| ▲ | intelVISA 2 days ago |
| Those pseudo-jobs are a necessary evil in lieu of some sort of UBI imo. Plus they're useful for sabotaging your competitors' TTM. |
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| ▲ | RealityVoid 2 days ago | parent | next [-] |
| I believe we're not at the productivity level that UBI requires, and those "pseudo-jobs" are a waste that could be redirected to some more constructive endeavor. Even if you oppose consumerism and building stuff or whatnot, that wasted effort could be directed towards making products more sustainable or making better recycling supply chains or building nuclear power plants or whatnot. |
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| ▲ | 2 days ago | parent | next [-] | | [deleted] | |
| ▲ | bee_rider 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | If we’re productive enough to pay them to construct roadblocks, surely we’re productive enough to pay them to do nothing. | | |
| ▲ | Nevermark 2 days ago | parent [-] | | I do believe that a tiny uncomfortable UBI would increase the overall economy, and benefit individual businesses by pre-weeding out a lot of posers. If someone can get by on $500/month, and not feel the need to make the effort to live better, it would be a service to all to give that to them. And on the other hand, a small fallback that makes it easier for individuals going through a rough spot to come back also helps the overall economy and individual businesses. Finally, if we had a basic program like this started, the number could go up with overall economic productivity. Slow at first, but as the AI/machine economy takes off, especially with practical accessibility to off planet resources, a tiny fraction of the economic output would make everyone rich by today's standards, just at the time when human labor's economic value heads to zero. | | |
| ▲ | jart 2 days ago | parent [-] | | The US already spends $1000/month per citizen on entitlements. If you just give everyone $500/month instead, you'd eliminate the deficit and have a few hundred billion leftover to spend on colonizing planets. |
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| ▲ | andai 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I think UBI will actually lead to the mass adoption of pseudo jobs, at least for a while. |
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| ▲ | bee_rider 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] |
| I think this is true. At the time I’m writing this comment, yours is unfortunately getting downvoted, and I wonder if it is a wording issue or something. There definitely exist some people who do these sort of jobs in a way provides a negative/roadblock only type of contribution. This isn’t to say nobody produced a positive contribution in these jobs. And it isn’t to say these people who produce negative value are, like, bad (everybody needs to eat and they didn’t ask to get born into a capitalist society). But, there are definitely some folks who we’d be better off paying to not do anything. |
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| ▲ | aleph_minus_one 2 days ago | parent [-] | | > But, there are definitely some folks who we’d be better off paying to not do anything. An even better idea: simply don't hire such people. | | |
| ▲ | bee_rider 2 days ago | parent [-] | | They are motivated to be hired (the alternative is no money, possibly no home or good). They aren’t dumber than the folks who really want to do engineering and make neat stuff, just differently motivated. And if those two groups get in an office politics battle, the group that isn’t distracted as much by engineering wins, right? | | |
| ▲ | Terretta a day ago | parent | next [-] | | > And if those two groups get in an office politics battle, the group that isn’t distracted as much by engineering wins, right? Wiser than the average wisecrack. | |
| ▲ | aleph_minus_one 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | > They are motivated to be hired I am also very motivated to convince you to give me, say, 10,000 EUR or USD, will you hand me over the money? ;-) Seriously: if you see no value in giving me this money, you clearly won't do that. Also: if the person you could hire does not bring more value for the company than he/she costs you, you won't hore the person, no matter if he/she is motivated or not. | | |
| ▲ | immibis 2 days ago | parent [-] | | Have you ever watched a scam in action? It's in my best interests to convince you (a boss) that I'll bring lots of value, and then not bring it, and continue convincing you that I am bringing it. | | |
| ▲ | aleph_minus_one 2 days ago | parent [-] | | If the boss or HR falls for such a scam, I clearly opine that they are not suitable for their job. | | |
| ▲ | kaashif a day ago | parent [-] | | I agree, but the incentives are lopsided. The prospective hire has a huge incentive: they get the money. But the hiring manager doesn't have any such incentive: it's not their money they're spending. Even worse, they may in some way be compensated based on the number of people or teams they manage, in which case the incentives of useless hires and hiring managers are unfortunately all too aligned. |
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