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Comment by bob33212 | Hacker News Reader

This is my biggest problem with all the people promoting entrepreneurship for everyone. If everyone took two years off to start a company there would be no one keeping the lights on.

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Doesnt' matter. Most people won't. I have worked professionally for 17 years now and last 6 running my own business. I can tell you with a guarantee that there are lot of people who just want a job, get a paycheck and get the f out (not that anything is wrong with that). They don't care about entrepreneurship or whatever. So there always will be "employees" for every "employer".

until UBI?

I doubt UBI will make everyone stop working. As far as I understand, the point of UBI is to ensure that people are not homeless, have enough to put food on the table and it covers your absolute basic needs. Lets say we implement UBI at 1K/Month which is what people like Andrew Yang proposed. That is not enough to just sit at home all day. You still need to make money but hopefully with that 1K, you won't be homeless (or at least thats the idea).

I'm confident that there are many, many people who would choose to continue living with no permanent home (tent, RV, etc) and spend their UBI on oxy, meth, heroin or crack.

At least they wouldn't need to turn to petty crime quite so often. And they'd have a means of getting some stability in their lives, which tends to reduce rates of addiction.

I'm curious where your confidence comes from. Do you know many people pulling in a stable income while also living out of a tent, smoking meth?

I’m still not clear on why UBI won’t just raise the price floor on everything (rent in your example) to the point where it becomes ineffective again. In Mountain View, landlords raised rents when they heard companies were giving a bonus for people living within 15 miles. Some even included it in their advertising.

> Some even included it in their advertising.

I'm really curious what the language/spin was to make that something that was included in the advertising.

I don't think OP means the rent hike was included. More like "We're within 15 miles of Google offices! Move now and qualify for their bonus!"

That makes me feel better, if so.

Although reading it again ...

> In Mountain View, landlords raised rents when they heard companies were giving a bonus for people living within 15 miles. Some even included it in their advertising.

I've never been to the west coast, but I would assume that location to the various offices would already be part of the advertising. I regularly see it in this area for Epic and the University.

Everyone wants to earn the money salespeople make until eat what you kill really sinks in.

If everyone started taking two years off to start a company the incentives offered by existing companies would rise until the tide was stemmed.

> there would be no one keeping the lights on.

Why would that be? Two years is only four percent of a working lifetime and it won't be at the same time for everyone. And not every company takes two years to create anyway.

Another way of looking at it is that two years is less time than it takes to get a degree.

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