skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Payroll taxes are both regressive, substantial and non-refundable: 7.65% on each of the employer and employee totaling 15.3%, which stops when you make too much money. This accounts for a further $6273 if you haven’t taken the employee amount into consideration (I didn’t see it in your breakdown) and $3136 if you did but neglected that this is paid on your behalf by your employer and you never see it. This alone zeros out the net credit you mentioned.

Then of course since we’re comparing the rest of the world to the US, you need to add a couple hundred dollars per person per month - easily $10K for a family per year - for health insurance that gives them a $5K out of pocket maximum per year they can’t afford so they don’t die of cancer (but can’t afford an early diagnosis) and can’t afford their insulin. All of which is included in the tax burden and covered in Europe and Canada and Australia and New Zealand and Taiwan, to name a few. This amounts to a regressive 25% tax if you’re comparing directly (as good health insurance costs rich and poor the same, but represents a disproportionately higher amount of take-home pay for the poor).

I never understood the “freeloader” narrative, payroll taxes easily cancel it all out.
New Relic changes business model, open sources agents and instrumentation
Asking to be paid for work is not being rude.

Spending 10 minutes on the phone to answer questions is one thing, as long as they are respectful, but more than that means that they want you to work for them.
UBI reminds me of Bagehot's statement on the English Constitution being split into two parts: the dignified and the efficient.

It's also useful to think about the economy as being divided in two halves: one that keeps people alive by making available basics like food and shelter (the efficient), and the other that is where we pursue our hopes and dreams (the dignified). UBI plays in the first half by making sure people can at least subsist. They may then choose to what degree they participate in the second half.

If you just want a few extra creature comforts, then you can do gig work when you need it. If you dream big, then start prepping to interview at a FAANG while UBI pays the rent on a modest apartment.
The big risk of UBI is that it can lead to a rise in populism.
This is very obvious in the former communist countries of Eastern Europe. A large part of the population is fully dependent on the state for pensions or some sort of basic income and lots are even working as civil servants. This sizeable section of the population is very susceptible to populist promises or scares. “If X wins, they will cut your pension” type of rhetoric.
This has very perverse and non-intuitive consequences. People vote for obviously corrupt leaders in the hope that they would share the spoils with them, and to some extent they do.
If a western country adopts UBI, I can easily see a similar path. Maybe not immediately but over 20-30 years as more and more people become dependent and know nothing else.
This is a very slippery slope.
Surely you believe that some percentage of the poor are that way as an avoidable result of their choices? If you believe that, reasoning about whether UBI will have a general propensity to improve or degrade that outcome seems a sensible part of the conversation to me. (If you don’t believe that, that’s ok, but then we disagree.)
>The government, unlike corporations for example, is accountable to the public in elections.

For now.
Control elections, establish favourable policies, silence influential thinkers going against the popular order.
I don't know. In Europe almost all of these things (welfare, social security, minimum wage) have been tied to inflation since forever. Sometimes they get cut, sometimes they get raised.
This wouldn't prevent you sending cash to the developer in an envelope, just like Github existing doesn't prevent you hosting your project elsewhere
> In the event that Apple receives any notice or claim from a payment provider [...] Apple will have the right to retain its commission on the sale of that Licensed Application, notwithstanding the refund of the price to the End-User.

"From a payment provider" means a chargeback, e.g. a customer calls their credit card company the charge was fraudulent, and the credit card company files a dispute code against payment provider (usually Visa 83/JCB 546/Mastercard 4853/Mastercard 4863 depending on the case). In this case it's not uncommon to not refund the fee. In fact, many payment providers will also charge you extra fee for the dispute (e.g. Stripe charges $15[1]).

There's also filing fee in case the merchant trying to fight the dispute and lose. The fee varies by network: $500 for Visa, at least $600 for Mastercard.

[1]: https://stripe.com/docs/disputes
How are you more at the mercy of the rich if you have more money?

Consider a very smart and very poor person. You walk up to him and say "Hey, want 1200 dollars?" Do you think he'll say "No, that would increase my dependence on the rich." I don't.

I just can't conceive of the mechanism. Slum lords try to separate the poor from their money now. Pretty much everyone does. The only difference is, the poor would have more money.

There's probably going to be predation on the mentally ill or incompetent. That could be solved by helping those people, limiting what they can buy, or harshly punishing the exploiters - some combination. But even if they were cheated out of their UBI I don't see how they'd be worse off (without assuming people wouldn't help the mentally incompetent if they had UBI which seems dubious to me).
I'm the opposite. I've thought about deflation for half a decade. Interestingly the conclusion is always the same but with a different coat of paint. The central bank stimulus doesn't reach the real economy and by "real economy" I mean the parts of the economy that are being used to measure inflation.

Inflation happens when lots of money chases too few goods or workers. We see it in housing, stocks, perhaps also education and healthcare. The money does go somewhere but not to where it is most effective. Why is there no inflation in salaries? Because of underemployment. Companies can always fill their open positions and pick among the cheapest applicants. Why is there no inflation in other consumer goods? Production is happening primarily in developing countries with an even larger surplus of labor.

The answer is probably a little boring and obvious. Give money to people that will spend it immediately, rather than to people who will try to convert it into inflation proof assets. The coronavirus related economic stimulus packages are pretty much the only policies that even attempt to do this.

If they overdo it can easily result in hyperinflation but I think inflation is overdue.
Red Bull in Thailand and in the west come from the same origin, Chaleo Yoovidhya, the Red Bull founder.

The west Sriracha was developed by a Vietnam immigrant. You can see his recipe as one of many available Sriracha variants at that time.
Calling people idiots without citing sources is really unproductive. If you're right, cite sources, so folks can be educated. Trusting a random hn user who doesn't back up their claims is something even @hn_check would scoff at.
It has been like this since day 1 — the developer agreement says Apple has the optional to retain their 30%, but in practice, I have not heard of anyone hitting it.
> I see this line of thinking a lot, but it's a bad one.

You can't just state that and it be true.

> It's understandable that people think like this in a place like SF where landlords have grabbed up a lot of salary increases, but it really doesn't work that way.

Yet, it does work that way. In every city I have ever lived in, it's worked that way. For rent in particular, any excuse that more can be paid leads to higher rent prices. A company built a new office nearby? Rent goes up. More "affluent" people are moving into a particular area? Rent goes up. And so on.

> If it was true, rents would keep climbing to 90+% of incomes but they don't.

Why? That's not the implication. Rent increases are done in a cleverly predatory way. Often times, rent is increased in small to medium steps but frequently, and the notice of such rent increases is notified in the minimum (if that) time legally required. That often leaves renters stuck because there are other, big surprise, expensive barriers to moving. Rent is a predatory system that maximizes the amount of rent that can be collected. That doesn't mean it goes to 90% of incomes as you claim, which nobody else is claiming.

My overall point is not about just rent. By providing UBI and not putting other protections and improvements in place, a capitalistic society will not just sit around and leave meat on the bones. Things will simply shift and people will still be in poverty. A poor educational system will still be there. Creditors will still be around. Etc.
Micro looks nice, but Nano just works when SSHing from Windows, Micro requires some X things to support copy and paste.
Actually, elsewhere on the thread, a few other folks note that this behavior did not occur for them, even though the terms allow it.

Unclear whether it happened in this case.
Do you need Universal Basic Income, or could you target increase social spending on the poorest and most needy in society instead?
First, they don't even cover the cost of their credit card processing. They even used to match donations up to $5000. This is clearly not a profit center for them.

What it is, actually, is excellent long-term business sense. They know that maintaining open source is draining, often thankless and demoralizing. Making sure that their best assets are provided for is just smart.

But also, your attitude is wishful thinking, like Linux on grandma's desktop. And are you seriously implying that Github isn't a FOSS platform? That seems intellectually dishonest at this stage.
I can't tell from your tone if you are joking or not. I hope you are? Your utopia sounds a lot like Brave New World to me.
What do you follow to get deeper and diverse understanding of technology skills?
Like I do follow changelog, reading article, courses, etc.
As soon as I feel comfortable maintaining a Crystal server in production I think I'll switch to it. Last I tried it, things broke and shards required some effort to maintain every version update. I'm eagerly looking forward to their 1.0 and hoping they stabilize a lot more.
Hi! I regularly donate to CCL, but I haven't seen a way of volunteering that I felt would be an effective use of my time. (I'm not especially eloquent or charismatic in person)

What do you do for them?

And why can't HR 763 get any republican sponsors? I vaguely recall this policy seeing more republican support in previous session (though I could be misremembering).
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Business Quotes to Inspire for Success
Apparently those prices were determined mainly by bureaucratic means. Prices encapsulate production costs and demand for a product therefore in a socialist commonwealth bureaucrats and even supercomputers would have to base production on market information using data from capitalist era.

By the fall of the SSSR the black market of illegally imported goods constituted a huge chunk of the soviet economy.

Also I find intriguing how I got downvoted just by questioning. Makes you wonder how wisely those mod powers are being used.
Confirmation bias is usually as a result of previous behaviour allowing us to make assumptions about how something would respond/act. Confirmation bias in this situation is because it sounds in line with how Apple operate elsewhere.
Do you think that asking people to read -- and potentially answer a simple captcha-like comprehension question -- about content before amplifying it could help in situations like this?

(Twitter is apparently experimenting[1] with the former approach)

[1] - https://www.theverge.com/21286855/twitter-articles-prompt-un...
Counterpoint: downvoting is how Hacker News has maintained a comparatively high quality focused discussion while having only one full time moderator. It's not without its disadvantages - certain things will get instaflagged off the front page, especially "sexism in tech" stories. But it's like a firewall. If you don't have one, you get pwned eventually.

Occasionally you get "Boston Bomber" moments, and something true gets downvoted. That is on the poster to figure out why and how to present it in a way that will be accepted.

(I have 60k karma, so I know how to play ranked competitive HN, but even I still get downvoted occasionally if I'm lazy about sourcing or needlessly confrontational)

(edit: first downvote received in less than thirty seconds. Walked into that one, I suppose. Now leaving the edit window at +3. Sorry, +8. You're not really supposed to threadsit your own comments like this, but since we're talking about the voting system I thought I'd mention it)
Friend, you are going to be waiting for a very, very long time.

In the meantime, every day OSS project maintainers get burned out, depressed, and often called mean names and there is no viable mechanism for them to get paid for it. CodeFund shut down, Flattr is not a significant player - I first heard of it in this thread.

Frankly, the network effects of GH make them the only viable place for this to happen in the medium future.
Stylish. I'm restyling sites with poor typography like Hacker News to make them more readable on my HiDPI laptop. I also use Vimium and ad blockers.
I guess I'm not following your counter argument. The reason SF housing prices have gone up so much over he last 20 years is because people need to live there to get the job they want. If you can live anywhere...wouldn't that mean only the people who need to life in SF to do their work would live there? People who don't need the service job money would just move out. I'm just missing the issue here. When you decouple housing from working, the equilibrium would simply move out; you would no longer have a force keeping people in.
One of Apple’s main adversaries, Samsung, has been taken to court for paying students to manipulate social media against their competitors.

And given Apple’s stance against the bread and butter of less scrupulous companies (privacy intrusion and data mining), it would be no surprise if there are many other people who are literally paid to make them look bad at any cost.
This state of mind, from being around the evidence of death .. may well be both good and not unusual.

There's quite a lot of evidence that dissociation induced by drugs like psylocybin in controlled circumstances help terminally ill people come to terms with impending death. A state of mediation on the fundamental mortality we face is useful.

Also this (unrelated) https://www.theguardian.com/society/2020/jul/25/death-anxiet...

Stoics might call it a sense of resignation. Quiet acceptance. Luis Prima had the outlook I like best: enjoy yourself, it's later than you think.

https://youtu.be/n7VT2EHa0b4
^ is quite obvious if you’ve tried to use any keyboard shortcuts in the terminal while a program is running.
So for Germany, that'd mean it ought to be lower than our current social programs? They provide an okay living, and there's not a lot of incentive to work, which is why we have a lot of long-term unemployment.
Not only was the original story incorrect, but the top comment defending the incorrect information was also wrong.
Well I’ll just say that if you were lasing real violent people in the eyes, like the okc bombers, then I would maybe look the other way. That’s all.
> Why do they defend such an awful practice if it really happened?

(do you mean "didn't really happen"?)

Controversialists work like that. There is no position in defence of power that people won't argue for, and have a little circle of people cheering them on.
Andrew Yang says he don’t like the name Universal Basic Income. He rather prefer Freedom Money. I do agree. It sounds good.
The current situation is similar in the US, except for the extra enabling legislation. Copyright law was never intended to completely prevent the secondary market, because nobody envisioned technology that would make ownership transfer impossible without making copies— a consumer would always have an “original” that the author was paid for and could be given away freely.
South Africa to produce faster Covid-19 test kits by the end of 2020
Agreed. Generalizing based on assumptions is very useful. Using those generalizations (e.g. assuming the apple thing is true) to reinforce beliefs is incredibly harmful
With my tongue firmly pressed in cheek, I think you're being charitable to imply that most loud FOSS champions are currently making any meaningful attempt to send money to developers.

No, this is all about hating Github/Microsoft because they are big and because they won. Nothing in my comment is remotely controversial to realists.
This was something npm was actually thinking about: https://twitter.com/izs/status/755802779432562688
Some people do, some people don't. The threshold is surmountable for some people, but it could be a lot lower.

> "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."

I strongly disagree. For one, there's a lot less room for fraud if it's something that everybody gets. Secondly, the government already needs to know that people exist. People get born, they go to school, they pay taxes, they vote, they die.

> "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."

I would prefer those not to be means-tested, but equal for everybody. If you're disabled, you get disability benefits on top of your basic income, and you get to keep them even if you do manage to get a job despite your disability. Similarly, I'd like to see health insurance as part of that basic income.

The only place to test people's income would be for paying taxes. Basic income takes care of everything else. (I suspect even progressive taxation might be replaced with a single flat tax rate in the basic income is high enough.)
You Want to See My Data? I Thought We Were Friends
Principles of high-quality database integration tests in Go
Elite University is not about the learning for many people, it's the networking and jumpstart up the ladder? If you want to learn, even pedestrian University and community colleges can do what you need but sometimes what you buy is not education but a 'foot in the door'.
This is not just "Microsoft Engineer", it is Michael Larabel, the principal author of phoronix.com.
> You work because you want to lead a somewhat nice life, where you're able to afford things. UBI (at least the more serious proposals) would cover just the very basics: You'll be able to afford a roof over your head, food and other such basics. Want to afford some nice things? Need to work.

Situation in Germany for unemployment / welfare: 450sqft apartment, utilities included, TV, smart phone, 400€/mo cash. Where are those serious proposals that suggest making the UBI pay less than the current social programs?
An abandoned seaside town in Cyprus is about to reopen
Cosmic tango between the small and the large
> (do you mean "didn't really happen"?)

I messed up (just edited the comment to correct), what I mean is in a hypothetical scenario where Apple really did this, why would you defend them?
People are emotional and ideological with these matters. I don't think it's HK people's fault. However I do think understanding and communication is the key. Waging wars on ideological differences is toxic and hiding real issues. E.g a lot of sensible conversation has been drowned in the noise of social media.
You don’t think it’s the high demand for housing in SF, combined with limited supply to meet that demand, that allows landlords to raise prices?

I suspect you’re used to thinking of an information economy where supply is effectively unlimited and “best services command top dollar” is the principal factor in pricing.
What does that do? I mean you can walk in 1G just fine, so probably we could go there, take a walk/sit there in 1.6G, and leave, right?

That means that if we put a 100km wide structure around it, we can service it easily(?) even without robots.
Do we know that those things aren’t pointless (more specifically, temporary gains)?

For many people, rent + other compulsory costs do exceed or exactly meet income. That’s precisely the problem.
Personally, I really hate this comment, for several reasons.

First, let's consider the price of the rent. Assume for a moment that somebody manages to fix all mental health problems, alcoholism and so on, and that magically everyone manages to find a good job that pays reasonably well. This is supposedly the dream land of the pure capitalists: everyone works and is productive and so no handouts are received. Well, what would you suppose happens to the rent in this situation? If everyone is able to pay, then rents would go up, wouldn't they? So the difference between UBI and this is only that in one case people don't necessarily have to work, while in the latter case they have to spend 8+ of their lives doing stuff they may not like.

What this means is that your main point is simply that you don't want people to have money to pay for housing, because that may make prices go up for you. You are literally advocating that some people must be homeless so that life for us is easier.

Secondly, the rent argument consistently ignores the fact that if you don't have to work, you can go live wherever you want. One could go live in Alaska and buy 1km2 of land for 10$ because who gives a shit? construct their own igloo or something and then live there forever. This would additionally free them up to spend a larger part of UBI on other products. Instead there is this weird assumption that people will forever cluster in SF or other highly populated centers, because apparently humans are ants and like to breathe pollution.
Grocery store is very different from a soup kitchen.

It’s much harder to repurpose a bowl of soup (where you have to give the bowl/spoon back) than a bag of rice.
I believe that it's a mistake to compare sponsorship and a monthly pool as the OP suggests, as they are motivated by completely different instincts.

Patreon vs. Humble Bundle, as I said elsewhere.
High level summary & FAQ: https://energyinnovationact.org/how-it-works/?cn-reloaded=1

Some pages about forecasted household/economic impact: https://citizensclimatelobby.org/household-impact-study/

The actual text of the bill: https://www.congress.gov/bill/116th-congress/house-bill/763/...

(It's pretty short. If you're a native speaker of english I guess I would allocate 20-40 minutes?)

A signed letter by thousands of economists: https://clcouncil.org/economists-statement/

(in case you like appeals to authority)
> The difference is that UBI would be something like a right

The notion of a right does not include material implementation of that right for you by others, it merely states that you have a right to earn it and keep it by your own work and effort.
Are you sure? free for me at least.
At least where I am (Germany), the cheapest beef is from further away and the local beef is more expensive.
I don't think land is fixed in supply. We can build up and down and in the far future, into space. Either way, we are seemingly far from land being the bottleneck at the moment.