I'm replying to you since you got the most upvotes :-)

I take issue with your main point: that not having to work and receiving financial aid cause depression. Did anyone receiving the $1400 pandemic check from the government feel down about it? The notion is frankly preposterous.

From this, we can infer that reducing one's labor burden also doesn't cause depression.

So depression might come from elsewhere: maybe boredom, existential angst, who knows. But it's not pertinent to the debate around UBI.

Now, we can talk about the financial toll of paying taxes for UBI, or the risk of inflation (there is none - that comes from increasing the money supply not incomes - although political machinations tend to preserve wealth at the top), or the collapse of various service industries that profit from underemployment. But those are probably best analyzed in simulation, since like with ventures and startups, there is no way to predict the benefits to society if 1% succeed even if 99% fail or are idle.

My personal take is that sentiment for UBI will fall along political lines. We can use other spectrums for reference:

* female vs male
* positive reinforcement vs tough love
* liberal vs conservative

Since HN is mostly composed of tech workers, I'd predict a male-dominated slant with a preference for tough love and conservative values. It would have an inherent bias towards work over caregiving. So the majority of HN might disfavor UBI, regardless of any actual merits it provides.

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I decided to get an estimate of UBI support on HN based on the sentiments of the replies here:

https://deepai.org/chat

please analyze the text from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41638103 (the text follows the news.ycombinator.com forum comment structure).
divide the text into a list of replies.
note that any line starting with ">" is a comment from a parent reply.
determine the sentiment of each reply as to whether it favors UBI or disfavors UBI.
count the replies favoring UBI, the replies disfavoring UBI, and the replies that are neutral/defensive/etc about UBI.

* Favors UBI: 12 replies
* Disfavors UBI: 26 replies
* Neutral/Defensive: 12 replies

Unfortunately, it started saying "I currently cannot access external websites, including the one you provided" so I had to stop at that preliminary estimate.

I also tried changing the first line of the prompt and with manually pasting the page between "<< ... >>":

please analyze the text between "<<" and ">>" that I've pasted after this prompt (the text was obtained from a news.ycombinator.com forum and follows the same comment structure).

That returned similar results.

https://chatgpt.com/ has an arbitary length limit that can't separate prompt from context data, which makes it generally useless for this type of work. https://iask.ai has similar limitations which negate its usefulness also.

But going by the first estimate, it looks like about 1/4 of HN users favor UBI, 1/2 disfavor UBI, and 1/4 are neutral.

It would be interesting to see this analysis on a larger sample size.

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With 50% of HN seemingly disfavoring UBI, since we're essentially thought leaders in tech, it's highly unlikely that society as a whole will vote to adopt UBI.

I think that's ..sad, for lack of a better word.

We're basically saying that even though we know automation better than anyone, we don't believe that it can lead to a decrease in labor, or that its proceeds should be used to benefit everyone.

I think that's an abdication of our role in working to make the world a better place, and why we got started in tech in the first place.

So without a viable plan of action for getting to UBI, it's probably time to form an independent organization outside of public government and private industry. One that's opt-in, with a commitment to contribute a portion of one's future profits to an even payout of UBI, without means testing.

After a lifetime of struggle with countless losses and no big win, despite hard work on a level that most people probably wouldn't believe, I would opt-in in a heartbeat. And I'm going to make it my life's work to focus on manifesting self-actualization for everyone, starting with bringing about UBI. That's how strongly I believe in its potential to change the world for the better, for us and for future generations.