Late stage capitalism is because why.

You mean in Ireland?

So far I am unaware of a UBI policy having been appropriately implemented anywhere in the world.

It would be the end of “bullshit jobs” and make employment outside of specialist roles people actually want to do a sellers’ market.

You’ll have to raise the pay, benefits, and other working conditiona until it actually becomes a job people want to do, rather.

Right now there are enough desperate people, particularly immigrants in many countries, willing to do anything. That should be an ethical problem for all of us.

Immigrants probably wouldn’t get the UBI and would still be more likely to take up unwanted jobs, so there would still need to be instruments like minimum wage (or better, guaranteed minimum income) that apply to all people engaged in full time work. The GMI should only be needed in industries with low profits or no profits so these employers can offer attractive and fair wages.

I don’t think there’s a meaningful difference. If you’re a citizen or permanent resident of a country with UBI you should get the UBI if you’re of working age. No exceptions.

It’s not the only progressive policy that’s needed. Certain regulations over the cost of basic services and commodities is essential too. Housing/rent, food, and healthcare prices to name a few need to be controlled or there’s a risk those dependent on the UBI will be priced out of the market. That’s the biggest challenge to making it work, next to of course taxing the wealthy their fair share.

Fuck, oops. Swipe typing on Android is a minefield of typos. But it’s so fast one handed.

One day AI will properly fix my typos. Maybe.

This is why universal* basic is the proper way. We’re heading toward a world where there will never be enough existing jobs for everyone who wants to work, let alone those who can’t work, and finally the smallest cohort, those who don’t want to “work” at all.

The administrative burden of means testing so many people is absurd. And when you do and they fail then what?

People who are against looking after the unemployed rarely say the quiet part out loud. That they don’t care about homelessness, disease, violent crime, or whatever, since they can isolate themselves away from it. The law works for them, and so does the system, so they’re safe. So let the peasants who refuse to tow the line figure it out on their own.

Yes, unless consciousness is more than the totality of our biology and there really is a soul or something erather.

It doesn’t. But “needing” itself is an undefined term without consciousness - definition itself is a product of conscious experience.

The point is that there is no fact of a universe existing without something that can know facts. It’s necessarily tautological, after all we cannot know not existing.

Were we not, the universe could not be as we know it. Whether or not it exists at all without us cannot matter, because mattering itself cannot be defined without a definer, nor can existence itself be verified without a verifier.

That which “just is” could be absolutely anything at any time.

In other words, Maybe the big bang happened some 13.8 billion years ago and over all this time events transpired until the first consciousnesses came online. Suddenly the universe knows being. Then one day you come online, somewhere around the age of 5 or 6.

Or… That is just what it looks like to you and in reality someone preprogrammed the simulation and switched it on and you came into existence at the moment of your oldest memory. All that history is true only in the sense that it’s what the simulation shows you. But 13.8 billion years never really happened.

That’s basically how it is, and it doesn’t need to be an external simulation. Those 13.8 billion years had nothing in them to experience, to remember, or to document concepts like duration, and years are a relational measurement we invented.

Haha, that we, but same difference.

Us. Conscious creatures humans or otherwise. We are the genesis of “point”.

By analogy, what’s the point of a sun, or a planet, being a thing? It just is, right? A mechanism of nature.

Maybe we are do, but it’s undeniable that we experience reality. Experience is the only thing they can have a point, by definition. This is simply axiomatic.

There is no knowing a universe without knowers, so whether something just is, absent is, is a nonsense question. Sense to whom, after all?

What would be the point of a universe if there was nothing experiencing it?

Who or what is it “best” for?

Indeed. But it’s an axiom, not a tautology.

It’s a cool axiom though. I mean if there’s nothing conscious to know the universe exists, like, so what? A universe needs life to matter to that life. Intrinsic mattering makes no sense. Things have to matter to other things that have the capacity to want or need. But without consciousness, those things might as well be like calculations in a computer.

We are the cosmos pondering itself.

Carl Sagan said it more or this way and he was right.

The ‘why’ is us.

Without consciousness in the universe, there might as well not be a universe.

Nutella mixed with the cheapest American peanut butter is heaven. Thank you globalisation.

I do partake but it’s not for the faint of heart.

I have bigger things to worry about than conspiracy cock.

What you described in your other post is slavery masked as UBI. It’s like how Trump’s right wing talk about “freedom” when what they actually mean is nothing like the freedom people actually want or imagine.

Salaried work is effectively gilded slavery. Unless you’ve got ahitloads of capital, money is basically already limiting you to a certain bracket of “freedom” that we call your “means”, and it’s under the duress of poverty and death. The rules, particularly laws, apply a lot more strongly to those who are poor than who are rich. Interest punishes poorer borrowers and rewards those who can barrow with impunity by giving them access to endless credit.

A true UBI is essentially unconditional access to the bare necessities of life. Food, shelter, healthcare, security, and public utilities. Doesn’t matter if you never work a day in your life - you are valued because you exist. It should grant those who do not want to work a means to live with dignity, and those who do want to work a secure launch pad for finding a vocation that is right for them.

The claims this would lead to lack of incentives to work is misleading. The psychological reality is well l-raised mentally healthy people who are valued as members of a community wish to serve that community however they can, and don’t want to feel like “free loaders”. They want to be seen to be contributing and making a difference. Not to be thought of as lazy or useless. We’re social creatures and we have an instinct for living in a society. It’s why we’re here now after hundreds of thousands of years.

But, would we want to do dangerous, dirty, unfulfilling and undignified work, for shitty pay? Who will sign up to clean toilets, sweep roads, carry worksite debris to the skip, stand behind the till at the gas station or convenience store 8+ hours a day, answer hundreds of phone calls a day just to give people information they can find online? Obviously, where we can’t automate, or otherwise relieve people of the need to do this kind of work, and many hands will not make light work of the situation (e.g. instead of having janitors let’s some percentage of the office staff clean up during the last hour of the day, like how we take turns doing the dishes at home), and we actually need sufficient people doing this kind of work full tim, then clearly these jobs need to have rewards sufficient to have people sign up to them. There won’t be a need for as many as their are nowz and those who do sign up will be more efficient for the fact they’re there of their own Accord and can quit any time they want.

It will be a real challenge to transition to this kind of incentive structure under the current incentives of capitalism (not to many how fucked up it makes people’s mental health and moral sentiment towards “the other” as competitors rather than collaborators), and ultimately monetary economics will probably need a significant overhaul and it may not even necessary in the long run. There may be better ways to distribute resources that still has mechanisms for rewarding hard work and determination, unique talent or passion, risk taking, etc. to a degree that nobody will resent such people for their success.

But the way I see it, this is what progress looks like. It’s working toward this kind of world that should drive our social and political engagements. I want you to be free - truly free - to life your best life. And not so that your doing means others have to be enslaved. That should make you miserable at every moment.

You’re being needlessly confrontational. I agreed with your sentiment the very first time you replied to me, and clarified my concern is about accuracy of the reporting, so don’t blame me for your own failure to stay on topic.

Indeed, but that isn’t my primary concern, since we have as much responsibility to call out their bullshit. Problem is that the media gets bored after one pass and never tried to correct the record.

A responsible CNN for example would call Trump out at every opportunity during live presentations and not broadcast anything pre-recorded that Trump says that doesn’t have a basis in fact or hold any value to the public otherwise (like trump rambling nonsense reveals his worsening senility, which is handy to know).

FOX News isn’t even worthy of criticism it’s so utterly captured by the conservative propaganda machine.