"all those "saved" watthours will get sucked up by their subscribers' homes. Then what, shut down the datacenter until things get warm again?"

Why assume the saved watt-hours just disappear? If local residential demand absorbs them, Google can still buy power from elsewhere. The interesting economic question is why Google finds it cheaper to pay consumers to curtail usage than to acquire additional supply through the grid. That suggests congestion, transmission limits, [price gouging, psychological noise,] or peak pricing are the real bottlenecks, not total electricity production.

Is he too lazy?

If no human will help me, is does asking a chatbot seem better than winging it on my own?

When's the last time a human failed you?

Copilot: That argument assumes AI can only repeat what it has seen before. But some of the most interesting AI results, including in mathematics, involve combining known ideas into solutions humans had not previously written down. If synthesis never produced anything new, those results should be impossible. The real debate is whether those successes are common or rare, not whether they can happen at all.

Copilot: A typical chatbot exchange appears to consume only a few watt-hours. Keeping a human in a heated/cooled office with a computer and network connection for the same interaction may consume an order of magnitude more electricity.

"It will never fly in the US, unless there is a huge political shift." Has Trump suggested basic-income-adjacent policies?

Gemini:

"Universal" means unconditional, but more importantly, it offers a path away from total market dependency.

Imagine funding basic income through direct currency issuance, with payouts fully indexed to inflation so buying power remains immune to price gouging. Combine that baseline financial security with open, localized technology--think repairable hardware, local micro-grids, open-source automation, and zero subscription fees.

When individuals have both a financial floor and the tools to run independent, self-contained local systems, they don't just survive inside the market; they opt out of its worst traps entirely. The ultimate purpose of a basic income shouldn't be keeping people tethered to corporate supply chains, but giving them the autonomy to build sovereign alternatives.

Copilot:

You're worried about a few welfare recipients making bad choices with public money.

Fair enough. But where is the comparable outrage over the trillions spent on wars, corporate welfare, bailouts, procurement boondoggles, and failed government projects?

Suppose a small fraction of basic-income recipients waste some of the money. That's not ideal. But compare the social cost of a few people buying things you disapprove of with the social cost of destroying infrastructure, conducting wars, or transferring enormous sums to politically connected firms.

Why is the microscope always pointed at poor people, while the telescope is rarely turned toward the much larger expenditures?

The question isn't whether some people will misuse resources. Every system has waste. The question is where the largest harms actually are.

Can we see the big picture?

The most revealing sentence in these UBI discussions is often the one that assumes observers get to decide what recipients ought to do with their lives.

Why should the success metric be "became more employable" or "increased earnings"?

A genuinely universal income would buy something more basic than that: the ability to say no. No to a job, no to a lifestyle, no to social expectations, no to optimizing one's entire existence around economic performance.

If people use that freedom in ways that researchers, employers, or policymakers would not choose for them, that seems like evidence that they are exercising the freedom, not evidence that the program failed.

Why not provoke a balance-sheet recession, so the Fed can buy bonds again and return all that $1.3 trillion in interest payments to the Treasury?

Remember when flipping houses was the new tulips, and are stocks much higher now than then?

How come markets kept setting record highs since then, providing returns that have been close to ten times inflation?

Can they live off the interest to their investment portfolio hedges?

What pesticides, cleaning agents, microplastics, etc. that we happily consider miraculous materials today will prove to be as harmful to us as lead was to the Romans? Can I tell a plausible story of your brain being as full of microplastics as the Romans were of lead, such that you dismiss as a toy something that may prove to be revolutionary for human civilizations?