Hacker News Reader

Comment by aeblyve | Hacker News Reader

They've been talking about UBI, as one variant.

UBI is going to be the only option eventually, outside of a moneyless, post-scarcity utopia.

Investing in subsidized worker retraining can work very short term, but with widespread automation and a reduced requirement for human workers, that can only go so far as the demand for employees simply won’t be there.

So we either have strong laws and protections that enforce that everyone receives the benefits of automation, or we don’t and only a small percentage of the population receives the benefits while everyone else starves to death.

There is no reduced requirement for human workers. Our infrastructure is crumbling, and we're using as many Chinese, Vietnamese, Indonesian, Pakistani, Indian, Mexican, etc. workers as we always have.

The only reason America itself fell into dust is because they couldn't figure out how to ship bridges and high speed rail from China. They were hoping that removing all border controls would be the answer, but people who used to have good paying jobs making and building things got upset.

The Democratic Party strategy to ridicule and censor them into silence seems to have failed miserably, but the Republican strategy of making a huge show out of deporting 30 poverty-stricken refugees while ignoring businesses who employ tens of thousands is working.

Nobody has managed the politics of a true UBI, and America will be one of the last places to get it. The need to punish perceived slackers is just too high.

> The need to punish perceived slackers is just too high.

That's because the US was always in a race to find more enemies to fight. It's an easy way to rally the many under a single banner and then move the banner around as needed by the few.

Well, sometimes perception is reality. If you have too many slackers, then your group/society stops functioning altogether and/or succumbs to other, more successful groups.

Then it doesn't matter what entitlements you think you should have been getting (or were getting)

Also, based on your phrasing, you seem to think that the current system punishes slackers (and/or perceived slackers) and that's our collective preference? In your opinion is this being done deliberately, or just through regular pricing mechanisms of capitalism?

As a whole, in the US, people don't even want people to have free healthcare. What do you think the chances are that they want people to have "free" money?

Nobody has been talking about UBI except in the same sense that people talk about warp drives, i.e. as a nice-to-have-someday bit of speculative fiction. Everyone is aware that if UBI were actually proposed in the political sphere it would be killed immediately, by most of the some oligarchs who dishonestly talk about it now.

But when consumers disappear and the wealth is threatened, won’t it simply be the only solution to keep the show going for the oligarchs? It may well be inevitable.

High income consumers are a steadily increasing percentage of consumer spending, and the bottom 60% of consumers are something like 20% of all spend. One outcome is just that the trend continues and high income consumers spend more which offsets decreases in low income consumers.

That cohort can’t buy many iPhones. Does the price of an iPhone balloon to 5 figures to compensate?

I think this is part of the reason why Apple has been promoting subscription services. iPhones have historically been apple's largest revenue source, but revenues have been increasing, from about 10% to 20% over the last 10 years.

Lets say the lower 50% of consumers buy something like a $1000 phone every 4 years currently, and they switch to buying a 16e for $600, or a decrease of $100 a year per customer. In revenue terms you could offset this by selling .5 customers a $240 a year Apple one subscription, up-selling a iPhone pro customer to 1TB storage, or convincing someone to buy a pair of Airpods Max over regular Airpods.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com