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airdvr

Universal Basic Income...Folly

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PhreeZone

A counter argument to the concept of loss of jobs is the issue of "replacement birth rate". Right now in developing countries the birth rate is still growing but in developed countries the birth rate is falling to levels under that of a sustained population limit. I was seeing that over all world wide population is expected to peak around 12 billion in another 50 years and then should start declining back to our current 9 billion in another 25 years after that. The situation is that for a population to remain stable (replacement worker for everyone retiring) you need a live birth rate of around 2100 per 1000 women. This allows for a direct replacement per person with the expected mortality rates until adulthood. The issue is in some countries the birthrate has dropped to less than 1500 per 1000. Two countries where this is really noticeable right now are Japan and South Korea. Japan is at 1400 and South Korea is at about 1250. This means that for every person that dies/retires and leaves a job opening there is only .5 persons available to replace them. People are literately going to have to do two jobs to keep everything at the same levels of production or those jobs will need to be replaced via technology. This is actually a great situation where automation and AI can help to replace that gap.

South Korea is really interesting when you look at the information on their birth rate and the impact on their median age: http://www.worldometers.info/world-population/south-korea-population/ When you see the birth rate drop below about 1.8 the median age starts to climb fairly shortly after that. With a rapidly aging population while also having a time of extended life spans they are facing a situation where workers are going to have to work longer in their life to maintain their overall productivity levels as well as the need to defer the time that the population is able to access their social services. They just do not have enough replacement workers entering into the work force funding their pensions to cover the mass amount of money being withdrawn from it so it questions the entire stability of the pension system in the country in the next 15-20 years.

The US birthrate has dropped to about 1800 per 1000 women and is continuing to drop with every year so we will start to see some of the effects of this in the next 20 years or so when the current worker force that is the last of the baby boomers retires and there is no one to replace each of them in the workforce. Population can either grow organically - get out there and have more children or it can be sustained by immigrants entering into a country and being added to the population.

There are lots of "interesting" ramifications of a decreasing and aging population. In addition to the ones you mention, what will happen to real estate values when there are more houses available than people to occupy them? We have some recent experience of the "ripple effects" through the whole economy when real estate loses much of it's value. For better or worse our economy is based on the notion of constant growth. Businesses that sell less this year than they did last year are considered to be in trouble, and that is reflected in their stock value. How is the economy going to continue to grow forever when the consumer base is shrinking? I'm reminded of some old science fiction stories where the "poor" are forced to actually consume things (such as walking miles a day to wear out a pair of shoes per week) while the "rich" are allowed to use robots to do the consuming for them.

Don
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Tolerance is the cost we must pay for our adventure in liberty. (Dworkin, 1996)
“Education is not filling a bucket, but lighting a fire.” (Yeats)

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You seem to think that because AI is, fundamentally, algorithmic it isn't true intelligence. However, natural intelligence is also built from fundamentally algorithmic processes.



At the moment nobody can even agree on what intelligence actually is...

Before agreeing on a universal definition every discussion about this topic is bound to fail because everybody is talking about their own interpretation of what they think intelligence means.

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skinnay

***https://www.investors.com/politics/editorials/guaranteed-basic-income/

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Last year, The Fiscal Times ranked 116 cities with populations greater than 200,000 for their fiscal soundness. Chicago ranked dead last. Just like the state of Illinois, it is broke. And the current incompetent regime seems to think that raising taxes to stratospheric levels and spending more is how to fix the problem.



Nice to see more people enslaved by giving them free money.



Most of Trump's base will be in this category of needing UBI. It's not that technology is replacing jobs, it's simply that we have a population that is not adapting and learning the skills that society needs. It's supply and demand.

Most of the people are not lazy looking for handouts, they are just simply useless. The smart people already developed the technology and infrastructure to make the world work.

Without UBI we will force a larger and larger part of the workforce to work for lower and lower salaries. Sure, you can say no free handouts, but like all poverty, it will become a nuisance for the rich as well. It's in our own best interest to provide *something* for the poor, even if they are just lazy sacks of shit.

Thanks for demonstrating so eloquently the arrogant and elitist attitude of many on the left. It's one of the main reasons we have Trump as POTUS.
Please don't dent the planet.

Destinations by Roxanne

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airdvr

******https://www.investors.com/politics/editorials/guaranteed-basic-income/

Quote

Last year, The Fiscal Times ranked 116 cities with populations greater than 200,000 for their fiscal soundness. Chicago ranked dead last. Just like the state of Illinois, it is broke. And the current incompetent regime seems to think that raising taxes to stratospheric levels and spending more is how to fix the problem.



Nice to see more people enslaved by giving them free money.



Most of Trump's base will be in this category of needing UBI. It's not that technology is replacing jobs, it's simply that we have a population that is not adapting and learning the skills that society needs. It's supply and demand.

Most of the people are not lazy looking for handouts, they are just simply useless. The smart people already developed the technology and infrastructure to make the world work.

Without UBI we will force a larger and larger part of the workforce to work for lower and lower salaries. Sure, you can say no free handouts, but like all poverty, it will become a nuisance for the rich as well. It's in our own best interest to provide *something* for the poor, even if they are just lazy sacks of shit.

Thanks for demonstrating so eloquently the arrogant and elitist attitude of many on the left. It's one of the main reasons we have Trump as POTUS.

Yeah well it's also the reason we will have a massively useless population. But at least Trump will be bringing those coal jobs back any day now. Hopefully the right can pull up their bootstraps and actually prosper again, but I have a feeling they will only keep blaming the problem on immigrants.

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"Thanks for demonstrating so eloquently the arrogant and elitist attitude of many on the left. It's one of the main reasons we have Trump as POTUS. "

I don't agree with them, I'm not sure I even understand them, but I know a lot of Trump supporters and people who write things like that about them have no idea what they're talking about. They don't like Trump supporters so they just pull whatever they want out of their ass and say it. Then wonder why nobody pays much attention to them except of course for those who already think the same way.
They're just jerking each other off.

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Both sides do the exact same thing.

Many Trump supporters think all liberals are either welfare queens or ivory tower intellectuals. Many liberals think all Trump supporters are mouth breathing wife beaters.

Real people exist in the middle, but real people don't saturate social media with their bullshit.

- Dan G

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DanG

Both sides do the exact same thing.

Many Trump supporters think all liberals are either welfare queens or ivory tower intellectuals. Many liberals think all Trump supporters are mouth breathing wife beaters.

Real people exist in the middle, but real people don't saturate social media with their bullshit.



I understand conservatism and right wing thinking. I even agree with some of it to a certain degree. I also understand how easy it is for some conservatives to fear and loath the change that progress sometimes brings.

But I do not understand how someone can be so unprincipled as to support Trump. No objective look at his behavior can possibly lead to that. The ends do not justify the means in this case. To think otherwise is.....deplorable.
Always remember the brave children who died defending your right to bear arms. Freedom is not free.

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"But I do not understand how someone can be so unprincipled as to support Trump. No objective look at his behavior can possibly lead to that. The ends do not justify the means in this case. To think otherwise is.....deplorable. "

But that has nothing to do with the way people just attach whatever descriptions they want to. I think most Trump opponents don't even want to know, it's easier to just say "they're obviously low intelligence" when, if they knew a few, they'd know isn't the case.

And then there's the Nazi thing. That really bugs me. I won't argue with the sentiment but the term. The only people I've ever known to use Nazi as a slur was petulant teenagers and people off their meds. It's right out of a Cheech and Chong album.

Someday Trump will just be an ugly grease stained memory, but will all the vulgarity and viciousness that some people now feel free to express ever go away? And it's not limited to Trump opponents yelling at Trump supporters, it's become a standard thing "I hate Trump so fuck you, and fuck you and you. Because I hate Trump!"

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Rush spent half of Obama's presidency calling anyone who supported him a "low information voter". Ron says that liberal voters aren't real americans. Huge numbers of right wingers say that being an academic means you are a flaming socialist who knows nothing about the real world.

Funny how you never wonder if all that Republican arrogance and condescension is the reason Obama got 2 terms and even Clinton won millions more votes than Trump.
Do you want to have an ideagasm?

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