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Advertising is a very typical arms race. If you're the only one advertising, a small cheap ad is very effective. If your competitor is advertising you have to spend just as much just to tread water. If you spend more, it forces your competitors to spend more too.

It's not surprising that the modern Silicon Valley economy is built on advertising.

To give an example of that - my friend runs a one-man internet shop, selling niche items. His monthly profit is around (an equivalent of) $1-2k, while his Google invoice is $7k$-10k. So, essentially most of the fruits of his labor go to Google. And, according to him, if he tried spending less on advertising, he'd just vanish from the face of the Internet and customers would buy at his competitors.

I've been thinking the exact same thing lately! There is also in there somewhere a nice paralel to proof of work.

Peddling buzzwords and tech fads has made some bigly rich.

I die inside.

But any suggestion of "mincome" or the like is met with such a harsh reaction... What, effectively, is the difference between goon-bloom and mincome? Is it just that one is too obviously a subsidy?

The protestant work ethic is still there - the notion that a difficult job is better for the person doing it than an easier job with the same pay.

Depending on the definition of "difficulty", and the type of person, I'm not sure they're wrong.

We're all engineers here. Can you honestly say you'd prefer a job that paid the same, but where you wouldn't have to use your mind?

Of course, it's been used to justify some serious horrors.

I honestly don't think it would be a bad thing if there were ten times as many lawyers, so that the cost of using the legal system became affordable to the vast majority of the people living under it.

Talking about America? Look at other countries for a better solution. :)

Which ones?

Antarctica ;)

I think it generalizes. Having a personal advocate will almost always yield a better personal solution than even a well intentioned bureaucrat. The law is complex, and the ability to afford a personal advocate is a very sharp privilege.

I think I've even seen this dynamic at play in international negotiations, with poorer countries being swamped by the experienced legal teams of larger countries, or being forced to effectively delegate their authority to an NGO that maintains a competitive legal team.

Goons are often highly skilled and highly compensated. So that's one difference.

I talk to people about changing the world so work is optional, and people are really attached to the idea that everyone should work all the time. Our world is sufficiently productive (a trend I expect to continue rising) that we could offer a modest life to everyone regardless of how much they work. Or more conservatively, we could build a world where everyone has 8 weeks of vacation a year or could take 6 months off every few years.

I believe this is doable from a technical perspective and it’s the problem I’m trying to devote my life to. We ultimately need to build optional societies where people who choose to join can opt out of consumerism, a major driver of our need for endless work.

My vision is for systems of robotics that are totally open source (modifiable and royalty free) that can create the basic goods for survival. Then groups of people fund corporations with bylaws like a constitution that guarantee rights to shareholders. The machines provide for the people and excess goods are sold to a market to support growth of the community.

I think something like that in the future is one very useful aspect of a society where unnecessary work is over and regular people get to enjoy the benefits of modern productivity (instead of a small percentage of the population enjoying that while most people miss out).

But in general when I talk to people I find that the hardest idea for them to grasp is the idea that we could all work less and things wouldn’t collapse. We just need to alter the distribution of wealth so that everyone benefits.

You might be interested in Marcin Jakubowski's work ...

https://www.opensourceecology.org/gvcs/

> Our world is sufficiently productive (a trend I expect to continue rising) that we could offer a modest life to everyone regardless of how much they work.

i realize that the rest of your post details technological advancements that could create this condition (on an indefinite timeline), but you also seem to be saying that it is already possible today. i often see this sort of claim these days, and i always wonder why this is treated as self evident fact.

in 2015, the PPP adjusted GDP per capita over the entire planet was just under $16k [1]. this is only 125% of the US poverty line for a single person in the same year [2]. even if we could deliver this sum to every person in the world without losing production capacity and with no administrative cost, it hardly seems enough to provide what you mean by a "modest living" to everyone. much closer to mere subsistence in a developed nation.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP)...

[2] https://www.census.gov/data/tables/time-series/demo/income-p...

I imagine it would start in the wealthier countries. US GDP per capita is $57.5k. I think if we had previously been focused on building a non-consumerist society, we could already have what I talk about today. That is, the problem is not technological but political and cultural. These efforts have not in my opinion really begun in earnest, but my hope is that robotics can be leveraged to rapidly replace the old human centric infrastructure with an automated one. Then it all just comes down to who owns the machines.

I recognize that in many places in the world, the development isn’t there. However the US can also play a part by ending the imperialism that helps keep these countries down.

This would be such a massive change to the world economy that I'm not sure present day prices for anything are even relevant.

Measure productivity different from money made. The point is that based on current production levels, we could provide everyone with sufficient food, decent housing and basic amenities like water and electricity.

The reason this doesnt happen is that those who sell the food, or build the housing are better off getting paying customers. This makes sense as a market, sellers are self-interested. It also leads to a certain kind of optimum. But certainly, as a matter of production, it is feasible to give everyone a modest life without needing to change productivity. As a matter of social stability, it isn't feasible, but in some sense, that should be a denouncement of society.

GDP is an erroneous measure for what we're discussing and falls into the same recursive logic that is noted at the top of this comment chain a la broken window fallacy.

If you blow up a tank, and then build a new one, this is considered a net gain in GDP even though in reality there was a relative net loss of human labor.

> Our world is sufficiently productive (a trend I expect to continue rising) that we could offer a modest life to everyone regardless of how much they work.

I don't think this is true, because I think too large a fraction of the world's current productivity is supplied by people who would not produce if they didn't have to to earn a living.

> My vision is for systems of robotics that are totally open source (modifiable and royalty free) that can create the basic goods for survival.

This would fix the productivity problem, yes. But...

> Then groups of people fund corporations with bylaws like a constitution that guarantee rights to shareholders. The machines provide for the people and excess goods are sold to a market to support growth of the community.

This would throw away the whole thing. If there are open source machines that can create the basic goods for survival, the obvious thing to do is for every individual to just own one. There is no need for corporate ownership; in fact, corporate ownership undermines the whole thing, by giving some people an incentive to game the corporate system. If there is no such system, there's nothing to be gamed.

> the world's current productivity is supplied by people who would not produce if they didn't have to to earn a living.

Not according to the article.

> Not according to the article.

I don't see the article making any claim one way or the other about what I was saying.

Hazing, austerity, and rigor. The military certainly cannot be accused of making soldiers more comfortable than taxpayers, and that’s what they really care about. Whether they’re deployed to economicically productive ends is more of an academic concern. On a gut level, the public needs to feel that they are not paid to be lazy, and the military delivers with overwhelming gusto.

Lawyers may similarly be accused of evil, but rarely laziness. There’s a general perception that they’ve passed through a crucible we wouldn’t survive (law school) and do work we couldn’t hack. Other bureaucrats, not so much.

Lawyers can be horribly lazy.

"let's just wait for a reaction, if we are lucky, nothings gonna come."

"Let's just threaten with outrageous claims instead of making an effort."

"We know the law is wrong but it's easier to roll with it than to fix it or find a way around it."

well... one way, you have goons, the other way, you have livers.

The problem with mincome is the hedonic treadmill.

the folk receiving mincome will grow dissatisfied with their lot and militate for raises. negative feedback is unpleasant but necessary.

>the folk receiving mincome will grow dissatisfied with their lot and militate for raises. negative feedback is unpleasant but necessary.

Close. What it does is reduces supply (fewer people working) while raising demand (people with more money in their pockets). This winds up causing inflation that erodes away the value of the minimum income. It's not even a hedonic treadmill, just an inflationary one.

A basic income guarantee can only ever work as temporary assistance or as a residualist stopgap for people on the fringes of society. If it's too widespread it ends up working against itself. A job guarantee increases supply (assuming you use the labor power productively) while keeping demand high, so that works against the inflation problem.

It's a tough balancing act though. You have to make sure the make-work is actually producing useful stuff or you'll have all the same problems as the basic income plus a bunch of random ditches dug. During Cultural Revolution in China cadres kind of engendered ecological catastrophes by creating bureaucratic agencies that would pointlessly clearcut forests for no reason. It's basically the paper-clip maximizing AI problem, only the intelligence isn't artificial.

Because at least in the goon economy you can compete in a hierarchy and be differentiated by status. "I have made X number of lawsuits/wars/security details successful which is more than Billy who only has Y number of successful lawsuits/wars/security details and that's why I should get a bonus and he shouldn't." sounds better than "I have exactly the same amount of income as Billy, but I should have more than he does because I think I'm better than Billy."

Yes, there are other ways to differentiate yourself in a social hierarchy, but finding a new and novel way to live is a lot harder than continuing to live the same way humans have lived for centuries.

"The factory of the future will have only two employees, a man and a dog. The man will be there to feed the dog. The dog will be there to keep the man from touching the equipment."

-Warren Bennis

The analogy to the army isn’t a very good one. It’s not a zero sum situation. A country can only devote so much of its GDP to the army, so the country with the biggest economy ends up with the biggest army. You don’t end up with 195 armies of equal size. The other thing that it misses is that the army is intentionally a vehicle for social mobility, and perhaps the most efficient one at that. The army is available to most people, where they can make a good career for themselves, or learn skills to take to the private sector, or move onto highly subsidized college. Dismissing it as bullshit is pretty narrow minded.

the country with the biggest economy ends up with the biggest army

But that isn’t true. Look at the size of the North Korean army.

Are you actually suggesting that it’s larger than the US army?

US Army 476,000 regulars, North Korea 1.1M. So yes, twice as big in terms of people.

You're comparing the entire NK armed forces to one US branch. The entire USA armed forces is about 1.3M active personnel, with about 800K reserves. Which the US manages to achieve without conscription or slavery. If you also consider equipment and vehicles (which you absolutely should), then NK is not even remotely close. The number of naval ships, air crafts, tanks, armored combat vehicles, APCs, UAVs , etc... that the US has is so far ahead of any other country that it's not even worth trying to draw a comparison.

You've made an overstated example of a single outlier. There's outliers at the other end too, with both countries that are too dysfunctional to have any national security at all, and countries that simply ride the coattails of their stronger allies.

In any case, this is all entirely irrelevant to my point, which is that armed forces do contribute measurable value to society, and that the level of investment in them is typically proportional to the level of security a country requires.

You're comparing the entire NK armed forces to one US branch.

No I am not https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=List_of_countries...

Yes you are.

>US Army 476,000 regulars

And that number goes up to ~1.3M once you add in the Air Force, Navy and Marines. And as I've said, you're still only comparing numbers of service personnel, and ignoring capability, equipment and other resources. You're also ignoring the point I was making entirely.

You said

the country with the biggest economy ends up with the biggest army.

That is demonstrably false, as shown in that Wikipedia article. In fact, there is barely any correlation between the size of a country’s economy and its army.

You're also ignoring the point I was making entirely.

Since your facts are wrong, there isn’t even a point to ignore

What? Zero sum doesn't mean that a stalemate is guaranteed. It means that one player's win is the other player's loss.

>All this is only a bad thing if you care about efficiency. If you let go of that axiom, there are unlimited jobs to be created.

Oh cool, we invented almost-basic income.

Most future goons will be robots too. For both practical and political reasons (dead soldiers are not so cool).

I think it's interesting this category is simply defined as "goon". This really has been the definition of our entire existence as a species. We have competitors and if they take our resources we attempt to kill them off.

Even today the military encompasses the largest industry in the world. All of the technology we use has been rooted in the Military. Engineering Departments everywhere are subsidized by the Military more than any other department because they know anything you engineer has the potential as a "goon" application.

I don't think "goon" is going away anytime soon, it's a core part of our evolution as a species.

cyber-xyz is the other new white-collar goon job