Not_mikey @ Not_mikey @lemmy.dbzer0.com

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8 mo. ago

Yes people will work, but less people will work then they do now, that will lower productivity and therefore supply and raise prices. If you're relying on imports from low wage countries, while your own countries productivity and therefore exports go down, then that will just increase the trade deficit. So more money will be leaving the country, increasing the supply of that currency on the international market and thus decreasing its value. Another word for a decreasing value of currency is inflation.

everyone is happy to not have to work, and still get cheap products

Again where are these products coming from. Internally they will get more expensive as wages rise, externally they will get more expensive as the value of the currency falls.

You picked the one job out of that list that people will voluntarily do. Very few people are signing up to do manual labor restoring ecosystems, building housing/infrastructure. You can say this is a mindset thing that will change once people have there basic needs covered but there are a ton of rich people who don't work for a living right now and you don't see them on the highway picking up trash. A change in scarcity mindset isn't going to build a high speed rail network, labor and investment will, and UBI will make that labor and investment a lot more difficult to get.

We don't not live a slave system we live in a capitalist system, both use coercion to extract labor from the worker but they do so in very different ways. I'd recommend you read some Marx to better understand the labor relations under capitalism. Either way a UBI system doesn't challenge the capitalists control of the means of production and thus doesn't challenge there true power. If anything it reduces the workers power as they can no longer use there power to withhold there labor. What are the unemployed on UBI going to do if there conditions deteriorate? If worst comes to worst workers can always strike which is devastating to the capitalist class. That is one of the main differences between slavery and capitalism, a slave can't strike and is thus completely powerless.

but any supplier can take share and profits by increasing supply

Increasing supply in almost every industry requires more labor though. With UBI you get a labor shortage though as less people will work, and the people that do work will be demanding higher wages like you said, pushing up the price of the finished goods.

This is the problem with UBI , it focuses only on demand and consumption on the assumption that increasing them will magically make supply increase to match. But demand doesn't create supply, labor does, its the core of productivity. Someone's gotta be making the food we all get to eat, and caring for you when you're sick or old etc. If more and more of those people decide to go on UBI then there will be less of those to go around and the supply that will be available will be expensive as the people that continue working will demand a higher wage for there service.

UBI + homelessness means you can afford a shoebox and a lifestyle...

Not sure what you mean by this, by homeless do you mean unemployed and a shoebox just means a small APT, or do you mean actually homeless and a shoebox is just a PO box to have a permanent address? Assuming you mean the former, again you aren't building more shoeboxes so that shoebox that the homeless person wants to rent with there UBI is probably currently occupied by a person who will use all there UBI to bid up the rent so that they can keep there housing as theyre now competing with those homeless people with UBI to keep from being homeless. This works further up the housing ladder as each tier will bid up prices to maintain there housing in the face of rising competition from the lower tiers who now have UBI. So rents increase, but the housing situation for everyone remains the same.

As for the jobs guarantee it doesn't have to be, nor should it be for most people, digging holes and filling them in. The other benefit of it is that we as a society can decide on what work is useful and not the market. Under this a job could be caring for your dependents at home, building green infrastructure, environmental restoration, building affordable housing etc. work that the current market based system doesn't value. With UBI you keep that market system of labor and that work doesn't get done but a lot of socially destructive work like say running a casino keeps going.

UBI actually makes it harder for the government to do these projects as the government wouldn't have the money for it and labor prices would also go up. It'll be hard to build actually affordable housing if all the government budget is going to UBI and construction workers now cost twice as much in wages.

UBI works on the assumption that there's not enough work to be done and that a sizable chunk of the population can stop working and we'll be fine. That's not true, not only do we have to keep working on all the things we currently are, we need to do more to transition to net zero and figure out how to sequester millions of tons of CO2 out of the atmosphere, that's not going to happen by itself.

forcing supply/competition to catch up

How though? There's no mechanism in UBI to increase production to match the increased demand. If anything its could decrease production / supply as less people work and choose to just live off UBI. Increasing the amount of cash in the market doesn't increase productivity/ supply, otherwise printing money would work. Increasing aggregate demand / money without increasing aggregate supply / productivity just leads to inflation. This is what I mean by its myopic focus on consumption, production also needs to be considered. Everyone wants to focus on the "to each according to their needs" part and not the "from each according to their ability"

Yeah certain industries can scale up relatively cheaply to match this increased demand but things like housing which have a limited supply that expands relatively slowly will just see price increases. You said this could cause increased competition for landlords but it will also cause increased competition for housing.

If there are 4 houses and 5 households and before UBI 4 households made enough to afford $1,000 in rent and they got the 4 houses, after UBI of $1,000 the landlord can use the threat of renting to the homeless person to raise the rent until that homeless person is priced out again. If you increase the amount of money people have without increasing supply then the people will use that money to bid up prices until you're back to the old distribution of resources.

The alternative to UBI that the left has been pushing forever, especially the African American left, has been a universal jobs guarantee. Anyone can go into a government office and they'll give you a job with decent pay. Since you're putting people to work you can actually increase productivity and supply to match the new demand. You still get all the guarantees of income and the benefits that entails of getting out of bad situations but you also are able to pressure employers for better labor standards. If the government is offering a living wage for 3 days a week then other employers will have to match that. It's also more politically viable, trying to convince middle America that "free money" is a good thing will be a lot harder then convincing them that a jobs guarantee is good.

There are some legit criticisms from the left on UBI, it's myopic focus on consumption, the possibility of it being eaten away due to inflation it causes and becoming a gift to landlords etc. I don't think "the government will use it to control us" is a good one as that can be said about any social service the government provides. Should we not have universal Healthcare because if a fascist takes over he can kick you off the roles and you'll die from a preventable disease?

Filling everyone's basic needs will be a vast social undertaking that will require a lot of organization, just because someone might take over that organization and wield it for power doesn't mean we shouldn't make it, it just means we have to keep careful watch over it when we do.

*except class war

And just like in Italy with Giorgia Meloni she's a right winger.

Watch out Germany, Alice Weidels gonna get elected next and bring back the axis, but with girl bosses this time.

No it was a flare that they launched at there own ship because they wanted attention, the hasbara bots told me so.

Idk about the Washington part but the Oregon part would be Jefferson, so not exactly progressive, until you hit the Willamette valley which I've never been to but assume it's like the central valley here in CA and full of the most annoying conservatives constantly complaining about the big cities.

Interesting that Newsom didn't say anything when colleges were forced to send the names of any professor or student who doesn't support genocide. I guess he has very specific concerns about academic freedom.

Hamas probably won't go for this as it still requires them to demilitarize and they, along with a lot of Palestinians in gaza, view that as a path to slow ethnic cleansing like what's happening in the west bank.

You'd think the "Hillary's gonna take our guns" Republicans would understand not wanting to surrender your guns and security to a government in general, much less one that's been trying to genocide you for decades.

You can make that argument for anyone feeding there cat dry kibble then as a cat probably couldn't tell the difference between kibble with meat and the one without as it's so processed anyway.

In general the stuff we feed pets is more like chicken nuggets then chicken breast and you'd be hard pressed to tell the difference between a vegan chicken nugget and a real chicken nugget these days.

Seems like it could be like music production software becoming widely available. Now you don't need to get a drummer, a bass player etc. Together to make music, you can just make it at home on your computer. It enables lower level people to get off the ground as they now have the tools that the pros do, you want a saxophone but don't know anyone in town who can play or can't afford one, just use a synth that sounds like one. Once you get signed though and you have a label giving you studio time you might hire an actual saxophone player because it sounds better.

Same with movies, AI could be helpful in making small low/no budget indie movies, but I don't think it's at the same quality as real actors for big budget movies where people expect more, so maybe the wealthy studio execs won't benefit from it much right now.

I mean that's sort of the point of the article. Stopping climate change is going to require both systemic and personal change. Media likes to focus on the systemic parts:

mining, manufacturing, and energy production (55.9%); fossil fuels (47.9%); and transportation (34%)

And ignore the personal parts because people don't like to be told "this thing that brings you joy is killing the planet" and are more open to the idea that it's all just the big corporations faults and if we could just control/regulate them we can have a sustainable future without having to change our lifestyle.

We are going to have to change our lifestyle though and meat consumption is going to be a big part of that change. It's also a personal choice, it's not like cars where the system is basically forcing you to drive. You can become vegan or vegetarian tomorrow and the only cost would be to your taste. Sure there are some subsidies nudging you towards consuming meat, but rice and beans is still the cheapest diet there is and no amount of beef subsidies will make a burger the cheaper option.

Beef industry groups take an active approach to messaging, including staffing a 24/7 “command center” in Denver that scans social media for negative stories and deploys counter-messaging.

Damn, as if watching out for Russia bots and Israel bots wasn't enough now we gotta watch out for beef bots.

Is there any evidence it stood on two feet? Figured it would look more like a gorilla then this.

I assume they already did this for advertising purposes, just like every other platform trying to guess your demographics to sell you more useless shit.

It's just like the old "music sucks now, it was best in (insert decade of your late teens, early twenties)" argument. It's a combination of

1. Survivorship bias, you only remember the good music, movies, games of the time and forget all the trash and dumb trends happening.
2. It's when key parts of your identity are forming and you develop strong bonds with the media of the time.

And for games it's also when your playing them the most. When you get older and get a job, partner, children and other responsibilities you tend not to have as much time for games . You can't put hundreds of hours into a game to fully appreciate all the story and content it can provide.

AI may not be profitable right now, but there's a lot more to "the magnificent 7" than AI that keeps them profitable. Even if the AI bubble popped, people would still be wasting their time on Facebook and Microsoft teams.

The nazis were inspired by the American example. Hitler grew up on cowboy and Indian stories and thought what if we did that to Poland and Russia.

There's a difference between the settler colonial project of the US and the extraction colonial projects of France, Spain and the UK. The former requires ethnic cleansing, the latter doesn't as you want to keep the natives to provide cheap labor for extraction.