Jeez I feel like its been forever since a good @Al_Kafir and @janitor discussion (fight:P ) and I’m glad to see they still happen 
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Well, their position is morally and economically indefensible.
It’s fun to expose contradictions in their supposed arguments from time to time.
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Riddle me this - why would people choose to pay this, when a fork of the same technology could provide the same level or service without it?
Open source software is the free market in purest form. Competition can flourish with little or no resistance from capital. I don’t see how these sort of schemes could ever survive in such a world, when it isn’t in the interest of those who would contribute the most.
Any fees levied beyond what is needed for the network to operate risks a fork to an alternative without it becoming the option of choice.
While this pleases me in many ways - we will get the best solution in time - as someone with maidsafecoins, it makes me less keen. I just hope that the devs have a keen understanding on this.
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That’s a very telling question. People recognize that fiat system cost much more % of their currency but they use it because there are many people who will trade in that. It has wide acceptance and utility for them.
By creating this system, there are a couple benefits that might attract people:
First is that it attracts members, and then more commerce and then investment and then more members and more commerce… etc.
Second is that the growth raises the value of the cryptocurrency which increases the value of any holdings you have.
Third is that many people recognize that technology is finally going to remove more jobs than it creates and this leaves major groups with too few jobs to survive. And when many people are unemployed or otherwise unable to survive, it impacts everyone in many ways. Sometimes governments will impose rules, taxes mandates or restrictions that otherwise wouldn’t have happened. Sometimes people turn to crime. Sometimes, it turns to wars. Either way, no one but the wealthiest comes out ahead.
Fourth, very few people would complain about 1% to fix the above problems in society if they had a guarantee that it would never be raised. The ones that would, however, are those that profit from the leverage of other people’s money. Virtually every type of financial activity on Wall St. is based on multiple transactions for the same dollar yet is taxed only one time. The productive sectors out there generally only have 2 transactions - one when earned and one when spent. This levels the playing field for the 99.99% more than most people realize. This is because most people simply can’t grasp that the banking industry and it’s siblings effectively rob 40-60% of the physical economy when all its forms are added up.
Fifth, it would give them the daily dividend.
Sixth, most would see its progress in helping the starving masses so often hidden from mainstream view.
Seventh, they would hopefully support the idea of getting millions of anonymous DNA genomes in the hands of scientists to aid their research.
Oh, and eighth, it would encourage membership into Safecoin, MaidSafe and a world where security and many other things can undermine the corporate versions.
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Needs are unlimited. If you could get a massage for $1, or have someone take out your trash for $5/mo, you’d probably employ them.
But one can’t do that in labor hellholes like the EU where one can’t sell such services without having a bunch of licenses, and on top of that there are minimum wage laws.
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Actually, its the exact opposite. Needs and even most wants are extremely limited. Operating in a scarcity based environment or just that perception yields competition which stems from our survival instinct. When something is abundant or even perceived as such, demand falls instantly.
This is easily seen in many markets as it’s a major focus on how push marketing works. But its easier to see in person.
5 kids at a party. Host puts out a plate of cookies. How many cookies determines what happens. With 5, 10 or 15, the kids will usually be democratic and all the cookies will get taken. With any other number up to about 17, there will be conflict and again, all or most will get eaten. With more than 20 cookies, one kid will take 3, 3 kids will take 1 or 2 and 1 kid won’t take any. I’ve actually done this twice with kids and half a dozen times with adults and it’s always the same.
But more importantly, the jobs are definitely going away. Driverless cars and trucks would replace 3-7 million jobs in the US alone. Automated cashiers, ATMs, customer service, will take more. Multi-service web sites simply disrupt entire industries (Instagram’s 13 employees replaced Kodak’s 140,000). And now we’re reaching the point that robots are being made and maintained in the hundred-thousands … by other robots. The going price for robotic systems in the first stage of simple jobs has already fallen to $4/hr. Next gen bots will tackle the professional jobs and so on.
So, if I had a robot that could give a massage and take out the trash, why would I need two?
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You hear that @jreighley, what is your retort to that?
@Traktion I think FOSS trancends the free market with zero marginal cost displacing the profit motive. Its a market/scarcity breaking pattern.
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Uh huh.
I assume if he put a dead rat on a plate and no one reached for it, that would prove the needs don’t exist.
Robots will kill driver jobs, but will create robot servicing and other jobs. Cheaper goods would mean more consumption of goods and services.
Experts have been laughably wrong for more than 100 years.
Tell me, how thousands of cryptocurrency developer and exchange jobs were you predicting as recently as 10 years ago?
And while we’re at it, how many cryptocurrencies are actually needed (since there are hundreds, but you say actual needs are very limited)?
To answer your question about how many robots you’d have: as long as some of your neighbors have money or labor and want something, you could have two because you could be better off by having your robot make something they want and help you pay off the robot you need for your own needs.
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No, robots don’t create jobs at the same rate. A lot of reasearch on that, its a pattern from the past with older tech that is really not holding. Its actually the argument the classical economists make, data doesn’t support it. There is real tech displacement.
As I said above, I’m quite sure in many cases jobs become fewer because of the minimum wage and licensing laws and regulations.
Because of those, you cannot take many jobs that you otherwise could. And on top of that money is free so it costs nothing (zero interest) to replace humans with robots.
Historically we’ve never had so much economic fascism as today so I would bet that explains more joblessness than what the bookworm experts claim is a new paradigm.
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Matters of degree, but nano tech makes shoe shiners unnecessary and inaccessible even for those who want to lord about.
Quite right. From my many discussions on this, a few things now seem pretty clear. Advancing technology both creates jobs and destroys them but those ratios depend on a few factors.
Job creation and destruction comes from whatever industry is being disrupted or optimized. Invent cars, lose horse jobs and so on. This is linear if they’re both the same type of structure (people working to provide products for sale). If either is reliant on a vertical infrastructure (oil change shops, car parts, oil industry, roads, parking lots, tires, etc. are created solely for cars), then those related businesses get included making it exponential.
So far, job creation has been mostly linear growth with decreasing exponential component. 100x + 2x^2 becomes 200x - 0.5x^2
And job destruction has been the reverse. 50x + 0.1x^2 becomes 45x + 10x^2
Obviously the numbers are just a visual to show the effect. But the major point is that since the 70’s, job destruction has overtaken creation. Those exponentials have finally become more than noise. Think of this in light of what infrastructure was needed to be added for Twitter to create its industry - none. Since the 70’s, however, the people struggling to survive have simply conned their way into getting paid to do fluff jobs since then. And then the '08 recession shook out that fluff and here we are. Now, companies have learned that automation can replace enough workers so they’re not hiring. The result of all this is that US wages have stagnated perfectly flat since 1975 while productivity has maintained it’s exact same rate of growth since the 1800’s.
One only need to looks where investment money is going. Investor meetings regularly say (out loud, even) that physical products are too slow, labor heavy and capital intensive to make enough returns on. They would rather invest in fast turn software or high automation companies that ramp up a product via a dozen employees and the they can get out in 2-3 years. Money in this path massively dwarfs money in building physical products. And the result of that is that it’s driving manufacturing into the garages via small scale but even more intelligent automation. So, while this does create more jobs, those jobs tend more to be hobbies than high paid.
The result of all this is less and less total jobs each year. And with such massive problems from 10% employment, what options will be undertaken when it hits 20% or 30%? Numerous studies are already in the mainstream media suggesting 47-50% less jobs by 2030.
So my question to this thread is “How many years will it take to get a basic income solution implemented and how horribly bad will it be if it comes from the governments?” My answer is that they’ll wait until 2029 and then destroy everything. I’d much rather a truly universal, unconditional, borderless, globally equal system be put in place now so it can grow organically and settle to what the market requires it to become.
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But not like the new Saudi mantra of " let the market manage the market." But seriously, I’ve heard the point of serious risk of civil war is generally at about %20 real unemployment where “real” is still quite nebulous but also ominous. And I think I just learned from what you’ve written that delinking wages from inflation going back to 70 was not part of the policy response to calls to replace all work with a GAI back in 68-70 where that response seeing capital as obsolete if labor was obsolete sought to take us back to the plantation to preserve status- kind of like tech backfiring on labor as with the cotton gin.
Perhaps that should serve as a hint. After the US government closed the gold window and the Wall Street took over the government, it became cheaper to borrow money and move factories to undeveloped countries.
At the same time socialists have gone on a regulatory binge to protect vested interests, including both the richest and unions.
Now they’re ensuing more misery and more robotization (and more money for Wall Street) by legislatively banning workers from freely selling their labor (which is what the minimum wage laws in Cali and soon NY, do).
- Burger flipping (or shoe shining) robot: $100K at 3% interest = $275/mo
- Human @ $15/hr = $1,800/mo (before the blessings of Obamacare are bestowed upon them)
Which part of this equation is not yet clear to you?
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I think robots will destroy more jobs than create. BUT, it will allow for other non-robot related jobs.
If robots are used everywhere, prices are going to drop. That means whatever alternative income people need will not be as high as we might think. Working hours might drop in a lot of places, too. That would allow for increased spending in areas of recreation. There will be some specialists to fix the robots, but you won’t need as many specialists as workers that have been replaced by robots since that kind of destroys the purpose of robots.
What do the non-specialists do? They need to become entrepreneurial. People can offer all kinds of services. When 3D printers go mainstream, we will have 3D template designers.
There will be hobbyists who’d like to create fun/useful/beautiful things with 3D printers. They could sell those things or teach others how to do it. There’s a whole host of other services people could offer. They might use 3D printers, robots or none of that stuff. We need to move to a culture of self-employment.
I think there will be a lot of opportunities for people to make a living, IF the government allows them to do so easily. Countries where it takes ages, an arm and a leg to setup a business and where regulation and taxation are high will suffer. Entrepreneurial cultures will flourish.
Unions will die. Politicians might try to stop it and that’s going to be annoying. Special interest groups will cry for new regulations for the new technologies. We need to stay one step ahead so that it cannot be regulated.
I think this is what it’s going to come down to:
Allow people to make a living, and the age of robots will be wonderful.
Regulate everything to death and 20% will benefit somewhat while the remaining 80% will stagnate.
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To be fair, yes monetary policy and many other policies and practices have caused unemployment. For me, the absolute largest factor has been unbalanced inflation between the 99% and the 0.1%. But whether it is caused by those factors or tech unemployment matters not. The fact is that jobs are going away faster than at any time in history and that pace is accelerating. See the videos:
Humans Need Not Apply
Will Work For Free
The only way to avoid chaos from this result is more welfare or other entitlements. So, would you rather it be done by expanding the current systems or by a decentralized system that cannot be gamed? I’ve ran all the numbers I can find and to tell the truth, I simply can’t find any way possible for a government system to work. But on the decentralized side, it’s actually so cheap that most wouldn’t even notice it. It’s kind of like the difference between using Saudi oil passing through a dozen systems to power your computer vs using PV panels on your roof (setting aside the battery part). The PV solution is not beholding to any central authority or system and satisfies the need directly where it is needed.
So what do you think about the actual implementation? How about the medical benefit of getting millions of genomes decentrally in the hands of researchers? How about the part where it attracts millions of people to use the MaidSafe network?
As I began this with, we can debate the why (and now we have), but I’d like to debate the how. Many governments at the national and local levels are currently considering a basic income. If they do so, it will be a disaster. Problems will arise from the borders between the ‘get’ and ‘not get’ people. Problems will arise from governments skimming from the top.
As far as I can see, the real benefit long term is that if it is given to all ages from birth on, the next generations will not need to enter the debt game of the bankers to buy a car, house, college (if that still exists) or other things. They can have that money saved up during their childhood years. I think this group would understand that no debt growth in fiat systems means the death of those systems. And I can’t think of a better way to treat them.
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Amazing, Obama care and government regulation as an aid to innovation.
It’s been doing wonders for Tesla, tool
Innovation is a byproduct. Plunder is the main “service”.
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It would have to be a universal guaranteed income on the gov side while it lasted. I don’t see a situation where a government plan B, sustainable or not is not needed in the transition. I think states must put forth a serious effort while they can.