RE: Thoughts on Dan Larimer’s “Universal Resource Inheritance”
Lots of good points but I want to focus on the education part and the inability to provide for themselves because they don't know how to.
Dishing out x/month is obviously not the solution. For those who want to be better, it masks their need to struggle to be better. Part of that struggle is learning to improve, based in prior experience. That experience is the core nature of what we are discussing here in my opinion.
Take for example, why you feel that you did not deserve an iPhone x as a gift because you didn't earn it. None of us deserve an iphone x. None of us deserve it unless we purchased it ourselves.
Instead the man who thinks to improve life may see the gift as a tool to improve one's self. Far fetched, I know. But my galaxy note 8 is impreitive to me improving my life because it allows me to exponentially work better.
Now, going back to the education thing. It think you are spot on. Someone who wants to do better but simply can't because they don't know any better. A shakespearian tradegy at its core.
I think about technology replacing all the shitty jobs that no one else will do. And where the poor fit into this world. There will always be a point where work related to the basic nececcities of life will be automated. Where will the poor go then? Education becomes their only way out, but that begins at a young age.
Suppose we provide strong education at a young age. We know the result. They will cause an uprising once they feel that the game is rigged against them, no matter what system you put them in (capitalism or any form of social welfare).
So what are we to do? Keep the poor uneducated? Or let them revolt? Say we do the later, where do we end up? Poland perhaps? Where nearly everyone under 30 has a degree, yet there isn't enough work for all the educated to fill because there isn't enough centralized capital to get things going at a fast enough rate.
I may be ranting at this point, but my point is that I don't see a way out. We do need to redistribute, but in a way that makes sense, I just can't make sense of it.
Maybe the problem is really over population.
That last sentence is definitely something to consider. Yet, for the first time in history we are beating Mother Nature at the game. In every species “self extinction mechanics” are built in, may that be actual cannibalism or in form of epidemics like the Black Death.
If we look back at last 50-60 years, only the pretty much oldest epidemic - the Big C - has survived and is still making inroads, eventhough a cure is coming nearer every day. HIV is a battle pretty much won, Ebola and bird flu and their ilk are contained always faster than the panic makes sound possible.
PS: Each Western European nation has the saturation of college degrees as a problem. A college degree merely buys you a job to stack shelves nowadays. And it isn’t any different in development nations either.
One of the benefits of redistribution could be more entrepreneurial behavior. In fact, we would mostly reset the cycle 50-60 years back and buy some more time. More time before the whole exponential curve kicks in again. Hopefully when that happens again, we’ve found a better solution for the next cycle.
Here's my problem with entrepreneurial behavior.
Most people will fail. Most people don't have the right fight to survive. They don't have something solid. They only have a dream where success is the only possible outcome because they don't know any better.
Granted maybe they will succeed, but reality is that they will simply earn a basic living.
This is what I always see in NYC, where I live. One person had a dream of the best soap in the world, but the cost of procuring material and labor causes the soap to be extraordinarily high. 10x the price of commercialized soap. So they barely keep afloat, even if they are grossing 10k a month.
The general public, like me, can't afford $20 soap because we are also trying to save. The business closes and another shop opens up, this time selling bubble tea. And the cycle continues. Ofcourse nyc is a cut through environment. But so is life.
Great point on us just pushing back the clock though. I think that's all we can do until we come up with a better solution.
That’s how they learn. Live and #flearn.
I have no problem with entrepreneurs earning only little. Not everyone is set for success and the name doesn’t de facto include riches.
But, honestly, it wouldn’t be worse than having naively bought into the short term Uber marketing pitch and even before the Uber machine reaches selfdriving status already needing to sleep in car parks. More often than not with an overpriced loan on the car too.