The economic incentive doesn't just vanish because people have a little more money. Notwithstanding, a lot of people enjoy the work of being a mechanic.
> The economic incentive doesn't just vanish because people have a little more money.
The incentives are changed dramatically, though. The unworkability of the plan comes down to a very simple question: Why work for forty years, scrimping and saving to afford a meagre retirement, when a meagre retirement is on offer the moment you turn 18?
People have the option now to live like the meagre retirement of this proposed UBI while working, saving a ton more, and retire with a lot more than this UBI in far fewer years than 40. Instead, they spend more, because people always want more stuff. A meager retirement is not appealing to most 18 year olds.
Or with this proposed UBI, why wouldn't people work 20 years and have a good retirement instead of the a meager one out of the gate? Why not work 40 for a great one?
The median 65 year old has 200k in retirement savings. That's 8k per year at a 4% safe withdrawal rate. Hardly worth 40 years of work.
> A meager retirement is not appealing to most 18 year olds.
The option of shacking up with some buds and playing videophones all day will be utterly irresistible for many (if not most) male high school grads. Basically the college experience, for free, forever.
Well, we're apparently significantly more wealthy as a society and individuals than XXX years ago. Yet, most people still seem to be working and the economy is stronger than ever (On a multi-century scale).
> Look at this web site (HN) which is used by some of the most vociferous nerds ever (including you and me) and tell me I am talking bollocks! Note the styles, layout, colours in use.
I use HN in a half window, so the text is roughly the same width as the website here.
Which is fine. Not everything needs to be defined to be suitable for businesses. It's even fine for things to be defined to be explicitly not suitable for a business.
I would think yes. Consider the alternate variation where the artist proactively draws Indiana Jones, in all his likeness, and attempts to market and sell it. The same exchange is ultimately happening, but this clearly is copyright infringement.
> I've not run into anyone who says AI is useless.
There's a front page post on HN at least once a week about how AI is useless. And in the threads that aren't about AI being useless, at least one person who will comment that they are.
I disagree. People will frequently say that downvoting is not for disagreeing, but in every controversial thread dissenting opinions are quickly downvoted and frequently flagged. Some recover, but many die or end up pushed down into obscurity.
Mildly controversial opinions sometimes survive and get discussion, but anything past that rarely get a reply and just get downvoted and flagged into oblivion. This isn't exactly a slight against HN, as this happens basically everywhere past a tiny userbase community. But I don't think it's particularly right to put HN on a pedestal for its ability to handle controversy.
I would also argue that shutting certain posts down early is what helps it thrive. Maybe you lose some value of topic but you gain the ability to discuss other things in depth. You also prevent pollution of discourse.
I have `showdead` enabled. It should not be the case that I find flagged posts that are good -- that are well written, don't break rules, etc -- but are flagged (presumably) due to expressing a dissenting view.
That's fair from your perspective -- although the parent's question is what would subjectively satisfy me. I don't keep a log of such instances, and I don't see a way to view my vouched posts, but it is something I observe often enough.
Sure, but the reason that question is being raised is so that we can decide for ourselves how good your evidence is - both conceptually and concretely. It certainly doesn't mean you have to share it but it makes the discussion actually meaningful.
Does that link only show vouched items of some recency? The page is literally blank (minus header and footer) for me, but it's probably been a week or so since I vouched a comment.
edit: sorry, I missed the sibling comment to this. I only ever come across dead comments, not posts. So I needed to add &kind=comment to see vouched comments.
Ah, I meant comments rather than posts (and I think flagging posts has a different meaning since one cannot downvote posts) but it looks like comments are visible by adding `&kind=comment`. Anyway, the most recent comment I vouched is https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43530295 which I think is a good example of what I'm talking about.
The person you’re responding to is not Paul Graham. Similar handle but not identical.
> The people here are rather anti-compassion and any kind of spirituality.
And how I was attacked for calling David Lynch a worthless purveyor of ultraviolence and vapid, wasteful lifestyles was unconscionable.
Maybe your problem is not with your opinions but with how you choose to express them. My observation is that disagreement is rarely downvoted massively if it is expressed eloquently. OTOH, emotional and brief conclusory opinions that aren’t supported with narratives or supporting information that are also contrarian may be subject to mass downvoting.
Looking through your comment history, I think you’re experiencing this phenomenon not because you respectfully disagree with others, but because of the quality of your communication.
You can vouch it, and if the comment is still [dead] but it's really good you can send an email to dang and tomhow hn@ycombinator.com Remember to include a link to the comment, and use it sparsely because it's a manual processes.
Like the parent commenter, I frequently see high quality posts via showdead. I vouch them, but I've never seen one resurrected soon after. I rarely remember to go back and check hours later, but by then the thread has died down anyway.
It takes a few vouches to unkill a comment. (The exact number is a mystery (I don't remember dang telling the number ever) and it may change from time to time (or not).)
For not-bad comments just vouch them, but for very-good-I-will-not-be-able-to-sleep-until-it-is-unkilled comments vouch and send an email.
Downvoting for disagreement has always been fine on HN. People sometimes assume otherwise because they're implicitly porting the rules from a larger site, but that's a mistake.
It has but I'm not sure this works at the scale HN operates at now. When the community was smaller, the band of opinion was narrower, so the downvote worked better. Now that the community is large I'm not sure if this scales well. Just a thought I've had over the last few years.
Downvoting pushes peoples comments down and greys them out, effectively silencing them. It creates echo chambers.
I reserve my downvotes for when arguments are made in bad faith, rely on logical fallacies, or present know-false information as an argument.
If someone presents an argument on something I disagree with, but it's made in good faith and is well-structured, it deserves an upvote, even if I still disagree afterwards.
Your very comment is now downvoted but not silenced. We all see it, as we do every grey comment, as long as one works their way down the comments page. Not every comment is going to be agreed with and rise above the fold, and that’s ok.
So you understand how echo chambers are created and are fine with it?
The problem is that there is no one with power here that can come to the "little guy's" defence. There is no will around here for that kind of support, because the only people hired to wield such power are of like mind. DJT doesn't hire democrats, and this is no different.
Look at this comment section, and tell me this isn't an echo chamber.
I don’t understand what your response has to do with what I said. Differing opinions are welcome here—particularly if they are eloquently expressed and factually supported—but that doesn’t mean they will be popular. That’s just life. Opinions, like most things, follow a normal distribution.
> Not every comment is going to be agreed with and rise above the fold, and that’s ok.
> That's just life.
Life is the result of what we choose, alone and in our groups, and groupthink creates a momentum that is hard to understand from within the group.
Only compassion gives us a clear and accurate perspective on life, my friend.
And that's a fact, and its not being a factor in this site's m.o. is precisely why it is the way it is, why it is staffed by whom it's staffed by, and why its founder has the Twitter profile picture he does and why he rails against DEI.
It's also why your opinions are so valued here, and why you don't understand what I said.
Perhaps you won't be so privleged some day and then you will begin to really understand what life is really about.
Without such a gift from life, you will most likely just continue to think you understand, while asking far fewer questions than you should.
What role does compassion play in your life? That is the most genius question you can ever ask yourself, and is really the only one worth either asking or answering.
That fact is never accepted as truth by those who already "know it all". Such is the way of "facts". Unless your knowledge base is founded upon compassion, nothing truly eloquent will be perceived as such. Such is human life, my friend. All the rest is just mammalian, when it comes to human beings in their groups.
Is your group founded on compassion? That you don't value it does not mean it is not the most valuable concept in the universe.
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