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Comment by commandlinefan | Hacker News Reader

> doesn't prepare them to do anything

Wait, what? I mean, I guess that just watching your parents work doesn’t “prepare” you for work any more than watching TV does, but that’s because it’s completely unrelated. Watching your parents go to high-powered executive jobs doesn’t “prepare” you for work in the 21st century either, education does. My father was a police officer (they don’t make much money) and my mother stayed home with us - they both encouraged us to study so we could do better than they did. Watching my father go off to a dangerous job every day didn’t “prepare” me for work, but it did help me grow up with a sense of “work is part of adult life” that I wouldn’t have gotten if he’d spent every day watching TV and drinking beer.

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"they both encouraged us to study so we could do better than they did"

And the parents who do this are not the ones who will sit home and drink beer all day just because they're getting a $2k/mo basic income. Instead, they could go back to school, or start a business, or travel outside the country once in awhile, or spend more time teaching their kids an important skill like music or math or programming because the intense, ceaseless, soul-destroying pressure of just getting by has been lifted a bit.

Also, while I understand that police officers don't make a lot and it's very tough job, it's also a very stable job with benefits, a pension, etc. so I imagine that despite not being anywhere close to wealthy, your parents also didn't need to spend their days focused solely on survival like someone who works minimum wage with no job security, who has possibly no health insurance, who likely has to frequently get high interest payday loans to make rent or buy food... that kind of lifestyle is extremely difficult to dig out of, and it leads inevitably towards family breakdown, crime, health-destroying habits, mental illness, and general despair. That's who basic income is really for. I mean these people are literally killing themselves just to get by, and the response of many folks with far more privilege is "eh, you'd just be sitting around drinking beer otherwise".

The only folks I saw working minimum wage to support the family didn't have those worries. Now I'll grant that health insurance was a lot cheaper 20 years ago, but still they didn't worry about payday loans - they weren't dumb enough to take them out. (I don't know who does - my personal experience doesn't show anyone doing it, but again that was 20 years ago when they weren't a thing)

The ones I knew working minimum wage lived cheaply. They didn't worry about losing their jobs because they were hard workers who could be counted on - the type of person who gets the maximum raise until they top out the pay scale. They were also the type of person to be offered job in management and have the potential to make as much as anyone with an engineering degree (we haven't kept in touch - typically the requirement to move for the job every few years catches up and they decide the next promotion isn't worth it and so stagnate at nice wage that is better than average)

I knew people who sit around drinking bear and working part time. Everybody knew they were losers. It wasn't lack of opportunity that is keeping them down it is lack of following up on it. They would abandon their kids even if you paid the a million dollars a year (even assuming they don't overdose on some drug)

I also know mentally ill people. Their abilities vary, but UBI won't help them as they will just waste it on some other scam. (I know someone who lost money to the Nigerian prince scam, and a dozen others - the family is careful to lock down his money now so he can't do that)

"Their abilities vary, but UBI won't help them as they will just waste it on some other scam."

This is correct. For scammers this will be a new gold mine. But I guess it will be a gold mine for everyone. It's 2.8 trillion every year injected into the economy. If you look at it like that than the question is, how can I divert some of that money into my own pockets?

Sounds like a good incentive to start services to actually help protect those most vulnerable to scams - my own mother could have benefited from something similar as one of her caretakers bilked her out of a few thousand dollars toward the end of her life.

A 'fool them once, shame on you... but it won't happen again!' policy would be a welcome thing.

> […] services to actually help protect those most vulnerable to scams

Services? This sounds more like a legislative than a marketplace problem. Pardon if it’s forward to ask, but what service do you envision could have helped protect your mother?

For quite a while, she had a financial assistant and a home visit assistant, each of whom visited at least twice a week. Because of insurance changes, the financial assistant had to stop.

It was in the gap of finding this out and getting myself back in the loop that the home visitor managed to get checks cashed that she didn't know about.

The services are already in existence, just not consistently or as comprehensively as they could/need to be.

A legislative issue to stop nickel and diming social assistance, for sure. These kinds of services should be available for anyone who needs them, not just whatever narrowly defined criteria in current funding mandates.

We as the public just don't care enough.

Watching your parents handle a high-powered executive job very much does prepare you for work in the 21st century - a certain kind of work, anyway.

I grew up poor in a very wealthy suburb and went to high school with a lot of children of high powered executives and attorneys. In my experience they were in no way prepared for the real world, unless by prepared you mean living with zero parental guidance and no sense of the value of money.

That's not true. You're saying the example your parents set has no effect on children and we know that's not the case

I said exactly the opposite. If I had watched my father sitting around doing nothing, I probably would have grown up to sit around doing nothing. I saw him working instead, and he set a positive example, even though his job wasn't a high-paying "powerful" one.

> Watching your parents go to high-powered executive jobs doesn’t “prepare” you for work in the 21st century either, education does.

Lucky for you, if your parents go to high-powered executive jobs, then you’ve won the jackpot and will probably receive a higher education!

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