MangoCats

I agree with your take, but I also agree with GL on this one... if you continue to get around in horse drawn carriages because cars are smelly and dangerous and non-traditional, you're going to get left behind.

There are plenty of things horses and carriages are "better at" than cars, particularly traversing long distances in a country with streams and fields and no gas stations. However... there are also things that cars are better at than horses and carriages...

I used to program in assembly language about 10-30% of my working time, up through the early 1990s. What changed? Optimizing compilers finally got better at writing assembly code than me. They had been around for decades, but they had always been a little bit lacking, until then. I still code for a living, but I haven't even looked at an aseembly listing in 25 years. I get significantly more done, faster and more reliably using compiled (and interpreted) languages than I do using assembly code, which I used to be able to use to make the complied (and especially interpreted) programs dramatically faster. Compilers do that for me now.

As of today, AI is kicking my ass at reviewing my colleagues' code. It's not saving me any work, I spend 2-3x more time in code reviews now than I did before AI code review "was a thing" - but now, those code reviews are 20-50x more valuable than they used to be. We're catching many more problems in the code (and documentation) at review time, not after the software gets into customers' hands. That's a very good thing, and today I would consider anyone who ships critical code without an AI review to be negligent.

I say: UBI is how you break that separation of the people from the resources they need to survive.

I say: UBI is something better. It is an automatic social safety net. It gives every citizen "credibility" that they can make some regular payments reliably.

I say: even $600 per month UBI would give everyone the ability to tell an overbearing boss "no, I'm not doing that."

I say: UBI + flat tax is a fair, progressive tax system which "caps out" at a rate that's fair (equal) for everyone and doesn't tax the poor, it's a negative tax on the poor.

I say: UBI is affordable. At a rate of $600 per month UBI, a US flat tax of roughly 33% would be revenue neutral, providing the $2.5T per year necessary to fund UBI and another $2.5T for incentive programs that used to be called "incentive tax breaks." This would be a modest tax break for the top earners who currently pay 37% on every dollar they earn above their current income. It would represent a tax increase on the wealthy, but they would never be paying more than the 33% flat rate that everyone in the country would pay on every dollar earned.

I say: UBI is overdue. There are 134 government domestic aid programs in the US, each one more byzantinely administered than the next. Most of those could be eliminated, replaced by UBI. Break out my tiniest violin for the bureaucrats who won't be "needs testing program applicants" anymore, they'll get UBI like the rest of us.

I say: only a tiny fraction of the US population would be opposed to UBI if they understood the impact it would truly have on their daily lives. Nobody would need to beg on street corners. Nobody would need to steal to eat. People would still do it, but people doing that with UBI could be short-tracked to the counselling they need to get their lives straightened out so they aren't desparate anymore. Who wants to live in a country with a bunch of desperate people?

The problem with these, and all, automated systems that detect EVERYTHING is that current code enforcement hardly detects 0.1% of existing violations, by design. That's how they roll. They only kick into action when somebody complains.

Think of speeding tickets - how easy would it be for our roadside ALPR systems to time your transit from point A to point B, calculate your minimum average speed to make the trip in that time, and mail you a citation when you're over the posted speed limit? Not hard at all, but that's not how speeding tickets roll in this country (and most others, too.) If they really wanted total enforcement, your car already knows when you're speeding, it can already wirelessly tattle on you to roadside monitors, they could effect 100% citation coverage if they wanted to, but whoever tries that is comitting political suicide.

One of the reasons HOAs are such groaners is that the types of people who run for HOA president occasionally (not always) go in for this "100% enforcement" mentality and due to the utter apathy of HOA residents who can't be bothered to depose their despot, they can persist in that mode for years. Last HOA I lived in had fearless leaders who "lived in the back" and hired an outside company to write upkeep violations, but only on houses in the front of the neighborhood.

When I lived in a big city with a code enforcement department instead of an HOA system, things went along for decades without much flap, the occasional citation on the really persistently bad violators - as things are expected to work, but then some new neighbors moved in and attended the city-neighborhood meeting and started chanting "just enforce the law, JUST ENFORCE THE LAW" and, so, code inspectors were sent to walk the neighborhood by foot and write every violation they could see from the street. Our 400 houses got more violations written up in one day than the entire city of 40,000 homes received in the prior year.

So, these systems that "observe 13,000 violations in a single week" need to chill out, turn the filters way way up and figure out what the 13 most important violations in the city are each MONTH and work with those property owners to get them fixed. Use the photo-scans to pre-screen citizen complaints, ensure that there's even a problem worth sending an inspector for when the neighbor says "there's been a junky car here up on blocks for the past 2 years and somebody needs to do something about it" the records can show whether that's true, or a gross exaggeration before prioritizing which citizen calls get seen this week and which need to chill out and "wait their turn."

I find PiHole to be quite helpful...

I work with a lot of fresh-out-of-box windows PCs. When I don't immediately wipe them completely for a Debian install, the first thing I do in Windows is fire up Edge, download and install chrome and set it as default browser, then delete all Edge shortcuts.

Several iterations of Windows stubbornly re-install the Edge shortcuts, luckily Google can quickly help you make the deletions stick longer. Of course, if they don't want to respect our choices of how we want our desktop configured, we also have a choice of desktops and OSs.

So, you're saying that the fundamental reason why people will always work is because a few rich bastards want it that way?

Sounds like a problem that has been solved many times in the past, never permanently so far but it never hurts to try again.

even if something like this was established, I imagine that a huge chunk of each dollar would disappear into the bureaucracy.

As it does in Alaska, though some views of the situation say that that's reducing taxes while simultaneously providing valuable services...

Also, given the financial issues, it may not be the cash cow everyone thinks.

Personally, I don't mind Bernie's plan: annex 51% of the company stock by imminent domain or whatever you want to call it, if it implodes there's no real loss, but if it's profitable then the business wizards of our government can tap the excess wealth to return to the people who provided the training for the models the buisness is based on. UBI is the politically flashy way to return the profits, but reducing taxes can have a similar effect for taxpayers - but my question is: which taxpayers need the breaks?

that’s why UBI ... will never be enough to get your average person out of wage slavery.

Care to elaborate on that one?

When Big Oil came to fuck Alaska they did this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alaska_Permanent_Fund it ain't much, but it's better than 0.

Vulture Capitalist firms? BlackRock? All landlords?

Go on...

Political lobbying is just a higer form of lawyering... most legislators (and virtually all judges) are ex-lawyers.