yadoomerta

not the worst summary

just fyi - this is an extremely popular take among the young and non-rich

exactly what the parent comment said - an incentive to not take steps to reduce your risk, leading to more situations like this

yupppp

at least they have to pay lipservice now and not just printing billions and handing them straight to the rich

Completely agreed - setting up Sandstorm itself is a bit of a hassle. Once it's installed, additional apps on the platform are extremely easy though.

Thanks for pointing out nextcloud! Hadn't seen that one before.

What's your project btw?

Thank you so much for sandstorm btw! It's a really incredible piece of software

You've probably already seen it, but if not, checkout https://sandstorm.io/ It didn't do too well commercially, but might have been ahead of it's time

sandstorm https://sandstorm.io/ 's dream is to make this as easy as installing a phone app. It's still rough around the edges but I think the model is completely right and the security it offers is excellent.

It's also partly the site's culture. Not saying it's wrong, because it adds some noise and not much new info, but I've been downvoted before for posting comments like "Thanks for saying this!"

imo that's the problem - everything gets corporate poseurs so quickly now could just be i'm out of touch and the countercultures have successfully hidden from me tho

perfect comment <3

idk why every comment i like gets downvoted here :p

this feels accurate to me, it's definitely part of the appeal of music so deliberately unlistenable that it will never become corporate trash

https://paradiserecordshtml.bandcamp.com/album/music-for-7-j... https://chezmonplaisir.bandcamp.com/album/cellphone

arguably, we're facing overpopulation right now

Maybe we just have a very different threat model?

Snapchat style messages completely solves:

- someone you trust now later becomes untrustworthy and would use old messages against you

- messages are stored on your phone and can be found by someone else later

neither of these can happen if deleting messages is not an expected and normal part of the protocol

it does not solve the problem of sending messages to someone who already wants to hurt you (ie. the public internet)

In snapchat, you're sending messages to friends, or at the very least individuals, who you trust have not rooted their phone to log messages.

Anything put to the public internet is there forever because antisocial corporations and the few individuals who do not respect privacy can operate at scale.

Asking a normal person nicely to delete something almost always works though, especially if not deleting it is a hassle

idk why you're being downvoted, it did read like an insidious content marketing piece. At least there was a disclosure.

With that said, I've been trying to lock down my smartphone to offline-only apps + text + calls, totally agree with the mission, I've felt so much more distractable of late

How do they currently?

thank you, this is exactly what I was trying to say but worded so much nicer

I really think the anti-student-loan argument is a red herring. Medical costs have gone up almost the same amount in the same time period without student loans.

That's a lot of the advantage of UBI in my opinion - is that it's much easier to access than the complicated welfare systems we have now, which require meeting up and consulting with lots of volunteer specialists to be sure you're doing it the right way.

I agree that getting benefits to people without an ID is a problem, but it seems very tangential to the UBI vs Status Quo debate.

What policy would you prefer?

The poorest will be much richer because you've given them money, almost by definition.

Student loans are problematic because they put the student in lifelong debt, before that state schools were just, state subsidized and students were given scholarships, both of which are much closer to UBI. And even so, they're still better than nothing imo, though free-school-for-all Germany style would be better still.

I share your worry about landlords jacking up prices. In a "free market" you'd expect them to compete on price but obviously that isn't the case since they have all the power and are able to set their prices as high as the renters are able to pay. That's a problem and would affect people on UBI, but could be solved by additional regulation as well, which essentially every UBI supporter is in favor of.

^ Might be the only good skeptical of UBI take in the whole thread.

I share your worries, it does seem like it will have to be in some way tied to cost-of-living. Done right, where you can actually have the honest threat of being able to quit your job without worries, I think it would give a lot of leverage to workers.

Why would UBI be like a loan, when there is no expectation that it will be paid back? I support it instead of food stamps because it's simpler to understand and more general, but otherwise does the same thing without onerous reporting and beurocracy

What do you expect someone living in America to do with $2 a day ?? UBI doen't have to be global, though ideally it would be, it can have a huge good for people working in exploitive jobs or doing make-work, freeing them to contribute and volunteer as they see fit. But only if it's enough to actually live on

Which 1% of the population are you counting as doing useful work? From how I see it - those doing useful work right now are compensated far far less than those doing well paid but useless work

yeah, its the unrelated to survival that gets me i'd be fine working equally hard on something meaningful to not die. im not happy with shuffling paperwork for the same thing. maybe this is a personal problem

For me personally at least, why I really want UBI is for soul-starving needs specifically. My job I fully believe is either net-neutral or hurting the world, and after some amount of looking have not been able to find one that's both clearly positive and not exploited. If I was given UBI I would quit, maybe volunteer to teach one class a day in a high school, or help run a boardgame cafe or makerspace. There would be no worry of putting people out a job since they'd be getting UBI too.

Right now I feel souless. I'm living well but through some glitch in the system that rewards people for writing useless code on a project that I'm expecting will get canned (the last two were thrown away) and spending time on hackernews. I want to be doing the useful things that currently don't pay well enough to be live without anxiety.

I think a lot of people working exploited jobs would also benefit, for the reasons you already know if you want a general safety net. Being able to quit without fear is a lot of leverage and would make things a lot more equal between employer / employee. Current unemployment benefits don't give anything if you quit (instead of fired) and a UBI style no-questions-asked solves this.

Addictions / vices are certainly a problem, and could definitely be worse with UBI perpetually enabling. I don't really have a great answer to this. The current system does not seem very kind to addicts without external support either, so I'm not sure how much worse this would be either way but definitely something to think about. Hadn't really considered that angle before.

Either way, I'm not 100% convinced UBI is the best way to add a safety net. I do think it would have some pretty profound effects on what work people would be wiling to do, most of which would be positive. It's a pretty simple / meme-able demand the same way 'fight for 15' or 'healthcare for all' is, that's really all the pitch i have for it tbh

What sort of changes are you hoping for?

(edit: is there a comment reply limit? if this is the end im happy to give an email or phone # to continue somewhere else. legit this is the only pleasant hackernews comment thread i've been a part of on this or my alt so thank you very much <3)

I think you're right yea -

A lot of the stuff UBI would pay for is (imo) not that scarce or shouldn't be. Food, water, most medicine, etc. we can absolutely just provide to everyone. We have the resources to give everyone a decent life (ie. not struggling to stay alive, not made artificially awful etc.).

I am quite sure of this for America given the current level of offshore exploitation not changing. I think but am not entirely convinced this is possible globally. Certainly there is some amount of population that is simply too much for the earth to sustainably handle but I have no real idea what exactly that number is.

Stuff that is inherently not scalable then .. yea .. ubi cant fix that. Not everyone can get a mansion, or 1918 wines, or even maybe suburban houses really. Not sure exactly where the lines are but there ARE unique things and it's wrong to discount that.

But the current system is set up so that you have to grind hours doing miserable things largely unrelated to survival to get enough money to _not die_. I feel like UBI is just the simplest most reasonable safety net for that. Certainly there are other options but they add bureaucracy and complications that don't seem worth it to me. It's like everyone has a house they can crash at indefinitely if they need or want to.

But it's not the only option ofc. Just seems to me like a decent combination of simple + politically viable + solves many problems of exploitative work. Healthcare-for-all would be huge step forwards even without UBI so it's not the only goal either.

& as for "right to happiness" - I really believe that most people will still want to be useful and make cool things people like, even if given the option to not. Open Source software etc. is already run this way on weekends. Making something useful for other people will still be an achievement people strive for, and would be rewarded on top of UBI.

oh, I agree with almost everything in this ^, sorry if I came off as confrontational earlier. Your first post read to me like the typical "there is no injustice because I, a well paid software engineer, is willing to work unlike those lazy poors" which reading this was clearly not your point.

To me, the problem is exactly what you identified, that the value is created by jobs we haven't heard about and poor villagers. And also baristas and musicians who are also routinely underpaid. And that value is mostly exploited by whoever the current elite is (currently shareholders and to a lesser extent, software ppl, and lesser still anyone in 1st world countries etc. etc.)

So I think the only difference is a boring semantic problem :p I was defining 'pursuing dreams' as what it means to me specifically - ie. my dream is to do something cool and respected and get paid well for it, which I think jives with why musicians want to be musicians. Making things nicer for people is a major part of it.

All the baristas I know say they like baristaing, the sucky part is that it's every single day and the managers suck, and you have to deal with some awful customers with a smile and you're never doing anything else. But freed from all of that they like making people nice coffee and feeling good about making things better. I hate my job because I'm fiddling with code that (to my understanding) is of no benefit to anyone and is only sustained by mooching off the government and tricking people into things they don't need. Doesn't hurt that we bought all the competition. Pay is nice though.

I think with something like UBI we will be closer to that. Free from exploitation because if the job conditions suck you can quit. But I really believe that most people really do want to be useful and respected and will continue to make value for the world for the pure joy of it. Anyone who is a teacher right now is intentionally giving up almost all possible earnings for the ability to do something directly useful. WWOOFers volunteer on farms. If farmers were respected people would like doing it more. Lots of people volunteer, edit wikipedia, make and share art, etc.

And, of course, ideally this would include all the people in other countries whose sweatshop labor is funding the world economy. I'm rooting for them too. If we can't solve this is our own country it seems unlikely we can solve it for the whole world though, but no reason not to try. I think both fights can (and kinda must) be happening at the same time.

Almost every job right now is so far abstracted from survival that it barely makes any sense. My job (that pays very well) involves taking an existing product and shuffling the UI around so people think it's a different product.

Even people with useful jobs like baristas and janitors aren't really helping anyone survive they're just making it nice for everyone else.

So few people are in farming, or medicine, where you can really say that. This is a societal problem imo, people really want/need to feel useful and we haven't been able to come up with 8 billion useful things to do

Also, yes there is injustice around the world, sure lets solve that, it sounds great. I feel like the solution is pretty similar to how we solve what's happening to poor people in our own country

I think it's more that most current employment is awful - you're either doing something useful and paid peanuts or a cog in the machine making the (you're the product) type products. There's terribly few jobs available that are ethical, useful, and well compensated.

People aren't unwilling to do a hard days work, they're unwilling to do it for less than a living wage, which is the current offer for a lot of people right now, especially young people.

And to your first sentence _YES_, society should of course be set so that people can achieve their dreams as much as possible! That's the point! I understand that doing this via wealth redistribution is touchy but you're acting like wanting things to be easier is a stupid goal in general.

fwiw I agree with you I don't see the heatdeath of the universe as a reason not to make things tidy while we can

keep on fighting the good fight, and good luck