It's a different world than it was ten years ago. Among the ways it's different are people are far more skeptical of billionaires, Big Tech, and capitalism generally. They're willing to cut them much less slack. This is one of the few ways that the world of today is better than the world of ten years ago.
I don't love your silly theory. It sounds like you're in denial, trying to cope with the fact that not everyone thinks LLMs are the greatest thing since flush toilets.
Yes he's rich and influential and blah blah blah blah blah and he's also AN ENORMOUS FUCKING DORK with the intellectual depth of a half-empty bottle of salad dressing. For all his money I'd rather be me than him.
I have a copy of the classic "Joy Of Cooking" in the kitchen. It was a lot cheaper, works perfectly every time, and doesn't get ruined if (when) I spill foodstuffs on it.
Agreed. I have can think of about a dozen things I'd love to do if I didn't have a full-time job. Unfortunately, most cost at least some amount of money (not to mention food, a roof over my head, etc.).
"I don't know if UBI would take people out of the workforce, but it would probably take me out of the workforce."
A realistic UBI would be $10-15k/year, which means a crappy apartment and/or roommates and no luxuries. There's probably a margin where some people who want to do FIRE would be able to retire slightly earlier, but I can't see many people abandoning median or better paying jobs.
UBI sadly is purely a fantasy. We don't have money even for retirement funding, which shows cracks in every country. And UBI is basically a lifetime pension.
We only don't have it because we refuse to collect it. There is enough wealth in the world to end hunger, poverty and allow people to age to death in dignity, but we lack the political will to achieve any of these things.
In countries without sovereign currencies it's more complicated, but in the US money wouldn't even need to be collected (technically it would need to be collected/added as debt, but that's entirely due to the Constitution and not some kind of natural law). The only real considerations needed to spend are whether or not adding more debt is politically viable and whether or not percepetions of and expectations for inflation are manageable. A UBI would be way too big to be able to avoid triggering inflation expectations and opportunism. Ending hunger would be much more manageable as the costs are very low relative to the impact and so it could be more easily hidden from financial doom-speakers.
Nominal wealth is useless if supply of products and services is in decline. The population histogram of pretty much all developed societies has passed the curve where the supply of labor is decreasing so that “wealth” will be competing to buy less and less labor.
US federal government alone spends trillions of dollars on wealth transfers from workers to non workers via Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, along with a few other program. And even that doesn’t guarantee you will be able to see a doctor in a timely manner.
Hunger is easy. It is housing, medicine and education that are unsolvable.
And no, even if you skin all the rich and put all their money to UBI, it will only last a year or two (you can take Excel and calculate). The bulk of income and taxes comes from the middle class.
Just try and calculate. The rich are rich, but there are too few of them. Even $1000 UBI (which is not enough for anything) is like $3.2 trillion per year. All the rich taken together do not earn this much.
In 10 years, the management (or "leadership" if you like the taste of boot) responsible for doing the cutting will have moved on to something else, with no consequences for them.
I suspect that for every grandpa who likes telling war stories, there are probably a hundred who get quiet and sullen when the war comes up and have to excuse themselves and go be alone for a while.
