Thing is, we are past scarcity, but corporations wouldn’t want you to know that.
There are enough resources in the world for everybody to eat, get shelter, etc. but the first world would have to take a bit of a lifestyle adjustment and nobody wants that.
Very few humans are actually starving or dying of exposure these days, even in third-world countries. Other than North Korea, anyway, and that’s a political problem not a matter of constrained resources.
Universal basic income is more about guaranteeing a certain quality of life and the opportunity to step up. Here in the US nobody’s starving, but the poor are forced to eat very unhealthy food, have limited access to healthcare, and great difficulty pulling themselves out of poverty while living in desperation. No time or resources for education or entrepreneurship when you’re working two jobs and always one paycheck away from losing your roof.
I agree with just about everything you said but I want to touch upon this.
I do not think they are “forced” per se, just that it is super easy to come by unhealthy food --fast food-- that people would rather that over going to the market for vegetables because it is somewhat of a comfort food.
not only is it easy to come by but its also much cheaper (atleast around here). a basic bottem of the barrel salad around here will cost you almost $9 and youll still be hungry afterwards compared to a $3 hamburger where you feel full afterwards
It doesn’t have to be this way, but unfortunately people in the western first world have been brainwashed to believe that anything to do with socialism (i.e., “damn commies!”) is bad.
Meanwhile, the distribution of wealth is out of control.
No individual needs a billion dollars. Yet there are individuals in the world with many times that. Meanwhile there are people without access to clean water. There are clever people unable to pursue scientific endeavour due to lack of funds (e.g., a good friend of mine has had to put her science Phd on hold in order to get a job - in Australia, and we actually get some level of assistance).
Sure, you want to reward hard work, but there becomes a point where having more money is irrelevant, and that money could be actually doing something for society if distributed to somewhere else.
We tried mostly pure capitalism (well, except if you’re a wall street banker, then socialism is fine!). Its broken.
edit:
there are plenty of people dying early, due to inadequate medical care (which could be helped with money/doctors/etc. I’ve made a few trips to various shit holes in Africa (Mali, Zambia, etc.). The average life expectancy in Zambia for example is 32. AIDS is rampant (IIRC, something like a 35% adult infection rate in some areas). Malaria is rampant.
If your life expectancy is 32, it changes your perspective on things a lot. AIDS for example is not seen as a big deal because it likely doesn’t kill you until after you’re likely dead anyway…
Well, buying a premade salad yes. What I was getting at was buying all the ingredients yourself.
One can get a surprising amount of vegetables for $20.
everything can be automated, who needs humans… lol.
Tesla, apparently.
Sciences & Engineering I would expect to be fairly safe for a while to come, not to say that automation and AI aren’t being used in those fields but they are just tools there for the scientists and engineers.
give it some time, everything can be automatized, and will be. If i can, so those the rest.
anime
machines cannot hope to be so depraved and tasteless
Medicine to include allied health care professions. Quality health care really requires a human touch. Even with all the advanced technology being developed in the medical field that human interaction between patient and provider can’t be simulated. Think about trying to describe your pain to a robot. Or in an emergency scenario think of a robot trying to extricate an unconscious person from a vehicle, now imagine that part of the car door had caved in and a jagged edge nicked an artery and there’s only seconds to identify the wound and apply a tourniquet. This isn’t even a complex medical scenario and considering how different and nuanced most medical emergencies are I can’t imagine it ever being automated. Maybe some parts of the process but never to the extent to which humans are obsolete.
Yeah, I tried to live off of $100/week in food once, just to try it. Keep in mind I live in a high CPI region, so it may be a bit skewed, but I was able to just barely keep myself within that, eating 2800 calories and 130g of protein every day.
Damn you must work out a lot. I try to keep myself to 1600 day because I’m chunky.
You could say that.
Yes and? How does it pay for itself without making the military 95% smaller and killing both Medicare and Medicaid.
There is a key word there, Basic. It’s what welfare is now, a bare minimum to exist. It cannot be more than that.
Making the US military 95% smaller would be a good thing for the world. But that’s not necessarily required, and I’m not talking specifically about the USA only.
You’re on the internet, the world is not just the USA.
Universal basic income, in countries where the idea is entertained is intended to be able to sustain you in the case where you are not working.
Whether it can be more than that or not is not really for you to decide.
As per previous posting, the idea is that you get people doing things they are good at or interested in which will often result in a better benefit to human progress than being stuck in a dead end job they do purely to pay the bills.
Yes, some people will sit at home and smoke weed. They do that already anyway.
Before this becomes a long winded off topic discussion I am going to respectfully disagree.
These are functionally useless anyway.
Most doctors don’t get that much from these avenues. Often, they give subpar service or are located so far apart that it is impractical for a lot of users.
Same story for Veterans with Tri-Care. That’s what my family used and almost no doctors would take it. The ones that did were rude af and never wanted to actually help us.
Poor people often live in “food deserts” where there are no grocery stores selling produce, and this causes them to buy all their food at bodegas or Burger King. Also if you compare the cost of fast or unhealthy food versus even buying raw vegetables and cooking them at home, it’s pretty incongruous. Veggies are expensive calories.
Anyway, we’re veering dangerously close to politics here.
Most of the Tech is there for urban agricultural someone just has to figure out how to make it economical. It being primarily automated could be the tick.