China's new regard for environmental safety can also be interpreted as a failure in the older model of disregarding the environment.

Rather like how the US laws were passed due due to failures in its older model.

> main reasoning behind UBI is the crime threat created by the poor

That's news to me. Source please?

Checking Wikipedia - nope, don't see that listed as a factor. Checking Google Scholar found https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w25538/w255...:

- One commonly cited reason to adopt a UBI is the combination of labor-displacing technological change –journalist Annie Lowrey calls this“the robot apocalypse” (Lowrey 2018)–and rising inequality and wage stagnation.

- Alternatively, a UBI might be seen as a response to perceived inadequacies --ineffectiveness, inefficiencies,unfairness, contingency, or insufficiency --of the current social safety net.

https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/full/10.1146/annurev-polis... lists:

- Those proposals share with recent versions of UBI a commitment to the view that a share of the wealth produced by all in common, or by previous generations, should be redistributed to all in the form of a direct payment to individuals.

- In a context of systemic discrimination against African-Americans and the resulting widespread unemployment and poverty, Martin Luther King, Jr. [2010 (1967)], the Black Panther Party, and James Boggs (1968) also considered guaranteed income as a strategy.

- Meanwhile, feminists, including the Wages for Housework movement in the 1970s, also discussed an income separate from labor as a way to weaken the prominence of the male breadwinner model

- Milton Friedman [thought] it would reduce the paternalistic and intrusive state bureaucracy required to decide who, among the poor, merits assistance

While there does seem to be evidence that UBI reduces crime, that appears to be a supporting argument, not the main one.

I strongly doubt the Black Panther Party would have supported increased police funding instead of UBI. Friedman's argument was "market forces ... accomplish wonderful things" but "cannot ensure a distribution of income that enables all citizens to meet basic economic needs".

I therefore believe your position does not have a solid foundation.

> and next year will become a non-US person for tax purposes?

The US has an expatriation tax. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expatriation_tax#United_States . And the US isn't currently accepting expatriation requests, which require an in-person interview, because of covid. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29745981

And US politicians have threatened to pass laws to make it harder to use expatriation as a tax-avoidance mechanism. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ex-PATRIOT_Act .

So I don't think you understand the actual details.

Further, his leaving for this purpose would greatly decrease the influence of the Gates Foundation, and limit his ability to visit the US, where he has the most influence.

> but no foreign capital will come in

Yes, I got that - you want the entire world to be a tax haven, catering to the richest of the rich, with warnings of the dire consequences should there be the slightest restriction in the free flow of capital.

> it is a country for the 1%, or even less.

8 billion people on the planet * 1% = 80 million. Population of the US = 330 million.

By your numbers, the US is NOT a place for at least 250 million of the current population. You've implicitly agreed that that's a bad thing, but you seem to think increased police funding is the better way to improve it? Note that the US already pays a lot in police funding, which doesn't seem to have helped.

> the end of the good old U.S.

I don't know what that means. Why would the US will break up because of this?

> simply become an irrelevant backwater

When did Brazil become an irrelevant backwater? Does Embraer no longer produce planes?

Brazil is ranked #12 in GDP by country.

> Do you want to be like the EU where people immigrate mostly for the "free stuff", and sometimes never work at all again after moving in?

Odd then that all the people I know who immigrated to the EU work. Given your earlier statements, I'm going to need some stronger evidence for that claim.

Nevertheless, since I support UBI, knowing that some people will sit around smoking pot all day while watching the surf, absolutely yes. Yet you sound like you're surprised?

I also expect that a lot of FOSS developers will jump at the chance to work on software projects used around the world, without having to worry about where the money comes from.

I think the benefits of the latter will far outweigh the former.

Famously, UB40 get their name from the unemployment form all of the band founders needed to sign, as they were unemployed when the founded the band. Famously, J. K. Rowling wrote the first Harry Potter book while living on benefits.