Universal Basic Income

To me the really important question is whether you (speaking generically) would rather pay more to help someone with less effective programs after they've fallen onto hard times and/or addiction or whether you would rather pay the same amount or less to provide a basic income in lieu of the programs necessary to help (perhaps less effectively) them after they've fallen on hard times.
Put another way: is it more important to help people who are in danger of falling through the safety net or punish those that do?

You might think that, but no. How I learned about some of the improvements was because of a "golden boy" (not being sarcastic, dude was wickedly smart) mentioned them and he couldn't get the owner to buy the stuff. (And yeah, they spent big $$$ to get him to work for the company, so they knew they had a valuable employee on their hands.)

Something, something, market conditions will force them to change. Maybe, but they make medical supplies, including eye shields. The pandemic hits, and nobody gives a goddamn what such things cost, they're more than happy to pay for them. Where's the incentive for the company to turn out more of them? The harder eye shields are to get, the more expensive they are, and since such things need to go through rigorous testings (either by a government or private testing lab), it's not like somebody else can start cranking them out on short notice. If you upgrade your equipment and flood the market, then the price will collapse. From an economic standpoint, it makes far more sense to just keep doing what you're doing and jacking up the prices as demand increases. And why bother buying new machines even if you don't plan on shipping out things at a faster rate than you're doing now as you'll just have to find some place to store the stuff and that can get expensive.

Steve Jobs once said: "We don't hire smart people to tell them what to do. We hire smart people so they can tell us what to do."

I presume the owners have computed that their current strategy is the best moneymaker (or they're fools if it isn't). But they're open to competitors coming up with cheaper product.

Heck, I bet plenty of the people who go on Facebook and make snide comments about "burger flippers" not deserving any more pay are willing to spend a fair amount of money and time to flip burgers themselves, as long as they get to call it "grilling" and do it in their back yard.

No, but rather unusually, Michelangelo's father did demand Michelangelo be paid by his master Ghirlandaio during his apprenticeship, rather than paying to be there.

Steve Jobs also said that "Hacks steal from one person, artists steal from everyone." Jobs also had to basically be brow-beaten by other execs at Apple (who were wealthy enough that they didn't have to worry about being fired) to port iTunes to Windows and to make iPods compatible with PCs. iTunes, iPods, and iPhones became the "gateway drug" that got people to by Macs (and Apple makes more money from iPhones than it does from Macs).

Yeah, no. Because anyone currently selling the same product knows that if they flood the market, then the price per unit will fall, so it's in their interest to not ramp up production. Anyone wishing to get into the market will have to provide massive amounts of documentation showing that they can make a product as safe as those currently for sale (a process that could take months or years, and is important since lives are at stake).

And let's say, for example, that I put together a machine that could make the eye shields (not terribly hard) and decided to try and sell them. If I can't provide documentation that they were sterilized and met the certifications required by various governments, I'm not going to find any legitimate buyers with deep pockets (hospitals, etc.). Sure, I could sell them to individuals and folks who didn't care that they were buying stuff from a potentially sketchy source, but somebody gets sick and decides to file a lawsuit because they think that I'm to blame (regardless of if that's true or not), then I'm SOL. Doesn't matter if I'm at fault or not, without the right kind of paperwork, a jury is going to assume that I'm to blame and I'm going to have to pay out a chunk of change. Maybe it'll be an amount I can afford, maybe it won't. I have no way of knowing. I also have no way of getting an insurance policy to cover my ass without all kinds of paperwork, showing that I followed the various requirements needed to produce a safe product. The only way I can hope to do that is to submit what I produce to various certifying agencies and wait for them to give the okay. By that time, the pandemic could be over (or the panic buying of the stuff I make), and then I wouldn't have the nearly unlimited profit margins that one has now. So why do it?

That's an interesting point. I wonder if there's some sort of equivalence effect between low interest rates and a UBI as far as the socialization of risk goes.

I dunno. All I've ever seen are memes of him screaming about how raw the chicken was or some other shit. I've been told by people who watch his shows that he's trying to get chefs to be able to handle angry customers, but it seems to me that one's better off telling Karen to GTFO than trying to be sympathetic.

since when do chefs bear the brunt of irate customers? all that shit falls on FoH staff-and then those fuckers want a portion of the tips!

which brings us back to "died impoverished and mentally ill at 37..." along with how all he produced was never of any value to him (which is true with most artists).

now more realistically, let's look at what UBI would really provide. Like the capability of paying for basic needs like rent and nourishment or support to update one's education.

I thought his abuse was generally only directed at certain people like restaurant owners that think they're perfect or arrogant competition contestants. He's kind and gentle with the kids in the junior version of the show, and with the servers he encounters so long as they're professional with him. I even remember a meme floating around where an adult contestant asked him not to yell because he struggled with anxiety, and Ramsay apologized and said he honestly didn't know.

The conditions that created Van Gogh were as unique as he was. An argument for a UBI shouldn't turn on creating great artists because it probably won't (and even if it does, it will create legions of mediocre ones in the process). That said...

Yes. I'm still undecided on a UBI, but I'm intrigued by arguments (like Murray's) that a properly constructed UBI could replace the entire welfare system and incentivize people to constructive/beneficial behavior.

This is really the only justification for a UBI. It must replace every other form of public support - welfare, unemployment, food stamps, medicare (or include medical coverage as part of it), etc. Not simply be layered on top of all that.

Yep. It's an absolute non-starter for me unless it does that.

I don't know. 99.999999% of the video I've ever seen of him is him screaming in the face of someone in a chef's outfit, who is almost always crying. I've had to deal with enough assholes screaming at me for shit that's not my fault that I don't need to watch a show that seems to be centered around someone who does that for sport (I couldn't watch the Orange County Chopper assholes for the same reason). I merely gave the defense trotted out by people who are fans of his.

I've watched a few of his other shows, including the BBC version of Kitchen Nightmares and a 4 part miniseries in which he helped inmates learn to cook. In all those other non-Americanized series, he is not screaming at full volume. Hell, one time, Ramsay even brings the plate back to the owner completely empty and tells her the food was great:



I don't mean to simp for the guy but the further I dig, the more I suspect a lot of that shit is heavily edited for our market.

He's also told off customers who complain about well done steaks being overcooked and has Opinions™ about vegans so I doubt he's putting up with entitled Karens either. But if people are using that excuse as a reason he needs to yell at chefs, yeah I agree that's just stupid.

Yes, but that's not what proponents of UBI want. They want it tacked on to other programs.

Yeah, there's got to be some sort of punishment and/or humiliation. As far as the "Van Gogh" premise: the only reason we have his breathtaking work to enjoy and be inspired by is because he was subsidized. Contemporary judgements on the worthiness of art are not always in line with historical ones. If it had been up to the critics and "experts" of his time he would have died in the gutter. There are plenty of others who barely avoided starvation. Saying someone's art has no value because no one wants to buy it reminds me of the definition of the cynic: somone who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.

An overly simplistic statement. Some do, some don't. This was a source of debate between Andrew Yang and Robert Reich, among others.

At any rate, there are plenty of reasons why "UBI should totally replace every form of social assistance" is too simplistic to make sense. Let's say the UBI is set at some pretty low level -- enough for a person to share a small apartment with a roommate, keep the heat and lights on, and buy enough rice and beans that they're never hungry. There would still be a pretty powerful incentive to work under this system, because nobody wants to live like that. But what if you're quadriplegic? You probably can't do most jobs; should you be condemned to a life of soul-crushing poverty with no possible escape? What if you're paraplegic and can do some jobs, but only with the help of a whole lot of expensive hardware? One-size-fits-all makes for a nice bumper sticker, but poor policy.

If they were quadriplegic because of their own bad choices, like forgetting to wash their hands and caught polio, they obviously should be punished.

What about if they were in college and crashed the car their daddy bought them while trying to date rape drunk chicks?

Oh wait, I guess they could run for congress as republicans and beat up dead trees.

Congress? Hell nah.

Supreme Court or bust.

Don't give Cawthorne any more ideas

the argument never was presented as turning on an anomaly...
as to replacing the welfare system we have, yeah, that is the argument proponents like me have been making for years. I usually start just at the commercial space the 50 or so (floors worth) offices around my city take up.
Constructive/beneficial behavior is probably a little fuzzy to define though, and doesn't touch on the very significant portion that aren't capable of that.
Like, one of my clientele... you could find all kinds of reasons to deny him-alcoholic, addict, not always the most cooperative. But then you find out that the scars on his legs are from when his father tried to set him on fire as a child 35 years ago and...well, among other things, I don't really feel capable of judging someone as being lazy or whatever if they never quite got their life on track.

umm.. no.
we have healthcare.. it's been strangled the last few decades by conservatives tryin gto pave the way back to privatization, but the people demand it if only because it's proven that single payer non profit provides better service for far less. granted, it needs to be expanded to include dental and mental still, but at least anyone in ontario can get treated at a hospital

The Guaranteed Basic Income that was the CERB/CRB program was an extension to Employment Insurance and replaced welfare for the 18 or so months it ran. It covered those of us who'd lost not only regular jobs, but also went a step further and covered those working the "gig" economy in irregular employment. Frankly the extra money was likely less than either program's overhead... so yeah, those can be eliminated with a G/UBI with the money going to the clients rather than overheads (go ahead and look up what 10000 sq ft of commercial office tower costs in Toronto-then staff it with 50-100 people making an average $85K to fill in/rubber stamp forms). The trick there is that EI is federal and welfare is provincial via municipal.

Getting rid of Disability would be a little trickier. For basic payments, sure the disabled are eligible. Of course, they either require subsidy for medical needs and medicine OR those things also become directly paid for.

Even if you didn't get rid of existing programs, enrollment in one would disqualify anyone in receipt from the others.

I was specifically talking about the US.

Perhaps you missed this bit:

that just goes to how much more inadequate the social safety net there is

other than a far superior health insurance system here, what's different there or would be different with G/UBI implemented? most, if not all other social payouts would be folded into that.

That does address the expensive hardware (hopefully), but not the other problem.

(I have been assuming that the UBI level would be bare-bones subsistence level, and that the goal is to keep people fed and sheltered while still providing an incentive to work. If it's higher, my objection to the removal of SSDI/SSI becomes less material. But there might be other problems with that.)

I would also argue that unemployment insurance should still exist, (a) because it's insurance, not welfare, and (b) because immediately plunging somebody into subsistence-level poverty if they lose their job is not conducive to anything good.