I'm sorry if this has been answered many times in the past. I didn't find the answer anywhere else.
If everyone gets 1000$ extra, why wouldn't rent increase by close to 1000$. If you're not willing to pay it, someone will.
I don't understand how giving all of us X amount of dollars would help. The number of goods are the same, they would become more expensive through inflation.
to the government. Tax rate has to go up for UBI to be revenue neutral. So, it is not inflationary. It just provides safety net for low income people.
Note that this formula would greatly simplify the tax code (especially if income included capital gains and maybe excluded donations), and is also actually progressive (your effective tax rate increases monotonically with income), unlike the current US system.
The current US federal tax system already is progressive in this way. Your first $X are taxed at 0%, the next $Y at 10%, etc. up to 37%. Your UBI in your formula is basically the standard deduction in the current system. But you still need to work or invest to make the first $X which are federal tax-free.
That kinda just means that tax evasion is still not totally precise but I still think it's closer to the mark than money laundering. They can both be either illegal or legal in similar ways and, indeed, the same otherwise-legal actions can be seen as either or both in different contexts. It's just a matter of semantics whether one's (seemingly legal) actions are better labeled as one or the other, and the tax evasion seems to more sense in this context.
Money laundering refers to making "dirty" money (profits from criminal activity) "clean" by introducing it into the general financial system in a way that doesn't easily trace it back to the crime. The way Breaking Bad used the car wash business to launder the drug money is a good example: the car wash business model doesn't have easy means of verifying the volume of legitimate transactions (e.g. inventory) so the owner can just arbitrarily perform fraudulent transactions with the dirty money. I presume it's far more complex when actual banks are involved but it's the same basic concept of making dirty money appear legitimate through some transaction.
Tax evasion is just not paying taxes. Whether or not someone avoids paying taxes through loopholes is only really a legal technicality that I don't think most people care about when discussing this topic. Corporations avoid paying the tax they should and that can be reasonably described as tax evasion even if it's not strictly illegal tax evasion.
For instance, you can time (usually, defer) your income to make sure you are never in a higher tax bracket. That doesn’t worth with flat tax with UBI.
One big problem with stock based compensation is that it pushes income into a big windfall year. The top marginal tax rate in the US is something like 52%. So, someone that would pay 25-30% effective tax in a fictional average year ends up paying 52% on multiple years worth of income.
Also, you can’t use the standard deduction to make your taxes negative. Assuming the average effective federal tax rate is 25%, to convert the standard deduction to UBI, it’d be reduced from $22,500 to $5600, but applied to the total tax owed, leading to the IRS paying you if you paid less than $5600 in taxes pre-deduction.
I think $5600 is too low. It should be enough to live off of. The 25th percentile household income in the US is $40000. $10,000 UBI per person seems more reasonable (probably still too low) to me.
US income tax is already progressive and therefore increases monotinically with income. There's no reason to believe UBI and increased income tax brackets would result in a simpler tax system or removal of the various carve-outs - that's a totally separate issue and a poltical landmine.
If you have millions of dollars in the bank, you can invest frugally and get more than UBI off of interest/dividends today. If you're not happy with just that and still working, you won't be happy with just UBI either.
The main effect of UBI getting people to not work is that it raises the bar for working from “I don’t want to live outdoors and starve” to “you are paying me more than my time is worth”.
People that use ubi to quit their jobs mostly end up investing their time in things like additional education, higher paying (per hour) part time positions or entrepreneurship.
>"Everyone on this forum with hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars in the bank will just stop working."
Why would UBI stop the category from working? From my personal perspective - I am an independent, make good money, have savings and work on my own terms and schedule. I just can't imagine stopping doing what I do and loose the income and freedom it gives me for some meager $1000 or so a month.
I wish this forum had a !remindme, it will not work. Everyone knows it will not work. It really is a fun idea and I wish it would work. It will not work.
That's a different claim than the one you made in reply to hedora. There, you claimed post-Covid inflation as evidence, despite the fact that it didn't disprove hedora's position at all. Here, you claim (without any proof) that everyone will stop working. Even people with millions in the bank, who are working now, will stop working... because they get an extra $1000 a month?
You could be right, but I'd like more than a bald statement that "it is so" before I believe you...
I don't think there has been a trial that shows what happens if you do it, permanently, for everyone, and raise taxes enough to pay for it.
I don't agree with dgfitz's dogmatic "it will not work". But I don't agree with your claim, either. There has never been a city- or state-wide trial, let alone a national one, that increased taxes to pay for it. So under actual conditions, no, we don't have evidence that it works.
I agree there have not been any permanent trials (wouldn't be a trial, then). However, we were discussing whether "it works" or not, in terms of the impact on society (i.e., "nobody will work anymore!", etc.), not how it would be paid for, which is an important but separate question.
Raising taxes is only one mechanism. There's also reduced spending (the defense budget is now approaching $1T).
Its seems there are two opposite arguments taking place: 1) AI will eventually displace a very large number of jobs and there are no ideas emerging as to what new industries will appear to provide jobs for the displaced (and that is because the new industry would have to be something that AI is incapable of doing cost-effectively, and we only need so many barbers), and 2) people who are capable of working but do not work should not be receiving compensation from the government.
I honestly don't know if UBI is the solution (I prefer means-tested BI rather than UBI but I concede that means-tested is problematic). But there had better be a solution, because 1) above is inevitable (probably not in the next 5 years, but in the next 25 years, certainly).
"Trials" by true believers who don't understand their own proposal?
We don't need trials to know if UBI can work or not. Basic economic literacy is all you need. It's like saying there's a bunch of trials that show 2+2=5. No review of the trials is required, all the statement means is the trials were incorrectly designed/run.
The concept of UBI boils down to "something for nothing", which is incoherent, practically a violation of the laws of physics. Money is not wealth. You cannot simply pass a law that magics wealth into existence. The only way to give everyone a minimum standard of wealth is via the already heavily used strategy of taking wealth away from other people who are creating it, and then hoping it doesn't bum them out so much they stop working.
We're not creating something out of nothing unless you ignore improvements in productivity and automation over the past few centuries, as well as the ones that are coming.
As time goes on, we need fewer and fewer people to do the work required for a population of given size to survive. That is an indisputable fact - how does that factor into your mental model?
Productivity levels don't matter! UBI isn't just a more generous welfare scheme, with conditions on who gets it and where the rich lose wealth because it's being transferred to the poor. UBI says everyone can receive wealth unconditionally. In other words, that it would be possible for 100% of the population to stop working and still receive a spendable income that buys some meaningful standard of living.
UBI taken literally is a demand for an economic perpetual motion machine: it's not merely hard, it's an impossibility.
That's why if you apply even a little bit of pressure to UBI arguments they collapse and a mass retreat to the bailey begins, e.g.
• In reality most people would work even if they didn't have to. Doesn't matter: the claim is still wrong, and hoping people don't call your bluff is no strategy.
• People in high tax brackets will pay more into the scheme than they take out. Doesn't matter: if some people lose wealth net it's not a UBI as by definition they wouldn't be receiving an income (wealth has to come in to be an income).
• The near future will be a hard sci-fi scenario in which self-repairing robots and AI do every imaginable job both now and into the future. In other words: UBI is a utopian fantasy from a children's book, not something governments should be wasting time and money trying to implement. Arguably, people who propose UBI should be seen as very dangerous, given the long history of utopians who became tyrants when their dreams hit the rocks of reality.
There are no real-world scenarios in which UBI makes sense as a concept, sorry. It's just /r/antiwork rebranded.
Is this the first time you realized that human ideas tend to fall apart if you conveniently ignore how people collectively behave like it doesn't matter, make up a scenario in the logical extreme and pretend it's the obvious outcome? In the same reductionist spirit I'm sure you would agree that:
Fractional reserve banking can't possibly work because what happens when everyone withdraws at the same time?
Capitalism can't possibly work because what happens when a single corporation owns everything in the world?
Insurance can't possibly work because what happens when a natural disaster affects the entire world?
Maternity and paternity leave can't possibly work because what if 3/4 of the working age population just keep having children every year and never go to work?
Disability benefits can't possibly work because what if everyone just harms themselves so they don't have to work?
Bridges can't possibly work because what happens when every lane is filled bumper to bumper with fully loaded semis?
Power grids can't possibly work because what happens when everyone uses 100% of their capacity at once?
> Doesn't matter: if some people lose wealth net it's not a UBI as by definition they wouldn't be receiving an income
That's an argument over what we're calling the system, not an argument addressing its viability.
> That's an argument over what we're calling the system, not an argument addressing its viability.
What you call it is everything in these debates. You accuse me of taking something to a logical extreme, but UBI is a logical extreme by definition. It takes welfare and then extrapolates it to an extreme in which nobody has to work at all.
If you're imagining a system in which most people do work, and are forced via taxes to pay more taxes to people who don't, that's fine and viable even though it's a bad idea. But that's just welfare. No new names or trials needed, we know how that works out already.
If you're imagining UBI as the system actually presented in these trials, and aren't merely playing word games, then everything I laid out isn't some reductio ad absurdum but rather a direct consequence of the actual definition you're using. That's why UBI proponents have to make arguments of the form "we offer that nobody has to work, but it doesn't matter we're lying because in reality nobody will take us up on it".
We are already doing it with various forms of welfare, except that it comes with a very large bureaucratic overhead because of the myriad of rules as to who can claim what. UBI with properly calibrated tax brackets is no different.
That's the core misunderstanding found in every discussion of UBI. Welfare doesn't create something out of nothing, it redistributes wealth by taking it from those who created it.
UBI is fundamentally different to welfare at a conceptual level. It posits that everyone receives money unconditionally. This is technically possible if you don't care what that money buys - just inflate the currency - but that's merely an accounting trick and doesn't achieve anything by itself (it makes things worse). If you replace the word money with wealth, which is what people mean, it isn't possible at all. It's the economics equivalent of a perpetual motion machine.
The lower overhead argument also doesn't work. You can't eliminate most of the overhead of welfare distribution by using UBI. Any UBI scheme would still need at minimum:
1. A strong ID verification scheme to verify that each person only receives UBI once.
2. Bureaucratic systems for ensuring people's births and deaths are always found and tracked correctly, and cannot be forged.
3. Management of name/address changes, immigration, emigration etc to ensure the above.
And so on. Look at the stuff DOGE has been doing to the existing US social security system and notice that none of the problems identified are at the level of means testing going wrong. They're all the absolute basics, like "do dead people keep receiving money". UBI doesn't fix that. You would still have a massive bureaucracy.
That doesn't seem like a full explanation. Sure, prices are tied to supply and demand. But demand is tied to how much money people have, so that just brings you right back to the original question.
Housing supply and demand isn't static. With UBI the need to live close to employment opportunities decreases, opening up more supply in areas that are currently less attractive and decreasing demand in other areas.
Furthermore we still don't know how people will react to UBI once they feel it is universal and permanent. If you're busting your ass to take home $1500 a month today, and then you get $1500 a month UBI, will you keep working just as much and take home $3000 a month, will you cut down on work and aim for $2200 a month, or will you keep living on $1500 a month and just chill all day. Depending on what choices people make, most people might not end up with that much more money.
> prices are dependent on demand/supply rather than how much money people have ... [UBI] might increase rental prices
Which is it? You can't have it both ways. The right answer is that if you print new money prices go up. If UBI is funded by taxes it's not a UBI (some people will end up giving back more in taxes than they "receive" in UBI, so it's net negative for them). If it's funded by borrowing it's not sustainable. If it's funded by money printing then prices will rise and the effect is eliminated.
> the people that are reliant on UBI tend to be on some sort of rent control mechanism
The argument for UBI is it lets you get rid of other means tested welfare systems. If you're going to introduce a category of people who really need UBI vs other people who don't really need it, and have special rules for the former, it's just a rebranded welfare system and those already exist.
I guess the theory, really, is that it's funded by corporate taxes. The triad of key taxes is income, sales/VAT and corporate. Income, as you say, is out, so is sales (since it's paid by end consumers) so you're left with corporate. And I guess that's kind of what would happen if one day AI takes over. There will be masses of unemployable people, farms and mines and factories ran by computers, and we will all be funded by this.
Until that utopia comes around, I don't see any way to fund UBI, as you say.
Taxes are all paid by people, ultimately, because it's people whose labor creates wealth. Corporate tax isn't some pool of money that would otherwise sit around not doing anything if not levied, as all profits eventually get paid out to individuals in one form or another. Corporate taxes are popular partly because people don't realize that (same reason governments love printing money), and partly because they're nice big static objects that find it harder to evade the tax man or move around.
AI doesn't change anything, no more than the internal combustion engine or computers did. There will still be plenty of jobs. AI has been around a few years now and hardly even impacted the job market! The effect will be like computers themselves, an uplift in the general welfare but give it 50 years and economists will be asking "where was the AI productivity boost?" just like they do with computers today.
What you find with UBI discussions is that the rationale for why it's going to be necessary constantly changes, and is always based on very dubious suppositions and extrapolations. UBI seems to be just a more respectable sounding version of /r/antiwork, when you boil it down.
> If UBI is funded by taxes it's not a UBI (some people will end up giving back more in taxes than they "receive" in UBI, so it's net negative for them)
This is plainly nonsense. UBI means only one thing: you get a check for a certain guaranteed amount no matter what. It doesn't mean that the amount on this check is necessarily smaller than other taxes due. And yes, it does mean that, in effect, some people will end up paying into the system while others will receive money from it. That is precisely the intent - to provide a baseline for the lower end of the income spectrum such that nobody is ever below it.
That isn't how UBI is advertised. If it was, it'd be no different to existing welfare systems and there'd be no need for any such name as UBI.
Of course, you can play silly accounting games in which you take $100 and give back $10 and say "look, you now have $10 in guaranteed income", but such word games have no merit and can't justify the claim to change to the economic system.
This is exactly how it's advertised. I have no idea where you've got the notion that UBI is about printing an extra $X for everyone, because it was never about that.
It was always about that, but I'm very curious what you think it's about. Because taxing someone $X and then giving them some of that money back as $Y is just word games - it's exactly the same as taking $(X - Y). We have that system already. If UBI just means higher welfare spending then call it that and stop running pointless trials.
> prices are dependent on demand/supply rather than how much money people have.
That's not the full story of how the economics of demand work.
Demand increases as the money supply increases, but supply remains constant. This is inflation. More dollars chasing the same basket of goods.
Another way to look at it is as the money supply increases, the cost of money and the cost to borrow decreases. This leads to an increased desire to spend. It's an aggregate demand increase across businesses and consumers.
We recently saw the impact of this when the money supply was increased during Covid. It led to one of the largest jumps in inflation in our lifetimes.
> Another way to look at it is as the money supply increases, the cost of money and the cost to borrow decreases.
I'm going to say something radical here, so do hear me out. any bank that loans money, is increasing the money supply. the more banks lend, the more money is printed. There is no fixed supply of virtual money. We don't really know how much actual dollars there are out there. (ignoring eurodollars)
Banks profits are literally because they are printing money. The very act of loaning out means that the 1 dollar bill you deposited with become 1.8, as its loaned out again to someone else, who then repays it, with interest.
<<end radicalism>>
Sure we had QE, we had covid cash, but the problem with using covid as an example of "giving money to everyone causes inflation" is that its difficult to distinguish from supply chain, tariffs, stimulus and $other.
the other problem is that stimulus was given to companies as well.
but the argument about not increasing the money supply is difficult to argue unless you are a bank, because that's their job, not the government's.
so, the point is, the economics of demand is an approximate model, rather than a formula. Its based on the collective perceived value of a good or service, rather than a strict supply/demand. sure its a close approximation, but not an accurate one.
This applies less for basic human needs like a roof over the head, especially in a supply constrained market like we've been in for quite some time in many places around the world
Rental supply is fixed in the short to medium term. Rental prices are wholly decided by demand on that timescale. Giving everyone money would obviously increase demand
Housing follows supply/demand curves more than most other goods do. Most other goods have elastic supply -- when demand for widgets goes up factories start producing more widgets so the price follows the commodity rule "price = marginal cost" rather than classical supply and demand.
I think you're referring to the Winston Churchill's "on Land Monopoly".
I don't remember exact details and may miss something, but the work is very short so please check it. In short, he described, I believe, a real situation when a major of people in a town got extra extra money because a toll on the bridge to the fabric was eliminated. But in a short time the town's rental cost grew up by exactly this amount.
Because presumably the money doesn’t come from increasing the money supply but rather by the redirection of tax revenue.
FWIW we have had a form of UBI in the USA for decades: the earned income tax credit, which for many people amounts to a significant subsidy over and above their tax burden. Nobody stopped working, and prices didn’t go up.
>FWIW we have had a form of UBI in the USA for decades: the earned income tax credit, which for many people amounts to a significant subsidy over and above their tax burden
How is a tax credit that you only get if you're working, and scales up depending on how much you earn (to an extent) an "universal" basic income?
>Nobody stopped working, and prices didn’t go up.
Nobody stopped working because you had to work to get the tax credit.
But the logic that having your basic needs covered makes you lazy is just ridiculous on its face. People don’t just keep working in the first thing that covers their basic expenses. They strive to advance, especially when they feel that they are not under duress.
They seek better jobs, better lives…. And a solid foundation empowers them to take the risks inherent in seeking those advancements.
How is this different from inheriting a house, or something similar? We all know that results in improved outcomes. Why would ubi be any different?
I suspect the resistance to ubi comes from the idea that “they” don’t deserve it. I would suggest to the people that think this way to ask themselves instead whether their own children deserve to grow up in a more egalitarian society where people are more free to be kind and humane, or is it better to inherit a world where half the population is scratching in the dirt and throwing elbows just to feed their kids?
I’ve always seen UBI as part of a post-scarcity sci-fi future. Once the robots run the farms and deliver the food and build the buildings and so on, and there just isn’t enough work to go around for humans, of course the fruits of this productivity should be shared with the wider population (both morally and to prevent uprisings). Sure, in this sci-fi future you can live in your basic pod and eat basic food for free or you can work a little or a lot to try to upgrade your situation.
But I don’t think we’re there yet. We do have a lot of industries that rely on shit jobs that people would rather not do. If we, IMHO prematurely, try to institute a UBI now we’d be in for a world of pain along the way as the prices of basic services skyrocket without robots being ready to step in.
Instead, automation will make money irrelevant in the “we don’t need to make money because money ultimately only can be used to pay wages, and nothing else” way.
Since automation means you don’t pay wages anymore, you only need natural resources and energy.
When corporations no longer see (external) money as useful, but only as a way to apportion resources internally to stakeholders, that makes everyone outside of that system into ants.
If you make the "basic pod" a tent, wealthy countries could probably afford this sci-fi future today. But "enough money to live like a homeless person without having to beg or steal" doesn't sound so great as an aspirational goal, does it?
If the "basic pod" is supposed to be something more durable, probably the first step would have to be building enough homeless shelters for all the UBI recipients without another source of income.
Yes, I'm saying that wealthy countries can definitely afford the "basic food" part of the "live in your basic pod and eat basic food" future, but the "basic pods" are more uncertain. If there's not enough money to build enough homeless shelters to house everyone, how could there be enough money to pay for UBI high enough that everyone can afford a roof over their head?
Money has never been the problem for homelessness. It costs cities more money to deal with homeless people than it does to build public housing if the city provides the will to do so. This has been proven out time and time again.
There are many, many perverse incentives involved in keeping homeless people homeless.
At the general level, for many people witnessing exigent poverty is a calming horror. “I’m doing ok I guess”
Then, the broken healthcare system. We would need to acknowledge that we have an ill society that refuses to provide care for its victims and even its children.
Also, the homeless are a very useful spectacle to keeping people in line, a constant reminder that most people are a couple of bad months from living under a bridge. This prevents people from organizing for better pay, better conditions, better lives…. Facilitating the harvesting of all of the excess value that they can be coerced into providing for their employers.
What UBI does, as proven time and again, is empower people to risk looking for better jobs, better lives. Reduce the stress of daily life by removing the spectacle of losing your family and living in a box down by the park.
That people find the idea of this intolerable speaks volumes about the society we inhabit.
Wealthy countries could afford this even with proper housing, food etc (not fancy, but not tent/slop either). Even not so wealthy ones could afford something. You have to go back all the way to hunter/gatherer societies to have a situation where each person's productive labor only generates enough wealth to feed themselves. In any modern industrial society, the productivity is long past the point where each person produces enough to satisfy multiple people's needs, in aggregate. The only problem is that most of this generated wealth is then directed to satisfy the whims of the very few people at the top who get to collect economic rent from the rest of us.
> of course the fruits of this productivity should be shared with the wider population
we're quickly getting closer to that stage with the promises of AI-increased productivity; and yet, there is not the faintest signal from those building and profiting from AI that the fruits of the increased productivity will be shared; quite to the contrary it will be captured almost entirely by shareholders -- why are investors pouring hundreds of $B into AI otherwise?
Do you know the adage location location location? The competition for good locations is among renters, not landlords. Seller's market vs buyer's market. Doesn't have to mean there's a cartel, it also doesn't mean there isn't one but it's not a guarantee.
I am trying to understand your perspective. How do people buying and selling real estate, the origin of the adage “location, location, location,” not compete on locations?
Rent is expensive because all the jobs are in expensive metros, so people are forced to move there. With UBI the idea is that some fraction of people won't have to work (or can do part time remote work), and therefore can move to a random town in North Dakota with cheap rent.
Other cool things cities have is police stations and hospitals, but I guess since there's no jobs you just get treated by a robot in the woods?
But then if people are creating art or working on their theater play or whatever, they'll want other people to show it too. I don't see cities existing only because of jobs.
Because you can buy anything with that $1000. Some people will buy clothes, others a new computer, others will travel etc. The demand for any one specific thing (apples, rent, netflix, etc.) will only increase a tiny fraction.
The most common criticism of UBI is that landlords will raise their prices to
capture all of the gains. I disagree, I believe that a properly implemented UBI
will lower rent prices.
Rent rises quickly because both supply and demand are inelastic and renters are
relatively price-insensitive. Any market with relatively fixed supply and demand
experiences large and quick price changes. The most prominent example is oil --
a small change in supply causes a large change in price because demand is
inelastic; people don't stop buying gas just because the price went up. But oil
experiences quick price changes in both directions. Rent only seems to increase.
Housing is a necessity. If there are more families needing housing than there
are houses, families will pay as much as they are able to ensure they're not the
ones without housing. So when supply exceeds demand, price rises rapidly. The
converse is not true. Most landlords are not as desparate to rent their
dwellings. When supply exceeds demand they have the ability to say no, they can
and do choose to leave the dwelling empty rather than accept a lower price.
But prices do eventually come down when supply exceeds demand. For example, the
rent for 1 bedroom apartments in Toronto is down 10% in the last 12 months.
If implemented poorly UBI could definitely be inflationary. If UBI is paid for
by money printing rather than through taxes it will be inflationary. But if it
doesn't increase the money supply and is constant across the country UBI will
lower rents rather than raising them.
Why? Becuase it makes demand elastic. Right now people are moving to the
expensive cities because that's where the jobs are. They don't really have a
choice. UBI gives them a choice. You can move to San Francisco and work 2 jobs
to be able to afford rent, or you can move to West Virginia and pay your rent
out of UBI and not need a job. Some people are going to do that. Not many, but
likely enough.
There's a saying. "100 supply, 101 demand; price goes up. 100 supply, 99 demand,
price goes down". Small changes on the margin can have a large impact on prices.
Keep in mind that any UBI that is fully tax supported is going to necessarily be
very miserly. US average income if $40K. So if you set tax rates at 100% and
spent every penny on UBI then UBI could be $40K. Obviously neither assumption is
going to be true. Tax rates will have to be significantly less than 100%, and
we'll spend money on our military, etc. A UBI of more than $1000/month seems
highly unlikely without money printing. And there are basically only three ways
you can live on $1000/month: Move to a low cost of living region like West
Virgina, live on the street or live in highly shared accomodation. All three of
these scenarios reduce housing demand in expensive cities rather than lower it.
And how would UBI change that? The kind of people who are willing to break the law to avoid paying taxes are already breaking the law to avoid paying taxes.
You're reiterating my "UBI will be miserly" point. Yes, if taxes were set at 100% to support a $40k/year UBI, I would quit my six figure job to make $10/hour cutting grass under the table. OTOH, if my taxes went up 25% to support a $10K/year UBI, I wouldn't.
It's absolutely not going to work if you can afford children without working. Literally zero people will do anything they don't absolutely feel like doing under that social regime.
I don’t think _everyone_ gets an extra $1,000, just those at the bottom. I’m pretty sure there are different ways of implementing UBI, and some of them only provide a certain amount to the lower income folks. So if you are making plenty of money, whatever plenty means in your location and context, you would not receive any additional income.
UBI by definition is paid to everyone, regardless of their income. That's contrasted with GMI, guaranteed minimal income, which supplements your current income to some minimal level, which would work as you described
The point of it being universal is that you still have a good incentive to work, since every dollar earned is a dollar more in your pocket (initially, before you reach the income level where you need to pay taxes).
Compare that to non-universal social help, where every dollar earned gets subtracted from your social pay, so the first $1000 you earn are effectively taxed 100%, creating an incentive to not start working.
- If more money is available for rents (increase demand), more people will build apartments to get that money (increase supply). This will introduce competition and keep rents reasonable. This won't work where housing supply is artificially limited.
- I might live with a relative instead of paying $1000 extra, and can now afford the car to get to and from my job instead of living with them without a job or deepending on them for a ride.
- I might put that into a mortgage payment instead of rent. UBI if done correctly is always there so it's something a bank could count on as a reliable asset.
- "The number of goods are the same, they would become more expensive through inflation" - If there is more money to buy goods, people will find a way to produce more goods, if allowed. If people aren't producing more goods then your problem is there - transportation to markets could be an issue.
Desktop Dungeons isn't this game at all. While a similar style of resource management, and a great game in it's own right, it's lacking the "minesweeper-y" exploration tactics.
The book and the movie are quite rough, raw and extradry - i don’t mean this in a bad way. The mood reminds me more of eastern productions like tarkowsky (stalker) and the like.
Also called "stale beer" spy fiction to emphasize its lack of glamour and that settings like dive bars are more common in it than fancy casinos and cocktail parties.
Not having listened to it, I'd guess he's referring to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richat_Structure, a very large circular rock structure in Africa. And also one where the archaeological evidence shows nothing more than periodic visitation by nomadic peoples, nothing like the supposed state society Atlantis would have been.
A rich civilisation (possibly in the millions), leaving absolutely no trace in any shape or form? Maybe time to apply Occam's Razor.
On the other hand, a green north Africa is well established. And it turns out that the Ancient Egyptians might have descended from hunter-gatherers who were driven towards the nile as the grasslands gave way to desert. For all of which there is archaeological evidence.
I can imagine a green Sahara, as I could imagine a civilization. What I can't imagine is a civilization that exists without leaving any archaeological trace of itself.
What about catastrophic tsunami induced by asteroid impact? That's one of the theories in the context of that structure as Atlantis. There are people who think some of the geologic features surrounding that place lead to that conclusion. Comparable to the things found in North-America, where there is no doubt at all that these are traces of catastrophic flooding at laaarge scale.
Anyways, theory is that giant masses of water rushed from somewhere of what is now the southern or southwestern cost of the mediterran sea(Lybia, Algeria), downwards and westwards, until reaching the Atlantic. Not gently at all.
What do you expect to find there, especially after so much time passed?
The hardened pyramid defence bunkers of the Kinks of Koulou?
> What about catastrophic tsunami induced by asteroid impact? That's one of the theories in the context of that structure as Atlantis. There are people who think some of the geologic features surrounding that place lead to that conclusion. Comparable to the things found in North-America, where there is no doubt at all that these are traces of catastrophic flooding at laaarge scale.
It's ~400m in altitude, approximately 500-600km inland, and not along a major watercourse like the Mississippi river that might funnel tsunamis inland. So... no, it's not plausible for this structure.
Yes, I'm aware of their other activities, that it could be considered clickbait, scamming naive people into subscribing to their premium content elsewhere, or whatever.
While I don't believe in much other stuff they are propagating, this seems to be at least usable as 'work(ing) hypothesis' in the sense and meaning that it isn't more absurd, than so much else we subscribed to by 'tradition'.
I won't go further into that now, because I had my fun/enlightening/scam/brain wash/whatever with that a few years ago, and won't budge an inch into my acceptance of the possibilty that it could have been.
At 10:45: Somebody who jumps from “A city that was busy all day, all night” to “it must be millions of people like New York” can only be described as daft.
There is scholarly work on Atlantis. And this clown mentions none of it.
My current understanding is that it's similar to Emacs, but in this case it uses Smalltalk instead of Elisp.
It's an IDE who's selling point is that you should extend while coding.
If my day job uses Python, for example, is it pragmatic to use Glamorous Toolkit?
Yes, it has a few functions for editing code in some language .. but you get a lot more Python power from Intellij or Pycharm. I don't use Smalltalk but if I were, I would consider it, alongside Pharo or instead of Pharo.
If my day job used Rust, I’d be very interested in trying this. Live development with your code loaded gives you a lot of power that you don’t know you’re missing until you try it with a Common Lisp, Clojure or Smalltalk environment.
I fiddled with its python interop a bit. It's OK, but could use some expanding: it runs python code in a single venv that you'd need to populate with the packages you need. I couldn't find any support for switching venvs based on project directories, etc.
I could imagine using GT as a more hackable way to interact with code. You don't get the nice automatic features of a python IDE, but you could define graphical views for your objects, drill-down into sub-objects, and the like. But to do that, you'd also have to know some Smalltalk.
Just tried this and it did temporarily stop the tone for a moment. Easy to do, instant relief. Simple massage to the muscles near the base of the skull.
A physical therapist commented that tight muscles contribute. Hopefully practicing this regularly will prolong the effects.
I'm sure that octopus has a UFO kidnaping story.