neonmoon
Trevor FlowersI wish more people who are worried about FOSS supply side attacks would realize that universal basic income and free healthcare would result in an almost infinite stream of excellent software from people who care more about quality than profit.
Shane Celis@trevorflowers Damn. That’s yet another good reason for UBI.
0x160r@trevorflowers I want to print this toot and put it on a wall, perfectly put.
Jobu Tupaki@trevorflowers
as the youngs would say, that is based AF.
seriously, this is such a great angle on UBI that i'd never considered. i even like to believe that i would be one of those people!
NO NAME@trevorflowers I am totally down to help. Got any resources, sites, charities I can read about?
MylesRydenOne comment I didn't see in the thread, which has some great comments by the way, is the assumption on the past of many, perhaps most people that UBI means that no one would work.
Which is ridiculous. People love to do and make things when they aren't getting paid. The problem is getting people to do shitty jobs. So, put down another benefit of UBI that there would less shitty jobs.
Bob JonkmanThe shitty jobs still exist and still need to get done, even when there's #UBI. The difference is, with UBI people can say "No" to shitty jobs with poor pay. So to get the shitty jobs done they have to pay enough so people want to do them. UBI makes shitty jobs a bit less shitty.
😀🚲@bobjonkman @MylesRyden @trevorflowers you might be amazed at how quickly technology would eliminate shitty jobs when people have to be convinced rather than coerced into doing them.
@enobacon @bobjonkman @trevorflowers
I've seen many comments saying (essentially), "I wanted AI to sweep and mop so I could do art and write, not do art and write so I have to sweep and mop."
o_andras@enobacon @bobjonkman @MylesRyden @trevorflowers you might be disappointed when you realize the oasis is not...
Riley S. Faelan@bobjonkman That's how you get the shitty jobs automated away first, not the ones that people actually want to do and enjooy doing.
Zorro Notorious MEB 🪷🪷🪷@trevorflowers I'd like to see your data and the model you use to make that claim. The studies I've seen on UBI indicate benefits to the recipients and society in general, but the number of FOSS developers in the general population is vanishingly small.
Universally paying FOSS developers, not forcing them into unpaid labor, seems like a better way of increasing the supply.
@AlgoCompSynth Sir, this is a Wendy's.
@trevorflowers In God We Trust - all others, bring data. 😉
I'm a fan of UBI and public health care - I'm retired and I want everyone to have that. I do FOSS development on a small scale on personal projects. But open source development is industrialized now.
Look at commits to Linux, PostgreSQL, etc., and you'll see a lot of corporate paid programmers. IMHO UBI will get more projects like my consonaR but not Linux, PostgreSQL or even liblzma.
Carlos Solís@trevorflowers The only part that's missing from the UBI equation is finding how to actually raise the money to make basic income workable, especially with the expected fewer people in the workforce.
Haelwenn /элвэн/ 
@csolisr @trevorflowers Which is quite why I find that https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salaire_%C3%A0_vie makes more sense, you'd even keep the economic encouragement for people to study/work which politically is likely more acceptable.
LisPi@lanodan @trevorflowers @csolisr That has a number of flaws, but most particularly an insistence on papers.
A lot of Free Software programmers do *not* have the academic certifications and so on paper do not have the "professional competency" they actually have. In some cases, due to a variety of issues unrelated to monetary cost, they *cannot* acquire said certification either.
It is also an issue for Libre work on politically inconvenient technologies (though it is equally an issue with pseudonymous authorship of some investigative stuff), such that alternative acknowledgements of specialization/competence might also pose a risk by flagging one as a target for feds.
A lot of Free Software programmers do *not* have the academic certifications and so on paper do not have the "professional competency" they actually have. In some cases, due to a variety of issues unrelated to monetary cost, they *cannot* acquire said certification either.
It is also an issue for Libre work on politically inconvenient technologies (though it is equally an issue with pseudonymous authorship of some investigative stuff), such that alternative acknowledgements of specialization/competence might also pose a risk by flagging one as a target for feds.
@lispi314 @csolisr @trevorflowers
On the certification part, it's not supposed to be tied only to the academic part, but also experience, otherwise I would throw it all away. (as I have 0 academic certifications and realistically I'm not if sure I'll ever have any)
As for the political part… could be a problem for say Tor Project / Tails developers but the publicly known ones also participate in other projects. That said I'd rather have it work via unions (like unemployment works in some countries) rather than government agencies (like done in recent decades in France for unemployment, which plainly sucks).
On the certification part, it's not supposed to be tied only to the academic part, but also experience, otherwise I would throw it all away. (as I have 0 academic certifications and realistically I'm not if sure I'll ever have any)
As for the political part… could be a problem for say Tor Project / Tails developers but the publicly known ones also participate in other projects. That said I'd rather have it work via unions (like unemployment works in some countries) rather than government agencies (like done in recent decades in France for unemployment, which plainly sucks).
@lanodan @trevorflowers @csolisr The problem with unions, at least here, is that they *also* often have paperwork red tape requirements. So they wouldn't meaningfully differ from government, and in fact might be worse since they often have harsher requirements on recency of employment, certification/license and whatnot. (Needless to say, there's a lot to fix.)
I think the overwhelming majority of people involved in stuff like I2P are pseudonymous, and for good reason since the project feels a fair bit more serious about traffic obfuscation than Tor.
I think the overwhelming majority of people involved in stuff like I2P are pseudonymous, and for good reason since the project feels a fair bit more serious about traffic obfuscation than Tor.
Reid@csolisr @trevorflowers UBI has been tried before and the economy was unaffected, turns out lots of work, particularly in software, would still get done without paying specifically for that work, if the devs can work on it full time knowing they don't have to worry about having food and a roof over their head by the end of the month
@csolisr Did you just make a "We have a shortage of money, so some people have to do work that is important to the society without getting paid for it" argument?
Because it sounds like you did.
(Fun fact: if people who are currently made to work without pay had an UBI, the money made for them would trickle all the way down to all sorts of rich people, a convenient place to get it back to the government via taxes, and get rid of it.)
Matt Palmer@csolisr land tax, wealth tax.
Oblomov@csolisr @trevorflowers no, that's the trivial part: progressive taxation and better use of the tax money. 300$ per person per month for 350M people is 1.26 trillions per year. That's in the order of magnitude of the US military budget, as well as the estimated tax gap in the USA, and that's with the criminally unfair tax system they have, where lower incomes have higher taxation rates then billionaires.
Where to find the money was never the problem. The political will is.
@csolisr @trevorflowers and that's without even going into how UBI improves the economy, leading to higher revenue from taxation. UBI is an investment and this has been show by every single experiment that has been made with it.
wraptile@trevorflowers since college my dream was to work on FOSS but it never materialized as I had to pay bills somehow. If I had UBI it most certainly would have become a reality as I all I needed is some eggs, ramen and a laptop.
I trully believe UBI would be the biggest positive societal shift since the internet. That extra safety net is just so invaluable for human creativity!
Clairetown Siegelytown@trevorflowers Same with art. No fear of it being impossible to live on and thus a waste of time and energy, more freedom to be creative, experimental, weird, potentially difficult to market to a mass audience.
UBI and free healthcare would do so much for probably a *lot* of different areas.
jbhughes@trevorflowers And there are a lot of them out there.
cslinuxboy
your auntifa liza 🇵🇷 🦛 🦦@trevorflowers 🗣️ 📣 THANK YOU!!!
Mark Gardner@trevorflowers @AFresh1 Who pays for that and what gives you the right to take it from them?
Mark Gardner (@[email protected])
@[email protected] @[email protected] True. Sorry to mix metaphors, but when you dangle the notion of a “commons” in front of people, there are those who see the free lunch and others who see the first group as potential serfs.
Andrew Hewus Fresh@mjgardner the people benefitting from the commons, and because they used the commons to benefit. Although obviously slightly more complex than that, but if you're throwing out stupid questions, you get stupid answers.
@AFresh1 Nah, communism is a stupid answer on its own with over a century of bloodshed to its name. It didn’t need my help.
@mjgardner I'm open to other solutions, but folks pulling themselves up by their own bootstraps works just as well as the author of the saying meant. Which is it doesn't. Everything I've seen shows UBI to be one of the cheapest and at the same time most effective ways to get people out of poverty and becoming "productive", putting more into the system than they take. No, not everyone for sure, but the percentage that don't are the ones need the help the most. Part of being in a healthy society is making sure everyone is taken care of. If caring for other people is not something we can agree is good, there is not really any way we can agree on anything else.
@AFresh1 You’re packaging the abstract good of “caring for other (unspecified) people” with “not caring as much for a specific group’s right to their property,” i.e., the results of the productivity you hope to see from everyone.
Look me up when you resolve that contradiction. Until then, I agree that we don’t have much to talk about.
@mjgardner A little less snarky an answer is that your framing is wrong. It's not that property is being "taken", it is that being part of a society includes agreeing to the rules that the society has. Some of those rules where I live include *giving* some of my property to support society by way of paying taxes. If, as a society, we decide that part of that support includes providing a UBI so people have access to basic things necessary for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness (that are also considered rights, at least in the UN's Universal Declaration of Human Rights) and agree that to be a part of the society, the folks who can will agree to contribute towards that.
@mjgardner If you want to compare rights, what gives you the right to insist on enforcing the blatantly unfair status quo?
@mjgardner @trevorflowers @AFresh1 I'd extend the question to "... and who gave them the right to take it from those, from which they took it"
... and now I'm going to look at your link 🙂
... and now I'm going to look at your link 🙂
Earthy in EV heaven@trevorflowers What I imagine is a lot of music and other creativity, along with tree planting and community development projects
Graham Downs@trevorflowers The problem with UBI, that I still struggle to wrap my head around, is inflation, and the fact that the more money you pump into an economy, the less that money is worth.
As a South African in his mid-40s, I'm quite familiar with what happened in Zimbabwe, when Robert Mugabe decided it was a good idea to print large sums of money, and before you knew it, one US dollar was costing twenty million Zimbabwean dollars, and in Zimbabwe, a loaf of bread cost ten million. Years after Mugabe's death, they're still struggling with that; the economy is in a total shambles, and it's likely to take multiple generations to recover.
Or further back in history, with Argentina's silver rush. Everyone had silver, so before long, silver was worth bupkiss.
I see it happening with UBI. If everyone suddenly has $1000 a month to spend, regardless of their class or occupation, then before long, a loaf of bread is going to start costing $500.
I haven't read any UBI proposals yet that address that possibility or offer any potential solutions to it.
Short of government stepping in and directly capping prices of everything. But that sounds like a terrible idea to me. :(
emailgeek@trevorflowers @GrahamDowns @oliphant for my understanding this is no issue, because it is no additional/new money which would be distributed. It would be a redistribution of existing money and that is not causing inflation.
requiem 🦫@trevorflowers there’s lots of people who realize this, but unfortunately they all make too much money the way things are and hold all the power needed to change it.
Adlangx@trevorflowers but then how would I be able to spend time adding a worthless widget to software that doesn't need it?
Just call me Ash@trevorflowers yes I'd be one of those people. I've started several open source projects in the past, and maintained others.
If I had a level of UBI that I could comfortably live on I'd split my time between writing open source software and books.
vorsprung@trevorflowers would they make software?
In the UK in the 70s an 80s young people could just about get by on unemployment benefits
With hindsight we see that now as a great time for music and the arts in the UK
Software? Nah. Abstract art? Now you're talking
Sparky@trevorflowers That would be one way.
Another would be companies more actively supporting the FOSS projects they actively use in their products, both through recurring donations and by setting some employees aside that assist the maintainer with squashing bugs, vulnerabilities and checking merge requests.
Another would be companies more actively supporting the FOSS projects they actively use in their products, both through recurring donations and by setting some employees aside that assist the maintainer with squashing bugs, vulnerabilities and checking merge requests.
Billy SmithAdd in libre education, and we have the base requirements for the next Renaissance.
It will allow people to work in all fields of endeavour. :D
Eleanor Saitta@trevorflowers
Many of us do, but have immediate software security needs and no sovereign state at our disposal.
Many of us do, but have immediate software security needs and no sovereign state at our disposal.
Simon LucyThere may be an opportunity for that and all sorts of mutual benefits for society but there are no certainties. There will be negative behaviours as well, neither are reasons for implementing UBI.
w4tsn ~> 
@trevorflowers totally with you. The point where I struggle is: does this automatically ensure that the limited resources we have are used by priority (as if economics would actually care about such things today lol)? I would argue yes, because ideas that are valuable would just get more attraction by more people, but I don't know that
Neotheta@trevorflowers imagine all the other things people would create aswell, art, events.. probably also have more time to care and hang out with eachother.
Urzl@trevorflowers I was a hobbyist coder well before I went pro. I've said at work that they didn't make me do this work by paying me, they *let* me.
Given carte blanche, I don't know what I'd be making but it wouldn't be nothing.
SaftyKumaAt the very minimum, Universal Healthcare would allow for many more smaller companies and independent businesses to exist.
Which is probably why corpos hate the idea even though it would save THEM money too.
tojikomori@trevorflowers I hadn't made this connection before, but now that you mention it I've noticed that UBI is particularly popular with devs: I often see studies and news stories about it hit the HN front page.
"Retire early and do FOSS dev" is a common refrain, too. (Will be interesting to see how many 40-something programmers are actually able to do that in ~10yrs time.)
⚙ARC
Andy Wootton@trevorflowers It would still require the dick-head crackers to be filtered out.
It's funny how this self-healing wound in FOSS hasn't alerted anyone to the possibility of exactly the same thing happening in closed-source commercial software, where nobody is doing independent checking.
It's funny how this self-healing wound in FOSS hasn't alerted anyone to the possibility of exactly the same thing happening in closed-source commercial software, where nobody is doing independent checking.
Chris Johnson@trevorflowers Oh stop making sense.
@trevorflowers @alfredohno Not just software either.