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In any case, the basic income is big enough to give people a lot more freedom and security than they had before. It's empowering.

Young people and whole villages can use it to bootstrap: things like proper cell service, internet, and healthy food become affordable where before they were not.

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GiveDirectly is my charity of choice right now. I have a $1000 monthly recurring with them.

The difference in cost of living between San Francisco and rural Kenya is vast. The upshot is that an amount that many of us here on HN can handle is life changing for a lot of people on the other end.

I live in a co-op, so I save more than that every month compared to many of my friends in rent alone, and still we all have ridiculously comfortable lives.

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Poverty exists here too, but a lot of it's entrenched and intractable. It has complex causes like bad urban design, bad schools, and political gridlock. It's hard to create improvement with a donation. It requires creative activism.

Rural Kenya and Uganda, on the other hand, have lots of communities full of bright young people where the main thing holding them back really is just an abject lack of resources.

That means there's an opportunity, and I think GiveDirectly is the best organization right now to take it.

- They are effective. They don't do virtue signaling. They don't helicopter in, build a cinderblock schoolhouse, and then pose for photos with smiling kids. They measure outcomes.

- They are efficient. They stick to cash transfers, the most direct way of giving. They track and advertise the fraction of their income that they lose to corruption and overhead. Most charities are worse on those metrics and don't talk about them.

- They are rational. They don't do sob stories. They don't spam. They are run like a startup, by economists.

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Be an activist locally. Be a donor globally. Many of us are extremely lucky and, by global standards, powerful. Wield it well :)

> He is a libertarian

I just find this impossible to reconcile with his support for Trump, the most authoritarian presidential candidate in a very long time and possibly ever.

I think many of his supporters would actually agree with that description, they like that about him, and they absolutely do not describe themselves as libertarian.

They describe themselves as "conservatives" who want a "strong" president to "take their country back". They talk about "getting tough".

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I've lived in America my whole life, but I was born in Austria, and German is my first language. It pains me to see a fellow German-speaking immigrant support a right-wing populist who appeals pretty explicitly to white identity politics. We of all people should know better.

Unfortunately it's not a Universal Basic Income at all.

UBI and related proposals like Negative Income Tax minimize economic distortion. As you make more money, there's a smooth transition from receiving money from the gov't to paying net money as your taxes increase.

When you're on disability, you are generally not allowed to work. Any "substantial gainful activity" beyond roughly $1k / month ends your benefits [1].

So you might have a choice between $13k/year working 0 hours a week, or he could make $15k/year working 40 hours a week doing something menial and unpleasant.

If you tried to design a system to incentivize the working poor to drop out and accept a lifetime of poverty and gov't dependence, it's hard to see how you could do more. The fact that the program also incentivizes states to convert welfare recipients into disability is just icing.

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I think America needs sweeping entitlement reform. Not "entitlement reform" in the euphemistic Republican sense of cutting benefits, but reform done with empathy for the poor and guided by competent economists. IMO the goals should be to simplify and combine the many ways we have of giving money to poor people, and to reduce the perverse incentives that those programs create.

Yes, it's consulting. Palantir has done an amazing job branding itself as a product company even tho it's mostly not, and for a long time, up to ~1000 employees in 2012, branding itself as a startup. A surprising number of my friends and classmates (Stanford '12/'13) ended up working there.

Stanford emails out a jobs summary for each graduating class. For 2013 graduates the #1 most common job title was Forward Deployed Engineer lol

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Calling Palantir a "sweatshop" when the starting salaries are six figures is ridiculous.

There are 8 billion people in the world, and a lot of them actually do work long hours for a few USD a day with next to no rights.

Say you took a job at Palantir because you bought into the hype about fixing government. Now you work with some smart people and the pay and perks are pretty strong, but you find yourself doing consulting type work and feel unfulfilled. Maybe youre helping some large fund manager migrate off of Oracle DB or something.

The solution is to find more important work. Something you really care about. Something that directly helps at least a few of the 7.9b people out there who are less lucky than you.

Surprisingly many of the comments here have a boorish, misogynistic tone. Please be respectful. This is Hacker News, not r/RedPill

Many of us learned a short, sanitized history of human rights in school. The story tends to focus on progress. We once had Inquisitions and witch burnings, and then the Enlightenment put an end to that. We had slavery and Jim Crow, and then the Emancipation Proclamation and the Civil Rights movement fixed those.

The unspoken implication is that the problems are now solved. Schools teach children the injustices of history, but rarely talk about the injustice of the status quo. The message is that the evil is past, and that present authority is legitimate and benevolent.

So, what injustices will students learn about in 2100?

I think that today's mass incarceration, the war on drugs, and unequal education will be towards the top of the list. Students will learn how we once had 5% of the world's population, but 50% of the world's inmates. They'll learn how many of those inmates were in jail for nonviolent offenses, especially drug offenses. One of the root causes for the cycle of poverty, crime, and jail time is unequal education. It manifests in the many communities and schools that simply don't teach children the skills necessary to succeed or make a legitimate living. Students of the future will probably learn how some of the worst schools in the industrialized world in the early 21st century were sometimes a few miles away from the best, separated by a certain road or a set of train tracks. "Schools" with fifteen year olds that were barely literate, with armed police officers on staff, with metal detectors at the entrance.

Then, they'll learn how those injustices were fixed.

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I'm sure at some point we'll shift from punishing the poor to trying harder to empower them--or at least empower their children--to live better.

What can we do today to be part of that?