Comment by MarcelOlsz | Hacker News Reader

Comment by MarcelOlsz | Hacker News Reader

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During COVID, my friends and I were temporarily retired. Lamenting every moment since having to come out of retirement. We were all laid off and received about $2k/mo for awhile and what happened was we ended up hanging out every since day working on whatever we were working on, and feelings of inadequacy faded into the background. It was a micro golden age for us and that period of time has cemented UBI for us. It was a small amount of money and we lived with our parents but we were never more productive and happy.

Hopefully before I die I can witness a strong implementation of UBI. It would directly reflect in culture in terms of music and the arts. Little funding for the arts currently combined with massive rent nearly everywhere leaves little room for cultural phenomenon that was possible in places like the lower east side bowery for example. Or arts funding in the USSR and other soviet bloc countries.

Time is more valuable than anything else.

East side bowery was very cheap back then (it was also a pretty rough part of town, which is easy to forget). You just need to convince a hoard of like minded folks to congregate somewhere cheap and you can live like this. There's plenty of cheap places to live in the US. I kind of feel like we need to learn how to build new cities, we have the land, it's mostly cheap, we just continue to choose to reside in expensive places chasing jobs that help us cover the rent while working us to death.

Idk man, I wouldn't call bowery rough or cheap by any stretch - 20 years ago, during covid, or now. For rough during covid or now, head to east new york. For cheap, head deeper into the other boroughs.

The art scene there was more like 40-60 years ago, no?

No, and I don't get your point.

As a taxpayer this kind of nonsense fantasy is exactly why I would never vote for UBI.

Absolutely. More generally, as a taxpayer, I'm very unlikely to vote for anything that is justified in terms of how great the USSR was. One of several comments in this thread that give away the game: scratch a UBI bro, find a commie.

You were the beneficiary of a bullshit short term policy that has wrecked the global and national economies and think that means it was a good thing to replicate?

Your fun time was extremely damaging to people everywhere but of course, we can pretend "it was necessary because COVID" which we then knew and now it's undeniable, was an absolute farce of hygiene theater.

The people who worked paid for you to do nothing at your parents home. That's all there is. Meanwhile, there also were massive transfers of wealth with the same excuse, from tax payers to the wealthies company owners.

The only good Soviet art was the stuff that expressed the suffocating oppression of the communist regime and warned the world to never to do it again. Some of it was oblique, but all of it was human. If you and your friends lack the taste to understand that, then I am really glad that my tax dollars are no longer funding your arts and crafts projects.

> Or arts funding in the USSR and other soviet bloc countries.

This is pretty good example why UBI is dangerous. Those funded artists were very happy to suck it up and go along with the regime. The censorship was in place, but self-censorship was even stronger.

Meanwhile a lot of art existed outside of the system with people working some shitty jobs and doing arts in free time.

ok, then look at the depression era US federal arts project

Totally explains why the gulag archipelago was never written.

Well, that book was not officially published in USSR till the fall of the iron curtain. So in official sense your snarky comment is sort of correct :)

Day in the life of Ivan Denisovich was published. The premise was that people were self censoring even outside of what was being officially approved, so not really.

That book was published during Kruschiov era. Which was definitely not representative of the rest of Soviet era. Let alone that the book was peanuts compared to Gulag archipelago.

Eventually Solzhenytsin was kicked out from USSR and had to take exile in west. Do you really want to use him as an example of Soviet artistic freedom?

I didn't. I even said that the premise was that people were self censoring outside of the censors. Clearly not though.

So, one dude did not censor himself, during a cultural warm up era, ended up being kicked out to exile. Which was a fortunate outcome due to his previous fame. Hmmm, is that an example how people were free to do whatever in USSR? :) Is that more like an example how dangerous it was to not self-censor even to well known people with support (for some time) from the ruling elite?

Hearing parents and grandparents stories... And having talked to older artsy people who did grow up before the fall of USSR... Self-censorship was the default modus operandi. Sure, few didn't do it. Most of those paid the price either in gulags in earlier years or mental asylums later.

> is that an example how people were free to do whatever in USSR?

Who are you even arguing with at this point?

You? That people did self censor indeed. And one example of one author not self-censoring and being made an example does not deny that.

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