Universal basic income will start in the 2030s, which will help cushion the harms of job disruptions. It won’t be adequate at that point but over time it will become so.
In the US? Fat fucking chance. The social safety net here is so poor that even the amount you get for unemployment is the same as it was decades ago, which doesn’t pace with inflation and can’t even cover rent anymore.
I don’t believe I’ll see UBI in my working lifetime. There are too many powerful interests that oppose it.
A friend of mine got the shit end of a “restructuring” at work the other day and immediately started applying for unemployment. Florida hasn’t increased that benefit in almost a decade (probably longer) so he’ll be getting the same paltry $275/wk that I got many many years ago when I was on unemployment for a bit. I hope he finds a new job soon because there’s absolutely no way to live on that.
The social safety net here is so poor that even the amount you get for unemployment is the same as it was decades ago, which doesn’t pace with inflation and can’t even cover rent anymore.
In .nl our far right gov has seen this and decided to uncouple unemployment and wages/inflation as well. So yeah lol.
Yes, so many people fail to see the existential stakes here. They think that even a bandaid like ubi is inevitable, because they don’t acknowledge the possibility that we could just die.
Like that if it’s cheaper to let us gather in unregulated tent cities and croak from the new plagues that blossom there, then that’s what’ll happen.
Obviously it’s not good for anyone in the long term, but corpos can’t think long term.
but corpos can’t think long term
they can. it’s just that, structurally, incentives are far more strongly geared to not do that in almost all cases.
I hovered on that word while writing it; almost put “can’t afford to think long term,” but that is even more ambiguous…
Anyway, thank you, I agree with your distinction.
My feeling is those incentives are so strong that anyone behaving too long term will usually get their lunch eaten by someone who is just out to make a quick profit.
You hear UBI thrown around a lot by the AI crowd, often before or after the word “obviously” and the phrase “the government will.” The people who talk about such-and-such political solution being INEVITABLE due to (some non political thing over here) have almost never spent even a moment paying attention to actual policy conversations that touch on their proposal. They usually have not looked at the political context either.
It is, in the year 2024, a Herculean effort to get the U.S. Congress to pass a functioning BUDGET. Every. fucking. year. The institution nominally in charge of the country grinds to a halt as it debates “Hey, should society continue existing? I’m not sure” for a few weeks because some asshole decides to throw sand in the gears over what the culture war issue is trending that day. Modest improvements to existing infrastructure or policy areas are MONTHS and YEARS long battles to get passed. And in the lucky event something does get happen, no one ever looks deeply into either the sustainability of the policy nor the implementation of the policy. Making sure the-thing-we-passed-helps-the-people-we-intended-and-is-functioning is always a Next Year problem for Somebody Else.
The very idea that, like, our government could get it together long enough to create and fund a long-term permanent UBI program is laughable. Insulting. “Well, it’s a very obvious problem that a government will have to solve” you say. “How could they not solve it?”
My dude. Not solving very obvious problems that it is their job to solve is our legislature’s speciality. It’s what it lives and breathes for. On the metaphorical resumé of Congress, “finding reasons to not do things” is the first bullet point under “Strengths.”
And UBI is not some trivial post-office naming bill. It would be a hugely contentious issue, as you’d have to decide fun questions like who qualifies to receive the money, how much money do they get and, most fun of all, who is going to pay for this. And whatever clever answer you think you have for that third question, I guarantee you they will immediately launch an all-out assault on your very soul once they catch a whiff of you attempting to redistribute THEIR GOD-GIVEN RIGHT to hoard piles of cash large and small alike.
It’s an annoying statement to hear repeated because it’s such a STEM-head “on my napkin this is all very simple” reflex that totally ignores the reality of the human beings and the society they live in.
searches for who tf this is
Wikipedia:
Lol, this is the most passive-aggressive way of saying “known for absolutely nothing of value to anyone or anything” I’ve seen.
That is what imho sets Ray apart from the other singularitarians (fear of robot god optional), he has actually done a lot of stuff. The keyboards, all the work in helping people with disabilities (sorry, I need to clarify, people currently alive with disabilities, not future humans who might have them) etc. Just sad that more of his life is spend on this rapture of the nerds stuff.
yeah, I knew about kurzweil reading machines for years before I connected them with ray kurzweil, and I don’t know how much of his tech ended up in speech rec during the scansoft / dragon systems / nuance / lernout and hauspie katamari years, but that tech has enabled me to be an independent working adult for more than 20 years. So I owe him a debt of gratitude, but also, he needs to not be on his bullshit.
he thinks we are going to survive to 2045
His synths are still legendary
106 comments
only 7 top level comments
Thank you lord for this feast you have blessed me with.
How much worse it must be for the people in the lemmieverse (are we calling it that?) who don’t have accounts on awful.sys directly. The neuralink is life extension (unless you are a monkey) that proves Ray is right person is still going at it.
oh I’m not at all surprised. part of why we ban early and often is it’s very easy for posters like that to flood threads with utter bullshit, beyond anyone’s amusement but their own, much faster than anyone can respond with anything approaching the truth (because writing truth takes time, but being a big pain in the ass fanboy for a telephone psychic takes no time at all)
As @soyweiser@awful.systems says, this is not just an eyesore for people not on awful.sys, but unmoderated bullshit that is, for some reason, being federated out to everyone (except awful.sys).
I bring this up because this is some fresh new jank, not from concentrate: who is supposed to moderate hate speech or disinformation that is being spread in this way? Why does lemmy federate comments from banned people? This happens in techtakes as well, another user has no idea they’re banned, posts regularly and is having conversations [removed link] with no indication that this guy is persona non grata.
wonder if it’d be worthwhile to make an AP mod that replies to banned posters with “ur bannd dumbo”
I guess it’s not a great idea because a lot of the Indignant types are probably likely to then start alt-accounting
The neuralink … person is still going at it
shouting into the void with all their being. willing, nay, DARING it to shout back. entirely unawares that the void does not care about them.
Nah they are not shouting into the void, others from outside the instance are interacting with them.
