Doesn't really matter. It's just a regular run of the mill government subsidy for artists. Nothing we haven't been doing for a well over 150 years. My point is that we shouldn't be calling it basic income because it's not.

The problem isn't whether giving out money helps people and helps society as a whole we have plenty of research on the topic and yeah it does. The problem is like I mentioned people who give out the money resent giving it out and people who get it resent the handouts and I don't have a solution to that emotional problem.

And quite frankly we are running out of work. Actually strike that it's worse. We still have work that needs to be done but not enough for everybody. So we are going to have a class of people that need to work and a class of people who are completely useless economically.

We've seen this before when the two industrial revolutions happened and it ended in world War and tens of millions dead and that was before we had nukes

And frankly I don't have a solution

I can't be bothered to post the link you can find it on Google pretty easily by searching for the phrase. There are actually studies of the effect of automation on employment over the last several decades and they are not good.

We are currently at 25% functional unemployment. That number includes everyone unemployed, everyone who gave up looking for work and crucially everyone who makes less money than it takes to afford a studio apartment and enough food to survive.

Those people are mooching off relatives and friends or they have joined the working homeless.

If you have seen those huge protests and wondered why aren't those people at work that's why.

This is not sustainable. The center cannot hold. And that's before we talk about how the jobs that the robots took if they did get replaced got replaced by low paying service sector jobs.

Now there is a lot of work that we can do to make everybody's lives better but that's not profitable work. It's the kind of thing that you could get a government to do if it was properly run but it's not something you're going to get large corporations to do.

And that just dovetails right back to socialism and the resentment everyone feels from having economic resources shuffled around.

Automation is a completely intractable problem. Meaning that there is no solution. Any of the solutions that are mechanically sound are not emotionally sound. People simply will not accept them emotionally.

I think the basic problem here is that our technology has advanced faster than our society and our brains. You're dealing with a species that at best is at home in tribes of a few hundred people expected to function as a unified whole across 8 billion people.

I just finished explaining that this is not basic income it's just a subsidy for artists.

I then switched to talking about basic income which is the process of giving everyone enough money that they can have an okay life.

Those are two different things. Please do try to keep up.

That's a subsidy for artists.

Basic income doesn't work because the people getting the money resent the handouts and the people paying the taxes for the money resent giving the handouts.

If you have ever had a coworker that doesn't pull their own weight it's like that. You resented them right? That feeling of resentment where you're working and somebody else isn't is easily exploitable.

Now we have solid evidence that 70% of middle class jobs in the last 45 years got taken by machines and we all know AI is about to devour jobs. It might be in 5 or 10 years but there's no question that it's happening. And while it turns out that self-driving cars are not actually self-driving and are being piloted by people in the Philippines it doesn't matter because those jobs are still going to be shipped over to third world Nations and there's so much money involved that you can't say no.

Basic income is a trick people who are desperate to keep capitalism functional but who don't want to do market socialism and actually regulate the billionaires turn to.

The real problem here is that in addition to the problems with human nature I'm bringing up above the billionaires are done with capitalism. They have gotten what they want out of it and they are moving towards a techno feudal future that does not include any of us.

One way or another capitalism is going to be dismantled and I don't see any viable alternative that doesn't involve about 3,000 people and a handful of hangers on living in abject poverty and occasionally being bombed by drones so that they don't get too uppity.

I'm open to suggestions I just haven't heard any that can survive the billionaires sabotaging them

Now don't you feel silly? Also drug prices have dropped over a 1000%. People just get paid to take drugs now like how your grandma warned you what happened in the 80s. Pay no attention to the 41% increasing coffee prices...

The possibility of replacing every white collar worker is just too tantalizing. Even if it costs more replacing those workers moves more power to the top.

We are past the point where billionaires are just trying to make more money. We are at the point where they want more power. More power means being able to decide who gets the function in society and that means controlling who gets to work. The best way to do that is to limit the amount of available work.

It breaks a dependency the billionaires have on us working stiffs. Over and over again when we catch billionaires candidly they show complete disgust for us. So if they have to spend an extra 20 or 30% of their already limitless wealth to no longer have to interact with or depend on us that would be a small price to pay

Basically it's the end of capitalism just not the way that the blue haired girls keep telling you we should do it

Propose an even better one, call it the Trump Telescope, and it gets instant funding.

Thisverse?

But we drove it rough.

Because it means they only need 144 years of this profit to hit their market cap!

And this is still somehow infinitely better than Tesla.

The stock market is massively overvalued and we all just have to pray to hell that it continues to be for at least another three to five years.

Because when the correction hits, and it will sooner or later it always does, it's going to hit like the fist of a god. And we are going to need at least moderately competent people in charge or we are more fucked than usual which is substantially fucked

Explaining why you are full of shit. You already know you're full of shit. What layer of hell will you burn in spreading these lies?

Are you ever going to stop responding to the bot pretending to be me? Do you own the bot account? Is that why I can always count on you to respond to the bot?

That he can't just kick a few million to Trump and get a pardon. If I remember correctly he's well enough connected he can get the money together. It's only at most two or three million to get a pardon from Trump. I don't recall that his crimes were state level either.

All I can figure is that one of the dumber billionaires, and they're all pretty stupid, gave him a ton of money and lost it. Like how Bernie Madoff and Elizabeth Holmes or both rotting in prison because they ripped off people that actually matter.

Then there are jobs. We are at the point where there are some people who just cannot have a job. Full stop.

And this is the people actively looking. These are not all the people who are massively underemployed or who have stopped looking. If you take functional unemployment into account, which is the same people who do not make enough money to afford a studio apartment and food, we are a 25% functional unemployment.

I keep saying this, but the center cannot hold. We cannot keep this up. There will be violence and I get that a lot of people here are looking forward to being able to shoot people in Cold blood so they don't care...

The thing you got to remember is when there's a horde of people coming after you because you still have a house and a job you have to shoot and kill every single one of them but they only have to shoot and kill you once and it's game over.

This isn't a video game. There are no respawns and there are no save points.

Dark matter and dark energy is all the gunk God left in the universe's engine. Since we are an experiment, he didn't bother to change the filters.