This isn't new to AI. The same kind of thing happens in movie test screenings, or with autotune. If something is intended for a large audience, there's always an incentive to remove the weird stuff.
This is better than nothing, but the big advantage of the UBI is that there is no bureaucracy deciding who gets it and doesn't get it. If there are any conditions on the income, then there's a constant danger that the program will become another tool of control.
As for a "does this person actually live in this area" criteria, I have a hard time seeing that single thing alone as "bureaucracy" -- it's quite common.
The EITC was inspired by advocacy for a Negative Income Tax (which is generally isomorphic to UBI funded by income taxes, despite coming from the opposite side of the political spectrum.) But the designers couldn't avoid giving in to all the same problems with means-tested welfare that both UBI and NIT seek to eliminate, except or the separate eligibility bureaucracy, which integrating it into the income tax system avoided.
Of course, a GMI also differs from a UBI/NIT because that term generally refers to means-tested welfare with a sharp (usually 1:1 but not >1:1, which sometimes happens with means-tested welfare programs in aggregate in some ranges) cliff at starting at $0 in outside income up to the level of the minimum guarantee, whereas UBI/NIT benefits have a (usually much) <1:1 clawback via the tax system.
As a contrast to means-tested welfare the U in UBI (whether “Universal” or “Unconditional”) generally is refers to the absence of means- and behavior-testing, it generally does not actually mean that there is no defined scope of eligibility (usually citizens or legal residents of a particular polity, possibly also with an age floor.)
with GMI the conditions are very simple math: what percent of the poverty line are you within?
I agree that adding a lot of conditions is part of the problem, but "help those who most need it first" seems like a very logical primary (and perhaps only) condition.
Feb 1: receive monthly paycheck Feb 2: spend all of it on strippers/drugs/alcohol/twinkies/etc. Feb 3: I'm hungry.
Unless you are prepared to let the wagies starve to death, wages will never work.
Or to put it in less sarcastic terms: Why would UBI payments be more likely to be squandered than any other monthly payments? Especially by people who can't afford food without it. Are there any studies that show such behavior?
I suppose the difference is that we have a means-tested program which the wagies can fall into. Was the proposal to have a UBI with a means-tested program behind it? I thought most UBI proponents count on turning off the means-tested program in order to fund the UBI program.
At $1k/month for 340m people, we will double social welfare spending per capita if we don't turn off the existing programs. That will put the US at the tippy-top of per-capita spending above even Luxembourg. Fascinating.
Hmm, means-tested program behind UBI would mean you get more money if UBI is not enough, right? I have heard some arguments in favor of that, for example for disabled people. You are right that those programs need to be a lot smaller and simpler to be worth the bureaucracy. But I doubt "I spent it all on prostitutes" would qualify you for that.
Other UBI advocates don't want any additional program like that. I think healthcare would need to change a lot to make that viable.
Or if you mean spending restrictions like those that exist for food stamps, then yeah, UBI usually means getting rid of those. So the argument there would be "people who are on food stamps instead of a job are idiots (sic) / too irresponsible to spend it wisely, so we must control what they spend it on", which is one of the foundational ideas that UBI advocates disagree with.
I'd like to add that I feel quite strongly "Universal" and "Basic" are hugely probematic words. You end up with massive digressions immediately.. case in point.. look at this AMA for proof:
How much of that MASSIVE SET OF DIGRESSIONS (which Neil handled like a gentleman, because he's a truly nice person) could have been avoided by not using "universal" (like, every atom in the universe? every person in the world? every mammal in this country) and "basic" (what is basic, even?) ..
It seems to me that the person driving the tractor already knows how to grow corn, and the guy behind the laptop typing prompts about corn is might as well be playing Candy Crush.
The people already doing this work today already do exactly that.
There's no goalpost shifting here - it's l'art pour l'art at its finest.
It'd be introducing an agent where no additional agent agent is required in the first place, i.e. telling a farmer how to do their job, when they already now how to and do it in the first place.
No one needs an LLM if you can just lease some land and then tell some person to tend to it, (i.e. doing the actual work). It's baffling to me how out of touch with reality some people are.
Want to grow corn? Take some corn, put it in the ground in your backyard and harvest when it's ready. Been there, done that, not a challenge at all. Want to do it at scale? Lease some land, buy some corn, contract a farmer to till the land, sow the corn, and eventually harvest it. Done. No LLM required. No further knowledge required. Want to know when the best time for each step is? Just look at when other farmers in the area are doing it. Done.
I've been making music videos with a very satisfying creative process: Use AI to make a ton of images, pick the very best ones, and carefully arrange them in the right order. Example: https://youtu.be/r-_dJNgt3SM
This article fails to mention why the currency circulated so fast. It was depreciating: it was defined as gradually losing value, so hoarding didn't work, and the people with money had a strong incentive to spend it. The article makes it sound like these currencies worked because they were local. They worked because they depreciated, and it's possible to do this on a national level.
Free geld is a deflatory value, if you don't produce 1% of all value monthly there is less currency available, which means less currency has to cover same assets.
But each month you are being taxed, on your liquid assets.
Modern inflation punishes wage earners much more than capital earners, as the second category is closer to the money printing machine, and benefit better from it.
A deflationary policy would hit capitalists a lot more than wage earners, since it's basically a wealth tax.
I don't understand how deflationary policy is a wealth tax. The wealthy wouldn't lose anything, would they?
Inflation + capital gains tax is effectively a wealth tax, but deferred until the gains are realized. And it's possible to avoid realizing gains, e.g. by dying.
> I don't understand how deflationary policy is a wealth tax. The wealthy wouldn't lose anything, would they?
Wage earners would always receive "fresh" money, so their relative purchasing power grows compared to someone that just sits on their shrinking money. The money supply is a zero-sum pie. You actually can get richer if you're income stays the same but others have their net worth shrinking.
I still don't think it's a wealth tax. I guess you could say deflation is less good for the wealthy than inflation, but it still doesn't result in the wealthy losing anything, so I wouldn't call it a tax.
If the deflation rate is lower than typical stock market returns, the wealthy would keep their money in stocks, and their wealth would increase faster than a wageearner's wage. If the deflation rate is equal to or higher than typical stock market returns, the wealthy would keep their money in cash, and their wealth would increase at the exact same rate as a wageearners' wage.
The big downside of deflation is it discourages spending and investing. In "The Miracle of Worgl" it sounds like it solved their problem by encouraging spending and investing. If spending and investing is discouraged, the economy grinds to a halt, and unemployment rises. Instead of using some money to create a new business and hire people (aka investing in a new business), people are encouraged to just hold the money in the bank. That's why unemployment rises.
In the neighboring Germany during 1920s the inflation went into triple digits, if not more. Did it help Germany restore faster? In Zimbabwe about 30 years ago, the inflation figures were ridiculously high, and daily expenses required banknotes denominated in billions. Did that help? A few other things must be present to make money circulation go brrr in a beneficial way.
A great book on this subject is In The Absence of the Sacred by Jerry Mander. He argues convincingly that the correct biological metaphor for technological progress is not evolution, but inbreeding. We are turning our attention more and more into worlds of our own construction.
Still, there's a lot of cool technology out there, and a lot of room to use it better.
I agree with the author: Heroes II is my favorite of the series, just for the innocent vibe. Also, Heroes IV is underrated. It got bad reviews because it came out buggy, but the bugs were fixed in updates, and of all the HOMM games, it has the best soundtrack.
100% agree, esp. on the soundtrack. I thought I was going crazy when in Witcher 3's Skellige island it started playing the soundtrack from HOMM4. (See Track 14 here: https://youtu.be/F9sG0r_9f4M?t=4400).
Heroes IV has a bad design. Your hero can be attacked, so you are forced to pick the warrior class to not get oneshot. You can only have 2 classes and one slot is kinda fixed.
