will be replaced with something burining dinosurs.

Entirely true. But unfortunately there are a lot of nuclear plants not getting built at the moment. Tragic as it is, developing working fusion is probably an easier way to change that than political persuasion.
Amazons's carbon footprint, 2018:

44.40 million metric tons [1]

Average American carbon footprint:

16 tons [2]

Now, I'm sure there's some inaccuracy here, and it's a bit of a stretch to say Bezos is personally responsible for all of Amazon's emissions, but he's pretty clearly in the same order of magnitude as having a million times the carbon emissions of the average American.

[1] https://d39w7f4ix9f5s9.cloudfront.net/26/7f/e1693ffc45db88d8...

[2] https://www.nature.org/en-us/get-involved/how-to-help/carbon....
But what’s more sad here. They want McDonald’s or that there is a McDonald’s?
> Congresspeople are not fishing for soundbites. They have a legitimate interest in knowing what are the current practices being engaged in by major economic players. They need information pertinent to building consensus amongst their numbers to fulfill legislative mandate.

I don't completely disagree; political subcommittees do tend to be more practical than politics at large. But the committee a hostile environment for the people bought before it; if the politicians just wanted information they'd do it in writing or chat to Zuckerberg at a party or something. The committee process is a legitimate one for that sort of thing, but there are much easier ways to to figure out what is going on. If they actually care about matters of fact politicians tend ask domain experts to write a report - that is a much more comprehensive and nuanced approach.

Literally everything in a committee is about building a narrative to underpin political action. And the people appearing in front of the committee will generally not be the people who were advocating for that action.
It’s a well established term. Coined in 1967 according to Wikipedia: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firmware
Manufacturing is the foundation upon which all tertiary and quaternary industries are ultimately built.
You can still earn a lot, and be on the edge. I'm not, but a lot are.
If the landlords are not being taxed at least as much as they increase rent, they have an incentive to increase rent in response to UBI. The result could be an inflating effect in essentials like food and housing, even if offset by a deflating effect in non-essentials, disproportionately affecting the poor whose main expenses are essential.

IMO the only viable responses are either rent control, or more elegantly, high availability of public housing at fair rents mixed with private units so as to not create class segregation.
Looks like „utf8mb4” mysql issue ? :)
Hilbert's Twenty-Fourth Problem
How would we ever find that? Gravitational lensing of the background stars?

Do we stand a chance of uncovering it at all?

Edit: from the abstract,

> The observational constraints on a PBH in the outer Solar System significantly differ from the case of a new ninth planet. This scenario could be confirmed through annihilation signals from the dark matter microhalo around the PBH

Wild.
So that's not a problem in JSON. Why can't the library output nullptr?
You can tax jeff bezos as much as you want, low end property prices will still go up, (and food etc), because poorer people will have more money, and will spend it on the same things. You might decrease the demand for luxury yachts, but demand for necessities will be the same.
If I had a cent for each time people suggest UBI without explaining how to pay for it, I could probably fund UBI myself.
Really? The same christianity which condones slavery, mistreatment of women and homosexuals?

Good riddance. There are very good reasons religiosity is dying in the west, and there’s nothing anyone can do about it.
Returns on capital are just incentive for that guy to take out loan and take risk.

As in many cases involving risk and uncertainty a few people had outsized returns from it.
As is often the case this completely ignores the cost and the financing, which are key but paint a much less rosy picture of UBI (which meaning must also be clearly defined in any discussion).
So... why isn't it $1m? Or $1bn for that matter?

As long as its something like $1000, my argument still applies. Are you saying you'd like to see a UBI of $1m?
References, please.

"Welfare" has a really big downside that it "phases out" (because of a "means" test) which locks people on one side of a "qualification" line.

UBI wipes that perverse incentive out.
Dexamethasone Announcement Could Have Made Hedge Funds a Fortune
I wonder if this post was transported from 1996?

The 2020 USA welfare state is bonkers stingy and punitive: prove you have these dependents and have been looking for work for this long and have not received benefits for this period...

UBI would be an absolute sea change. It is not some mild extension of "welfare" which isn't really a thing. Go in clear-eyed!
I have found that the best way to create perfect software, is to teach it to someone.
European tax offices[0] manage to automate that cruft. If your tax offices (national/regional) cannot, it is your
state's problem.

> everyone's citizenship status

A government has to know one's citizenship already.

[0]: https://ec.europa.eu/cefdigital/wiki/display/CEFDIGITAL/2019...
Terraform Recipe for WordPress on Fargate
Thanks for pointing this out. As a non-native speaker I always thought "firm" in firmware was referring to "company".
The issue with ubi is that it will never be implimentable with the type of winner-takes-all government of the US, UK, Australia etc. There will always be a slim majority to cross out the Universal part and give people like them (almost) double and everyone else nothing. This is why we have insanely high pensioner benefits and no funding for working people at the moment.

If you cannot implimented a good policy, it doesn't matter how good it is, it's a unicorn.
Because it makes sense. Why wouldn't rent seekers - both landlords and more abstract rent-seekers - just raise prices?

Maybe competition takes care of that? But that doesn't seem to work very well in the current housing market.
The US already has lacking support systems. I'm still baffled how people can simultaneously complain about tent encampments and not be outraged at the lack of homeless shelters. I'm not sure if there's much to destroy left.

Elsewhere, neoliberal UBI would definitely cut into these systems.
> When everyone has an extra $1000 do you really think landlords won’t increase rent?

Before even going there the key is to ask where this money comes from.
Handing any significant amount of money on a recurring basis to everyone is tremendously expensive.

Without considering inflation the first issue that comes to mind is that people will use the extra money to pay the extra tax needed to give them extra money....
Even if I like the idea of UBI idealistically, I am worried about potential inflation.

Once there is more money in the system (that before the UBI just wasnt there) the prices of basic things might rise and at the end the money you get from UBI will be a "new zero".

I am not saying that this will happen but I think this is serious concern.
Moments ago, I stepped in to a discussion and corrected some angry people still spreading this misinformation.

My thought was to ask HN editors to run some kind of a correction post, because these angry people had learned of this “fact” here but never saw the follow-up comments. Since @twolivesleft already has a correction post up on Twitter, I just posted that on HN instead.

It remains to be seen if this post does well on HN. I'm afraid it won't, because personal embarrassment isn't quite as fun to spread as anger against billion-dollar companies.
holy cow, I have not born yet in 1985)))
All of Etcetera Type Company's fonts are now open source, thanks to Google Fonts
In 1990, according to comment from Antonov.

Please also check detailed history:
http://ru.arf.ru/Hrono/index.html

12-19 August 1990.
Obviously you can with Gentoo. That's basically its "thing" (choice).
I doubt parents rich enough to afford this are overstretch. It doesn't seems especially useful though.
> if the introduction of a UBI was followed by a drastic reduction (or complete elimination) of the means-tested system we know today,

As I understand it, that elimination is part of the point of UBI. The MTBs are no longer needed.

Why do you think hunger would be caused by UBI? At worst, I would expects those who already depend on MTBs would be in the same position they are in today.
The fact this tweet is so believable says something about how poorly Apple has been treating its developers the last decade.
Viral MedBikini Response to Leads to Paper Retraction
I think you are touching upon an important point there. Because from the little I know, it appears that experiments with UBI have been largely more successful in places where people appeared to me smarter. Smarter, as in capable to make less ignorant/unwise decisions. Which indeed is largely proportional to education (although not grade or level), but can also in part come through culture and unwritten social habits and norms.

However, this is also why I believe that there is nothing that could still save the USA. For starters, the changes it would need to prevent it from cannibalizing itself (as most crumbling empires), would require dismantling existing power structures and interests that will not hesitate to destroy everything (civil peace, country, world, everything) to "defend" themselves. Those powers are almost nowhere as powerful as the are in the USA, and I am everything but positive about reining those in. As long as those run the show, good luck with anything else.