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Comment by madamelic | Hacker News Reader

These articles always bother me.

The content is usually alright but they always have the tone of a petulant college student.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with it but no need to start writing Communist Manifesto 2.0 when all you need to say is "Robots are going to replace us, jobs are going to go away and we need basic income".

Like, for the time being, non-coal miner, educated jobs are doing fine. There is no need to be a "gangster" to live a comfortable life.

What I am trying to say is the hyperbole in these kinds of articles put me off and paint the author as immature, kneejerk-y and unknowledgable.

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It's a curious fact then that the author is James Livingston, a 67-year old professor of history at Rutgers, who has also written numerous books.

> all you need to say is "Robots are going to replace us, jobs are going to go away and we need basic income"

Each of these points would need to be expanded upon for this to work. A lot of people don't believe that robots are going to replace us, or that jobs are going to go away, or that we need basic income. Also, there are a ton of issues with the process involved in this transition. How big of a change? How fast? How disruptive?

> It's a curious fact then that the author is James Livingston, a 67-year old professor of history at Rutgers, who has also written numerous books.

Someone can be all these things and still write something in a grating tone.

Agreed. I didn't make it too far out of the first section. "[U]nless of course you’ve landed a job as a drug dealer or a Wall Street banker, becoming a gangster either way" is a ridiculous line. His definition of "full employment" seems to shift to support his arguments in the middle of a paragraph. And when he said that "[n]o one can doubt the moral significance of the movement" and "[w]hat, exactly, is the point of earning a paycheck that isn’t a living wage", this told me that the author isn't well-versed on opposing viewpoints, which means this piece is just a wordy editorial, and a crude one at that.

>"[U]nless of course you’ve landed a job as a drug dealer or a Wall Street banker, becoming a gangster either way" is a ridiculous line.

Agreed. Gangsters never got a trillion dollar bailout on top of their pillaging.

I haven't read the article but this is high time we rethink "commune-ism". Not a feudal system under the politburo, but communal ownership of robot-factories, more along the lines of Kibbutzim and some anarchist ideas.

Nothing within the current legal framework in most Western countries prohibits you from doing exactly that. Provided of course that such communally owned enterprises will still have to compete with "regular" for-profit companies.

There's the legal framework, though, and there's the actual way a society is structured and who calls the shots.

So, while the legal framework can allow it, the big corporations have politicians, media and laws in their pockets, and can make all of this very difficult in a lot of different ways.

So what might be a solution to the problem that government have so much control that it can make the functioning of the communally-organized enterprise very difficult?

It's not that "government has so much controls". It's that private interests have so much control through (among other things) government.

That said "less government" is another way to let them have even more control.

Will "more government" somehow provide more control to the regular people over private interests?

No, the key is: enough government + vigilant citizenry.

In other words, the key is the people being ahead/in-control of the government, and using it to protect their collective interests.

> Provided of course that such communally owned enterprises will still have to compete with "regular" for-profit companies.

Deleuze & Guattari 1972; 1980 devote abundant space to the fact that the present system is set up to intentionally hinder non-capitalistically organized enterprises from freely competing with capitalistically organized ones.

Are you referring to a Thousand Plateaus?

>There is absolutely nothing wrong with it but no need to start writing Communist Manifesto 2.0 when all you need to say is "Robots are going to replace us, jobs are going to go away and we need basic income".

Although the Manifesto was a product of its time, many of its ideas still hold for Communist revolutionaries, along with the rest of Marx and Engels' works.

Same here. By the second graph I was asking "Who is this moron?" which I don't like. I don't like having a poor opinion of writers after so little of their content.

I'm interested in UBI and how the economy adjusts. I'm interested in how mankind could adapt to having all basic needs provided.

I am not interested in something that sounds like a rant from a 15-year-old.

> Like, for the time being, non-coal miner, educated jobs are doing fine.

The problem is a large section of the population aren't cut out for "educated" jobs. People with a below median IQ need to feed themselves too.

true!

And the ones drawing the big bucks are unhappy if you tax them with 80%

It's a dilemma

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