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Comment by badsock | Hacker News Reader

I think Norway and the way it's managed its sovereign wealth fund is a counter-example.

Governance can be done well.

If it's a universal basic income, it should just be automated as well. By the point automation has advance enough to require UBI, it's advanced enough to handle its administration. Pull the human governance aspects out of it.

Who runs the automation for UBI? With Artificial General Intelligence a person needs to run it.

Put another way, A self driving car can put 10 taxi drivers out of work, but it cannot manage a monetary fund. Neither can the mechanic who fixes the car.

My argument would be: UBI could be so simple that it wouldn't allow for corruption.

A dollar amount shows up in your bank account every day. If it doesn't, that's a problem. The one debate should be whether the number should be moved up or down.

If there's exceptions (like criminals not getting it or something), then it's not UBI.

This is exactly th kind of automation the article ignores. This implementation of UBI could be a small python script that fits in single gist, but if implemented even just 20 years ago would involve the labor of hundreds.

Norway and the US are very different in terms of size, diversity, economic output, geography ... pretty much everything. Saying that something works for Norway isn't really a good reason to adopt it in the US.

Americans always pull out this excuse. There's a whole world running experiments on how to best do things, but you're unwilling to look at the results because it's not a perfect match.

It's never a perfect match. It doesn't mean you can't adapt lessons learned elsewhere, or that you can afford to ignore what works in other countries.

OK, so why wouldn't it work in, say, Minnesota? It's population, GDP, geography, etc. is similar.

I've wondered for a while if size invites corruption. The more governmental functions are removed from the public eye, the more easily corruption can creep in. If this is true, then smaller nations (and smaller companies) which have less scale would tend to be better run.

Aye, but as a counter point remember there is safety in numbers. What's Norway going to do when a five million man army comes marching for its riches? Pray for help from allies or die screaming. Such has been the history of humanity from first recording through the invention of the atomic bomb.

Countries with atomic weapons have never invaded another country with atomic weapons. This is a great improvement over WWI and WWII, although it is hard to know what the long tail risk is of killing almost everybody with a full scale nuclear exchange and nuclear winter. I think maybe the best situation would be that each responsible (to be determined) country would be allowed 10-30 nukes on ICBMs only (verified somehow; live cameras plus inspections?). With nukes on ICBMs only there would be no sneak attack where the attacker is unknown. With a small number of nukes, deterrence is still likely and the possibility of a nuclear winter is eliminated. I'd trust Norway with a small nuclear arsenal.

That's not completely correct. During the 1999 Kargil War either Pakistan invaded India or vice versa (depending on where you believe the legitimate border lies). Both countries had atomic weapons as of 1998. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kargil_War

I had not considered that conflict. It was in Kashmir and the border was never agreed upon by both sides (as you state). I wouldn't call it an invasion or even really a "war" with the small number of killed at only ~1,000. Others might disagree.

When Russia invaded Finland in the second world war all they got was a bloody nose.

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