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Comment by hueving | Hacker News Reader

The basic income discussions are pretty pointless though. There is just a group of people who think we should have it and another who think it's a pointless thought experiment because it the economy is about an order of magnitude short of the output required for the numbers being proposed.

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That's not pointless, those could be really good points! Maybe UBI is something we have to throw out for now, maybe it can be implemented in a way to get around those challenges.

But it's the same points over and over again. Every single time something about minimum wage or job automation shows up someone brings out the UBI horse to beat some more.

It is possible, if not probable, that each of those times you thought someone was beating the horse some more, at least one other person reading was unaware of and interested in the discussion. It may seem to you like all the stuff discussed here is common knowledge, but most of it really isn't, and this community grows all the time.

Maybe a way to flag topics to hide similar ones from yourself would be helpful, but applying this more generally to the entire community doesn't sit well with me.

Agree. If topics and comments are going to be hidden because they're "political", there should be a way to view and upvote these if you want to "opt-in".

There is. Set "showdead" to "yes" in your profile. You can "vouch" for comments made by banned users.

That's what "hide" does for a submission, though you have to do that on per-submission basis.

Those might just be today's lucky 10,000[0] who haven't seen the discussion up to that point, and a small price to pay for being able to discuss it at all.

I know I just learned something from this meta discussion, about the argument that the economy can't support UBI based on GDP numbers, and I'm eager to go read more. Most arguments I have seen say it won't work because of moral hazards and I haven't seen an argument that says it flat out can't be done, because there are so many different approaches and different ways it could play out.

[0]https://xkcd.com/1053/

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