Wiki Contributions

Comments

Viliam30

For some reason it feels like you wrote everything twice. For example...

I’ll also pre-commit to buying at least 200 stools from your baby for $20 each in the first 2 years of its life - assuming (as is likely) that the baby actually ends up being a good donor.

and I will pre-commit to buying at least 300 stools from your baby for 20$ each in the first 2 years of its life - assuming the likely case that the baby actually ends up being a good donor.

...and there were more examples like that.

Good luck, I hope someone takes this generous offer, because it really seems like free money. But you would probably find more people with babies and needing an extra income at some other community.

Answer by Viliam20

Note that "continuous" does not need to be "linear" or similar to that. Maybe the qualia decrease exponentially with the complexity of the structure that experiences them, so maybe each particle has a technically non-zero quality, but still all particles in the universe together have less of an experience than a single human. Numbers can be technically non-zero, and yet zero-ish for most practical purposes.

Viliam31

Yeah, that it as stupid situation as I expected.

A reasonable rule would be like "a person with health problem X gets Y money", full stop. Anything else means regulating how people need to live (usually requiring them to make the worse choice) so that they do not lose the support.

Viliam20

why specifically sounds arranged in patterns through time over anything else?

We already have speech, so the progression could be something like: saying the same things (repeating what the high-status person or the the person you love said)... saying the same things together (in a religious ritual)... singing together... listening to the music (and imagining that you are singing along?)

Viliam20

The optimal solution could be to have both a human and an AI partner. (A kind of polyamory.)

Viliam31

marrying someone while on disability

Never heard this mentioned explicitly, but I assume the idea is that you would lose the money, because your spouse has an income, right?

In my country (not USA) we have the concept of "full disability" and "partial disability", and I know a guy who technically would be eligible for the partial disability, but he doesn't bother doing the paperwork, because the money he would get would not be enough to survive... and when he gets any extra income, then he loses the partial disability, because apparently this cheater is capable of work. Which is kinda sorta true, but ignores the fact that out of many possible jobs, he must be looking extra hard to find one that is compatible with his specific health problems (no sitting, but also no hard work, accessible by mass transit because of no sitting in a car, etc.), and while such jobs exist, they are quite rare. (Basically, "partial disability" only makes sense for people who are also supported by their family.)

For this guy, UBI even on the "can't really survive on it" level would be already a huge improvement.

Viliam80

days starting with S

September 1st

September 2nd

September 3rd

...

Viliam20

That said, there are also discussions that suggest the poverty trap - i.e. overwhelmingly strong labor disincentives for poor, from outrageously high effective marginal tax rates from benefits fade-out/tax kicking-in - may be partly overrated, so smoothing the earned-to-net income function may not help as much as some may hope.

I just skimmed the linked article, but it seems to me that it makes some "spherical cow" assumptions. For example, if you get a job, even low-paying, you should gain more money on the wage than you lose at social benefits. But you also need to consider additional costs of having job, for example the commute. And that's often the problem in practice, that "wage > benefits", but "wage - commute < benefits". The article seems to ignore such things.

I agree that even with UBI, people with special needs should get extra.

Viliam20

Thank you for the answers, they are generally nice but this one part rubbed me the wrong way:

And this is before factoring in the "economic value" of better psychological and physical health of people who work on small farms vs. those who eat processed food on their couches that is done from the crops grown on monoculture mega-farms, and do nothing. 

If I live to see a post-scarcity society, I sincerely hope that I will be allowed to organize my remaining free time as I want to, instead of being sent to work on a small farm for psychological and physical health benefits. I would rather get the same benefits from taking a walk with my friends, or something like that.

I do not want to dismiss the health concerns, but again these are two different problems -- how to solve technological unemployment, and how to take care of one's health in the modern era -- which can be solved separately.

Viliam42

To me it seems like UBI and negative income tax are just two ways to describe the same thing, two ways to write the same equation that give the same numerical results. It's like arguing why 2x+6 is better than 2(x+3). More precisely, negative income tax sounds like "UBI, but you need to do tax reports".

My other objections are relatively trivial compared to this, so shortly:

Simplicity of the system is a good trait, in my opinion. The current systems has various costs (time and money, but maybe more importantly, opportunities wasted by perverse incentives) associated with proving that you are eligible for some benefit. Plus you need to pay the people who verify all this evidence. Making the benefit universal would remove these costs.

Load More