u/alino_e

Yeah I mean facepalm.

Like, if you have some piece of technology that can save you cost, you use it.

And if you can develop a piece of technology that saves other people money, you therefore develop it. Because it makes you this thing called "money".

This is just the free market.

Don't take take it up with the tEcH oLIgArCHs, take it up with the free market.

Or maybe take it up with the social contract that says we should all be working 40 hours a week for a living, and revisit your backward ideas on basic income.

I've been writing this off-the-beaten-path textbook for a while now. It might start to be serviceable for students.

You can find the link under my profile, see the "About" section.

If you read it & have some feedback, reply here or DM.

Thanks!

...just cuz, it's a bit of a pain to import these symbols at the top of a file each time.

Especially when your code changes a wee bit, then one of the symbols becomes unused and you get yelled at by the compiler that you have an unnecessary import, then later you want to use it again and the import line changes again, etc.

Just wondering if a value such as e.g.

Ok(#(Nil, [], []))

is recognized by the compiler as something that a constant that can be constructed-once-used-forever or if I need to give it a hint by declaring such a value as const my_const = Ok(#(Nil, [], [])) outside the function to get better performance.

I.e., will

const my_const = Ok(#(Nil, [], []))

pub fn some_stub_i_need_to_fill_out_will_be_called_a_lot(_, _, _) {
  my_const
}

get better performance than

pub fn some_stub_i_need_to_fill_out_will_be_called_a_lot(_, _, _) {
  Ok(#(Nil, [], []))
}

or not?

The fact that "bad" economies in western societies translate themselves by a pool of people mulling around looking for work on one side faced by a loosely intersecting pool of people mulling around starved for services on the other shows just how ass-backward our economic system is.

Actually, it turns out that if you let property-based free market capitalism run amoc for long enough you don't end up with a resource-allocation utopia. Given enough time, you end up with a congealed monopoly board in which the losers are renting every inch of monetizable infrastructure from the winners, 4ever trapped in the "tenant" class.

Yes free markets do innovate based on consumption demand, but they are not good at distributing that demand. Money circulates by fits and starts, and, before very long, gets stuck in various bottomless Scrooge McDuck vaults that are peppered across the landscape.

UBI is a missing organ of the economy. A missing piece of the circulatory system to keep purchasing power distributed to the furthest corners of the population, like veins do for our body. The missing organ to give those two mulling crowds the means to facilitate the exchange they both so desire.

He finds lots of time and energy to discuss the potential evils of AI, the job displacement ohlala. YouTube videos every other day. Convenes tech experts and researchers from across the globe to fancy symposia where they glaze each other about how dangerous AI is. How it might even take away jobs we like. Gasp gasp gasp.

All this energy for AI ghost stories yet none zero zilch for basic income. Never mentioned. The simplest, most direct way to address job displacement not to mention a thousand of other ills. Just can't be bothered. Just would really like it if we could just please instead go back to 1960 and keep pick up the kabuki fight between hard hats and top hats where it left off, before the unions got decimated. Thankyouverymuch.

Yeah no it's starting to piss me off.

It's not only a Sanders problem, the only politician on the left whom I could find today advocating for UBI is.... the obscure congressional candidate Alex Bores from NY-12?

UBI has a "left" problem in the US, it's become tainted as this brainchild of the tech bro class. (The cuddling up to which of Andrew Yang did nothing to ameliorate, alas.) Have no clue how to fix it.

I get this sense that even those left politicians who might be sympathetic to it are afraid of being painted as freebie handout commies by the right.

But someone has to be the first to break through the wall in order for the overton window to grow, at some point.

You can find the link under 'About' in my profile.

I'm trying to teach calculus a different way we'll see how far I get---so far only getting towards the end of precalc.

Please feedback!

Seeing UBI reduced to its one-dimensional rightwing caricature of crumbs thrown to the jobless peasants, as Ezra and Bores basically both describe it, is eye-blinking. And Ezra's wife wrote a book on it FFS.

For those who missed the memo, the goal of UBI is all of:

• a means to reliably transmit the needs of lower income deciles to the market, i.e., have a market that can continuously hear the signal of people's true bulk physical needs

• an automatic, always-on strike fund that enhances the bargaining position of labor

• a one-size-fits-all "universal insurance program" for that day your car to crap out or etc

• a better-than-nothing recognition of the family- or neighbor-based care economy (or non-economy, as it stands now, since no one currently gets payed for that), including the task of raising children

• an job mobility measure, encouraging people to experiment with different careers more easily, not just sucks-to-be-you unemployment benefits

• an anti-corruption measure that makes it less desirable/necessitous for public officials to scrape that little bit of icing off the top of the cake

• an anti-lobbying measure and more generally anti state-sectorial-capture measure, as people in certain "dead" or "zombie" industries that depend on a parasite/host regulatory- or subsidy-based relationship with the state to keep afloat can now more easily leave these industries instead of lobbying to the death for fear of economic annihilation

• a rewriting of the social contract that entrusts each individual with some portion of public resource-allocation unconditionally as opposed to filtering all public resource allocation via the paternalistic opinions of the collective

• a means to boost micro-economies and entrepreneurship in rural areas by virtue of creating neighbors that have time to explore where they live as opposed to being so burnt out that they order everything from Amazon and only find time to shop at Walmart (on top of just being stressed for cash)

• a means of strengthening and encouraging civic participation, again, mainly, by giving time back to people

======

OK.

I have to say I'm particularly dismayed at the reductive framing of UBI given that today's economy is so obviously gunked up by too few people owning too much of the monopoly board.

Lack of UBI has become an efficiency problem for our economy—the missing means to keep the supply of money circulating up and down at a healthy clip—long before automation precipitated this discussion.