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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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All we have to do is make better kool aid to give them… Electric kool aid acid.
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.
That is fine about the expression. Time and practice will improve it.
Anyhow, I think free time comes from limiting the amount of hours people can work each week, and making it so that doing more time doesn’t make more money. Income is given as a lump sum each month, and that a company is obligated to pay a month’s income if someone is fired. This makes it so that companies genuinely choose who works for them and incentivizes the retention of trained workers, all the while emphasizing genuine efficiency at the workplace.
Also, naturalization should be a nearly automatic process, with acceptance of the naturalization by the worker being the part with friction.
Anyhow, I will toss out my slide deck. I built it several months ago to explain my economic concepts.
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 obsessively/compulsively update and optimize computers. I see a missing driver or BIOS update not installed? A dusty CPU Fan? A security alert? I fix. I literally just went to bed after running “sudo dnf update -y && Sudo flatpak upgrade -y” on my wife’s laptop that she doesn’t even use! Thankfully, my work lets me tinker on machines all day, every day, and nobody cares if a side project shows up on the bench every now and then. I would do it for free if I didn’t need the money. When I’m not at work, I do IT for family, and I volunteer at the library. I don’t even game anymore, I self host and tinker. Hell, I spend more time mucking with Jellyfin than watching media. There are people like that. We exist.
Can you tell Me why Jellyfin keeps playing media with black bars across the screen? Every time I start playback, it’s a die roll whether I get a black screen, horizontal stripes, vertical stripes, a grid of black lines, or a perfectly ordinary video. I usually have to start and stop a video two or three times at the beginning to get good playback. The problem seems to get worse when My root partition is more full.
That’s a surprisingly complicated question! If you post the playback info, that might help. Also, what are you hosting Jellyfin on, what OS, environment, gpu? Do the same videos pay back clean in VLC? Does the computer posting back the media have scaling, or a weird OS? I have my Jellyfin in a Proxmox container and had all kinds of issues when passing a (very old) GPU through, but without it I can’t get 4k. I have more than a few movies where I manually re-encoded them before putting them on Jellyfin and kept the source file zipped up for storage.
Thanks for helping! I’m both hosting and playing it on a CachyOS (Arch) KDE machine with an Intel i5 and NVIDIA RTX, and the videos are fine on VLC, Haruna, and mpv.
I love customizing the art and movie ratings on my jellyfin
This is why a ubi is so essential when society evolves to a post scarcity state.
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.
Thank you for the rec I’ll check it out!
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.
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.
It’s ONT and BC so fingers crossed.
UBI? You mean Unstoppable Bot Invasion?
🤣😆🤣🤣😆😂😂
Kinda similar. I work in HVAC-R. There are a ton of times where I’m working on a system where I would love to just spend a few more hours making part of it better and then another few hours streamlining things to make future work on it easier. But we charge $200 per hour so no customer wants me to spend 12 hours making their system perfect; they want me to spend 2 hours and just get it functional. If I didn’t have to charge money for my time then not only would every system I touch run like a dream, but they would also be beautiful. As it is people more frequently wind up with duct taped functional travesties and then refuse any follow up work to fix it properly.
Not that I’ve had much luck with this, but I have tried to explain to customers/managers that the work is like to do is preventative.
Sure it’s “expensive” now, but this reduces potential failures AND reduces maintenance time in the future.
This means we spend $ now, but save $$ later 🤷🏻♂️
Unfortunately there’s never time to do it right and always time to do it twice
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.
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
With a cloth, right?
Right?
I too have been to a comic con.
Well at least they won’t commit crimes out of desperation like joining the military industry complex or worse Nazi-militia groups like ICE
objectively wrong
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’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.
Comrades, we have to be comfortable calling capitalists “larcenists/thieves/robers/stealers” so folks actually get the problem.
And every single one of them would have a YouTube channel.
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
don’t worry revolution will come next tuesday, trust the plan 🙏
@Five this is fascinating. I’m sure I’m not alone in this: even just the internal bureaucracy and culture within a company suppresses (smothers) people, and, in some cases, deliberately prevents them from doing what they’re best at. I’m sure the theoretical free plumber you mentioned would be seen as a threat to the livelihoods of 50 different hedge fund backed outfits here in Las Vegas (Goettl for example…🖕you Goettl).
Wikipedia editors
this is especially true for researchers, most of us would work for free if we had the funding to
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If I have no money how do I get a plumber under capitalism? There’s no social infrastructure for the poor.
[Stealing] is literally the social infrastructure that allows it.
Corrected your illiteracy.
And worse, beneath wage slavery, the “benefits” “welfare” system, that blackmails you into not doing anything, nor appearing like you’re doing anything, lest suffering imposed destitution, starvation, freezing, and death by denial of medicine access; and sometimes they’ll cull you in an hour of hate anyway even if you were conforming. The worst “bullshit job”.
So much lost potential.
Does rather evoke the notion of a genuine UBI & social dividend as superior. … But can we get that arranged in a mutual decentralised way, not dependent upon those who promote and enact dehumanising culls and countless other abuses upon us?
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.
