Also, Brett Stephens is a bed bug

Wow we’re just going to allow blatant antisemitism on here /s

Demand goes up but not production. Adding UBI doesn’t increase the amount of wood harvested, or bricks produced or construction workers. In fact some construction workers may quit and go on UBI, lowering the production.

If demand goes up without production increasing, and thus supply, prices go up. This is part of the reason for the latest round of inflation, demand shot up after the pandemic but production was still at pandemic levels and yet to ramp back up.

Production in a lot of other places can ramp up relatively quickly to match demand if the infrastructure is built out already. In housing though production in general is slow and also slow to ramp up. It can take 2-3 years to build a house, and housing production takes years to increase. That’s part of the reason housing is still so high right now, housing production plummeted after 2008 and we haven’t gotten back to that even though prices and demand has skyrocketed.

All this is to say if UBI goes in it’ll take years for the supply to increase, I think they’re estimating housing production won’t get up to match the current new high prices now until 2030. Meanwhile your landlord is increasing your rent as soon as you renew, and rents don’t tend to ever go down after they’re set. This is if new housing can be built at all, a lot of places in America are zoned for single family housing and all the land is taken so no new housing can be built, housing production is limited by desirable and developable land and that just doesnt exist in a lot of places.

This is all if you don’t increase production, which the government can do, but they don’t right now and they definitely won’t if UBI comes in and replaces section 8 and all other welfare. If you do a universal jobs program though you can use those people to build affordable and public housing.

It won’t drop to zero since someone else will come in who will give them the extra $1000 because they need a place to live. Market forces don’t dissappear with UBI, that’s why when aggregate demand goes up and supply stays fixed, such as with housing, prices go up.

Say you pay $1500 for rent and there’s another guy who pays $1200 and wants to upgrade to your apt. They get the $1000 UBI and now they have enough to bid up to $2200 for your apt. Now either you pay $2300 or your landlord evicts you to get the higher paying tenant. This percolates up and down the housing ladder from the homeless person who gets $1000 only to see rents increase to $1500 to the millionaire who now has to pay an extra $1000 drop in the bucket for there high-rise in Manhattan.

In capitalism your standard of living is determined by your ability to outbid the person on the rung below you to maintain that lifestyle. If everyone moves up a rung then nothing changes.

I’ve soured on it recently, if you gave everyone $1000 a month then your landlord is just going to raise your rent by $1000.

If full socialism is out of the picture, and we could enact something like UBI I think we should expand disability and social security for those who can’t work and then do a universal guaranteed jobs program for those who can work because:

1. It’s way more politically viable. It’s going to be almost impossible to convince a majority of Americans to “pay people to sit around all day”. They’d be way more open to it if they’re doing a job.

2. We could use the labor on fields that the market doesn’t value, such as building green infrastructure or social work for low income individuals. This would go along with expanding the definition of a job to any work that is benefiting society. If you’re a parent spending all your time caring for a young or disabled child then that’s a job and you should get paid for it.

3. It you increase the wage for these guaranteed jobs that effectively raises the minimum wage since the private employers have to compete with the government. Why work at McDonald’s for $10 an hour when the government is paying $15. If you raise UBI that may decrease wages as employers will use it as an excuse to pay less.

4. Even for people making above minimum wage it gives the worker more bargaining power since your employer loses the threat of throwing you onto the streets. This is also true for UBI but only if it’s enough to fully cover a comfortable life which I don’t think will happen due to the inflation it may cause.

5. It increases production which can help to increase supply and cover for the increase in demand giving people that much money will cause so inflation is checked more.

6. People neeed a job, as in the expanded definition I gave above, it’s a big part of how people make meaning in there life. The best case for someone not working would be they just play video games all day, worst case they turn to drug use.

Or an isp, we’ll soon be longing for the days when we got to talk to an at&t customer service rep.

I was sort of lumping storage and compute costs together as “compute” but compute itself is probably astronomical too.

Even if it was just a CDN, a cdn at that scale streaming that much content simultaneously would require a huge amount of compute just to handle the streaming request traffic.

There’s also the recommendation algorithm which is powered by ai and takes a shit ton of parameters, at that scale that would be a massive computational task in and of itself.

Even video processing they probably send it through a couple Ai pipelines to add subtitles, make sure it’s not porn, check if your discussing topics with high misinformation so it can put that Wikipedia link below the video, etc.

All that plus probably another million other little problems that comes with running a service at that scale.

You forgot the part where they pay the video creator 50% of the money and use the other 50% to run one of the most computationally expensive and complex services on the internet.

This is why I cringe every time I hear someone say trump is the worst president ever. Yeah he’s horrible, probably worst in the last century, but he didn’t single handedly sabotage radical reconstruction and take away any chance to disempower and punish the treasonous planter class, instead of letting them rule the south for another century and bring back slavery in all but name.

I guess he’s got a second term to prove me wrong though 🙃

Is it quartz?

There was a falling out between them after the board picked altman instead of Elon as ceo.

Now Elon is suing openai nominally because there renegging on the whole non profit thing, but really because he has his own xai that is competition and because of the grudge because he’s a petty manchild.

This but with Dennis from always sunny, and then the gang has to stop him from killing frank to impress a girl.

If you want Gary I’m pretty sure Indiana will give it up voluntarily.

Yes, marx always thought a socialist revolution would come in the late stages of industrial capitalism. Everyone thought it was going to be in Germany up until WWI. The problem is capital becomes entrenched and people become comfortable, especially if they benefit from imperialism and exploitation abroad or of a minority racialized underclass.

Another problem with skipping the first revolution and industrializing under socialism is it gets blamed for the the horrors of industrialization. The early stages of industrialization are always horrific with long hours, bad working conditions and slum living conditions. Combine that with general conservatism and desire to stick to a traditional life and you have to coerce the peasents into going into the cities to become industrial laborers. Capitalism did this through enclosure and farm consolidation, the soviets did it more blatantly, sometimes at gunpoint. Either way it builds an animosity with the system that robbed you of your traditional life.

Note: all of this is steal manning dengism, I am not a tankie advocating for it

They are in the first stage. Classical Marxist theory divides development into two revolutions / stages:

1. The first revolution is the bourgeoisie overthrowing the feudal order, eg. The American revolution, the English civil war, French revolution of 1830. After the bourgeoisie take over they will use the proletariat to industrialize and develop the means of production. This will eventually lead to a boom in efficiency and production, the peasants moving from the countryside to cities, and abundance of necessities. Eventually though everyone’s needs will be met and without an expanding market to profit from capitalist will be forced to produce more efficiently with less labor to get profits from there now limited market. This will lead to mass layoffs and unemployment which leads to

2. The socialist revolution where the proletariat overthrow the bourgeoisie and sieze the productive forces. They will then distribute labor fairly so you have 8 people working 10 hours instead of 1 person working 80 and 7 others unemployed. This then leads to communism where people have control over production and use it to guarantee well being and leisure instead of profit.

In order to get to this communist phase though you need to industrialize and develop the means of production so you can provide people with basic needs with little labor. The problem is the two major countries where socialism took hold, Russia and China, were still largely agrarian feudal societies. So they had to develop the means of production, Russia, and maoist china did so with 5 year plans, which had some success and some catastrophic failure but was ultimately pretty inefficient. So after mao a new leader in China named deng Xiao ping took over and followed a policy of allowing capitalism into the country to develop the means of production and industrialize. This unleashed powerful forces in the country that needed to be tamed by an even more powerful state, otherwise they would take over like they did in other capitalist countries. Then all the bloodshed from the original Chinese revolution would be for not as they would have to do another revolution to remove the bourgeoisie again. So the state maintains tight control to avoid “regressing” into a capitalist democracy until they fully develop and industrialize. At which point they will use that powerful authoritarian state to disposses the capitalist class and usher in communism.

the cartels should have access to military grade guns

Said no Mexican ever. The federal government has tried multiple times to disarm the cartels but they can’t take on the flood of drug money and guns coming from the u.s. No one wants them armed except u.s. arms manufacturers and the cartels themselves, and maybe the CIA for some fucking reason.