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Comment by pixelready | Hacker News Reader

I think this is the piece so many that are stuck in the hustle culture mindset miss, and why they are so quick to dismiss anything like UBI or a strong social safety net that might “reduce people’s motivation”. There are many many creative, caring people that are motivated to create things or care for each other for the sake of it, not for some financial reward. Imagine the incredible programs, websites, games, crafts, artworks, animations, performances, literature, journalism, hobby clubs, support groups, community organizations that would spring into existence if we all just had more bandwidth for them while having our baseline needs met.

Would it be chaotic? Sure, in the same way that open source or any other form of self-organization is. But boy it sounds a whole lot better than our current model of slavery-with-extra-steps…

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I've made my living working fulltime on a single open source project for more than 15 years now.

I think it is important to differentiate between different kinds of projects that people might undertake, and 3 particular categories always come to my mind (you may have more):

* "plumbing" - all that infrastructure that isn't something you'd ever use directly, but the tools you do use wouldn't function without it. This work is generally intense during a "startup" phase, but then eases back to light-to-occasional as a stable phase is reached. It will likely happen whether there is funding or not, but may take longer and reach a different result without it.

* "well defined goal" - something that a person or a team can actually finish. It might or might not benefit from funding during its creation, but at some point, it is just done, and there's almost no reason to think about continuing work other than availability and minimal upgrades to follow other tools or platforms.

* "ever-evolving" - something that has no fixed end-goal, and will continue to evolve essentially forever. Depending on the scale of the task, this may or may not benefit from being funded so that there are people working on it full time, for a long time.

These descriptions originate in my work on software, but I think something similar can be said for lots of other human activities as well, without much modification.

If a "well-defined goal" project gets popular and sticky enough, it can metamorphize into an "ever-evolving" project by injection of VC capital.

Or just good old scope creep =)

https://www.laws-of-software.com/laws/zawinski/

> Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can.

  -- James Zawinski, 1995

> There are many many creative, caring people that are motivated to create things or care for each other for the sake of it

Very true. In a UBU world I have no doubt we’d have many exciting libraries, lots of pottery, and many books.

But I’ve never met anyone passionate about collecting bins, development of accounting tooling, or pricing of phone insurance. You need rewards to allocate people effectively, because “passion” is random and not related to what people actually need

If you think that literally no one is motivated by making more money than the minimal amount they need to survive, how do you explain rich people who still work? UBI isn't a proposal to make salaries illegal, so the problem of "how do we financially motivate people to work" isn't going to change if people happen to get a subsistence wage without employment. The assumption that there's a binary of "people will either be motivated to work or they won't" is nonsensical; there's a entire spectrum of what motivates different people (and how much they're motivated by them). Some people who work now might stop under a system of UBI, but plenty still would continue to. There's a fair question about what the correct amount of money for this is to balance things properly, but without the flawed assumption that motivation is a binary, I don't think the answer is nearly as obvious as you imply.

Seems like you are making same binary assumption that people either work or they don't. The important question is probably how well/hard do people work. Lower productivity means people that work produce less so prices rise. Many make mistake thinking only about having money, but forget the supply part of the equation. If productivity is lower, there are literally less things available to everyone. And these equations are not linear. Look at the current RAM situation for example.

But the major issue is that the progress slows down. Effects of slower progress accumulate with time. At first you are only a few years behind, then you are a few decades behind etc. Imagine inventions, cures being available decades or hundreds of years later (depending on what timescale we look at).

I think UBI sounds nice, but is far from an optimal solution. Wouldn't be better, if we could solve same issues UBI promises to solve in a more efficient way (with less negative side effects)? UBI is just throwing money at the problem, hoping it will solve itself.

Most work is worthless for progress though.

No matter how many janitors, cooks, etc you have you'll never invent a rocket. Most hard working people are just doing societal plumbing not inventing. So losing a bunch of them won't impact the technological advancement of your society.

But, I still think there's a flawed premise here. Loosing a janitor to UBI means that they can occasionally help their friend with rocketry or some other pursuit they have interest in. Providing UBI means that geologists don't need to hoard data because they won't starve if they don't get a cut from it's usage. The people involved in technological break through are often doing it for self-interest or fame and don't stop once they've hit some financial breakpoint.

We're long past the point where we barely need anybody to work to actually feed/house everybody and at this point it's all gravy. For obvious reasons we couldn't feed/house everybody if they wanted to solely live in NYC but IIUC no UBI proposal is about that; UBI lets you live in below median-desired places without additional income.

But knowledge and academic research and industry R&D are key for progress though. All of which require hard work.

You also don't balance equations in your examples. Your janitor goes to help a friend with rocketry, which seems like a net gain, but someone else now needs to stop helping a friend to replace that janitor's position. Otherwise researches at that facility where janitor had worked will have to do janitor's work instead of doing their own. You call work cooks and janitors are doing worthless for progress, but researches (or children in school) need to eat, need to have functional workplace/classroom, etc. While they might not make progress directly, they enable other people to make progress.

> We're long past the point where we barely need anybody to work to actually feed/house everybody

Why would we need UBI then? The price of food and of housing everybody would be dirt cheap, if that were really true. Value of anything is completely relative (which I find that many people have trouble grasping). If something requires very little work, then it will be very very cheap in an ideal free market.

> But knowledge and academic research and industry R&D are key for progress though. All of which require hard work.

Do you think that the people who do valuable research are doing it purely because of financial motivation, or is something else going on there? The point I was trying to make is that giving people a basic income so that they won't literally starve if they don't work isn't going to completely eliminate all motivation to work. Some people will be motivated because they want more money than what UBI provides (as I think there's pretty ample evidence that desire for more money is something a lot of people seem to have independent of how stable their situation is), and plenty of people will be motivated to work for the myriad of other reasons that already motivate them. There's an argument you can make that the money from UBI will be enough to change the decision some people have, but exactly how many people that will be and the effects that have on society will depend quite a bit on how much money is being given. To me, that means the question isn't a binary question of "would UBI be good", but a spectrum of potential amounts of money (with $0 being the choice of "no UNI" that's presented as half of the original binary). Maybe there's a compelling argument that the value should be $0, but I've yet to see an argument for it that actually engages with it as a spectrum in the first place, which is why none of those arguments end up seeming particularly compelling.

Of course money is not the only thing that motivates people. But there's a lot of empirical evidence that it matters. A lot, unfortunately. And I say unfortunately as I would rather have it matter less. But me whishing it doesn't change the data.

UBI is a high concept pitch, that is memorable and catchy, but AFAIK it's not well supported either by psychological models or by empirical economics data. It gives some social safety net. Problem is that it gives a rather weak safety net. We can actually do better.

Can I ask you why exactly does it need to be UBI? If another system (more complex, with less sexy pitch) could provide a bigger safety net and have a more positive economic impact, wouldn't you rather choose that?

> Otherwise researches at that facility where janitor had worked will have to do janitor's work instead of doing their own.

Or facilities optimize to produce less trash so they can handle the newer trash load with less staff instead of paying extra.

> The price of food and of housing everybody would be dirt cheap ... then it will be very very cheap in an ideal free market.

We don't live in an ideal free market.

Food is extremely cheap to the point that the USG (effectively) sets price floors which prevents it from falling further. People do live on $3/day.

SROs not in say NYC are cheap as well. Everybody trying to live in the same major cities will never be cheap.

> Why would we need UBI then?

Activation Energy - Many people have no choice to work a dead-end or low-paying job because they cannot afford to take a break to find higher paying work more suited to their skills.

Opportunity Cost - The geologist example from above where you need to hide information from others so you don't suffer.

Societal unrest - Literally right now there's a president in the US whose base is upset about how the technological progress was not shared with them to the point they want to throw away any current advantages to go backwards in time.

> Or facilities optimize to produce less trash so they can handle the newer trash load with less staff instead of paying extra.

You are breaking the principle of keep all other conditions constant. If it's possible to optimize, why didn't they do it before? They were already motivated to maximize profits. Optimization is also an additional work which you are conveniently ignoring.

> Food is extremely cheap to the point that the USG (effectively) sets price floors which prevents it from falling further. People do live on $3/day.

Food prices sometimes fall below costs because agriculture is volatile. It's not proof that food is inherently "extremely cheap" to produce. Also, absolute prices cannot be easily compared between countries and low quality food has negative health effects.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/food-expenditure-share-gd...

> Activation Energy - Many people have no choice to work a dead-end or low-paying job because they cannot afford to take a break to find higher paying work more suited to their skills.

If basic needs are so cheap that UBI can cover it, then doing low-paying job part time should also cover these basic needs. Something in your logic is not adding up.

> Opportunity Cost - The geologist example from above where you need to hide information from others so you don't suffer.

Opportunity cost is the loss of other alternatives when one alternative is chosen. Geologists not needing to hide information, because they don't need that money to survive is opportunity cost how? And even with UBI they would still benefit, if they get that additional money.

> Societal unrest - Literally right now there's a president in the US whose base is upset about how the technological progress was not shared with them to the point they want to throw away any current advantages to go backwards in time.

UBI fixes that issue how exactly?

> You are breaking the principle of keep all other conditions constant.

We've added a change; of course the world will change! But yeah sure if we introduce UBI and hold the rest of the world the same then UBI will have an unobservable effect.

> If it's possible to optimize, why didn't they do it before?

I mean people aren't actually rational so there's a million angles there. However, the cost of a janitor is going to go up with UBI as the opportunity cost has increased.

> then doing low-paying job part time should also cover these basic needs. Something in your logic is not adding up.

No, I just don't think you understand the world around you. Have you never heard of remote nomads? Plenty of people work full-time for parts of the year or part-time all of the year.

> Geologists not needing to hide information, because they don't need that money to survive is opportunity cost how?

Giving the information away for free costs you the money that you could've gotten for charging for it. When you need that money to survive then you have to restrict access. When you don't then you're able to volunteer it.

If we want to have any meaningful debate on what effect something has, we need to try to separate what are the reactions/side effects caused by it and to try to avoid additional confounding changes that were not caused by it. Trying to undo the negative side effect you don't like by, for example, introducing new technological innovations, or in your case a new optimization even though there is no increase in anything that would help do develop this new optimization, is making a confounding change.

While speculating what might happen in some particular cases can be fun, the real questions that need to be answered are regarding the macroeconomic effects of UBI. Starting with what % of GDP will be needed for UBI that will cover all the basic needs (food, housing, healthcare, etc.)? And then focus, not just on what few good Samaritans might do, but on how households, firms, and governments would respond at scale: labor supply, wages and prices, inflationary pressure, taxes, effects on productivity, growth, etc.

But I think our discussion has run its course. While we clearly have different opinions, it was still fun and I hope we both learned something. Be well!

> So losing a bunch of them won't impact the technological advancement of your society.

This reminds me of Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide, where a civilization decides that phone sanitizers are useless, until removing them quietly collapses everything else. Declaring work “non-essential to progress” usually just means we don’t understand its role.

I don't disagree that people work with different amounts of efforts, but if anything, to me it seems far more likely that people who have to work only because they won't be able to survive otherwise are going to be more stressed and less likely to be able to work productively. If the only people who work are the ones who choose to rather than an additional set who are forced to in order to survive, the average motivation level is going to be higher, and it's not obvious to me that this wouldn't be better even if the total number of workers is lower. This just seems like another balancing problem, and there's still no obvious reason to me why the default assumption is that maximizing the number of people who work will end up being the best option.

> But I’ve never met anyone passionate about collecting bins, development of accounting tooling, or pricing of phone insurance. You need rewards to allocate people effectively, because “passion” is random and not related to what people actually need

You're making the mistake of conflating UBI with "no one works anymore". This is a silly mistake to make. It's like believing that providing a universal healthcare service that provides basic care to everyone somehow meant supply and demand for private health services would be eliminated. In the meantime, look at pretty much any European country which already provides free universal healthcare.

Listen, UBI stands for Universal Basic Income. Universal means everyone gets it, Income means an inflow of cash, and Basic means it's not much, just enough to cover basic needs. Think of a kind of unemployment benefit for all that doesn't go away once you find a job. Once you get a job, you get paid an income that supplements your basic income. That's it. The biggest impact is that if you find yourself out of a job, you still get an inflow of cache that allows you to meet basic needs.

UBIs does change the economy. For example, most if not all poverty-mitigation policies can be effectively replaced by UBI. Instead of food stamps, use your income to buy food. There's no longer a pressing need for unemployment benefits if you already are guaranteed a basic income.

My main objection to UBI: won't landlords, grocery stores, power companies and the like simply raise their prices to suck up that money that everyone is guaranteed to have now until it ultimately doesn't cover basic needs like it was designed to do? Maybe I'm being too pessimistic.

> Basic means it's not much, just enough to cover basic needs

But what are these basic needs that are not much? Housing costs, medical expenses...?

I actually volunteer to take care of parts of the trash in our neighborhood. Like with a proper garbage truck. And the amount of volunteers so big that I only have to do it a few times a year. All the money they make with recycling goes to the local school. It is fun to do, even in cold rain. The garbage truck driver gets paid, but I am sure in an IBU world even drivers would chip in if they could afford it. People want to contribute and feel useful.

>development of accounting tooling,

There has been several really nice personal accounting CLI projects lately.

I’ve met a lot of people who are passionate about public cleanliness to the point of organizing rubbish pickups, beach cleanups, and river dredging using their own power. With UBI, you may have to take your own trash to the landfill but rest assured the larger ecology will still be taken care of by passionate people.

I think a bigger issue will be that the people who are passionate for a project may not be the most effective at accomplishing it, and without income you can’t motivate those more effective people into working on the project.

UBI is not in contradiction to paid work to make more than the minimum that is guaranteed. Think of it as being like food stamps that you get in addition to whatever you do or do not make.

Interestingly, UBI would be compatible with ending the minimum wage. If survival is guaranteed, then there is no reason to insist that a low end job pay a living wage. As long as someone wants to pay for the work and someone else wants to do it, let them!

This sounds like it'd be one of the many ideas that sounds great on paper but in reality just creates an even greater stratification in society. I think you're completely correct that in many places, particularly higher end - people would come together to keep the place looking great, possibly even better since you get to 'own' it on some ways.

But on the other hand in many 'urban' neighborhoods, there's far less motivation to take care of things - and once you remove the external actors going in there to do what little they already do, these places would fall into an even more pitiful state very rapidly. But I also think we're looking at things superficially. There's a lot of technical work that can't be casually done like plumbing or electrical that is currently moderately compensated. In an UBI world costs for this would likely skyrocket which would lead to an even higher UBI which would lead to even higher costs which would lead to Zimbabwe.

Pessimism aside I would probably actually support it, simply because I think it would be the ultimate expression of liberty - but you have to realize that you're not going to create anything like the same society we have, but with everybody being able to independently support themselves. You're going to completely destroy the contemporary economy and create a new entity that would probably be much closer to something of times long since past when the overwhelming majority of America was self employed. 'The Expanse' offers a realistic take on what UBI would probably entail.

> But on the other hand in many 'urban' neighborhoods, there's far less motivation to take care of things - and once you remove the external actors going in there to do what little they already do, these places would fall into an even more pitiful state very rapidly.

You're letting your prejudice get in the way of making a rational argument. There is no difference between what you chose to call "urban" and any other place, be it rural, suburban or urban. You don't see people taking care of their surroundings because you only get to see a snapshot of it's current state, not what others have done in the recent and not so distant past.

Of course OP is silly in making the mistake of believing UBI will get all people working on urban waste management fired and out of a job. It's like believing that if a service provides a free tier, all other services will suddenly vanish. But presuming people don't care about their surroundings because they live in an 'urban' neighborhood reflects a problem that's about prejudice and not UBI.

This is rather a tangent but I spent years living in these areas. Have you ever wondered why it seems so many people who grew in these sort of places tend to have seemingly so much less 'empathy' for them than those who grew up e.g. upper middle class? You are probably seeing things through a foreign perspective where you assume everybody is, more or less, like you and so these awful differences must be caused by reparable externalities. You probably imagine that if you were granted infinite power, you could create a utopia.

But what you learn living in these areas for years is that no - not everybody is like you, or even remotely like it. There are a significant number of people who are simply broken and beyond repair. It reminds me of this video [1] which is from a minister of the UAE speaking on a perfect analog. The one thing I'd certainly agree with you about is that prejudice is bad, but the direction of one's prejudice, good or bad, matters not. We should always form our opinions based on reality, and not ideals.

[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s0jIKBhUDeA

> You don't see people taking care of their surroundings because you only get to see a snapshot of it's current state, not what others have done in the recent and not so distant past.

I think that is what observation actually is, you get to see what others have done in the recent and not so distant past, or am i missing your point.

The hikikomori[1] or NEETs ought to be a hotbed of creative works if your hypothesis is true. And they aren't, plain and simple.

There is effectively zero evidence suggesting a population on UBI will result in some sort of outpouring of creativity.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hikikomori and it's not a phenomenon limited to Japan.

Chiming in as a former-ish member of the demographic you are just making stuff up about. There is no way to determine how much and how UBI would impact hikikomori because the demographic is inherently adverse to study.

I personally know that some crucial open source work is maintained by people with schizoid-avoidant spectrum issues. I know a lot of them but I won't out them here. hikikomori are driven to be invisible because their extreme pathological avoidance of attention. You don't know them and their contributions because they don't want you to know that they still live at home, out of their car door dashing because no company ever hires them, are shut-in because of serious unhealed trauma, are still deeply in poverty in such a wealthy industry etc.

A lot of these humans if given a no pressure handout of cash would likely contribute more to society. Would most not contribute? idk. But I do know that the contributions of those who would might offset all the others.

Many prominent pseudonymous devs have had hikikomori traits. _why practically inspired a generation of Ruby devs. visualidiot (RIP) was a crucial driver behind a lot of web dev culture in the 2010s. Heck, I made significant contributions to Joomla and WP themes back in the day -- you have probably used sites with themes or plugins I made. Also I ran a blog a decade ago that used to rank prominently in google and receive dozens of emails a month from people struggling with mental illness -- many people crediting me with saving their lives. Surely that is something of value to society.

Don't go around spreading bullshit like it is facts about a group of people we know little about.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/gb/blog/creative-exploration...

Love a headline that conforms to Betteridge’s law

Strangely though, all the studies cited on the wiki page seem to suggest that there is a higher number of "yes" questions than "no."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_law_of_headlines#...

You assume much about what I know about the hikikomori demographic. My power level is well over nine thousand.

>> The hikikomori[1] or NEETs ought to be a hotbed of creative works if your hypothesis is true. And they aren't, plain and simple.

> Chiming in as a former-ish member of the demographic you are just making stuff up about.

Which bit is made up? Can we tell at all if that group is "a hotbed of creative works"?

> A lot of these humans if given a no pressure handout of cash would likely contribute more to society. Would most not contribute? idk. But I do know that the contributions of those who would might offset all the others.

"likely", "might" - this is all speculation on your part too. There is no reason to believe that a lot of humans if given a no pressure handout of cash would, in fact, contribute more to society, nor that the contributions from those that do would, in fact, offset those that don't.

It's speculation on both sides of this particular argument I see no compelling evidence at all.

> Which bit is made up? Can we tell at all if that group is "a hotbed of creative works"?

If we can't tell, the "they aren't" bit is of course made up. Are you not arguing in good faith, or are you just not paying attention to what you're quoting?

"they aren't, plain and simple" is the made up bit I was calling out. There is literally not much more to the original comment to be calling made up.

"A lot of these humans" was me referring the humans I personally know mentioned in the prior paragraph. And I was speculating on the effect UBI would have on them.

Because anecdotally my experience is that hikikomori are a hotbed of creativity and that financial assistance with no strings attached has helped us increase contributions. However, it is very possible I have a skewed sample point because of course I would only know the hikikomori that are hotbeds of creativity -- I wouldn't ever encounter those silently scrolling and never building community online. That said, it feels intuitively correct to me that people with no irl connections would be pretty motivated to build connections some other way. I certainly was. But perhaps that is simply outlier behavior maybe it is more typical for hikikomori to spend their lives watching anime. We don't know.

The thesis of my comment is that we don't know enough about the demographic of hikikomori to state absolutes about them -- to do so is to spread bullshit. I said "There is no way to determine how much and how UBI would impact hikikomori because the demographic is inherently adverse to study." Which seems to also be the thesis of your comment. I suspect from your comment history that you are just being deliberately argumentative so you can pass reading off as new insight.

People who are specifically not employed because they aren't motivated to do anything at all don't seem to be the best sample for what average people could do if they had more free time during their waking hours.

It seems unlikely that the most motivated people will take up UBI; the most likely UBI recipients are those who are marginally employed, and likely marginally motivated.

Guess what the U stands for

did you mean to write the opposite of what you wrote?

Accidentally posted in the middle of an edit; corrected now, thanks.

You posted the edit over 7 hours ago and it still doesn't make sense. You should check what the U in UBI stands for.

What do you think UBI is and how do you think it works? Honestly.

a) I'm not sure it logically follows that the hikikomori would be a particularly artistic group, thus don't understand the assertion; b) how do we know they aren't? By definition, they wouldn't be out promoting their works or gaining recognition.

Also, there is at least one example of UBI contributing to an increase in activity:

"According to the research, 31% of BIA recipients reported an increased ability to sustain themselves through arts work alone, and the number of people who reported low pay as a career barrier went down from one third to 17%. These changes were identified after the first six months of the scheme and remained stable as the scheme continued." [1]

[1] https://musiciansunion.org.uk/news/ireland-s-basic-income-fo...

> The hikikomori[1] or NEETs ought to be a hotbed of creative works if your hypothesis is true.

This seems a non-sequitur. People whose motivation is isolation are unlikely to try to generate anything for other people.

But your general idea is correct - is there group where motivated people don't need to worry about money?

Well yes - we see this in artist colonies and indeed in entrepreneurial retreats like https://www.recurse.com/

Counterpoint to your counterpoint: the flourishing of the arts in Bohemian districts[1] in the 19th and 20th centuries.

Maybe there’s a feedback loop with societal expectations regarding the hikikomori / NEETs? The more they are demonized as unproductive, the less productive they become.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bohemianism

Hikikomori seems to be largely a symptom of mental illness. NEETs almost by definition are not productive.

The fact that these groups are not producing mass amounts of creative works in no way implies that currently-productive people would not produce significantly more creative works if they had the time and resources to do so.

No that wouldn’t. If the zeitgeist, culture, society at large are antagonizing toward you, if you are meant to feel like a useless negative part of society, why would we expect amazing output from them?

This reinforces others talking about the flaws of hustle and grind culture. The status quo create the conditions for the negatives and then point to that and say “see”.

NEETs are, by definition, people who are either unwilling or unable to do anything productive, so I don't think they are a good example. I expect you'd get better results if you include the people who are employed today.

> The hikikomori[1] or NEETs ought to be a hotbed of creative works if your hypothesis is true. And they aren't, plain and simple.

It's funny how you chose to frame groups as "NEET", but you somehow failed to refer to "aspiring artist" or "aspiring musician" or "aspiring novelist". I mean "aspiring artist" already implies engaging in an activity albeit not professionally or reaching success.

You also somehow failed to refer to "amateur artist". As if not enjoying enough success to live comfortably with your art to the point of requiring to hold a job to pay rent is something that would validate your argument.

I'm not sure you are even aware of the fact that most of the mainstream artists you see around are not even professional, in the sense that in spite of their success and touring they still need to hold a job to make ends meet. Check out any summer festival, pick any random non-headliner band, and see how many members hold jobs, and had to take time off to go touring. Even some music legends have a history of holding humble jobs at least up to the time they made it. See Black Sabbath's Tony Iommi, who famously lost a couple of fingers in an industrial accident while working at a sheet metal factory.

It's not just music, either. Luminaries like Fernando Pessoa could very well be classified as the ultimate NEET as he spent years of his early life not in education, employment, or training.

The UK music culture of the 1960s was in large part due to the "dole" or cash payments to poor people.

I don't think that's the only reason since the dole exists today too and there's not as much good music coming out.

Jazz and other music genres in the US came without government welfare, they came from struggle and oppression. Motivated artists will still work part time to fund their dream, they don't necessarily wait for welfare to start making art.

IF you were to give a lot of people free money today, will you get more and higher quality art in return, or will most people just drink and smoke that money while playing videogames at home?

Society, people and the world today are vastly different than back in the 1960s, so we need new polices targeting the society of today, not 1960s policies.

What do you mean there isn't much good music coming out? Maybe the genres people are creating more of don't match your personal preference, or you aren't looking for it and are just relying on major media companies to show it to you, but ive never had more high quality music of more variety than ever before.

Much of it is farther in the electronica genres that many people somehow still ignore the existence of but I haven't had to listen to the same song twice unless I wanted to in a number of years. Just on my youtube discovery feed right now I got multiple 1+ hour synthwave mixes, EBM/EDM, industrial bass, multiple forms of metal, filk, jungle and DnB, punk rock, old and new jazz styles, and more, 95% of which was made in the last 2 years.

>Just on my youtube discovery feed right now I got multiple 1+ hour synthwave mixes, EBM/EDM, industrial bass, multiple forms of metal, filk, jungle and DnB, punk rock, old and new jazz styles, and more, 95% of which was made in the last 2 years.

How is that proof of "good music"? That's just background noise.

From the post you replied to:

  Maybe the genres people are creating more of don't match your personal preference

What do you think those policies might look like? It's true that we have more screen based entertainment options today. We also have a very different music distribution system that is likely influencing things substantially. In the 1960s, I imagine getting on the radio was what it took to launch a career, now it's matching the algorithm on spotify.

I don't know what the right policies would be, but I noticed that smart, driven and disciplined driven people will always find a way to work around algorithms to get to the top, it's not something the government can legislate in order to get a desired outcome.

It's not like becoming famous back then was easy either. Plenty of good bands never got anywhere. The Mona Lisa wasn't a famous painting until someone stole it in 1911, before that nobody gave damn and now it's the most famous of them all. Survivorship bias and randomness in art is real.

Um, hikikomori are a hotbed of creative works, though. Your entire premise is false. I don't know that you could get reliable statistics proving this claim, but Japan likely has the highest number of creatives per capita of any country in the world, and a ton of them are NEETs who spend their time drawing fanart or writing trashy webnovels. The vast majority of this creative work isn't commercially successful, of course, which is part of why they're NEETs.

> "NEETs who spend their time drawing fanart or writing trashy webnovels"

And you expect the voting public to be persuaded to support UBI because of the immense societal value of an tsunami of gooner fanart (yes, I do have some passing familiarity with the sort of output Japanese NEETs generate) and "trashy webnovels"? I'm pretty sure that when the person I'm replying to talked about "the incredible artworks [and] literature ... that would spring into existence", that's probably not what they were hoping for.

I'm not commenting in any way on UBI, as I try to avoid having strong opinions about topics I don't have expertise on. My only stake in this matter is addressing the patently false claim that NEETs are not creative, when the exact opposite is true which perhaps is incidentally harmful to the argument you were building against UBI given that you staked it on an inversion of the truth.

That you boil it down to "gooner fanart" reflects entirely on yourself and what you view. I believe this is known as "telling on yourself". The overwhelming majority of the artistic output is actually not lewd; somewhere in the region of 85-90% of what gets published is SFW. Not only that, a pretty considerable amount of output is in fact professional-quality; if anything keeps them from being professionals, it's merely the fact that they spend their time creating what they want to see in the world. Being an actually professional artist generally entails creating what other people want to see in the world; specifically what a critical mass of people willing to pay want, which renders commercially viable art to a limited subset of possibilities, mostly only possibilities that appeal to the lowest common denominator if you want to ensure the safety of your income.

You could indeed say that literature is a weak point relative to the very high quality art, music, games, etc, in the NEET cultural sphere, but it's because people aren't trying to be literary. There is simply a subcultural preference, among both creators and consumers, for easier-to-digest writing. The forms of creativity people take an interest in don't have to match the exact ones you value in order for them to have merit. People read and write trashy webnovels because they like trashy webnovels, and that's fine too. It is still an expression of creativity all the same. And some small percentage of those trashy webnovels do go on to be extremely commercially successful, so even if that's your cynical metric for creative value to society it would still be incorrect to say they don't have value.

Can it really be a 'hotbed' if there is no demand (or even maybe awareness) of the works? That just seems like a hobby done for selfish reasons.

Quoting GGGP:

>There are many many creative, caring people that are motivated to create things or care for each other for the sake of it, not for some financial reward. Imagine the incredible programs, websites, games, crafts, artworks, animations, performances, literature, journalism, hobby clubs, support groups, community organizations that would spring into existence if we all just had more bandwidth for them while having our baseline needs met.

As it happens, the Japanese internet is absolutely rich with content created by individuals, most of it done for the sake of love for creative work rather than financial motivation. I spend much of my free time either consuming it or contributing to the pool of such work myself. The entire point of this discussion thread was about the potential for creativity if you were to unshackle it from the demands of financial self-sustenance.

As an aside, I believe this phenomenon manifested as strongly as it has in Japan because of the extremely low cost of living relative to the level of economic development; a studio apartment can be had for less than the equivalent of $200 USD per month, and many parents can afford to and are willing to pay this price to get the NEETs out of their house. In essence enabling them, not that they want to enable their adult children to depend on them but the burden is small enough that they can tolerate it.

I have no problem with people doing whatever they want, but if nobody else values it, there’s no ‘contribution’ to society, art, or anything else.

People valuing something is not at all the same as people spending money for it. For one, there is always competition with an abundance of freely available material. At the very least, you’d have to compare with a situation where nothing of the sort whatsoever would be freely available, and that’s very hard to do.

That being said, I’m skeptical of UBI being workable as well.

I think that's an unbelievably cynical worldview, one I don't agree with at all, but within that view: what of the things people value, but which they do not pay for? Much of the tech of the world is built on the free labour of FOSS developers. Are they not contributing to society because they are not compensated for their contributions?

I contribute to FOSS, and everything from issue reports to branches and pull requests are indications of a project’s value! True value is difficult to measure, but there are many projects which contribute no value.

It's quite possible to be creative while not contributing to society or whatnot.

A crappy sand castle from a eight-year old that will be torn down when the tide comes in is not really contributing to anything useful, but can be quite creative.

I never disputed the fact that shut-ins can be ‘creative’, but instead focused on ‘hotbed’. I would characterize artistic failures as being more ‘original’ and perhaps ‘creative’ than successes, but they still lack value (to anyone but the creator). Regardless, this seems pointlessly semantic.

Counterexample:Ignaz Semmelweis, who discovered in the 1840s that hand-washing dramatically reduced deaths in childbirth. The medical establishment rejected his findings, and he was institutionalized and died tragically, vindicated only after his death.

Surely this was a contribution even if not valued at the point of making it.

Even given the other objections to your argument, there are an extraordinary number of examples of now-very-appreciated artists, writers, etc whose work was not valued at the time they were creating it.

All hobbies are selfish, that's kinda the point?

Hikkis will barely have their (speaking from Maslow) physiological needs met, and seldom their safety and security needs. This leaves them with very few mental-emotional resources to put into even having any creative thoughts. UBI would absolutely uplift these people into a position where they can start producing output.

and yet their hypothesis is true, there are already many people, with or without UBI, that volunteer, create things and in general help people surrounding them without any reward and they are the backbone of every society, not the career-chasers

I think phenomena like hikkikomori have more to do with (at least perceived) social rejection than lack of motivation. If the only acceptable message you receive from society is that you must chase the brass ring constantly and any setback means you are an abject failure, then withdrawing from the pain of that rejection makes sense for anyone who has experienced enough setbacks or strongly feels alien to that culture. A broader societal shift would occur if it was truly universally understood that everyone has value as a human being separate from their labor market leverage or capital accumulation.

There will always be strivers who measure their self worth against superficial standards (Russ Hanneman “doors go up” hand gesture here), I just don’t see why everyone should be forced to play that game or starve I suppose. Giving everyone the option to settle for a life of basic dignity while caring for those around them, or going all in on some academic / creative pursuit seems equally valid investments for society.

Yes. The only real conclusion from people like NEETs is that society failed them. Outside of a fraction of total people (or when addictions are at play), it is very rare that someone never wants to be productive.

> Imagine the incredible programs, websites, games, crafts, artworks, animations, performances, literature, journalism, hobby clubs, support groups, community organizations that would spring into existence if we all just had more bandwidth for them while having our baseline needs met.

If people find these things useful, they can actually pay for them. If you can't find people who value it enough to pay for it, then may be it's not as valuable as you think it is.

By that measure, doing something for a poor person who cannot pay would be entirely worthless, while delivering food to a particularly generous billionaire would be more valuable than an entire month of an average person's work.

The error of your argument lies in the assumption that any participant in the market possesses enough money to pay the true "value-to-them" of a thing.

I support UBI, funded by high capital gains taxes, to offset the growing value of capital relative to labor due to ever-improving automation, but I think it's silly to think a significant number of people will ever be happy with UBI alone.

First of all, "baseline needs" are fluid. These days, electricity and internet are broadly considered baseline needs, but would have been unimaginable luxuries for previous generations. The future will inevitably bring new "baseline needs" we can hardly yet comprehend.

Secondly, the vast majority of people will never be satisfied with the bare minimum, no matter what that minimum is. If you have a friend who can afford fancy things, and you can't, then more likely than not, you will not be satisfied. It's also much easier to attract a partner if you're financially successful, for similar reasons. That's just human nature. Just because you don't have to worry about starving or succumbing to the elements does not mean people will stop competing with one another.

> The vast majority of people will never be satisfied with the bare minimum

Isn't that a benefit for UBI? If everyone's basic needs are met and they want more, nothing would stop them from taking a job and making more money right?

Ya. I'm saying I support UBI, and that the concern most people raise about UBI (usually along the lines of "I don't think anybody should just coast by without working") is completely unfounded.

The parent post was talking about how everybody would have more time for unpaid pursuits if only we had UBI. I'm saying that I don't think UBI would change that much. People will continue to pursue unpaid hobbies much like they do today, but making money will still be just as important.

Not really against welfare programs...but...

UBI and safety net would just get eaten by economic rent. Basically your landlord would just raise the price of renting space leaving people right where they left off.

You need to impose a tax called the Land Value Tax to prevent landowners eating up the public money. Even then we got a long list of much needed public spending before we can even think about a Citizen's Dividend.

> UBI and safety net would just get eaten by economic rent. Basically your landlord would just raise the price of renting space leaving people right where they left off.

This is only true if there’s a static supply of rental units, which isn’t true in most places (despite new construction being constrained by regulation in many places). I support an LVT, but it is not a necessary precondition for redistribution.

Somehow no one talks about the incredible plumbing.

I'm generally an advocate for a robust safety-net such that people shouldn't be on their knees every month just to scrape by with food/housing/healthcare, and would love it if we reached Star Trek/The Culture levels of post-scarcity, but I'm simultaneously not convinced by this idea, but possibly from another angle.

1) I'm not sure I want Github to be the arbiter of FOSS resource distribution (See: Spotify and small artists).

2) A second order effect could be creating a reliance on it which enables a future rug pull once the current framework is eroded.

TL;DR: I wholly agree with your overall vision of the future, but not necessarily this step towards it.

“Strong” social safety can be achieved only by enslaving producers who have to provide the ground for “many many” caring people. This is always the case. Consider Russian support of young families: the government takes the money from families without children and gives it to those who have. Personally, I cannot imagine a worse moral depravity than supporting this atrocity as a matter of justice.

Capitalism is not “slavery with extra steps,” it’s freedom in a fragile world repleted with conflicting goals. Just because people don’t agree with your goals doesn’t make you a slave.

>the government takes the money from families without children and gives it to those who have

IDK, this seems perfectly reasonable if the state also provides an old age insurance / pension system for retirees. Without a younger generation of people paying into the system (i.e. the children of parents) these systems collapse. It seems appropriate to support the people that keep the government functioning.

Of course, I’m guessing you oppose systems like social security too, given your comment. I just find it odd that you can’t imagine anything worse than giving money to parents, given most governments give money to a lot of people, most of whom aren’t opting into anything as noble as parenthood.

Giving uncharacteristically large direct stimuli for procreation disproportionately incentivizes the people in dire need of money, meddling with the rationality of the decision and increasing social tension later.

The only other way to be promised a big pile of cash from the govt there is a military contract.

UBI is an idea from another money-centric ideology, namely “libertarianism”. It’s not an idea for fostering creativity. It’s an idea for dealing with less employable dependents of society, while the true dependents (parasitic capitalists) take the real spoils of industrialized productivity.

Doesn't UBI come from taxes? I can't reconcile the idea of welfare for everyone resonating very well with any of the libertarians I know. Personal charity, sure, absolutely, but not government controlled payouts to people, even if that includes everyone. They would probably consider it better than the current welfare system with all it's bureaucracy, but that's as positive a response as I can expect.

Most libertarians I know (and I consider myself an on and off libertarian as I learn more about it) want the government to stick to making sure people's rights aren't being trodden upon and otherwise leave us alone.

See Milton Friedman. Or Friedrich Hayek if Friedman isn’t crazy enough.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_advocates_of_universal...

1. Work for free making open source code and giving it away for free.

2. Giant corporations take all my code without giving me anything.

3. Now I'm really angry! I should have gotten some money from them!

4. The government must force my neighbours to pay a salary to me!

5. Continue to work for free making open source code for giant corporations, so they can profit.

How about instead?:

1. Don't work for free or give away your code. Instead charge a fair price for people to use your code or software.

2. If your code is good, people and corporations pay you for it.

3. Now you're really happy! You got money for your labour.

4. The government doesn't need to oppress innocent people to pay your salary.

5. You can continue to work for money and make more money.

I'm not agreeing with the OP proposal, but with LLMs today, no matter how you license your code and no matter what ToS or other prohibition you put on it, there does not seem to be any way to prevent LLMs from absorbing and using it to implement a replacement based on your code unless you choose to only do closed source code - there's no "opt out" for someone's source code, let alone an opt-in (again, unless we give up open source). (A very different situation from the AI companies themselves, where companies such as Anthropic make Claude Code closed source, and their ToS provide strict prohibitions on using it to work on something that could compete with them - can you imagine if Windows or MacOS's ToS prohibited people from using their OS to work on a competing OS, of if the VSCode ToS prohibited people from using VSCode to work on another editor?)

> The government doesn't need to oppress innocent people to pay your salary

Pretty much everything a government can do is going to qualify as "oppression" if you use the term so broadly that's it includes levying taxes, so that's pretty much a meaningless characterization.

Let's put it in more concrete terms: if the US government passes a law to raise taxes to fund UBI, that probably wouldn't even make the last of the top 100 most oppressive things it's done to innocent people in the past year. If the strongest objection to this policy would be "I don't want to pay taxes to fund things for other people", it's in pretty good company.

> Pretty much everything a government can do is going to qualify as "oppression" if you use the term so broadly

Yes, and that's why great care and respect should be applied to how the government uses the tax money which they have raised from oppression.

Paying somebody to work for free for a giant corporation is not a justified use of that money. Those corporations should pay for their labour themselves.

I can't think of any worse oppression than taxes, bare forced labour. When it's done to pay for an army to defend ourselves against enemies, for the justice system to protect all citizens, or for healthcare to save lives, then that's palatable. As well as for a myriad of other things. But to pay a programmer so that he can make server infrastructure so that Amazon doesn't have to pay him? That's not palatable.

>I can't think of any worse oppression than taxes, bare forced labour.

Really?

Not among the standard things which every government always does. Are you thinking about crimes against humanity and such?

For example, I am a very strong supporter of free speech. And many or most governments oppress free speech. But I still think that taxing labour is worse than suppressing free speech. I still think taxing labour is worse than oppressing the population with curfews, which is also something almost every government engaged in during the covid pandemic, and which I am against.

> I still think that taxing labour is worse than suppressing free speech

I guess we're just not going to agree on any of this then, because that's pretty much the opposite opinion of mine

I think you've missed the point again, it's more like this:

1. Work for free making open source code and giving it away for free.

2. Giant corporations take all my code without giving me anything.

3. Work for free making open source code and giving it away for free.

If you can't go to step 3, then you are doing it wrong and need to change step 1 from "giving it away for free" to something like "giving it away for free to the common people and at a price for corporate."

Which you could say "but that's not open source!" and you'd be right, which is exactly my point here: I don't think you want to do fully open source software, you want to do software and get paid for it somehow. If you do open source and get paid eventually and non binding, that's a nice little bonus, but it's not the main goal, never was with open source.

Although I agree with your overall point, there is a middle ground here: (commercially) non-free but open source software.

I believe that's where the biggest disagreement ITT lies. There are currently good ways to do FOSS, proprietary closed-source and free closed-source software development. But if the OSS is worth charging for (commercial) use, devs are left with asking for donations, SaaS or "pay me to work on this issue/feature".

There arguably should be better mechanisms to reward OSS development, even if the largest part of an OSSndev's motivation is intrinsic.

I'm sorry, but in my mind, open source and commercial don't mix. What would a license for that even look like?

I'm not saying going commercial is bad, go for it. I'm just saying that when we are talking open source, we are not talking money, that's all. Money is just one of many things in life, sure it's important, but not by itself.

Agree completely, that's why I don't understand these people who demand payment for open source code after having given it away to the world.

And everyone can get stuck with big corporation proprietary software that they have no idea how it runs or what it does under the hood

You can then make your own software. Nobody owes you free software.

You're not wrong, but I think it is increasingly harder (and perhaps socially taboo) to stay far away from proprietary software while still being part of a functioning society.

FOSS zealots love to dunk on capitalism, but unless you're prepared to go off-grid and live in the woods, and try to convince other people to be poor along with you, you might be very lonely.

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