Comment by hn_throwaway_99 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by hn_throwaway_99 | Hacker News Reader

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hn_throwaway_99

> A lot of its adherents are older people who have retired and have a lot of free time.

Pre-MAGA you saw these effects everywhere, and they were often satirized. Just look at the dynamics of the "Boca Vista" retirement village from Seinfeld where Jerry's parents live. Many episodes were built around the completely inane battles they would have (e.g. the condo association election) with the subtext being that they all had enough time to spend on these pointless minutiae. Heck, I'll shine the spotlight on myself - I think I'd be pretty embarrassed if I calculated how much time I spent writing HN comments...

This is one reason I'm extremely skeptical of the "Basic Income people" who think that if we all had the security of basic income then we'd be happy sitting around writing poetry and taking pottery classes. To be clear, there are plenty of other reasons basic income may or may not be a good idea, but if you look through the course of history, giving lots of people loads of free time without any guiding principles or direction has tended not to end well.

Yep, just look at aristocracy over the ages, and in different societies.

Ironically they were at their best when doing nothing!

There's a theory that the medieval tournament (jousting, etc.) arose because rulers wanted to make sure that (a) their aristocracy was prepared for war, but (b) as it's really difficult to distinguish war game preparations (large gatherings of armed and provisioned knights) from rebellion preparations, the formal tournament —announced well in advance, with a recorded list of participants— meant an aristocracy kept busy by the former had no free time for the latter.

(a little like the principle that one should encourage one's sales force to take up expensive hobbies and acquisitions: keeping them hungry for the next commission)

I kinda just want basic income so that I won't feel guilty about never donating to charity. Everything else is centralized and specialized, charity could be too.

much like there's always room for startups, there will always be room for exploring new giving opportunities. Ubi is no substitute for Givewell.

With basic income, presumably more people will want to run charities. Next you end up with everybody competing for how much charity they give - this happens already. Go to a charity store and look at who works there and why.

You'd be guilt/tripped and pressured by your well meaning peers.

And the only upper limit on how much charity we can give is the number of hours we have free. This spirals out of control in some groups (e.g. some religious charitable organisations or orders)

My understanding is that the people who work at my local charity store are unhoused people who can only stay in the shelter if they work at the store.

Different charity stores have different employees - I presume that is worldwide.

The animal rights charity here has very different volunteers than a religious charity which has very different employees than you find at Red Cross or Habitat For Humanity stores here.

> unhoused people who can only stay in the shelter if they work at the store.

I believe that doesn't exist here in New Zealand. It worry be very difficult to run a charity that way here because employees and tenants have very strong legal rights. I don't know how you could structure it to work - maybe a religious organisation with homeless members of that religion?

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