What I personally would do is:

• implement a progressive income tax that scales to 100% at the highest tier.
• include all income from all sources, including inheritance and capital gains (especially those in fact) in income such that it counts toward the progressive taxation model in the previous step.
• implement a public fund for the retired and disabled paid into from the income tax base from all taxpayers (my country already has this called Social Security, but it is undermined by corrupt tax policy).

That isn’t the hard part, though. Like i said, there are a ton of solutions to THAT problem that can work, including yours. The really hard problem is that I am not sure how to protect a government from allowing officials elected under false pretenses from dismantling the solution for disingenuous reasons, like is happening throughout the entire developed world in real time right now, despite their varied social, economic, and governmental structures.

ETA: I would also include people with debilitating mental health as among the disabled for purposes of eligibility for the social fund aid.

I’m sure that’s true, but again, the positive outcomes you’re describing are the result of the poor peoples’ increased buying power and reduced economic uncertainty. I don’t believe the specifics of HOW they got those things makes very much of a difference, if any. UBI is one way of many to do that.

And you are again correct: there is no way to “dry run” new social programs fully. You can only create small “labs” to partially test them, which is way better than nothing, but still leaves great unknowns. The only truly tested social and economic structures are the ones we’ve seen really used in the real world.

The fact that all past models have eventually failed doesn’t necessarily mean they were bad, though. It means that they were inadequately protected and eventually were corrupted from within (not counting conquest, which I think is safe to say is outside the scope of this conversation).

I mean at the scale at which it would be used. A small pilot program that has millions of eyes on it is not going to get undermined by bad actors because everyone is watching. It is good to create tests and pilot programs to try new economic and governance systems, but it is also important to remember that those are idealized lab conditions.

Also, consider the context of the discussion. Literally any system where money is put in the hands of those in poverty is going to immediately result in improved conditions for those people and increased local taxable economic activity. I could give them a UBI stipend, big tax rebates, increased wages, or even drop cash from planes. The point is that it is not necessarily the method that made the difference but the result. In this case the result is “get buying power to poor people”, and any system that achieves that is going to be an economic and social good.

I’m just not convinced UBI is the safe way to do that. Its an inescapable fact that any government is going to have internal forces trying to undermine its protections to enrich themselves, so it is wise to remember that any government systems we come up with that are not made highly resistant to capture are only going to serve their intended purpose temporarily.

UBI is the new hotness in terms of popular modern means talked about to undo the ever-growing wealth gap, but it is completely untested in the real world. It has challenges even on paper, including the ones I alluded to above involving being exceptionally susceptible income uncertainty and government corruption.

And you are right to point out that anything we do now to correct the wealth disparity problem is wasted if we don’t do enough to prevent another regression back to this same state again. I’m sure UBI could work under the right conditions, as well as many other solutions, but the real success or failure of the program will be measured based on how well and for how long it can resist attempts to dismantle it by bad-faith actors.

I am pretty sure there’s a lot of agreement here on the core of the issue, I just have doubts about UBI because it puts the fate of the most vulnerable citizens with the most easily-ignored political voice even more into the hands of their government, who often do them dirty.

I would personally consider it very shaky ground to found a family on if my ability to support them came in the form of a government stipend I have no direct control over.

Can’t we instead restore the economy to functionality rather than slapping a big “UBI” patch on the big crack in the dam?

Restoring earning power to the middle class such that a single income can support a household will give families the stability they need to start families with out handing over all the mechanisms of the economy to a single, potentially untrustworthy entity the way UBI does.

The upshot of this and a lot of the other replies I see here and elsewhere seem to suggest that one big difference between this bubble and other past ones is that with this most recent one, there is so much of the global economy now tied to the fate of this bubble that the entire financial world is colluding to delay the inevitable due to the expected severity of the consequences.

I work adjacent to software developers, and I have been hearing a lot of the same sentiments. What I don’t understand, though, is the magnitude of this bubble then.

Typically, bubbles seem to form around some new market phenomenon or technology that threatens to upset the old paradigm and usher in a new boom. Those market phenomena then eventually take their place in the world based on their real value, which is nowhere near the level of the hype, but still substantial.

In this case, I am struggling to find examples of the real benefits of a lot of these AI assistant technologies. I know that there are a lot of successes in the AI realm, but not a single one I know of involves an LLM.

So, I guess my question is, “What specific LLM tools are generating profits or productivity at a substantial level well exceeding their operating costs?” If there really are none, or if the gains are only incremental, then my question becomes an incredulous, “Is this biggest in history tech bubble really composed entirely of unfounded hype?”

The people that were societally oppressed in the USA during the middle class boom were in their bad situation due to other societal ills, not the taxation structure.

I’m not saying that the entirety of US policy was good then. Clearly there were many societal ills, including widespread gender and racial discrimination in housing and hiring, terrible literacy rates and targeted violence against ethnic minorities in the rural south that persist to this day, and religious bigotry was widely accepted. The economic structure, though, successfully allowed for personal wealth while limiting it, and created an undeniably huge middle class. The fact that many citizens didn’t get to participate in it was due to those other non-economic social problems freezing them out.

Also, mid-20th century USA is a single example of a system that was brought up to illustrate the point that there were more than the false dichotomy of choices presented. Surely there are way more ideas out there than status quo or status quo + UBI.

UBI has no precedent for working, and I, some rando online, have already identified a potentially disastrous problem that undermines it that I’ve never heard any convincing solutions for.

I love gaming out problems and solutions, but it is important not to fall in love with our ideas. Getting upset when holes are poked in them or ignoring these weaknesses aren’t going to prevent our opponents from exploiting them. If a plan has intractable problems, there is no shame in making new plans that may avoid those problems.

I don’t think there is any reason to think that those are the choices we will actually end up with. Those are just the choices being presented. I believe there are are other choices available that don’t involve me having to trust a band of thieves that have done nothing but show me they can’t be trusted at every opportunity, but they don’t want to present those choices because they would result in them having a lower concentration of wealth and power.

For example, in the USA where I am from, we once had a hybrid capitalist model with a graduated taxation system that essentially limited the maximum individual wealth by taxing all earnings over a certain amount at near 100%, making it functionally impossible to accumulate much more wealth than that. This resulted in wealthy individuals and businesses reinvesting their excess profits in themselves, their people, and their communities because they would not get to keep those profits anyway. That then created one of the most robust economies and largest per-capita middle classes in the planet’s history.

This is something that we already know for a fact will work because we have already tested it, and it is but one of probably thousands of possible economic models not being presented to the public.

Reimplementing that system or many of the other ones that don’t involve giving the thieves all the money and trusting them to divvy it up fairly are less likely to go wrong. We then need to make sure they are more resistant to being dismantled than previous systems were, so they don’t get destroyed like those were.

Taxes are redistribution of the capital of the general populace of the governed area. UBI is different in that it proposes a special tax only on the capital class where wealth is concentrated, which is then used to supplement the incomes of the general populace, with the most future-utopian thinkers envisioning UBI replacing income and work entirely some day in a super-automated future.

The point of great concern to me is that people bought in to the idea will not resist the ownership class’ attempts to consolidate resources and capital into fewer and fewer hands, because they believe those are stepping stones on the path to UBI. Then, when the capital class has got all the resources and control all the production, what force on Earth can make sure they follow through on the redistribution?

That last question is rhetorical. If someone’s got all the money, food, and weapons, there is no such force on Earth.

Edit to add another note: Observe how the capital class already actively seeks to avoid taxation at every turn, and are typically successful. I believe a government to successfully implement UBI, it would have to be somehow completely free of corruption from moneyed lobbying.

Be careful what you wish for. UBI assumes a small group in power will, while having all the resources in their hands, fairly distribute them to everyone and never use them as a bargaining chip to force our compliance with whatever actions they’re trying to take.

The whole UBI idea seems like a trap for the general public to accept the notion that it inevitable that a small oligarchic group must have all the resources consolidated to them, to stop us from working towards a true egalitarian economy.

There is no time I am aware of in history where a large group in power distributed vast resources to the community without being compelled to do so by threat of force.

He also had to write* it.

*alternative spelling

I suspect it because search results require manually parsing through them for what you are looking for, with the added headwinds of widespread, and in many ways intentional degradation of conventional search.

Searching with an LLM AI is thought-terminating and therefore effortless. You ask it a question and it authoritatively states a verbose answer. People like it better because it is easier, but have no ability to evaluate if it is any better in that context.

When pressed for further detail, Hegseth added, “It’s not Opposite Day!” (probably)

While that is true, it does not invalidate the poster’s point. All of the effects of drugs are just “effects”. They could just as easily market cough syrup as a sleep aid with the “side effect” that it suppresses coughing.

The difference in definition in this context is simply that “drug uses” is the list of its effects that they were going for, and “side effects” are a list of effects that they were not. Its entirely a man made distinction. Extend that reasoning to the “installing” vs. “side loading” discussion to see the poster’s point.

I believe him to be suggesting that “side loading” is a very different word for “installing” that can be loaded by PR people to shift public opinion against the practice. Whether or not they are doing that I can’t say myself, but that appears to be the point being made.

They could just as easily have coined it “direct installing” or “USB installing”, but they didn’t even though those terms are more descriptive. Draw from that whatever you will.

I’m sure some of them are pieholes.

I believe that the bad behavior of corporate interests is often one of the key contributors to these financial bubbles in every sector where they appear.

To say that some of the bad things about this particular financial bubble are because of a bunch of companies being irresponsible and/or unethical seems not to acknowledge that one is primarily caused by the other.

Its not so much of an argument as a concern. It puts an extreme amount of the country’s economic activity directly in the hands of the government. We see globally that governments can quickly change their motivations.

The same rope that can be used to help people out of a hole can be used to tie them up.

I can’t shake the feeling that all this talk of UBI and other social safety nets that are meant to support the majority of the populace after some notional post-work future society ignore a really big elephant in the room:

If most people are solely reliant on the good grace of a single entity, the government, for their whole means of survival, their entire existence is at the pleasure of that government. The populace becomes completely beholden to them, not the other way around.

The whole idea feels suspiciously like a trap set by bad actors with a long-term plan to steal the government from the governed.

It didn’t seem at all like an argument to me or an attempt by the OP to persuade anyone of anything. I read it as a description of their thought process as to how they arrived at the conclusions they did in their own life.

While some might find that enlightening if open to it or threatening if they disagree, it didn’t strike me as an attempt to talk me into their (non)religion.