Ok. I admit that’s unnecessary and confusing.

A bit more than a rewording, a complete overhaul from the current American system. Never expect us to be reasonable or simple in our plans like our northern cousins can be.

I agree, without a means test, income limits for participation, assistance programs can’t be funded enough to actually help the needy and hand out the same amount to the well off. Those plans are nuts IMO.

I understand your issue with UBI. I support it in the sense of a safety net, no one should be forced to live on less than $X and IMO there should be no requirement besides no/low income….but to function that requires those who already make over $X to get nothing and just be happy they won’t be mugged for food money. I don’t support the “here’s a free $500 for everybody”, inflation would make it meaningless in a year, more circulating dollars with no more in the treasury/total value = inflation on top of your valid points.

Yeah, the crutch of it for me is the UBI moniker.

What you describe at the end of your post, minimum income, is really just a rewording of the existing social security and welfare systems across the western world. I know they look different in each, but here in Canada what you describe is more or less our already existing system's design goal. Welfare money exists for those that straight up can not work, and an employment insurance system exists to protect those inbetween jobs, meanwhile other multiple programs are aimed at distributing financial assistance to the lower income groups.

Despite all of that already existing, UBI is still being heralded up here in trials as well as a replacement. The problem being that for the needy the UBI pitches are generally a step backwards.

Eg. $500/month is the UBI pitch, and they say it'll be great because everyone gets it no matter what so it's simple and fair and nobody is left behind. The trouble though is that the reality is the truly in need people were already benefitting more than the $500/month under the existing systems, and the cost was much less because it was targeted.

I here UBI and get very worried about folks just selling snake oil 'solutions' that in the end are just a demand to adopt their own particular flavor of wealth redistribution.

I'm gonna have to be that guy. $500 a month for a family of four is $2k, which is a very good chunk of money to drop in your lap.

That works out the same as it they were on a single income, working 40 hour weeks at $10/hr, so almost equivalent to a full time job. No doubt that's gonna be a big deal and noticeable financial improvement to the recipient(s).

As always with UBI schemes, the devil is in how you pay for it. If it's truly universal, paying $500/month to ~330 million Americans would cost $1.98 Trillion dollars, meanwhile the current entire US gov budget for 2022 is estimated at $1.2 Trillion.

So, to implement $500/month universally in America would require not only increasing overall tax revenues by almost 50% it would also require the cancellation of 100% of every single other expenditure. That not includes military spending going to zero, but even cancelling the jobs of everyone that collects taxes and would presumably have been responsible for distributing the $500 checks.

If the 'fix' is to just tax the pants off anyone earning more than the $500/month, or limiting who we give it to, then it ceases to be a UBI scheme, and is instead just a mundane modification of the existing social security scheme by shuffling more money back and forth between different folks.

The need for something like UBI is due to the runaway inequality caused by 'supply-side' thinking like Reaganomics and neo-liberalism.

Pretty much everything @ChaosEngine said, and as pointed out in the Humans Need Not Apply video. There are far more factors going into this than the economists are willing to look at.

Shelf checkouts might result in slightly higher theft rates, and each person might be at the register than they would be with a properly trained cashier, but you now have one minimum wage employee watching 6 or 12 registers, rather than 6 or 12 people... that is a huge savings. That's 5 to 11 jobs lost, and at the low end, where people can least afford to lose job opportunities. It's just a matter of time until McDonald's, Wendy's and the like all add app-based ordering, or ordering at a kiosk, and that saves a couple employees there (Chick-fil-a already has that in their app, order, notify when you are there, they process the order)... and it wouldn't be too difficult to automate the McDonald's cooking line either... the burgers aren't flipped, the grill cooks both sides at the same time, drop them in place, grill down, cook, up, then put them in the stream tray, easy for a cheap bot to do. Portion control would be far easier with a bot too... there are huge incentives for them to move to automate...

The only real incentive not to automate as fully as everyone can is the fact it would cause a huge disruption to the economy if a Universal Basic Income isn't in place. I'd expect the biggest push for a UBI to eventually come from the various industries that want to automate, who'd gladly pay an automation tax to help pay the UBI in order to greatly increase their bottom lines, because we are very close to where a UBI, even based on an automation tax, is still cheaper than employing people.

Not sure how this didn't get far more votes. It's *quality talk about an important, and under-discussed issue. I look forward to the second installment, as they discuss solutions like Universal Basic Income. It's beyond time that it should be a regular discussion in politics, as the UBI will be needed far sooner than our politicians and public will be ready for.

Driverless cars and AI in general. AI is capable in the very near future of kicking off a revolution to rival the industrial one we all learned about. Huge increase in productivity and a reduction in expenditure for large corporations that currently rely on human labour. And AI that can fix and monitor the robot workers.

Which also means unemployment without a new job to go for. But if 50% of people don't have an income, who is going to buy the stuff the robots produce? That's where universal basic income comes in. Tax AI to fund UBI which would allow people to pursue their own goals in life. Fully automated luxury communism ala star trek! Credit to Aaron Bastani for that idea.

I await someone mocking the idea of UBI, calling me a lazy idiot, saying people will turn to drugs and crime, without providing a single alternative solution to the certainty of automation and what it will do to the economy. If boardroom jockeys find out that they can get robots to do the work of 1/2 of their staff for 1/100th of the cost, 1/100th of the errors, none of the stress, illness, holiday or sleep time, do you honestly think they won't? This IS going to happen.

Meanwhile RE: housing prices - if roast chickens had increased in price at the same rate houses have, each would be £50 - it would be unacceptable. Having a place to live is equally necessary for life, so why is it acceptable and even encouraged, celebrated by some?

Beats me.

Organized mass movement, probably. You're not just dealing with an elite who has very little interest in such things, but also a public who has been, for a lack of a better word, conditioned to be suspicious of everything that breaks with existing structures. Given how many people dislike their jobs, you can't even blame them for assuming that no work will get done if there's an alternative in the form of an UBI. International treaties and trade deals are just the icing on top.

But again, who knows. I sure as hell don't. Been proven wrong too many times to have any claims to wisdom.

At some point, yes. But for the time being, increases in productivity (automation) are less of a job killer than your everyday policies and ideologies.

Speaking of my own country, the amount of work not being done is enormous, and the aggregate of work not having been done over the last decades is absolutely staggering. The current economic system not only unloaded a great number of burdens onto society, it also never found a way to come up with a way to integrate the aforementioned work. No one is willing to pay for it, so it doesn't get done, period. The most prominent examples would be infrastructure works of all kinds (energy, most of all), ecological restauration and care for the elderly. Our national railroad alone could hire 100,000 people and still be understaffed.

You can have full employment next year, but not if you expect the private sector to provide the jobs within the current system. The public sector could create them, if you use a sovereign, free-floating currency, but ideology doesn't allow for it.

As long as we focus on finding people for a given job, there'll be mass unemployment, no matter what. Reverse the process, create/find jobs for a given people and we might make some headway.

Again, ideology doesn't allow for it. And that's also what made me stop advocating for an unconditional basic income (UBI). The financial details of it can be a nightmare, yes, and it would be a break with a social welfare system that survived two world wars. But the deal breaker for me was politics.

A UBI would mean taking the boot of the peasants' necks. Liberty and (some) equality made real. Love it.
But look at how vicious the Greeks are attacked these days, not just by the elite, but by our fellow worker bees. They're not just burying the last bit of European solidarity in Greece, they're unloading all their frustrations onto the schmucks who had very little to begin with. It's despicable. And it indicates to me that any attempt to introduce a system that would take from people the need to work would unleash unimaginable hatred from the usual suspects. And significant portions of the public would go along with it, given how easy it already is to channel their frustrations towards "welfare queens" and "moochers".

So yeah, a UBI would be lovely. Finally some liberty, finally more negotiating power for the worker (can decline any job offer without repression). But the shit would need to hit the fan hard before there can be any room within the political sphere for it.

The thumbnail image for this video has been updated - thumbnail added by oritteropo.

The thumbnail image for this video has been updated - thumbnail added by eric3579.

I agree with DRM "punishing your customers". The only DRM I can tolerate is what Steam uses to encrypt files. And that's because Steam is more convenient than physical media and constantly-patching all your PC games.

Disagree with his notion of "always on" network connection solving the DRM problem. Ubisoft does this with their newer titles, and I don't like it. Even for single player games, like Assassins Creed 2, you have to be constantly connected. You lose your connection, game pauses or doesn't start. Ubi's servers went down too - no one could play AC2 for 6 hours the day after it was released. They claim it was a DOS attack, but likely it was unexpected demand. Oh, can't confirm it, but that DRM was already patched out and there are pirated versions of UBI games out there already. I won't purchase any new UBI game which uses this Always-On-DRM.

The reward system is up to the reseller, not up to the publisher. Truth is that resellers don't make much profit from selling new games. That is why Gamestop is always pushing their used titles (and have rewards program for it) - the profit margin is astoundingly higher. Although the publisher can offer some rebates, like if you own the prior title, you get a discount on the sequel. These are few and far between though.

I bought a PS3 to put linux on it. But that was when it first came out, and there aren't many games on it, so no compelling reason to own it. I only put linux on it to try out Cell programming. Honestly YDL was slooooowwwww on the PS3. Other than Cell programming, there's no compelling reason to put linux on a PS3. Sony was selling the PS3 at a loss, and could do so because of future profits from selling games. I'm not sure if the newer Slim models are profitable or not, but I understand them removing support for it. (my conspiracy theory is that IBM also twisted their arm, since a Cell-BE blade or workstation is $8000+). Now, I use my PS3 for games occasionally, but mostly for blu-ray. I don't feel ripped off. The PS3 still does quite a lot, just not Everything.

Disagree with "shuts off servers for favorite game" argument too. If they want to stop running "official servers" fine - but they should just release open-source version of a dedicated server for anyone who wants to run their own server, after they stopped caring about their old titles. id software consistently released the source for their entire games, not just the server.

I don't think I've ever heard of someone justifying piracy because there was no demo available...Did anyone pirate a game just to try it, then like it and buy the full version? I've heard of people buying the game, hating the DRM, then getting the crack for it so they could actually play what they paid for.

He left out high school and college students (bulk of game pirates) in the "I'm too poor" argument. They all got the consoles or PC's as presents from their parents, and can't budget $60/month for games because they aren't working. And if the parents are already paying for their housing and food, they don't want to buy their kids new games every month, so those kids do what's easy - pirate games.

In all though, I do agree with him - that you should pay for games because developers worked hard on them.

Also if you see a title that is older and discounted, and a new copy is $19.99 and the used one is $17.99 - please buy the new one, cause the developers get $0.00 from used game sales.

Ubisoft are only a publisher, their streak of shit continues just fine.

Q Entertainment are the talent. The motion-type controls are optional, the game will be playable with a regular controller. It's planned for release on 360 and PS3...the Wii I think would melt trying to cope.>> ^EDD:

First original game by Ubi that I've seen in years. Hope it's not utter crap like the vast majority of their product. I'll give it an upvote for the fancy visuals and aural treats, but I remain skeptical of the mo-cap. I guess this is planned for the Wii, Kinect or Sony's Move, right?

First original game by Ubi that I've seen in years. Hope it's not utter crap like the vast majority of their product. I'll give it an upvote for the fancy visuals and aural treats, but I remain skeptical of the mo-cap. I guess this is planned for the Wii, Kinect or Sony's Move, right?

2008 games I enjoyed immensely, consider unique, polished pieces of work and I'd recommend to everyone:
Dead Space
Witcher: Enhanced Edition

Honorable mentions:
Audiosurf
Mass Effect for PC (technically a 2007 game)

I can't for the love of me call any more 2008 games 'excellent' though.
For me, all other "AAA" titles were sub par (at times extremely so) in terms of quality that was advertised or I'd expected. Prominent examples include:

GTA4 (a letdown on pretty much all fronts except mini-games or mini-distractions),
Fallout 3 (lame story, complete lack of identification with the protagonist and shitty narrative & voice acting by decent actors bugged me the fock out),
Prince of Persia (cakewalk platforming, random-button-blocking-combat and those FUCKING QTE POWERPLATE SEQUENCES),
Crysis: Warhead & Far Cry 2 & Cod5-World at War all had god-awful storylines, terribly idiotic AIs, and conveyed the feeling that Crytek, Ubi and Treyarch had a competition scoreboard trying to see how many cliches they could squeeze into their games.

I guess I'm hard to please. I keep hoping it'll apply to me in bed some day