skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think there's 2 fundamental questions here:

1. Does the current system encourage work? When you require means testing for benefits and have sharp discontinuities, the incentive to work isn't very strong.

If a full time job pays $x/month and your benefits are $0.8x/month, then taking that full time job and losing the benefits only puts $0.2x in your pocket. That seems like a pretty poor deal for 40+ hours a week away from home. A UBI system which always paid the same amount would mean that any income from work would immediately go in your pocket. That's a very strong incentive to work - working would double or triple your income.

2. The type of work that people _must_ do for society to function is actually quite small. People must grow crops, run the water treatment systems, maintain roads, generate electricity, sure. But there's also a huge class of pointless jobs - pointless admin due to wasteful bureaucracy, entire divisions of defence contractors working on things which will never be used, a huge number of startups spending VC money on things which they have no hope of succeeding at, wasteful processes and systems at state telecom companies the world over.

The only thing we can say about work in our economy is that it is done because someone wants to pay for it to be done. Not that it's necessary. Things become profitable because incentives exist to do them, but often these incentives are artificial or completely crazy.

If UBI significantly alters the economic incentives, maybe that's not a bad thing. Does it really make a difference to society if someone spends their days pushing paper in a state telecom company, or creating art?

There will of course be scroungers and lazy people. There's a lot of people who work right now who do the bare minimum as it is. They might drop out completely. There will also be people who are given a stable safety net from which to pursue a new career, return to education, care for their parents, build a house in the woods, build a business.

I don't think we can say for sure which group will be larger.

We don't have UBI right now, but we do have people who inherit money. And in my experience with people I've known who've inherited enough money to live for a few years, they've almost entirely continued working. The inheritance has given them a safety net from which to pursue a risky career or retrain. It's been a huge positive for them. In inheritance we already have an entrenched intergenerational BI for a group of society - UBI in many ways is recreating that for everyone.
>And spending 3 years on a major project suggests not ADHD.

So true!! Thanks
“ their whole company is based on trust. The cost of losing it would be huge, so they’d be super driven to stamp it out.”

This was the exact argument put forth by defenders of Goldman Sachs when it was alleged they were screwing over their own customers in the financial crisis.
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> "So you still need to figure out who those people are and whether they're authorised to receive UBI."

You need to figure out who they are to be able to give them money in the first place. That's not the thing you're saving on, but all the other checks to see if you're justifiably unemployed/disabled enough to be receiving this money.

A big problem with the welfare system is that people only get it when they don't work. They lose it when they get a job, which can often mean they actually lose purchasing power, so they're effectively being punished for working. UBI creates a system where you always get ahead by working, even if it's only a little bit.

Of course you still need the basic civil bureaucracy; every country needs that. But you don't need an extra layer of bureaucracy on top of that.
This will serve me,and many others on HN as a lesson on how easy it is to fall for false information. I did read the related post yesterday and there were lots of emotions, mainly negative. Now I don't even know whether they take the money or not, so I'll put a question mark until proven otherwise for time being.
> I don’t think most people in poverty will work their way out of it. It’s a mindset and a lifestyle, in addition to a reality.

The way "it's a mindset and a lifestyle" reads is very harsh and diminishes the complexity of why poor people stay poor.
Funny way to spell vi
- Desires to hit people you hate and fuck people you find attractive are built into our minds and bodies by millions of years of evolution yet most people find not running around assaulting and raping to be pretty easy.

- Most terrible things people do are for the gain or preservation of resources and most people either have kids or want them. Piracy, animal poaching, bear bile farms, kidnapping and ransoming people, making and selling hard drugs, organised crime in general, war, telemarketing. Most people doing this aren't millionaires looking to buy yacht number 4, it's largely people just providing for their kids and we rightly hate those people anyway. So again not really a defence.
Yeah it’s like UBI people believe rent prices are set by something other than the maximum that the landlord can get for it. If you give people ability to pay greater rent, as say the advent of the motorized plow did, then rent goes up. Simple as that.
At the time it made no sense as a business practice, and seemed painful enough that I should have heard about it long before this. My immediate reaction was "really? I'll have to see confirmation before I treat this tweet as authoritative".

What is really amusing in hindsight was the number of people willing to pile on and argue that this was in fact totally reasonable of Apple to be doing and that we shouldn't be surprised or upset at all about it.
NANS, my explanation is that solid describes the aggregate state, and that firm is just an attribute within the solid state, basically a generalization of a mixture of sub-attributes (density/distance and cohesion)

Tight refers to density, strong to cohesion. So something within that range that's very dense and cohesive is hard, and something that isn't is soft.
The question I can't answer is "what stops a nation voting itself more income?"

If every unscrupulous politician can promise to raise the base UBI rate to get elected, what stops that?

Obviously, inflation will fix it in the relatively short term, but that's not a good result. And there's an unscrupulous politician in power.
I’m not going to rebut. But my point could not have been proven any more thoroughly... I even wonder if you are a conservative pretending to be a liberal just to try and help my comment...
Distribution indeed seems to be tricky. Out of the myriad of utilities you use, e.g. React & a string sorting library. Should they both receive the same remuneration? That feels wrong.
It's hard to imagine people won't bore to get themselves more free shit. If you look at is history and hell Ubi itself, it seems there is no limit to how much p people 'deserve' to take from others.
We used to have capital gains indexed in the UK. I've never seen an inflation allowance for interest though. I guess it would be too expensive?
It's much easier to deny that people meet a very specific set of criteria required for such a targeted entitlement, than to deny that they are citizens and alive.
That's what my wife told me as soon as I got home. If it ever happens again that's what I'll do.
Chinese AI Is Creating an Axis of Autocracy
A tabular, instantly updating set of information is one I'm frequently discussing with groups of people online, it is ridiculously handy even with the overhead of a web browser slowing things down, if it's updating live.
Of course a secure and easy to set up way to do it without the browser would be great as well.
It probably wouldn't, but what promoter would take the risk? So it serves its purpose.
>I guess many of us put more trust on the community rather than our gut feeling.

While that may be true, for me the gut feeling was in line with the fake news, which makes it even harder to spot (confirmation bias).

I never worked on iOS apps, but my consumer experience with Apple was such that I would have expected exactly this kind of behavior. They quoted me $400 for looking (!) at a just out of warranty macbook with a defective keyboard. I said I just want a new keyboard and I can replace it myself, but they wouldn't sell me one.

I just assumed that a company that treats their consumers like this also doesn't treat developers fairly.

Granted, this is my experience from a decade ago. I've never bought anything Apple since. So maybe they've changed.
Proposing a new funding model for open source
You know what? We have no idea what would happen. We should just do it and see. If it becomes a mess it will be our mess and be ours to clean up.

We can no doubt think of a million ways to calibrate the process when the need arises. Some ideas (probably not the best but its something):

Require everyone to apply for jobs and create a formal formula for it. Interviews with 1 employee, 1 employer, 1 government employee. 1 application per year seems the minimum. Permanent fines if employer or employee intentionally screws up. (not a real job opening, not showing up for the interview 3 times, etc)

Create a gov agency to repair rental homes cheaply or for free and zero interest mortgages for landlords - then hammer down rents dramatically. Invest in public transport in-to/out-of major (expensive) urban and industrial areas. Build lots of new houses fromwhere people can reach those urban centers.

etc
Snapchat IPO shares were priced at 17$. It's trading at 22.59 as I type this.
Also, it's obvious there's a lot of people using their time for more interesting things too, even despite the fact that we are pretty isolated and in a high stress situation. And I'd say that if that doesn't get so much publicity is because the spaces we have for that kind of interactions are kinda anemic in modern society (maybe due to spending most of our time working on pointless jobs?).
> Hence, the total cost of a very light to medium used WordPress site should be around 325 USD per month.

Bargain.
Ask HN: What would you like to know about typing biometrics?
Hi! I was wondering what would you like to know about (or around) the field of typing biometrics (also known as keystroke dynamics).
What are the losses they realize shipping last mile parcels?

If you're referring to agreements like their NSA with Amazon (the example from your parent post), that shouldn't be resulting in any losses. They're not legally allowed to set rates which result in a net financial loss; taking into account potential cost efficiencies from the increased volume, at the very least the NSA rates have to break even.

For other classes of parcel service, it's entirely possible they're losing money (I'm not sure). But that's because it takes a literal act of Congress for them to touch those rates. Even addressing the "cheaper to ship from China than domestically" was a situation outside of their control - it resulted from an international treaty[1] the US is a party to, and required leveraging authority beyond the USPS's purview to address the situation (in this case, by threatening to pull out of the treaty).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Postal_Union
Crisis mode: potential flaw in PhD thesis two weeks before deadline
>More than 1000 upvotes on a piece of false information[1], on a website where people are well educated and informed. HN fell to fake news.

"Fake news" is a regular thing on the tech/HN community.

The whole hype around technologies (e.g. Mongo/NoSQL, etc) is just that.

As Alan Kay put it "Programming is a Pop Culture".
It's called a "carbon fee & dividend" and an increasing number of people are advocating it.

(https://clcouncil.org/economists-statement/)

It's nowhere near enough to fund a UBI that most people could live on without additional assistance, but that's no reason not to do it. It just means you need to fund your UBI with other sources of revenue too.

And it _really_ is the best policy. Even if it did nothing to reduce emissions, it's a matter of justice. I won't tell you that you can't fly across the country every single weekend or emit a gigaton of carbon mining bitcoin but, if you do, you _really_ should reimburse me and my 2-year-old daughter for the harm you're doing to our futures. Likewise, when I heat my ridiculous suburban mansion to 80F through the New York winter, I'm harming you and your children, so I should reimburse you.

But it WILL have a great effect on emissions (if ever implemented). Probably more than any other policy we might enact.

Some of the comments around here complain about how regressive a carbon tax is. But in fact it is only regressive when not combined with the dividend. The price of a poor person's carbon footprint as a fraction of their income or wealth IS larger than that of a wealthier person. But the fact is that most poor and urban working class people's dividends will be greater than the carbon fee they pay, while people who have giant houses, travel by air a lot, etc will pay more in fees than they receive in dividends.

This page (https://citizensclimatelobby.org/household-impact-study/) has a nice chart showing the fees and where they come from for an average household in each income quintile in the USA. The expected fees for each quintile (under a $15/ton carbon fee) are $173, $219, $252, $292, $381. On another page on the same site, you can find that the expected dividend (which just depends on the number of adults/children in the household) is $288.

Lastly, this policy is currently a bill in the US House of Representatives (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_Innovation_and_Carbon_D...) and is currently "sponsored" (whatever that means) by 18% of the house. Sadly almost all democrats. I think the policy saw more republican support during the few years before the current administration, but I can't find the data too easily at this moment.
The article is all about the Europe version where the teams don't need to have sleep overs or take plane but the football team's bus.

Also pitch sizes are not strict and both width/length vary.

The comment doesn't cover the article contents.
It's not misinformation if it's part of the developer agreement.
> or support their living?

Ideally, IMO. Simply owning land is not a meaningful contribution to society. Rent from land ownership therefore disincentivizes meaningful contributions to society by creating reliable sources of income to those that don't contribute, disproportionately among the rich (who otherwise have the best means to contribute) because they disproportionately own land from which they can extract rent.

> If they sell it won't that just mean they have to pay 800k in taxes on their 1m house and then have to find another house for $1m?

Well, if land value was taxed on sale, grandma could just sit on the property until she died and not be affected by the policy at all. This is IMO not ideal because much of land value will then be lost until the next generation comes along. LVT should instead be collected on a regular basis.

Ideally, with single-tax LVT, land value is completely consumed by taxes. Any money grandma makes on the sale will be from the value of her own development and the excess value over land value the buyer expects.

That said, I believe that there are important criticisms that can be raised against Georgism. I believe that it would have to be accompanied by strict zoning laws to avoid displacing people and exploiting natural resources. I'm less concerned about grandma's little house than I am about a tax that makes things like fracking or deforestation to extract what makes the land valuable inevitable.
3. Assuming UBI has any negative impact on the value of the dollar, the fall in financial mobility you have from constantly, let's say "messing up" and losing your benefit every month would be greatly devastating. This wouldn't be a new group of people though, this would be the same homeless people we see today.
This is what I suspected the entire time lol.
> People must work. That is fundamental.

This gets less true every year. The only reason we can't have robots handling almost everything and people living lives of pure leisure (except for, say, mandatory menial tasks one day a year), is because we haven't yet figured out a way to do it fairly. And maybe the technology isn't there yet, but it will be soon.

The problem is that the people who own the robots don't see why they should give away the fruits of their R&D investment to everyone else for free. And they have a point! If you're saying "spend loads of time and money developing robots for us, and then we'll take them off you and you'll be no better off than anyone else", why would they bother developing them?

But in the long term, we need to move towards a world where automation serves humanity as a whole, instead of whichever particular corporation happens to own that particular piece of automation. I just don't know how to do it.
> Game developers and many enterprise software developers almost universally develop on windows.

Anyone doing mobile game development knows the pain of trying to develop for iOS without using a mac.
Or don’t do any of that, create a ridiculously simple tax (LVT) that has no dead weight loss, incurs no inefficiency, distorts no prices, reduces no ones freedoms, has no additional overhead (these values are already assessed/taxed in many places), and get all the same benefits.
Yet people routinely choose to get off welfare and get a job, so clearly, the thresholding can't be that bad. Obviously there's going to be some cases where some jobs and welfare package combinations don't make financial sense in the instant, if you assume no chance that the job will ever lead to a pay rise. But it works well enough most of the time.

I've argued above that in fact you will still need a complex welfare bureaucracy that looks very similar to the one we have today, given even basic constraints like "there should not be excessive levels of fraud". Deciding if people have a job or not is a trivial cost compared to the entry-level costs of just making sure you're paying people who exist and you only pay them once.

Again - does anyone have a rigorous, convincing analysis of the cost of means testing specifically? Perhaps I'm wrong, but I don't think so. Especially because people who argue for UBI do not argue for the abolition of things like disability benefits, government subsidised health insurance and various other means-tested subsidies.
That's what happens when you want to believe in symbols more than taking the time to investigate the complicated facts. And the symbol here was Apple as the big bad evil company trying to exploit developers.

Maybe it's a lesson to temper outrage before knowing facts.
It's between the lines - EU prefers or demands GAAP/conservative especially for startups versus financial engineering/stratospheric approach to growth in the US.
>They quoted me $400 for looking (!) at a just out of warranty macbook with a defective keyboard. I said I just want a new keyboard and I can replace it myself, but they wouldn't sell me one.

Do they regularly sell keyboard replacement parts? If not, why expect them to "sell you one"?

And the laptop was "out of warranty", wasn't it? How does "barely" change this?
Came here to say that :)
I've been poor. Even homeless. It definitely changes your mindset, but I'm not sure in the way you think it does.

I'm less afraid of poverty now. More able to take risks. Less afraid of "losing what I worked so hard to get".

I think what you're talking about is "the underclass" - people who have no experience of earning a wage and have lived off government benefits for multiple generations. They definitely have a different attitude to life.
Which US companies have been banned for threatening to overthrow the PRC?
I would help. The people who are suffering the most are your former coworkers. Presumably friends. Definitely people you may work with in the future.

I'd rather be known as the guy who helps than the guy who is rude about consulting rates.
That's only in a dysfunctional market (as housing is in the US). The solution is to fix the housing market by disabling NIMBYism and other such things that cause the housing market to be wholly dysfunctional.

But yes, we should probably fix that before we implement UBI.
Workaround: fork all your dependencies with minimal if any changes and add them back to your main project.

This allows you to cut-off the trickle-down funds in bad faith.
> He will spend a lot of time either angry at the situation, or spending that time also trying to get a tax break.

It is a good financial decision to spend up to "$1M * <odds of success>" to get that tax break, or another better one. (especially if the ~$500K spent on retainered-lawyers sets you up to pay less due to future tax hikes.) Economics gets weird when any of the numbers get really big, or really small.

I don't like this example though, as it doesn't detail why the tax break was so specific. Did 4/5 of them have no taxable income that year? Do all of these billionaires live in a despotic-shithole where the rule of law doesn't apply equally to everyone? (to be fair, most billionaires do. /s)
Land ownership is a fairly recent phenomenon and we got along just fine with out it.

Singapore uses this system today and is a capitalist powerhouse.

The desire to build generational wealth is natural. The enormous downstream consequences of allowing people to do that will eradicate all of the wealth anyway through violent upheaval or economic collapse. It’s happened dozens of times already, and it’ll happen again.
An old man's advice [video]
Why would it be worse? Slumlords exist because they are the only ones who accept the rent vouchers. If you just receive cold hard cash you can spend it in the conventional housing market.

Welfare isn't meant to solve addiction but it could certainly kick start someone's life after they have recovered. People think drug addicts don't deserve welfare but a UBI would prevent that stigma because nobody gets excluded.

Really the only valid concern is the first one. The rich have no interest in giving up their wealth but that is only natural.
I've actually done worse to a bad employer...

I picked up the phone, said my name, and as soon as they dropped that, I said "Oh, he's dead" and hung up. My former boss sent me a text later going "Very mature, but very funny"

Edit: Boss was the only one who had his head on straight