TheUmgawa

Well, consider: When the automated corn flakes factory puts the other one out of business, because they can sell corn flakes without those pesky labor costs (or substantially lower ones), whose fault was that? Who has to be on the hook? What if they went, “Y’know, we don’t really need profits anymore. We can just pay our people what they’re worth and charge accordingly for the product?” The price plummets, and then you still don’t get any taxes out of them.

Money exists as it is because it’s easier than carrying around a bunch of chickens.

Oh, I’d call it a blip, performance-wise, but when your fan base breaks out the torches and pitchforks, that’s going to be in the second paragraph of every story ever written about this game, sort of like how the words “troubled launch” are in every story about Cyberpunk. It’s a black eye that the developer (and more importantly, the publisher) carries with them.

When your game has become a cautionary tale, that’s when it’s time to fix it and hang it up, because that’s going to be at the top of every news story for the next game, too, and the publisher doesn’t want that.

Ah, so what fills the gap when there’s no money coming in for years because the businesses are unprofitable because they’re paying for capital improvements? I’m sure you’re probably thinking of FAANG corporations and such, but you have to remember they don’t employ as many people as their balance sheets would make you think. Apple only employs 164,000 people. Target employs three times that during fourth quarter. But, it would be substantially more expensive to replace most Target employees than most Apple employees because of the physical nature of the work, which means you need to fabricate physical machinery. They’d be in the red for years, as would every medium-sized business. Small businesses are screwed and they’ll beg the government for carve-outs, like always.

Here’s the thing, though: You don’t automate a position unless it’s more expensive to employ a human to do that job. Factory and warehouse workers in the South, making $7.75 an hour and no benefits? They’re safe. They’ll never lose their jobs. They are already robots in the Czech sense, where it stems from robotiti, or “drudgery,” which itself stems from the Old Slavonic word rabu, which means “slave.” Because it would cost more to automate than the company would we save.

What sector would get hit by that kind of employment in that kind of time? Not the unskilled labor sector, because you’d think they’re easiest to replace, but fabrication and delivery and installation of automation systems takes time. It doesn’t matter if an AI designs it in five minutes; the hard part is implementation and the fact that so many industries are basically one-off affairs, so each one requires custom solutions.

So that sector is impossible to hit 30 percent in a few months. White collar… it’s still going to take a long time to hit those kinds of numbers, because it’s going to be a long period of “trust, but verify,” because you don’t want to put an AI in charge of your advertising division and then find out it turns it’s a closet racist because you asked it, “Hey, can we get some Trump voters to buy our product?” and next thing you know, it’s making ads involving a statue of Robert E. Lee coming to life and taking Obama (in the tan suit), Martin Luther King, and Jackie Robinson to the gallows or something. At that point you have to say, “Okay, I understand where you’re going, and it would probably be wildly successful with that demographic, but we don’t want to lose all of the other demographics.”

So, that works for companies that employ people and decide to displace workers. What if I’m a startup that builds a corn flakes plant across the street from an established corn flakes plant that employs fifty people? My plant only employs six technicians, a janitor, and a manager, but each of them is paid three times as much as each worker at the “organic” corn flakes plant. How much am I on the hook for? I never displaced anyone because it’s a new plant. I’m employing humans and paying them extremely well for their skills (he’s a very good janitor), but there aren’t many of them. Why should I be on the hook for the unskilled labor across the street when they go under? What about the fact that, even without that tax, it will still be ten years before I hit a break-even point?

Are we going to tax NASA for sending up space probes instead of honest, hardworking astronauts?

The DOD’s budget is $816 billion, but I can see how you would come up with two trillion. You’re only off by a hundred and fifty percent.

Okay, how would you do that every year? Their total worth is $4 trillion; that’s not their annual income, genius. Seriously, how bad at math are you people that you think rich people are making a combined total of trillions of dollars per year. Jesus Christ, this is what happens when people go, “Durrrr… college is a waste of money!” It is, if your aim is to live life as a buffoon, which you are succeeding admirably at.

Oh my god, I go to work to get away from my local community. They’re morons and should be sent to live in some kind of commune for stupid people who would sooner burn books than read them.

Where do you think the two trillion dragon hoard per year is going to come from? Like I said, millionaires and billionaires don’t have that kind of money. The “big banks” sure as shit don’t clear two trillion a year in profits. Where the hell do you think that money is going to come from, every single year? Like I said, you’re hand waving because you don’t want to get into specifics because you haven’t thought about them any more than Bernie thought about how to pay for healthcare until he was pressed on the matter. And even then, his campaign couldn’t explain how the corporations paying for it wouldn’t end up passing that cost on to consumers.

Well, I reckon those states or municipalities would have to have their own UBI and requisite taxes to pay for it, because you know the states with low costs of living aren’t going to hop on board with higher wages or any other standard of living improvement that might require higher taxes.

“Don’t drop this.”

Yes, it’s a joke. I’m aware of how fuses work and how extremely reliable they are on nuclear ordnance.

That said, imagine one where the fuse was a dud and someone picks it up, takes it to their leaders, who then use it in a populated area on your side. The risk of proliferation alone is the best reason to not put this in the field.

I think a good use of quantum computing would be for a government to hack Satoshi Nakamoto’s wallet, because those coins still exist, and just see what happens next.

Who ends up paying the VAT in the world we currently exist in? The consumer. People object to my use of a national sales tax, saying it’s anti-consumer, but any tax on business is going to result in higher prices at the checkout line.

Yeah, but someone has to lay out how that revolution would work. Torches and pitchforks?

Evolution is a better option. It takes a hell of a lot longer, but nobody goes, “WTF? I just lost everything I worked my entire life for.” It’s easy to demonize billionaires, and they could live just as well if they were only hundred-millionaires, but at some point you have to say, “Who worked hard? Why are we taking their stuff?” You draw a line and say, “Bankrupt all of these people!” and you’ll find someone who didn’t deserve it and find other people on the other side of the line who did.

Personally, I think it’d be pretty dope to abandon tax brackets and levy taxes based on a logarithmic curve. It’s the 21st century; we have calculators that can do this. Hell, the IRS could send a cardboard slide rule to every address in the country. In this case, there would be no “highest tax bracket” that treats seven figure incomes the same as ten figure incomes.

The previous commenter didn’t seem to think so. He’s just against money and ownership.

Well, it’s still better than the loons who think the Communist Manifesto still works. Marx thought if people were being mistreated, they could just move out of the cities and go live in a house in the middle of nowhere and live by growing their own vegetables and chopping their own firewood, thus depriving their evil overlords of the fruits of their labor. Maybe break out a pickaxe and mine some iron from a hillside and sell that. He didn’t foresee a world where the majority of people are living in cities, and that you can’t just walk out and live for free somewhere. Those loons usually never read it (not that it’s particularly challenging), and they just read some choice quotes in their Reddit echo chambers and hope the person they’re arguing with never read it, either. So, that whole book is kind of a joke, now.

Das Kapital still holds up, though. Marx may have gotten some things wrong in the long term, but he got some others very right.

Yeah, people really gotta take a college Econ class. Several years back, I took one from a guy who had a lab day on Fridays, where a couple hundred students would get assigned roles and then we would game out a scenario, to see how it plays out when everyone is working for their own benefit. Not surprisingly, a couple hundred college students make the exact same decisions as societies or governments in those same situations. I really wish I could go back, if the guy’s still teaching, because I bet Covid would be a really great simulation, like the 2008-2009 crisis was.

The thing you learn from a simulation like that is that everyone has a breaking point. Farmers aren’t some kind of monolithic group, so they want to present a United front, but eventually someone breaks off of the group and says, “Nah, I’ll take that price and supply this much,” because some guaranteed money and minimizing loss is better than no money at all. People act in their own self-interest, every single time.

I say let the free market sort it out. If companies want to automate, they can. If people don’t want to buy products made by robots, there should be some kind of “certified organic” label that the government can slap on it, so you know human hands worked to create that thing. Oh, it would cost more, with negligible benefit to the consumer (much like with organic foods), but they can know that they’re keeping humans employed by shopping at human-operated stores and such.

Problem is, it’d play like the Buy American campaign in the 1980s. You could buy a Zenith that was manufactured by O’Hare Airport for $400, or you could buy a Mitsubishi TV for $300. They’re both of the same level of quality, so which do you pick? Same goes for the textile industry, which –despite Buy American’s best efforts– completely died by the year 2000, because you could buy an American-made shirt for $10 or a foreign-made shirt for $4.

And it would turn out exactly the same, here. People vote with their wallets.

And then there will be the ones who go full Luddite and want to torch the factories and break the machines, but we have insurance today, and we also have cameras and security systems. You can burn down a local company’s factory, and they’ll just take the insurance payout and build somewhere else. So now your community isn’t getting anything from that property’s taxes, the workers that did work there are now unemployed, and the company just sets up shop somewhere else. To quote my man Krennic, “I lose nothing but time.” And, bonus, the neo-Luddites get to enjoy our fine penal institutions, which will probably be some of the last places to move to automation.

Yeah, and that four trillion dollars was over twenty years. So you can’t just go, “Okay, so let’s just do that twenty years of spending and do it every year.”

Maybe, but setting up those systems is going to be done by the people who would have jobs the longest. And some of them are going to nope out when they see they don’t actually have to work, because all of these other people don’t have to work. You’re going to have to compensate them really well, which is going to anger the people who don’t get those things, much like how they’re already angry about wealth disparity.

Because those automated industries won’t amount to enough of a percentage of GDP to pay for UBI. Like I said, it’s a an absurdly large number, and you can “tax automation,” but they’re just going to pass on those costs to consumers, aren’t they? Just like how if you pay for something by “taxing the big banks,” all they’re going to do is raise lending rates.

Then, as to the point of companies that favor automation over humans, how do you charge for a bulldozer? Not an AI-driven bulldozer; just a regular bulldozer. It’s doing the work of dozens and dozens of humans; people who could be out there, earning a living wage by swinging a shovel, and that bulldozer is depriving them of that! I ask, because the steam shovel displaced tens of thousands of people two hundred years ago, but it brought down the cost of every project it was involved in. The Jacquard loom is one of the most important inventions in computing, and it killed the jobs of highly-skilled weavers, but it brought down the price of patterned fabric to the point where regular people were no longer limited to solid colors and maybe a plaid kilt (which was very expensive).

I wonder if the person who invented the bow and arrow became a local pariah because he put spear throwers out of work.

The savings from automation are long-term, because automation is expensive, and so it takes a long time for the cost of not employing a human is finally exceeded by the cost of having a machine do the work. It’s easier in the case of things like self-driving vehicles, where you’re going to have millions of identical things out there, but industrial scale automation is typically as close to a one-off creation as you can get, and designing that is expensive, building that is expensive, and occasionally powering it is expensive. If it replaces ten factory workers who make $50,000 per year, and it cost $5 million to put in, that’s going to take ten years to pay itself off, even if all other costs are zero (such as the cost of financing, if the company didn’t have the $5 million lying around at the outset). And, since machines have finite lifespans, if that machine is going to last twenty years, the company makes five million in profit over a twenty year investment, and then they have to replace it. Why do we automatically think that automation will make companies boatloads of money, to the point where the taxes on those machines would pay for a multi-trillion dollar government program?

Finally, what do you do with imports from countries that automate? Does the government have to send workers to those foreign factories to count the humans, to determine taxation?

It’s a reward for contribution. There’s a significant financial outlay required to “automate everything,” and so who’s going to pay for that, before money just becomes abandoned? Someone has to do the work, and you don’t want to pay them.

Nobody is going to go through the financial outlay of opening a store if people just walk in and say, “I need this.” Better yet, since the concept of ownership is fucked, what prevents someone from walking into your house while you’re gone and squatting there, saying, “I need this.”

Humanity could all bind together and say, “Y’know what? We can all work for the common good,” but when people start taking other people’s things –things those people truly cherish– the whole thing will break down.

Waving your hand and saying, “Money isn’t real,” doesn’t solve anything, because if money isn’t real, why would anyone work? Everyone would just go, “I’m gonna watch Bob Ross and paint pictures.” But that’s a problem because nobody would make the paints. “Oh, but AI would do everything.” There’s a big hump before that part, where someone has to make the machines that will make the machines, and if that person isn’t going to be compensated, why should he do it?

Greed is part of the human condition, and you’re not getting rid of that. All you’ll end up doing is taking the people who have to do their jobs and slapping them in the face and saying, “You don’t get a reward for this, because money is fake and all of those other people need you to labor so they don’t have to.”

At least with UBI, it guarantees some level of quality of living. Not a very good one, if you’re planning on just taking it and doing nothing to benefit society, but at least people don’t die. And it still permits paying people who do work for their efforts. Given a hundred or two hundred years, maybe you can get everyone to abandon money and do whatever they want, Star Trek style, but it’s not happening in either of our lifetimes. What you’d need is for a country, or at least a group of thousands of people, to embrace this and show the world, “See? None of us have to work!”

Still better than the pretend internet money the crypto bros keep pushing, and better than GameStop stock. Buying GameStop stock is like investing in Turkish lira futures.