360 karma · joined July 10, 2019
People are rioting because they are angry. It happens that people are constantly, very gently, angry at the entire capitalist complex. When people riot, therefore they are going to burn down the capitalist complex, because it irritates them and they are in a provocative mood.
Might be hard to find examples that are business-friendly, though; the growth-hacking of a business usually means harm to its customers. The prior polio vaccine, manufactured using Salk's method, had had quality control problems leading to illness in hundreds of vaccinated people; maybe they shouldn't have rushed to market.
There are communities like this; Something Awful is the first which comes to mind. These communities deliberately acknowledge that money is required to fund community spaces, and use the money to improve the space.
There are also extensions to the analogy. A local park has a bulletin board. Postings to this board are generally made by community consent; anything that any community member feels strongly enough about can be removed immediately. This is also how postings on telephone poles work. Sometimes a community will lock up their bulletin board after a wave of abusive listings. This is analogous to primitive message board moderation, as seen here on HN.
Are we here to advertise to each other, like on a bulletin board? Are we here to produce a great knowledge base, like in a garden? What should the shape of conversation be?
* I have accounts not just here, but also at places like Lobsters and Something Awful. In those places, because accounts are rare and can be banned so easily, discourse is constantly trying to stay much more civil than here or Reddit.
* As a former community moderator, I don't respect moderation actions on sites where anonymous signup is allowed. You asked for hoi polloi to wander in off the street and give their opinions; you can't then wonder why discourse is trash. Here, it's even worse; the moderators are paid for their work, which lends a clear bias to every moderation action. Similar happenings on Reddit led directly to user protests and revolts, and it's amazing that the community tolerates paid moderation here.
The idea of the well-tended garden is a potent one. I have had to tolerate obviously toxic but helpful people before and it is always irritating to not ban them, despite knowing that they are good for the garden.
It's nigh-impossible to take this sort of posture seriously when podcasts like "Behind the Bastards" spend their time either talking about horrible people, or talking about the evil of iHeartRadio and how terrible their sponsors are. This isn't the "end of podcasting's innocence;" this is mass media moguls realizing that they missed out on squeezing money from Joe Rogan.
There may be no good antidote for this. If Roe could not be unwavering in her convictions, or could not maintain the optics of being unwavering, then who possibly can? How could we better prevent evangelical Christians from lying about these false recantations?
From this perspective, electrons are a little conscious, while humans are a lot conscious (because we have lots of electrons in our brain), but we don't have to define consciousness beyond the ability to be forced to make choices.
Therefore we know that correlations with any definition of ethnicity or race are spurious, because those definitions must be socially constructed, because the gene pool simply does not have the shape that race realists claim that it does.
Think in terms of contraposition. Sure, if race were real, then maybe it might make sense to talk about racial demographics. However, since race clearly is not real, any demographic correlations must be bogus. There is a much simpler explanation for why some skin colors seem socioeconomically advantaged: Because our society itself has bigoted opinions about skin colors, and has practices like redlining [4] which systematically oppress folks.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hereditary_haemochromatosis
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sickle_cell_disease
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tay%E2%80%93Sachs_disease
I've tried to help you see how UBI proponents have not only anticipated your line of reasoning, but have long finished figuring out things like impact on business. Quoting from the summary of the Roosevelt Institute's study:
> When paying for the policy by increasing taxes on households, the Levy model forecasts no effect on the economy. In effect, it gives to households with one hand what it is takes away with the other.
> However, when the model is adapted to include distributional effects, the economy grows, even in the tax-financed scenarios. This occurs because the distributional model incorporates the idea that an extra dollar in the hands of lower income households leads to higher spending. In other words, the households that pay more in taxes than they receive in cash assistance have a low propensity to consume, and those that receive more in assistance than they pay in taxes have a high propensity to consume.
As long as you are predisposed to look down on so many people for supposed moral failings, and look at people as "couch potatoes", you are going to have a blind spot where you don't recognize how essential cheap labor is to our way of life.
Looking at actual models for UBI costs [0], there is a solid argument that GDP will grow. Keeping in mind that we are currently seeing trillions of dollars in bailout money being pulled out of nowhere, I feel that complaints about the sources of money are a little facile; there are clearly enough money sinks to handle all of the wealth not currently trickling down. We can pay for it. More importantly, there's a clear gaping hole in tax revenue where corporations are not paying taxes that they could clearly afford, and this has gotten worse over time [1][2]. Going back to Obama-era corporate tax rates of 35% would be worth $473b; going back to Eisenhower-era rates of 50% would be worth $676b. Combine that with the idea that social programs wouldn't allow double-dipping into both e.g. Social Security and the Freedom Dividend [3] and everything is now paid for.
Sure, we don't have to talk about Sweden or Alaska. But it's really hard to take the core counter-argument here, the idea that giving money to folks is so harmful, without pointing out all of the places around the world where giving money to folks is not only not harmful, but positive.
[0] https://rooseveltinstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/Mo...
[1] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Share_of_Federal_Rev...
[2] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:US_Effective_Corpora...
This means that we can analyze the impact of UBI as if it were a tax adjustment. The impact on businesses will be that, since laborers will have more job mobility, businesses will have less negotiating leverage over employees. This is a good thing.
Because cash can pay for anything, UBI is cheaper than any equivalent social program which purchases goods on behalf of recipients. When combined with the overall lower cost of administration, this makes UBI definitionally less costly and more impactful than other social programs, dollar by dollar.
Sweden is worth mentioning because, for basically any reasonable path in society that one can imagine, there is government money available to motivated citizens. This is the vaunted alternative listing of "other social programs" that your perspective values so much. Similarly, Alaska is worth mentioning because they really do send no-strings-attached money to every resident. This demonstrates that UBI does not have to disrupt the social and economic fabric of our society.
UBI is not an investment. UBI is a reassessment of taxation principles. You are not an investor, but a member of society.
1) People will exit the labor market, especially in cheaper jobs, since some folks currently only need to work in order to make up a small income disparity and will gladly quit their part-time jobs. Labor might get more expensive, but given how long minimum wage has been depressed, I wouldn't count on it.
2) No, UBI is as expensive to administer as the existing tax code. Also, the fuck are you talking about? Social Security has gotten cheaper to administer over time [0].
3) Who cares? Literally, it doesn't matter how many people "couch potato" or otherwise decide not to work when they already weren't in the labor market. Think about it for a bit.
4) Hopefully less wage slavery, less food insecurity, less homelessness, less wealth inequality. That is, UBI is hoped to do what it is marketed as doing.
5) In e.g. Sweden, the constant availability of funds from the government has enabled people to be more fully actualized, as they choose whether they want to go into secondary education, start a small business, buy a farm, or open an art studio. All of these are also subsidized in the USA, but poorly. UBI acts as an ideal prototype system for this sort of funding, without having to commit to a particular usage of funds.
6) Uh, we've had a global economy for centuries. All that has happened is that places with UBI and similar social programs have become well-known and globally visible. But UBI in Alaska exists [1] and does not draw people to move to Alaska, so I can easily conclude that it doesn't matter that much to the global economy.
More generally, I think that you are afraid of nothing.
[0] https://www.ssa.gov/OACT/STATS/admin.html
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alaska_Permanent_Fund#Permanen...
Boeing's biggest commercial customer, as I understand it, is Southwest, who owns about 5% of all Boeings in the air [0][1]. Thus, sure, Boeing doesn't need any one particular airline, but they certainly do need somebody to buy their planes, and each individual airline which cannot stay aloft is a potential lost customer.
Because planes are so expensive to manufacture, Boeing and Airbus typically take orders for aircraft in advance, presumably along with payment, in exchange for a hefty discount of over half off the advertised price [2]. Additionally, they take too many orders, expecting that they are overbooked on plane orders and some will be canceled [2]. This sort of accounting works well in times of trouble, as long as the system returns quickly to normal following the initial shock. For example, after 9/11, air traffic resumed after a week [3] and there was only about a 30% reduction in air travel, which lasted for about a year [4]. However, if there is a months-long depression in air traffic, then the reduction will be more severe; it's been about 45% to 90% reduced around the Pacific Rim [1] and could get worse.
Eventually, too many orders get cancelled, and production has to scale back, and once production starts diminishing, it's hard to regain capacity. The original article quotes the CEO as saying that it could be 3 years until we get back to prior levels of air travel; that is a long time for airlines to hold out, and a long time for Boeing and Airbus to keep getting orders.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southwest_Airlines_fleet#Curre...
[1] Read my cousin reply.
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Competition_between_Airbus_and...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Closings_and_cancellations_fol...
[4] https://web.mit.edu/airlines/conferences/DC-2002_documents/0...
Air travel around the Pacific Rim is down by about half a nine to 1 nine [0]. Worldwide, airlines are taking beatings of about half a nine [1], which isn't that much, one would think, but airlines famously have supposedly tight margins of about 1% [2][3], and so even a minor system shock is impactful.
Sure, 99% reduction, 2 nines, is a bold statement. I'm merely imagining what would happen if both Boeing and Airbus went under. Without their facilities and engineering knowledge, it could take decades for a competitor to ramp up. Airbus themselves took decades to ramp up against Boeing, and they were purposely assembled for that task [6].
Most Boeings in the air are a little dated in terms of design, which has led to scandals (read: "crashes and loss of life") in the past few years. Specifically, the 737s and 747s account for 77% what Boeing's got in the air [4]. Similar numbers for Airbus, with again 77% of those planes being the A320s [5]. That's a lot of planes that rely on the duopoly for not just continued production, but also maintenance; aircraft are continuously costly and require expertise and care.
[0] https://cdn.statcdn.com/Infographic/images/normal/21027.jpeg
[1] https://www.nationalgeographic.com/travel/2020/04/charts-sho... Apologies, but JS will be required to render the graphs. Ugh.
[2] https://www.economist.com/the-economist-explains/2014/02/23/...
[3] https://i.insider.com/4fdb8a20ecad04051f000016
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_Commercial_Airplanes#Ai...
[5] https://www.statista.com/statistics/263394/airbus-aircraft-i... More JS, sorry again.
The analogy with the Bronze Age is very neat. The two writing systems which ruled in the Mediterranean were Egyptian hieroglyphs and Sumerian/Babylonian cuneiform. Both were slow to use, difficult to spell, and non-phonetic. In contrast, the Phoenician-inspired scripts which popped up a few hundred years later were all phonetic, allowing people to more easily adopt them, and leading to Latin, Greek, and Hebrew.
I'm not saying that planes will vanish. I'm suggesting, rather, that there may be a dramatic reduction, on the order of 99% or more, in the amount of air travel, and that this reduction may last for over a generation. During that time, we may see entirely new, less centralized techniques for achieving air travel, which could not possibly have happened as long as Boeing and Airbus are still dominant.
[0] https://www.cnbc.com/2019/01/25/why-the-airbus-boeing-compan...
[1] https://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-health-coronavirus-airbus/...
[2] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-airbus-probe-idUSKBN1ZX2M...
[3] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/coronavirus-crisis-pushes-air...
Could we be on the verge of losing the ability to fly? We would still have airplanes, and some parts of the world might retain the ability, but without Boeing, we could see a dramatic reduction in the amount of airplanes, flying, airports, and tourism.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late_Bronze_Age_collapse
[0] https://github.com/p8952/bocker
[1] https://github.com/p8952/bocker/blob/master/bocker#L61-L90