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Comment by DoreenMichele | Hacker News Reader

I'm not even going to bother to read this article. I'm not a fan of UBI and I think this is an admission that we don't have real solutions for the pandemic and we aren't even going to try to come up with real solutions, like helping people get into remote work and creating germ control solutions (like Little Caesar's pizza portal) for things where remote work is not an option.

I mean, glad to see they don't want their people to just starve. Three years is maybe a good time frame for helping people come up with real solutions.

The problem is that if you aren't explicitly stating up front that we are giving you three years to adjust to the new reality and we need you working on solutions, then those three years are going to fly by without people working on solutions and then the checks will stop coming and then what? You are just delaying disaster, not resolving anything.

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This isn‘t the government carrying out the trial, but a crowd-sourced private non-profit.

Then the title is inaccurate. "Trial begins in Germany." would be fine. But "Germany begins trial" means the nation-state -- the government -- is beginning a trial. If the government isn't hosting it, it isn't "Germany" beginning this trial.

It's also a minor detail that doesn't significantly impact my opinion of the whole thing.

Yes, the title is inaccurate. Titles on the Internet often are. That is precisely why it is generally a good idea to actually read the article before firing off a flaming reply.

Basically, you were trashing the German government for something they never did, based on a faulty assumption.

No, I wasn't trashing the German government.

I'm well aware what I did is not a best practice. I've been on HN 11 years.

I've also thought a great deal about certain kinds of issues and formally studied them etc and I'm extremely frustrated with how certain things are being handled. I'm quite confident that reading the article wouldn't fundamentally change my opinion. It would only allow me to say it in a slightly more socially acceptable fashion.

The qualifier I gave covers any such inaccuracies and it's unimportant anyway because no one takes me all that seriously, though they really should.

And I don't really feel like pointlessly rehashing that fact. It never changes. It's the same BS as always and there's nothing I can do to fix that.

I'm done being silenced by that fact on subjects I'm knowledgeable about. I have enough karma to withstand a few downvotes for the crime of admitting I know something useful and never mind that no one is ever going to have a goddamned ounce of real respect for me. Whatever.

What makes you assume this is in response to the pandemic?

Fifty-five years of living and formally studying how people work and doing tons of therapy and yadda.

We've been murdering Black people in the US for years and years and years. The usual response is "Well, you gotta understand. Policing is hard and it's a judgement call and it's unfortunate that so man Blacks end up dead after the cops get hold of them, but ...blah blah blah."

And then a Black guy was murdered during the pandemic and suddenly people care.

I don't care how many years of planning went into it. They would still be batting it about and talking about it but not acting if we didn't have a pandemic where a third of Americans are failing to pay their rent and presumably similar shit is happening in Germany.

Edit: The PC term for it is "political will." It's easier to get a deal like this if you have a huge and obvious disaster ongoing to help justify it.

I happen to agree.

When times are, relatively, good there isn't civil unrest enough for governments to propose anything particularly novel.

People want more of the same if they're "comfortable enough" and politics is in direct reaction to that.

Yes. Exactly.

When things are mostly working, people don't want you to break stuff. When things are clearly not working, you can get agreement to try "the crazy thing."

Okaaaaaaay then.

Your fifty-five years of studying how people work didn't extend to anywhere outside the US then.

I'll leave you to it. Have a pleasant day.

My mother is German and I lived in Germany for nearly four years (as an adult, not counting the time I was there as a child, too young to really remember it).

Dismissive snark isn't really how you are supposed to be commenting on HN, no matter how much you may think I sound like a loon.

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