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Comment by intopieces | Hacker News Reader

My guess is this is of interest to us because it sounds an awful lot like UBI. But, I think the key difference is that the money is connected to parents, who presumably have a standard for how it's spent. If E.J. ended up spending it on drugs or other perceived vices, there's a chance the money might be cut off. The point of UBI is that it is 100% no-strings-attached, which has a different dynamic. That dynamic is one that concerns the anti-UBI people.

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People treat drug users as if this was something that they chose to do. In fact, most drug addicts are in this situation because they suffer from a tendency to drug abuse. Many of them had good jobs and lost them because of this condition. Holding up on the UBI program for everyone else because of the behavior of a few that need treatment is absurd.

I disagree. Of course there are many people with great jobs, that then developed a drug dependency that cost them. However, I'd counter that initial poverty (financial, parental, societal, educational - take your pick) is something that provides a fertile group to grow addiction. UBI would help remedy this. And quite frankly if somebody wishes to use their UBI to pay towards a crack addiction, then it works out cheaper for society than cleaning up their mess.

Nobody is compelled to take methamphetamines or heroin, especially not the first time. Yes, physical addiction is a beastly problem beyond simply quitting cold turkey - but you sort of put yourself in that boat to begin with.

It's a bit like not knowing how to swim, and deciding to jump into the ocean. If you don't know how to swim, don't jump in the ocean.

Since we're using bad analogies I would argue its more like being offered a piece of delicious candy and its great and you continue to eat the candy and its fine.

Eventually you wake up one day and decide you've been gaining too much weight and you try to stop eating the candy but to your surprise, over the past several months or years your brain chemistry has been subtly changed and now your physical well-being and mental state is literally tied to you continuing to eat the candy.

You can't stop and if you do you're in horrible pain and can't go to work, if you don't go to work you lose your job and if you want to keep working and not be homeless you keep eating the candy.

Except most people know that heroin isn't like candy. The side effects and consequences of snorting a few lines of cocaine isn't some secret.

Most people think heroin isn't like candy.

The physical dependence is the same, and there are 4 times as many deaths that can be linked to sugar as drugs per year in the US.

The only difference is that heroin is illegal and costs a lot more than candy.

Firstly, "linked to sugar" is not "squarely caused by sugar".

Secondly, sugar use is extremely widespread. Much more so than use of heroin. Few people avoid ingesting some sugar.

Even if there were 4 times as many deaths confirmed to be squarely caused by sugar, that alone shows sugar to be far safer, since it has far more than 4 times the users.

But never mind, let's look at, oh, the lethal dose (LD50) info. For sugar, that is supposedly something like 30 g/kg. The LD50 for heroin (intravenous) is something like 20 mg/kg: more than a thousand times less.

Plus there is copious sugar in your bloodstream without which you'd be in hypoglycemic shock leading to death.

> Firstly, "linked to sugar" is not "squarely caused by sugar".

Correct - the same goes for "Linked to drugs" and "squarely caused by drugs".

> that alone shows sugar to be far safer

Sugar is safer than cocaine, but that does not make it safe. I shouldn't have said the only difference - sorry.

> But never mind, let's look at, oh, the lethal dose (LD50) info

This is too narrowly focused - the LD50 only refers to the immediate effects of a substance, not the long lasting effects. I'd argue that long lasting effects are more dangerous as they're less apparent.

> Plus there is copious sugar in your bloodstream without which you'd be in hypoglycemic shock leading to death.

Yes, our bodies need sugar and create it from the food we eat. I was talking about the food we call sugar ("Sugar is the generic name for sweet-tasting, soluble carbohydrates, many of which are used in food.)

I should use "added sugar" or "refined sugar".

You're right. Peoples' doctors rarely tell them to take anything that will risk them getting hooked on candy.

If they started taking prescription painkillers for chronic pain or post-surgery, then they kind of were compelled to do it, weren't they?

"A study of young, urban injection drug users interviewed in 2008 and 2009 found that 86 percent had used opioid pain relievers nonmedically prior to using heroin... Of people entering treatment for heroin addiction who began abusing opioids in the 1960s, more than 80 percent started with heroin. Of those who began abusing opioids in the 2000s, 75 percent reported that their first opioid was a prescription drug."[0]

What if they're being intentionally coerced by pharma?

[0]: https://www.drugabuse.gov/publications/research-reports/rela...

That seems like a correlation argument. I'm sure at least 86% of those users had also been exposed to cell phones and sugar.

Even if that correlation shows causation, that's a big jump to: > What if they're being intentionally coerced by pharma?

No, it's not absurd. Most people don't want to give money to people who are not immediate family. And they especially don't want to give money to people who are not immediate family and who are pissing their lives away. And I wouldn't count on this changing anytime soon, since it's probably a trait which evolved to counteract cheaters and free-riders in the small-scale societies that defined our evolutionary past.

We already provide a UBI to an entire demographic of people who are hopelessly dependant on drugs and mostly just sit around watching TV. It actually works out just fine. We call them seniors and their UBI social security.

You're not kidding. Old folks watch so much TV. While they were still able to start conversations, my grandparents were always starting off with "did you see that thing on TV?"

Now I'm wishing I could have that conversation one more time...

The point is that the average person doesn't get $28000 a year. A landlord won't raise the rent of the author just because he has more money.

Why not? That's literally the most obvious thing to do as a landlord.

For the same reason a grocery store doesn't charge you more for milk just because you're rich: if they did, you'd simply shop elsewhere.

You know what happens if you raise your tenant's rent because you learned they have more money now? They move, and now you're losing money as you are trying to find a new tenant.

Apartments are sticky in the way grocery stores aren't. Moving to another place is expensive (in effort, money and social costs), and while the landlord can't just triple your price overnight and hope you stay, they can raise your rent in increments.

I think it's of interest to us because wealthy people so rarely speak so candidly about their wealth and the advantages it gives them.

> If E.J. ended up spending it on drugs or other perceived vices, there's a chance the money might be cut off.

But there's no reason why if someone was being self-destructive, a judge couldn't just freeze their ability to spend some portion of their money until they had their life straightened out.

> an awful lot like UBI. But, I think the key difference is that ... parents ... have a standard for how it's spent.

There's another important difference from UBI, that only a few kids now get this $28k. So being one of them, you can out-bid the others on having a nice apartment... whose price would otherwise rise.

This applies to work too: she could get ahead artistically by being able to write full time. Ahead of the competition, that is, who had to work. UBI wouldn't have given her that advantage.

that's a simplistic analysis that doesn't really capture the whole effect a universal basic income might have. For one, with a livable basic income, the value of housing shifts somewhat--since there's not essentially a requirement to have a job, the demand for housing-near-jobs changes. It is hard to predict exactly what direction that might shift in.

The competitive environment around an artistic endeavor changes too--you have the ability to experiment and fail and not be forced out entirely, since you can fall back and change things up without having to worry about finding a job. And it might not be the case that everyone looking for a creative outlet is looking to make it into a living.

Indeed, UBI is uncharted territory, so it's not obvious what would happen. I only meant that we should be very cautious about extrapolating.

I'm not convinced that the changes in competition would be in the direction you mention. It could be that even more people would like to live in Vancouver, if only their jobs weren't keeping them elsewhere.

It could also be that the artistic environment is more about competition for audience, and for status, than about creative outlet. As a datapoint, the world of the '80s had lots of small-time newspaper photographers, and commercial photographers, most serving a local market. The world of the '10s instead has instagram stars, and is in some sense much more competitive, much more unequal in terms of who gets their work seen.

Yeah, my parents just started sending me $30,000 dollar checks this year and the first thing they said to me was "We aren't giving you this money so you can go off and buy a Maserati".

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