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Comment by kmjg88nvf8 | Hacker News Reader

Sadly, most people would just watch Netflix.

We are not used to be free. Economic restraints force us to do things we don't want to do instead of watching Netflix. So most don't understand what "just watching Netflix" means. If you set out to "just watch Netflix" as your main activity, you would very very quickly get fed up and depressed, and thus stop watching Netflix.

Those fortunate ones with enough wealth to have the option to just watch Netflix for a year and don't do much else, don't do that and are happy with it. And neither would the less fortunate once after an initial learning phase. Humans must learn to be free, but they can. We want to take part, show our contribution, feel proud. As soon as we have found a pleasant way to contribute, we do.

Yes, conditionless basic income would change work ethics. People who fill up supermarkets displays or serve food to unfriendly customers at unhealthy hours would maybe just stop going to work. I would be happy for them, and I hope it would happen today.

There is a lot of work that is needlessly tiring, badly paid, and in which you are badly treated, but people just stay in the status quo because they see no way out. Once there is a way out, the jobs will have to change, and that rapidly. That would be progress for society I still hope to see in my lifetime.

We have been free. We were free for millennia.

But... if you look at the most free animals in nature: cats, after domesticating humans and getting guaranteed safety, shelter and food. They have independently decided to sleep and murder their lives away. Their contributions to the art world via social media (a task they’ve mostly trained their humans to do) is probably the nost significant and vacuous the world has every seen. Their obsession with small mammal terminating is probably better for the biosphere.

I have taken over a year off of work multiple times in my life and while I didn't do much that was productive with my time off, I was definitely unhappy with time wasting and lounging around all day. My motivation to eventually start working again would have assuredly been directed elsewhere if not for the pending need for income again eventually

That is a pretty pesimistic presumption that AFAIK has no empirical evidence to back it up. Even without holding the threats of homelessness and starvation over people's heads, humans are highly status driven, competitive creatures. There is a lot of evidence that people will do massive amounts of work that has little to no material benefit, just for a bit of social status (or even for self satisfaction.) Otherwise, volunteerism, open source software and Indy Games couldn't be as successful as they are.

I don't doubt there are some people who would stay home and watch Netflix. I just suspect there are more people that are ground down by the daily grind and abandon their dreams.

Even if there are more unmotivated people than demotivated people, unmotivated people are low value anyway. People that lack self-motivation are never gonna be the most productive members of society so designing a system to extract work from them at the cost of wasting the time of more motivated individuals seems... backwards.

What is the problem with that?

Besides for most people to be able to watch Netflix, some people will need to make Netflix. If there aren't enough people to make Netflix, something else will be made but at the end of the day there is no way nobody will do anything - if nothing else, people will be bored and actively want to do something.

There's nothing better than boredom for inspiration and motivation.

You seem to be under the assumption that the masses will find inspiration and motivation to do things you don't find disagreeable.

I'm emphatically for people having the resources to pursue whatever the heck the want (even if that's sitting around drinking beer) but I think that most of the UBI crowd is out of touch with how the people who will most benefit from UBI will use their newfound freedom. Covering poor people's housing and food expenses isn't going to magically make them want to spend their time acting upper middle class. You give people freedom and they will act how they want, not necessarily how you want. I'd still call that a win but many will not.

FWIW i'd also call that a win... but perhaps i do not see what could possibly go wrong :-P

> Covering poor people's housing and food expenses isn't going to magically make them want to spend their time acting upper middle class.

You seem to be under the assumption that the majority of "poor people" behave the way they are portrayed in "reality" TV shows or whatever you're consuming that makes you think this way.

In fact most are no different from the "upper middle class", except for the amount of money they can freely spend. Do you honestly believe they're somehow wired differently just because they're poor?

Watch less TV, interact more with actual people.

>You seem to be under the assumption that the majority of "poor people" behave the way they are portrayed in "reality" TV shows or whatever you're consuming that makes you think this way.

You seem to be making a lot of assumptions about my life experience and who I don't associate with.

>In fact most are no different from the "upper middle class", except for the amount of money they can freely spend. Do you honestly believe they're somehow wired differently just because they're poor?

Yes, people are very much the same on some level but it's pure lunacy to pretend that one's life experience does not have any effect on shaping a person's standards and preferences. If you give a poor person a good paycheck they will probably pick a few areas to indulge but they will not magically upscale their entire lives. Their standards and tastes will take quite some time (if ever) to adapt to the lack of economic scarcity. (Obviously I'm speaking in generalizations here and my statements are subject individual variance.)

You can leave the trailer park but the trailer park will never leave you.

>Watch less TV, interact more with actual people.

Since we're sinking to this level you should get out of your gated community and internet echo chambers.

I have no problem with it, I just don't consider it a good argument for basic income.

When I take a few days of holiday I literally don't do anything but waste time. When I have longer breaks between work I start doing productive things after a period of decompressing. My normal job just sucks up all my productivity in a way that it becomes hard to even take out the trash.

That would be _so_ much better for the environment

Does it matter? Even if only 1% of people used the time to do something constructive/beneficial to society and the environment that would still amount to over 70 million people worldwide. That could definitely move the needle away from the capitalist dystopia we have created.

We are not living in a capitalist dystopia. If you have an interesting thing you want to do but can't afford to do, head over to Kickstarter or Patreon and collect funding.

Thank capitalism later.

That is already dystopian not to mention people also use this to cover their medical bills. The gold fish doesn't know it's in a fish bowl.

How on earth is that dystopian?

To reply properly would warrant an essay about n order effects but long story short the fact that crowd funding exists in it's current state is a reflection of how broken our economic model is.

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