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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 16th, 2023

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  • Still based on taxes, they know how to make it work.

    The basic logistics or the least of the open questions.

    If every one gets 2k a month, how do prices react? Social security participants are only a subset of participants in the economy.

    If everyone’s compensation is equal, guaranteed, and sufficient assuming prices didn’t just screw up, can you still get people doing work like sanitation? Social security is from a mindset that no productive prior is no longer required. It pays more to someone that made 100k a year than someone that made 50k a year, so your get proportional to what you put in.




  • You can’t just do a "study’ of UBI. Every single study attempt I’ve seen looks like: -They have funding from something or another, they do not model the taxation half at all -They end up means testing because they can’t model taxation, so they fixate on those in need exclusively. -They tend to last maybe a year or two. The beneficiaries know this is a limited term benefit and need to make the most of it. -They do not target everyone, so the local market won’t even notice the difference in base earning power. You still have lots of poor people excluded from the study. -They did not just force people into the program, participants had to actively seek out participation.

    What the experiments have repeatedly proven is that welfare can work to give motivated poor people a needed reprieve to get their feet on solid ground, which we already knew. We haven’t had an actual “study” of real UBI, just studies on welfare that they say is about UBI. About the only difference from actual welfare programs is that the participants are not audited to try to make sure the benefit shuts off the second they get a job. Which may be a good indicator at least that auditing the benefits could stand to be more lax.

    UBI might work, but to date we haven’t actually tried it in any useful way. We have universal income in some places, but it’s generally well short of even basic.


  • We have voluntary programs, they are called charities and they gave so little participation that they have to pick and choose their battles and ensure they spend money on those that care.

    Also hard to know if the charity is efficient, competent, and free of corruption.

    UBI needs universal participations on contributor and recipient to maybe work. Hard to say even then since the nature of it resists meaningful experiments, and the few actual programs tend to fall well short of even “basic” income.



  • Right, that Steam Deck and myriad of PC handhelds I think is why I don’t consider the Switch quite so uniquely gimmicky… It’s a recognition that normal controller games can be played in a ‘tablet’ with better controls more than a particularly unique, possibly patent protected thing like the wiimotes, or the Wii-U tablet+main display, or the DS dual screens…

    In short, if they made their low-spec games ported to PC it’s quite likely to be a nice additional revenue stream without having to compromise the game to be workable on PC. If the Wii-Motes were still a big thing, then Nintendo would have a hard time trying to make PC ports without screwing up their console.









  • Of course, the ideal is not just about discontinuing labor participation due to disability, but because we actually want some time insofar as we can afford it.

    A mark of, ideally, a bit of ‘overproduction’ is that we can work fewer hours and/or fewer years. If our ambitions and capabilities allow us to work 32 hour workweeks for a decade and then nope on out on retirement in our 30s for the rest of our lives, that would be a pretty good economic state to be in. A fantasy in practical terms, but a concept to keep in mind as a hypothetical if we ever do manage amazing ‘productivity’ without enough ‘ambition’ to consume it all.