Taxes. Productivity is at an all time high.

People can donate their time to help others, and they still can work at whatever jobs they can find. Basic income isn't about keeping people from working - it is about keeping people from losing their homes when they are out of work.

I do all kinds of productive stuff in my spare time. Why would that change if I had more of it?

Because they have a coup every few years so they have practice in making it run smoothly?

Let's replace your anecdotal evidence with some information gathered by the Pew Research Center:

Smartphone Owners in 2014:

By Sex: 61% of men and 57% of women have a smartphone.
By Education: 44% of high school grad or less, 67% of some college, and 71% of college grads (or better) have a smartphone.
By Income: 47% of less than $30K/yr, 53% of $30K - $49.9K, 61% of $50K - $74.9K, and 81% of $75K+ have a smartphone.
By Age: 83% of 18-29, 74% of 30-49, 49% of 50-64, and 19% of 65+ years old people have a smartphone.
By Location: 64% of urban, 60% of suburban, and 43% of rural residents have a smartphone.

The percentages for the population who are likely to use a city bus doesn't look "quite high" to me. This demonstrates the dangers of anecdotal evidence. You normally associate with people like yourself and assume that just because your social group owns or use something then everyone else does too.

Seems like a good idea until you realize that the majority of the people currently using the bus service aren't the ones carrying the smartphones or using social media apps.

This reminds me of the pothole app that allowed people to tell their city where the potholes were and then someone figured out that only the wealthy neighborhoods were getting adequate road maintenance because of the app (and webpage).

I often find people don't seem to understand when talking about countries like Pakistan or Egypt that the military, police and intelligence services aren't just bureaucracies within the government. They are institutions that have a life of their own, a life that is parallel to the civilian government. And when push comes to shove, the nominal subservience of the security services to civilian authority goes out the window.

And here in the US, people are already crossing the line from respecting and honoring the men and women who serve this country in uniform to revering the military as an institution, and that we should never do.

The myth, by the way, was never just about killer machines per se. It was about unintended consequences, like the myth of King Midas or of Pandora's Box. The killer robot trope came down to us by way of legends of the Golem, which often come with a not-so-subtle warning about hubris.

It was only when the golem legend was translated into sci-fi that it became laughably implausible -- at least until recently. So many bad stories recycled this bit of mythological lumber for its scare value, and peopled the story with cardboard characters. In the old golem stories the creature is created by good and wise men, who can't always contain the consequences of their well-intentioned actions.

This is not some new-fangled "gee I don't know how to design a 'computerized' user interface" thing. Poorly thought out and over-elaborate controls are embedded deep within GM design culture, and have been for at least fifty years if not longer.

As proof I present the heat controls which I remember totally ruining my Mom's otherwise awesome '68 Skylark Sport Coupe for her.

To call for heat or air conditioning, you frob the thumb wheel until you think the bar graph is indicating the temperature you might want. The problem, as you'll see if you look at the worm gear mechanism inside, is that in order to give enough mechanical advantage to work the cables with a thumbwheel, the wheel has to turn maybe five full revolutions to move through the entire range. On top of that, you manipulate the wheel through the exposed arc that sits above the panel, which means you can move it at most about 45 degrees with a swipe of your thumb, or 8 swipes to get a full 360 revolution, or forty swipes to go from max heat to max AC. All the while you were supposed to be watching the bar graph instead of the road. Many's the time I heard my sainted mother swearing under her breath as she tried to get a little heat or AC out of the damned thing.

If I recall, one "helpful" feature of the bar graph was that it turned blue when going from heat to AC and orange when going the other way. This is another very GM touch. When I was in college I had a friend who had an Oldsmobile from the same era with a bar graph speedo that turned red when it exceeded 100MPH. You can imagine how safe *that* feature was in the hands of a young male driver.

I fail to see how. You claimed "Regardless, without public corporate ownership, the pool of capital available for companies to build their businesses would be a small fraction of what it is." That would only be true if some alternative source of funding weren't available.

Well, I already pointed out central planning. Have the US Government write out a check for $100M to any new business that asks for it. You now have lots of capital available for companies to build their businesses, which was your point. Sure, doing it that way would cause a million other problems, but my point was just that the way the US does things is not the only way they can be done.

We've already passed that point, if you count things like minefields. (and yes, the engineer who dreamed them up should be smacked)

I don't really expect to have a comfortable lifestyle in retirement, and my personal income is probably in the top few percentiles. For the reasons you state combined with declining birthrates that seems inevitable. Who is going to pay for the retirements of the baby boomers? They can save up all the money in the world, but that money is only useful if somebody is willing to take it from them in exchange for some good or service, and when they're the ones with all the money and none of the labor they'll find themselves parting with quite a bit of it.

Yup, and I don't own a horse like my great-grandparents probably did.

I do live in a smaller house than my parents did at my age, despite my income probably being in a higher percentile than theirs was at the time.

Technology is really the only area where people are richer than they've been in the past, since the nature of technology is to cause depreciation.

There is still scarcity in a world where there is absolutely no labor. If you tried to extract an infinite amount of energy to power industry the waste heat would make the Earth hotter than the sun. Indeed, an infinite demand for energy can't be satisfied if only due to the inevitable heat-death of the universe.

Obviously things could be a lot cheaper than they are today. A post-labor society would be far wealthier than today's society. However, there is still scarcity.

Suppose I'd like a house with a nice view unimpeded by anything but trees and beautiful landscape as far as the horizon? There is only so many square miles of beautiful landscape on the Earth, so not everybody can exclusively own it in this way.

Plus, if we're going to strip-mine the entire surface of the earth in a quest for free iron, there will be even less room for scenery. :)

I do think a post-labor society is inevitable, and enviable as well. It still will need some way of prioritizing conflicting desires, and that will probably involve some kind of currency. Maybe you want a really fast computer to do research on, and I'd like a bigger back yard. Currency lets me get more than a fair share of land in exchange for you getting more than a fair share in CPU time.

Ah, so government-managed welfare is a bad idea, just like evolution and climate change? :)

If charity works so well, then why are so many people stressed out at the thought of losing their jobs and being forced to depend on it?

Isn't that a bit like saying that without central planning there would be no way for businesses to start, since no government agency would be able to write the check needed to start an approved business?

There is no question that public ownership of companies is a major force driving the US economy. That doesn't mean that there aren't other ways of doing things.

Differentiate what from what?

The matter white dwarfs, neutron stars, and black holes composed of are fairly different from the matter we normally encounter day-to-day, and yet they're not identical to each other. In the last case we can't really be sure what it is like, lacking a well-supported theory of quantum gravity.