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Comrades, we have to be comfortable calling capitalists “larcenists/thieves/robers/stealers” so folks actually get the problem.
The problem is that a system like that would benefit a lot of people instead of just the parasitic owner class.
I think it’s moreso that a system like that would ultimately remove the ability for the parasite class to exist. Can’t keep everyone tied to your goods and services if they are entirely capable of producing them themselves.
We can’t just go around, doing stuff, without our
evildivine overlords earning their share! It simply wouldn’t be fair to our corporate slave-owners.
I invent utility and design patents, but am on disability and can’t afford to patent them open-source. My brain and body won’t let me have a regular job, but I could do this all day long if the social infrastructure was there
There are plenty of jobs people don’t want to do unless they’re compelled. Lots of people wouldn’t even bathe if there wasn’t social pressure.
Well at least they won’t commit crimes out of desperation like joining the military industry complex or worse Nazi-militia groups like ICE
you do realize that many of the most vital and least pleasant jobs are only performed because people have immense amounts of empathy or inherently want to do them, right?
Or do you think nurses have good wages and working conditions? lmfao
You think being a nurse is even close to the least pleasant job?
I completely disagree. I think most people want to do something, but they don’t have the means and opportunity to do a thing that fulfills them. I fucking HATE having a job. Coming to a place every day to do the same thing, it kills my motivation to do ANYTHING. The only reason I have one is to eat and to do the things I WANT to do. Usually pretty productive things, such as gardening, programming, repairs.
Those are all productive things. Things I COULD earn money for, but then they become work. I have to do them to survive, and so I no longer find the joy in doing them. If I could do them and not have to worry about bills being paid, I would by all accounts be a more productive member of society.
I don’t think people are all that fundamentally different. We have some differences in preference, but when you get down to the basics the majority of people are pretty similar. Some will fall through the cracks or abuse the system, but by and large no one WANTS to be useless. That’s a learned trait.
People like the person you reply to probably also don’t think “sitting on your ass making art while just existing on the subsidy” isn’t “productive enough” or some shit either.
Without realizing just how much of our current working society is built on completely pointless busy work nonsense. But its in an office and done in excel so its “Work” and its “productive” because it makes some rich asshole at the top richer.
If AI is doing one positive thing, its really really showing this out for the reality it is, because AI is pretty good at turning pointless data into equally pointless reports.
And I agree with you, people WANT to do things. I think even those dude who “don’t want to bathe” want to do things yoo, they just may not be “productive” things, or maybe they don’t want to bathe because they see the banality of everything we do in the world so why bother.
Exactly. No one gets to the point of not maintaining basic living standards when they’re raised in an environment of excess, stability, and choice. You get to that level when you’ve either never experienced anything other, or been beaten down enough to realize it’s pointless. Hell, I’d go as far as to say every thing living has the drive to get up and at least survive and procreate. They shut down and stop wasting energy when that seems impossible.
There are a startling number of dudes who don’t wash their ass
Yeah, but there are plenty of dudes that would compulsively wash every ass in a 10-mile radius.
I’m picturing dudes in halter tops setting up what looks like a car wash in the parking lot but it’s for ass
I too have been to a comic con.
I would work literally any job if I knew I was genuinely helping my community become healthier, safer, and better able to enjoy life instead of the current system, where my labor only serves to put more money in the pockets of oligarchs.
Idk, man. This reads like something I’d get from a Homeschool Mom who thinks her kids are being held back by their schools’ demand to learn advanced literacy and mathematics and physical sciences, instead of numerology and automatic writing. You do, in fact, want people to work outside their comfort zone. Especially when they’re young and everything is outside their comfort zone.
Like, you don’t actually want a guy with an obsessive desire to fix your plumbing to start work on something they’re going to forget about in an hour after they fixate on something new. This is how you get half the plumbing in the neighborhood disassembled while the guy doing the work has gone into a shame spiral and won’t leave the house.
You can argue about the merits of the Apprentice / Journeyman / Master system, but every project really does need a certain level of experienced skill involved. Working with a collection of amateur hobbyists gets you predictably amateur results. That’s before you even get into what happens when your enthusiast plumber declares a jihad on imperial units and tries to covert half the pipes on the block to metric measures.
I’ve done a fair bit of DIY stuff in my home including various plumbing projects and it’s all been doable with just reading manuals, watching videos and spending time thinking things through. That said blow torches scare me and I did everything with pipe cutters and sharkbite connectors and such, but it works, and I did what I could to make sure it was done well/correct because I need my plumbing to work.
My experience with commercial plumbers, mostly from when I was renting, is overall pretty bad and that they are mostly unwilling to think at all beyond the immediate billable job. There was a whole ordeal where water backing up from the drain kept flooding one of the rooms in my apartment from under the walls, and while fortunately my landlord was honest enough to call plumbers when this happened, just about every time they would use a drain snake, claim the problem was fixed without really checking, and then it would just happen again later. It ultimately turned out to be a problem with the pipes not being connected to the sewer where they met the street, and was finally fixed with city involvement, but it took a hell of a lot of advocating for myself and pushing back on bullshit explanations to get to the point where the real problem was even identified or acknowledged.
I am 100% convinced that just about any anarchist system of plumbing would be a significant improvement, though maybe the plan described in the OP image should be adjusted a bit away from hobbyist plumbers going around taking responsibility for the critical systems in other people’s homes and towards a network of free expert advice and guidance to help people maintain their own living spaces, which they will naturally understand and care about on a level people who don’t live there won’t.
Anarchist plumbing is a terrifying concept.
Shit flows down hill, why do we need a hierarchy to make that work?
Because otherwise you get people dumping untreated shit in rivers because it doesnt affect them. Any kind of enforcement of rules requires a level of hierarchy, though that heirarchy can be democratized and distributed within all communities affected by those rules.
and spending time thinking things through
Ah, you nailed the secret in the first sentence!
That is one huge advantage I bet you’d see in this anarchist plumbing system. The people would be self-selected to actually care about the thing they’re doing.
That doesn’t mean they’re all going to be rational analytical thinkers tackling your problem from first principles, but it would be a big step up from how we do it now.
No doubt there’s some mediocre professionals. But as a home owner myself the last twelve years, I’ve found at least as many professionals who were worth their weight. Meanwhile, the time I spend on YouTube DIY videos plus the actual home repairs rarely feels worth the effort.
I had to redo the master bath a few years back and I can’t even dream of doing that alone, much less with my own inexperience.
We don’t need wage labour in order to have experts.
We need organization, certification, and oversight of projects.
A random assortment of freelance hobbyists is very different than a horizontally organized Plumber’s union.
I’m a big fan of the concept of an universal basic income. Where everyone gets ~1000€ every month from the government. For children, the parents get the money.
And I mean everyone. Every legal resident. Including billionaires.
To finance it I would tax both income and capital gains at ~50%. From the very first € you earn.
The net tax load on most people would not actually change much. But it completely gets rid of situations where if people work more, loose their benefits and end up with less.
1000€ should be just about enough to life a frugal lifestyle. A flat with a partner or flatmate in a small town. Produce to cook a flexitarian diet. A public transport pass and a bicycle. A Samsung Galaxy A17 with an internet plan. And all those other real necessities of life.
If people want luxuries, they will still have to work. Someone still has to produce those consumables after all. But everyone should be able to get all of their basic necessities covered.
it’s a good idea but it requires that costs don’t adapt. that 800€ apartment you wanted? well since you’re already getting a subsidy it’s now 1600€. after all, if you discount the subsidy it’s cheaper!
Public cheap housing, public cheap supermarkets, public free universal health system and public free universal education system.
Free as in payed by taxes.
Yes, it definitely has to be recalculated frequently. If it doesn’t, it will be about as useful as the US minimum wage after some time.
But as I said, most people wouldn’t have significantly more or less money than they do today. At least I carefully calculated those numbers so that most people would have pretty much the same, for Germany in 2019. So I don’t really expect prices to go up drastically.
It’s not that people suddenly have 1000€ extra. Either their unemployment benefits get replaced by that UBI, or they now have to pay an extra 1000€ in taxes.
it’s not even supposed to be an “extra 1000€ in taxes”, it would just be gradually eaten up by taxes the more you make.
the big problem is, a lot of people on long-term sick pay who are not allowed to work would get less from this system. there needs to be something to deal with that.
Currently the tax rate is progressive. In the future it wouldn’t be anymore. But because those progressive taxes only apply to income over a certain threshold, people with lower incomes would profit more.
This system would not replace social security. If you get a pension due to age or sickness or in your first year of unemployment, you would still be covered by your mandatory insurance. Same with your mandatory health insurance. And you’d still have to pay for it on top of your taxes. The employee and the employer pay 20% of the gross income each.
it’s my understanding that the system would replace social security. the savings from slimming down the systems responsible for payout would be part of what made the entire thing possible.
It would replace long term unemployment benefits. And minimum pension. The benefits that are paid directly by the government, not mandatory insurance.
It would be mostly financed through getting rid of progressive taxes.
isn’t a progressive taxation system meant to ramp up as you earn more, not down? that would lose you money by getting rid of it.
Exactly. What’s to keep the sellers from just jacking everything up?
College was expensive, but affordable, until the government made it easier to get student loans. Colleges responded by wildly jacking up their prices, and now you literally have to voluntarily take on a lifetime of debt to get a college degree for a job that probably won’t cover the cost of your loan. And what did the government do? They went right along with it, and demand repayment before anything else.
They recently started a benefit program with Medicare that gives you some money each month to buy health related items in drugstores and such, and they responded by jacking up the prices in Walgreens and CVS.
I’m all for UBI as well, but it has to comes with price controls so the corporate parasites don’t just take it all. UBI Gouging has to be a harshly enforced crime.
well that’s a uniquely us problem which doesn’t really apply to the rest of the world.
I don’t doubt that. In America, our government encourages the Sociopathic Oligarchs to exploit us. That’s why they love it so much here.
What we need is to jail people who do exploitive shit like this. Just like any other harmful acticity we jail people for.
Or maybe jusr, OP’s 50% tax deal ramps up the more acxumulated wealth and property you have. Tonstrongly discourage that practice. Like sure, you exploited your rent holdings and you are a ten millionaire. But now we are taxing you at 100% so we can bump people’s UBI subsidy up enough to account for your exploitation.
Good job, you accomplished nothing in the end.
We can’t jail them without a law that makes it illegal.
And if we introduce rent control, we need to replace it with other incentives to build new apartment buildings. Ideally ones that create a slight oversupply of housing. Otherwise, in a decade or so, you get cheap rent but tons of homeless people because the supply is insufficient.
The incentive is that its what is good for society and good for everyone. The ince tive is doing good. Because people need places to live.
Needs of the many vs needs of the few and all that.
Laws can be made. Laws are all made in the first place.
Building apartments currently cost about a quarter million per unit. Plus interest on the mortgage. Most potential landlords don’t just have millions in liquid funds.
Nobody will be taking out loans like that if they won’t even earn their investment back if everything goes to plan.
Which is why UBI should be coupled with UBS (universal basic services). In this context, at the very least there would exist also a rental board (like Quebec’s existing Regie du Logement). If you’re more ambitious, housing would be a universal service and taken out of the market altogether. And don’t forget that that 1600E income of the landlord would be also taxed.
More generally: https://ubiadvocates.org/inflation-and-ubi-separating-fact-from-fiction/
If UBI is financed through measures that inject new money into the economy, such as deficit spending or monetary expansion, the risk of inflation may be heightened. This is because the increase in the money supply outpaces the economy’s capacity to produce goods and services, leading to a general rise in prices.
Conversely, if UBI is funded through redistributive measures, such as progressive taxation or cuts in inefficient spending, the inflationary pressures can be mitigated. By targeting resources from high-income individuals or unproductive sectors of the economy, such funding mechanisms redistribute existing wealth rather than injecting new money into circulation.
This ensures that the overall level of demand remains relatively stable, thereby limiting the potential for inflationary spirals.
I’m a big fan of it in concept, but TBH the pandemic made me think twice about it. By that I mean, I watched quite a lot of people get put on furlough, so essentially having their needs met while not having to work, and they went fucking crazy, like screaming fights in the shared hallway over literally nothing at 6am crazy. And it happened really fast too. I think a lot of people are so indoctrinated into the concept of having to show up to work and be told what to do that they kind of short-circuit when left to work it out for themselves.
Not that I think we shouldn’t do it necessarily, and I’d hope over time it would even out as people got used to it, but it would need to be done very carefully I think. Even if the math and the politics of it make sense, you also have to sort of account for the irrationality of people as well, which I don’t often hear a lot of discussion about.
we need time to collectively un-domesticate our thinking, and to basically recover enough of our lost human identity to even have bandwidth to imagine some way of life other than wage-slavery. It won’t be easy or quick to undo generations worth of programming, but the disruption is coming either way, AI and the looming collapse demand it.
Covid also woke lots of people up. Suddenly families had time to spend together (including dysfunctional ones), suddenly normies realised that maybe giant pharmaceutical companies actually don’t care about the population’s health so much. It showed people that governments can and will drastically intervene in their lives (including by making money rain from the sky) when there is some threat of elite interests actually being effected. It was a huge, scary and unprecedented event, so it makes sense that people would freak the fuck out. You’ll notice i didn’t even get into mandates or the insane mania our media pushed during the period.
IDK there was more going on than just ‘people suddenly had free time again’. But you’re right lots of people are already so conditioned that the thought of having the ability to spend their own limited earthly time however they wish literally scares them. These people have been separated from their own humanity, and even if the work is painful they deserve to be recovered as anyone else.
Many people also go crazy like that right after they retire. At least for a while. Structure is important for humans, and many find it difficult to create structure themselves.
But an UBI wouldn’t mean that people would suddenly be out of work. They 'd still have to work to keep their lifestyle
Just to put my 2 cents on the plate, it seems like a lot of people are stuck in living arrangements they don’t actually want to be in, purely for economic reasons. Lots of personality mismatch in close quarters, work is an escape. UBI would probably break apart lots of lives, but hopefully people will build back better.
In respect to being paid to work on hobbies, a lot of the tech sector was furloughed as well. FOSS projects massively improved, seemingly overnight. I’ve dabbled with Linux on and off during the 2010s, 2021 felt like the year where everything finally clicked together, now I run Linux and FOSS on everything where possible. I’m not sure how to find data to dispute or support that link tho, might just be me.
Samsung Galaxy A17
Samsung is shite.
Iphone SE3 is like $130 refurbished, if you’re into iPhones. My partner has it and they have no complaints.
Then buy a different 200€ phone?
Im already taxed like 20% in the US and see nothing for it. May as well do 50 and actualy get something of value for society
People need cars to live where I am. There is no public transportation and cycling is far too dangerous, no one even tries. They give up their homes before their cars. Tons of people living on UBI would be living in their cars.
In a political climate where you could actually implement UBI, you would also be able to implement walkability policies.
Also, e-bikes. E-bikes is where it’s at.
Yeah not in rural areas, we need cars.
Now, im all for banning bro trucks and crossovers over 3500 lbs. If you cant get by with a miata or a wagon, you have to get a special license for a bigger vehicle and pay more because youre damaging the road and endangering others 10x more in your 10,000lb f350 diesel.
Housing in rural areas is usually dirt cheap.
So you can probably afford a car and a rural apartment for the cost of a transit pass and apartment in a well-connected town
Totally. And for me thats better, I like having a house and garage with space. I dont mind not being in a busy city center because I feel caged in, and all there is to do in those places us go to bars all the time, something ive never been into.
I go downtown to the arcade sometimes or out to the fitness center/rock wall by my place and thats plenty for me. Sometimes go to the local theater plays and movies. All a 10 minute drive
Rural areas, sure. Suburban and urban where the majority of humans live, no.
yeah, reminder that even the USA has an 80% urban population! (below is per-state percentages)
Half the US population lives in these counties:
And
Yeah e bikes aren’t even allowed on the roads for now. The walkability problem is a matter of the billions and billions of dollars it would take to essentially redo every road in the county. Some zoning changes could help a little but we’re generations of work away from being walkable
The trick is to implement temporary measures at first. Like turning a lane into a sidewalk and a bike lane, by placing planters. Then when it’s time to renew the road anyway, the status quo only has one car lane in each direction.
In that situation there will be both the money and the will to build a grade separated sidewalk and bike lane.
Our roads are already only one lane in each direction. No shoulder, no sidewalks. Sometimes they’re marked as narrow and only one car can get through at a time. It’s a ditch in the side, not grass. People get killed on these roads all the time. Widening the roads means imminent domain land seizures, adding underground waste water runoff capability, and adding all of the infrastructure you’re describing. I won’t see 5% if our roads fixed before I die.
Sometimes they’re marked as narrow and only one car can get through at a time.
That should be the case every 200m or so, if there is no sidewalk. It’s really effective at slowing drivers down.
With a speed limit of around 10km/h streets like that can be safe and pretty comfortable for pedestrians
I’m being speculative, right?
In a political climate where you could actually implement UBI, you would also be able to …
Billionaires should not exist and their existence should not be tolerated.
Yes. If someone has a million times the median wealth, there’s something wrong with the system.
But how is that relevant here?
And I mean everyone. Every legal resident. Including billionaires.
That statement is just about how there’s no means test.
UBI is a billionaire slop ideology to defuse political tension with gifts, accelerating capital accumulation in the process. It places the 99% as clients of a power-holding elite. It’ll produce a few generations of hapless losers, who’ll be utterly incapable of defending their rights when they eventually roll a cruel patron that decides to take it away.
Statistically, university students, part-time employees and non working people in single income households are the most active in protests. They have the time, the means and the education to do so.
Wage slaves don’t have time. And if they unionize they might get fired and not have anything anymore. So they don’t.
A UBI means everyone is capable of protesting. Why would that produce hapless loosers?
Exactly. UBI is a reactionary socialist concept. It is a bandage for a bigger issue, meant to appease so as not to incite revolt. However the real issue is a commodity economy / money. Its really hard to get the masses on board with abolishing that without global revolution.
Agree, we should exploit autistic people’s hyperfixations for profit 🥀
Ending profit seemed to be the suggestion
It’d still be profit-oriented fundamentally, just more obfuscated since in this case the capitalist becomes the state, paying the worker a nonwage to reproduce their labor in exchange for the autistic service they provide to others. Within a private company, the worker is paid a wage to reproduce their labor in exchange for the service they provide to others.
I think the OP way is still ways better than what we are currently doing. And done right it wouldn’t be any more exploiting than what we are doing to neurotypicals. Everyone needs to feel valuable and that they have a purpose. I for one feel most alive when my skills are put to good use
No, both ways are completely shit - monetizing a hobby or a hyperfixation is the fastest way for it to burn out and make one hate it, speaking from experience. Companies as of “late” have been using this horseshit to get more out of young and impressionable people as well, by working them to the bone and “giving them purpose”, making them burn out then throwing them away for the new generation.
That’s not to mention the other issues if it worked as “intended” without burnout, such as increased competition depressing wages and creating more poverty since that’s how capitalist mode of production works. The only way out is to abolish the present state of things, including wage labor so we make things for their use value, not profit.
Right. Well hurry up with your revolution, because we are losing these people through suicide due to a complete failure in how society treats them
The problem is that these kinds of people are abundant on the internet where everything is interconnected and distance doesn’t mean anything.
But in real life, those people are few and far between. And definitely not one on every 32 km in the world.
I disagree. The exceptional ones who managed to actually find and fit into their niche are rare and far between in our current society because it doesn’t offer an environment that allows them to thrive and survive. If we allowed each and every person in this country to explore and find their niche without having to worry about survival, I’d bet that density would go up DRASTICALLY.
I know someone like that who cannot keep a job because of autism and health issues. Luckily she lives in a functioning country and gets state support including money and guidance. She is the regional pet/pony/alpaca carer and her house is always filled with animals from people on holiday or sick animals from people with full time jobs. She also notifies all the local farmers if one of their animals has an issue.
🥹
I hear there’s 80% unemployment for we Autistics.
So much for the idea that the Nazis tried to make more autistic people because we’re better workers.
Maybe in a different world, accepting of our different ways outside a very narrow conformity, it could be so. Irony. Heh.
So far, since self diagnosis, and formal diagnosis, I’ve mostly had abuse, rather than support. This functioning country stuff sounds very appealing.
That’s awesome! And I can entirely relate but my ADHD / autism isn’t so bad I can’t keep a job, but now with hindsight if could choose career path again I would leave the tech world of computers to work with animals. Instead I keep working in tech to afford filling my house with animals (at least as I work remotely I can spend a lot of time with them). Dogs, cats, fish, snakes, amphibians, parrots, …
I’m a pipefitter and I can guarantee all my peers would do if not a wage slave is percocets. Definitely not electively fixing pipes.
We need UBI (Universal Basic Income). People should have the choice to work, if they want more money or love their job. Not being forced: a choice.
If someone wants to follow a path that is not financial viable - be it art or just a hobby - that should be possible, too.
Life would become better for nearly everyone. Art would get a new golden age, people would no longer fear financial ruin, happiness and personal fulfillment all around.
Also paying people starvation wages or treating them badly would no longer work. Employees would have to be treated well or they would simply leave. Great wages and good conditions more or less guaranteed. People could support a big family and a nice house on a single wage again.
The only persons not happy would be the ultra rich, the exploiter, the CEOs. Because this would only work if everyone pays their due and the 1% no longer hoard the wealth.
I think this could create the best possible future, an utopia - if only our politicians were not bought and paid for. But sadly they are - and wealth only goes towards the rich, while we get poorer every generation.
I hope I live to see the day when the people notice that the rich rigged the game and react accordingly.
UBI is not the solution, ending the capitalist system is.
All UBI does is lessen the suffering slightly, why not just directly meet people’s needs without the middleman.
Ubi would never happen, and if it did they would constantly remove people from the roles until it was a subsidy to their supporters, a patronage.
Looking at medicaid and food assistance, I do not see how anyone could think it would not be ratfucked if it got through in the first place.
UBI is not the solution, but a great first step towards a better system.
To make it work well, you need strong regulations on a lot of systems: banks, utilities, corporations.
At some point it will be easier to just give the state control of everything concerning basic needs. Then to control institutions that ‘fight back’ the most against regulations, like banks and mega corporations.
You see where this might lead?
It’s a slow way towards a better economic system without the need for a revolution.
Your analysis is too light. The state isn’t some magical benevolent entity which is somehow “on the wrong path”. The state is an instrument of domination driven by the dominating class: the bourgeoisie. The bourgeoisie is against everything you cited. It will not slowly act against its own interest, willingly lose power and dominance. It will always fight for, at the minimum, keeping power.
That is why historically the only way to have changes that contradict the dominating entity’s interest is for the dominated entity to band together. It’s the only way anything ever changes: the balance of forces moves in the interest of the dominated. Women didn’t earn the right to vote because men were nice, but because women fought for it. Social progress never happens because the bourgeoisie is nice (that’s a very nice propaganda trick) but because the bourgeoisie has to compromise.
Waiting/wishing/hoping for the state to be nice, which is what asking for ubi is, and the “revolution without violence” the socdem has pushed about, never works. As long as the people who are legitimate are dominated, it will not happen.
Let’s stop dreaming in idealistic what-ifs and act in materialist actions. The material conditions define our existence. Let’s set our material conditions of existence, without asking nicely, and the balance of power will force the dominating power to compromise.
If we got UBI today, the majority of people would stop pushing for the better system and would be content with “better than they had”.
Effectively setting back liberation by centuries and perpetuating suffering, meanwhile it would always be a sword of damocles dangling above the peoples head with fear of it being withdrawn or diminished by future conservative governments at any minutes notice.
And frankly arguing for it is a terrible idea on principle, it’s like haggling and starting from the middle instead of the lowest.
It’s a slow way towards a better economic system without the need for a revolution.
We’ve had 100 years of unopposed reformism, and look where we are 🥀
The state isn’t some friend that exists for the public good, it literally dances to bourgeois private interests by design. There will be no UBI or better healthcare or whatever unless material conditions and bourgeois interests necessitate it (to prevent a proletariat revolution is one example). There’s a reason why it’s called a dictatorship of the bourgeois.
I’d argue humanity can’t end Capitalism without UBI first though. UBI is a stepping stone necessary to continue down that road. Likewise, we can’t just jump into something like Anarchism without going through Socialism first. Humanity’s progression has not only slowed, it’s being dragged backwards. Unfortunately even if we could make 1 nice big step forward, there’s a vocal minority that requires we take 10 or 20 baby steps instead.
I totally agree. There needs to be some financial mechanisms for keeping people from becoming insanely wealthy coupled with financial mechanisms preventing people from becoming impoverished. The obvious solutions are taxes that increase with income and wealth along with UBI that someone can reasonably live off of. All of this requires regulation and strict enforcement of tax laws, especially for the most wealthy. The rich know this and actively work against it. Probably the most effective method has been for them to buy up all the mass media and pump out capitalist and anti-intelectualist propaganda. We can’t change anything if half the people drank the coolaid and actively fight against their own interests and for the interests of the rich. I don’t know how bad things will have to get for those people to wake up. Hopefully not much worse but at this point I’m afraid it might take a real civil war for things to change, at least in the USA. Possibly even a world war with how things are going. We’re already barreling towards that cliff with the federal governments foot on the gas… I just hope I live through it.
Paying people starvation wages, healthcare tied to employment; treating people badly- these are the type of thing that people fighting against UBI really actually like. Like enthusiastically want.
Yeah, to get a bunch of the working class to vote against their interests you need to give them somebody to look down on.
They don’t just want to look down on someone, they’re so propagandized to by the ultra wealthy they do it for free.
Ultimately getting people to vote against their best interest is quite common, maybe even more common that voting in their best interest because of all the compromise with capitalists stuff. Wanting to address affordability but not addressing capitalism is like bargaining with a virus.
I would implement an Universal Wage Cap, and Universal Basic Products and Services.
The first doesn’t allow to earn above certain point, everything beyond that gets taxed.
The second one ensures that people don’t need to pay for their most basic needs.
I have been workshopping a similar concept, though it goes a bit further. Income is ranked - the lowest rank being UBI. When you are being educated or hold a job, your UBI income is replaced with a greater amount of money. Education has sub-ranks based on your grades, to help encourage people to take a job once they have acquired the credentials to do so. Jobs come as five ranks, based on the Effort, Risk, and Knowledge they require. $10k for UBI. $10k to $20k for education. $40k a year for the lowest jobs, such as clerks or waiters. $60k for more strenuous or educated tasks, such as warehouse workers, police, or librarians. $80k for firemen, and $100k for the last rank. Astronauts are an example of the highest grade.
Leadership roles don’t automatically receive a pay grade. Workers have to vote for the income of leadership, which is taken from the company after normal employees are paid. Earning retirement pay is 1:1, with each day worked, earning a day of retirement income. As AI automation becomes more common, displaced workers can enter a lotto to receive an job-based income. Companies using AI have to pay into the lotto, because they have wealth caps based on the amount of jobs they are paying for. So a company with lots of employees or job sponsorships has a larger amount of money it can contain. Sponsored jobs can vote on leadership pay and actions, just like employees.
There is a bunch of other details, but the intent is to create a system of absolute limits on wealth and income from all sources. This helps limits corruption and excessive wealth, plus it fights inflation because everything’s cost will be based on how much income society receives.
That still uses money as incentive.
I would give as incentive more free time.
I also like the idea of reducing as much as possible the need for having to pay for basic stuff, so instead a basic income I would guarantee basic housing, food, electricity, etc. for free and use wages to get those improved however you want.
The first one creates job availability and the second one makes them less like a need.
I would try to avoid as much as possible having higher wage caps, instead I think it would be better to give better perks that give the opportunity to save money.
It’s very hard for me to express myself, specially in another language.
You support UBI because it would create an utopia
I support UBI because it would literally destroy the economy
We are not the same
It wouldn’t destroy the economy, just the shareholders profit.
And that is the risk they signed up for.
It wouldn’t decrease profits in any way, in fact it’d bolster them temporarily given how everyone has more money to spend. Companies will respond in turn to bump up their prices, negating any kind of increase in purchasing power (what happens every time minimum wages get increased), and once everything catches up and it becomes the new “normal”, profit rates will continue to drop as they always have.
Meanwhile the states will bleed money paying everyone UBI and go in debt even faster which would result in austerity, abolishment of UBI, or more excuses to cut other welfare programs. There’s a reason why there are pretty much no welfare states anymore.
I’d be doing pickup truck stuff. I’m already that guy to my friends, family, and coworkers. Dump runs, moving, transporting large purchases like furniture, or bulk purchases like potting soil. Hell, sometimes I get free wood from trees cut down to drag home, split, and give away free to the neighbors. I’ve definitely thought to myself before that with a salary and a gas budget I’d be content with just doing that all the time.
That’d be freakin’ awesome
But nobody would be motivated to work if they grow up in a world where the broken ppl fixed everything so nobody becomes broken enough for their trauma to motivate them to obsessively fix the things that caused their trauma! We’d all die! Civilization would collapse! We need to traumatize ppl so they’d have ambition.
Realists be like
This is why a ubi is so essential when society evolves to a post scarcity state.
UBI? You mean Unstoppable Bot Invasion?
🤣😆🤣🤣😆😂😂
Yup but that would require the true ruling class to see their blood spilled to get it. Progressive people have tried and continue to try to push UBI throughout the world. In Canada alone we have had recent experiences both on the Federal and Provincial level. They intentionally get hamstrung or directly shut down to poison any potential results.
The longer we go without UBI the worse it’s going to get. Christ look at youth unemployment globally let alone the general struggles youth are dealing with that didn’t exist even 20 years ago. We need UBI yesterday but we are still struggling to get people to even entertain the concept of it.
In Canada alone we have had recent experiences both on the Federal and Provincial level
We’ve got a new UBI pilot program starting this year! I have no doubt it’ll get set up for failure just like last time, but it’s fun to think about a world that’s not run by sociopaths. Of course, even if it does go well it’ll be useless without crippling Capitalism first to prevent companies from just raising prices and funneling the individual UBI money into shareholder pockets.
Hopefully we can keep Doug Ford away from it this time.
I’d recommend reading The Dispossessed by Ursula LeGuin if you’re interested in an in-depth depiction of how an egalitarian stateless society could function without money.
Her short story “The Day Before The Revolution” is a good add-on to this too, and the preface is interesting IMO.
My novel The Dispossessed is about a small worldful of people who call themselves Odonians. The name is taken from the founder of their society, Odo, who lived several generations before the time of the novel, and who therefore doesn’t get into the action-- except implicitly, in that all the action started with her.
Odonianism is anarchism. Not the bomb-in-the-pocket stuff, which is terrorism, whatever name it tries to dignify itself with; not the social-Darwinist economic “libertarianism” of the far right; but anarchism. as prefigured in early Taoist thought, and expounded by Shelley and Kropotkin, Goldman and Goodman. Anarchism’s principal target is the authoritarian State (capitalist or socialist); its principal moral-practical theme is cooperation (solidarity, mutual aid). It is the most idealistic, and to me the most interesting, of all political theories.
Thank you for the rec I’ll check it out!
Honestly, if I was given time for it and a wage where I wouldn’t have to worry at all, I would probably be building drywalls.
I would be taking care of other people’s gardens. I’d encourage them to let me build habitats for native wildlife. And doing work outside is just so relaxing.
And I would build an alarm clock app, that lets you set the alarm according to the weather. It would allow you to set up alarms for snow and black ice. That way you can clear your section of sidewalk and use alternative transportation options to get to work.
Or maybe I’d open a repair-shop. One that also allows people to do the work themselves with tools and instruction.
Or maybe I’d open a repair-shop. One that also allows people to do the work themselves with tools and instruction.
I would use the hell out of this. I’ve been focusing on repairing over buying lately and it’s not only cheaper (obviously), but it’s really rewarding. Some plumbing, sewing to repair clothes, computer repair, I’ve come to realise that many things are easier to repair than you’d think and the biggest hurdle is just being shown how. For those of us who learn best by doing and being shown in person (not video) this would be amazing.
but it’s really rewarding
Exactly. I don’t even think that service could be offered any cheaper than having an employee do the repair.
But it’s fun. And it gives people insight into repairability, they can use for their next purchase.
