Comment by sillygoose | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sillygoose | Hacker News Reader

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Here's a relevant reply I posted to someone else:

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I'm guessing his point was that we're so accustomed to relatively comfortable living (especially here on HN), that we take valuable things for granted.

That leads to a sense of entitlement and confusion. We don't see how valuable the things we have are, so we end up thinking they should be "free", without realizing that nothing of value is actually free, because otherwise it wouldn't have value.

So if we experienced real hardship, our thinking would shift, and we'd appreciate valuable things more and we'd feel less entitled.

My point in another, heavily hissy-fit-downvoted message, was that everything of value costs something to produce, and therefore things can't just be handed out for free, because the things themselves are not actually free.

The same applies to "free money" in the form of Basic Income. People like to fantasize about not being personally responsible for their choices in life. Instead, they'd just get free money every month without having to work. "We have the technology!! Why aren't you giving me free stuff?! Damn capitalist oppressors!!"

People should think about how things work in the real world.

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Suppose Service X costs you $500 per month to produce. If you keep giving it away for free, you're incurring a loss of $500 per month. That is not sustainable.

In a similar fashion, running the Nanny-Fairy-Machinery and producing things with it would definitely cost something, and that's why giving the output away for free wouldn't be sustainable. It's a Marxism-tinged pipe dream.

>Suppose Service X costs you $500 per month to produce. If you keep giving it away for free, you're incurring a loss of $500 per month. That is not sustainable.

>In a similar fashion, running the Nanny-Fairy-Machinery and producing things with it would definitely cost something, and that's why giving the output away for free wouldn't be sustainable. It's a Marxism-tinged pipe dream.

The reason any of this is being discussed is because the cost of producing basic needs should be going down because of automation, technology, etc. and won't be stuck at $500 or whatever value you choose over a long period of time. It's not impossible for Service X to get to the point where its cost to customers is not worth handling actual currency from its customers (which is what happens if the number you pay always remains at $500/mo).

Eventually we get to employ robots to do hard labor better than any human can for longer periods of time until we're paying fractions of a penny per hour in 'wages', initial cost and maintenance included. The ability to do this just wrecks any intuition we have about what it costs to produce things.

The idea is that $500 is not a fixed cost. First technology came for labor (ex. farming that used to take man-years of labour now takes hours and will soon require effectively 0 man -units), now its even coming for capital as well (a small lump of clever sand can perform what millions of dollars of capital equipment used to do). The only real fixed cost in the long run is going to be the natural resources required to produce things, which are here already. All that remains to us is to decided how to distribute these amongst ourselves.

Most of our political effort right now seems to be spent maintaining an ugly clot of laws and regulations attempting to artificially maintain that hypothetical $500 "cost" and not answering that deeper question.

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