“Why in the age of supercomputers and smart robotics do we need to work 60 hours a week just so we don’t starve and freeze to death?”
This hits so hard because it’s not just about tech — it’s about who gets the benefits. We live in a world where productivity’s gone up, machines can do more, but ordinary people: still hustling full time, still exhausted, same bills, same precarity.

What if scarcity isn’t inevitable — what if it’s made by design? If power & wealth were shared better, 60-hour weeks might become the exception, not the norm.

I mean what's not clicking?

UBI IS PROVEN TO INCREASE AUTONOMY.

leaving aside all of the hollow "freedom" rhetoric, the us is largely a nation that does not value increasing its members' autonomy.

(unless of course they happen to be christian straight cis perisex old hot tall white rich men. in that rare case we'll literally fucking kill people to protect their autonomy.)

as long as usian leaders are permitted to keep lying about autonomy, ubi will never get any traction here whatsoever.

This is the big unstated reason why UBI keeps getting sabotaged. Business leaders know that as soon as workers will realize they have options besides show up to the 9-5 because We AlL hAvE tO Be In ThE OfFiCe (or because it’s unremote-able like fast food), they’ll experience such a crisis of labor that even temporary foreign workers can’t and won’t plug the gap.

They’ll have to actually adjust working conditions to be beneficial to workers and CEOs all hate this simple trick.

Yes! Doing nothing is fun for a short break, but prolonged, enforced idleness can quite literally drive a person mad.

Humans need to work. We like to work. What we don't need is drudgery.

Somehow, all the things that are meant to give life meaning: creating, learning, even human interaction – have become monetised, enforced, and turned into a source of misery.

Children love to learn – until they are sent into "education" and made to pass tests to justify their worth as humans.

Adults love to work – until they are boxed up into "employment" and made to turn every minute into money.

Humans love to interact with other humans – until doing so becomes "content creation" and every interaction comes with metrics.

To quote Terry Pratchett, "As soon as you saw people as things to be measured, they didn't measure up."

Or, to go back a little further to Antoine de Saint Exupéry, "Grown-ups like numbers. ... That's the way they are. You must not hold it against them. Children should be very understanding of grown-ups. But, of course, those of us who understand life couldn't care less about numbers!"

I mean, what’s absolutely bonkers is people will happily go for pages of critical analysis of their favorite book or movie or whatever, when it’s the same shit they railed against in their English classes and derided as something they’d never use in their lives.

Turns out when you want to do it, it’s a lot less onerous.

The same is true for anything we call “work”, which I think would be done very differently if we had UBI.

And we need UBI now. Let’s get ‘er done.

Sorry, I was considered an essential worker. I wasn’t “taking care of plants” or “learning useful skills” at home. I was learning the useful skill of dodging individuals that refused to mask up and wash their fucking hands. Got covid twice. So that shit didn’t work because Mutherfuckers DID NOT CARE. That was my Covid era 🖕🏼. Let’s not forget all of the people dying and people losing their homes. I mean yeah you learned how to fucking bake bread which you could’ve learned at any damn time and you learned how to keep a plant alive which again could’ve been done at any damn time.

I was also deemed essential, and I had to go to work every day while a lot of other people had their fucking la-di-da bakin’ mah bread phase.

Like okay, great, we got to see what people could do with UBI but it personally fucking gravels me that I didn’t even get a two week lockdown right at the beginning so I could decompress from the sheer what-the-fuck-just-happened that weekend in March 2020.

However, I still advocate for UBI because everybody, even essential workers, should have the right to unplug from society if they are feeling overwhemed by it.

this is my litmus test opinion lol theres more to it but depending on how much someone agrees with it tells me how much theyre worth talking to

radical take we give EVERYONE a universal basic income because people can't live when they're fighting to make enough money to afford to not die

People want to work. They find pride in it, but people don’t want to work in the current terrible conditions most jobs have. That reluctance for working in current office structures is usually then confused for not wanting to work at all…

If I just didn’t have to fucking deal with people I would be so much happier. As it is I’ve been giving serious consideration to creating the conditions for a (frugal) early retirement.

This is why we need UBI now.

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A series a 11 tweets by Lori Summers @ madlori from 23/07/2019

1/ When discussing Universal Basic Income, inevitably the retort comes: "So you just want people to not have to work, is that it?" Accompanied by a smug smirk, expecting me to backpedal and hem and haw, say "Of course not, that's silly." Except...yes. Yes, I do. 1/11

2/ People shouldn't HAVE to work. People should WANT to work. Sharing in the labor of building and maintaining a society because it benefits everyone should be desirable, not forced. It shouldn't be something we do because we'll die otherwise. 2/11

3/ Imagine a society where survival didn't depend on a job. Imagine how that would alter the fabric of...everything. Imagine if you could leave a job without fearing the loss of income or health care. Imagine the power of the worker in that society. 3/11 

4/ If a person could survive without a job, imagine what employers would be like. They'd have to treat their workers fairly, and make themselves attractive to entice workers. They'd have to offer a better option than other employers, and make people want to participate. 4/11

5/ Places that have offered UBI have seen the results: most people do want to work. The people who choose not to are generally young parents, students, people with disabilities and the elderly. people have a desire to contribute, for our lives to have purpose and to be useful. 5/11

6/ And before you say it, yes, some people will take advantage. That is true for absolutely everything ever. You think people don't take advantage of the economy we have? Like, say, the 1% who grow wealthier while their employees have to work three jobs and use food stamps? 6/11

7/ They can only do that, by the way, because people are so terrified of losing a job and the destruction that would follow that they tolerate mistreatment, disempowerment, the destruction of their unions, healthcare, retirements and even their bodies to avoid it. 7/11

8/ That would not be the case if everyone were guaranteed a baseline survival income. Your boss couldn't treat you like shit because he knows you can't leave. You CAN leave, and you will. 8/11

9/ What if desperation didn't motivate everything? Imagine the impact on health, relationships, parenting, well-being, crime, violence, progress. When you aren't desperately scrabbling for the rent, you can spare a neuron to contemplate long-term problems.  9/11

10/ Imagine a society where terror of destitution wasn't a constant thrum underneath everyone's existence. Imagine the creative works that society could produce. Imagine the children it could raise, the elderly it could care for. Imagine the inventions it could produce. 10/11

11/ Now, imagine knowing all this and thinking "NOPE. We can't have all that, because someone I don't like might benefit from it. So to avoid that, the rest of you can all hang." And there you have modern conservative thinking. 11/11 

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rebageling my most viral Hellsite moment because I just reproduced it on Bluesky, if you wanna come hang there with the cool kids.

Notes: Just like students now, you'd be graded, and you'd have homework and tests. However, you'd also get to choose your major and have all the seasonal breaks students currently have. Summer is unpaid unless you enroll in optional summer classes.

If you don't mind, please also include in the tags whether you are or aren't neurodivergent.

ANSWERING SOME FAQs:

Yes, you have to get good marks or at least pass to keep this job. That's just how jobs are. That's why I specified in the original post that you'd be graded.

No, you won't pay tuition. It's a job, they pay you.

As far as how long you have to do it, the answer is... pretty much as long as you'd do a job. The point of this question is basically "would you prefer school over work as long as you could afford life like that."

It's not the same as being a teacher: teachers teach. There is some overlap, but standing in front of many students every day is way more socially demanding than being a student. Not the same.

Paid grad school does exist (which I didn't know before making the poll, so that's neat). But it's not a guarantee in the US: For many of us, going into grad school means accruing debt.

I would love to be able to just pick a course and go “I wanna learn that!” even if it’s not remotely ~relevant to my future endeavors~.

So color me sold :P

Originally posted by carni611

And this is, once again, why we need Universal Basic Income. People should be allowed to take breaks from work for months if need be without facing catastrophic effects on their life in general.

Food? Should be free. Housing? Free. Hygiene products? Free. Electricity? Water? Yeah you're not gonna believe this but

alright so where does it come from?

Well, Generally with demands like this there will be three options. One, a category of people who will be required to produce all of those things but not allowed to be paid for any of it. This is called Slavery so people like OP don't want to admit this is what they desire.

Second is that instead of paying directly for goods and or services, they should be paid to a centralized body that will take over every element which will in turn demand money to maintain those things. This is also not 'free' in that you are still paying for it, just indirectly. Either way, this option is what many call 'communism' and has always lead to corruption as those in charge of all of these resources and services can just skim off of it and have a quality of life vastly superior to anyone else, but people like OP tend to not want to admit this massive obvious flaw.

And third is 'it will just spring magically out of the aether, falling from the sky like rain!' and it comes from the perspective of someone either mentally damaged or with a child's view of everything (as in, ignorant that their parents pay for everything) so it's modersately unlikely that OP has chosen this one specifically.

I mean, yeah most people who say "X should be free" are talking about the second option, meaning they think it should be paid for indirectly and collectively through taxes as opposed to individuals directly buying it. And I do think that it makes sense to have certain public goods be funded that way. Even the most capitalist countries generally have elements of democratic socialism in them. It's not an on/off switch, people mostly just disagree about which aspects of society should be taxpayer-funded and available to everyone and which should be supplied directly by the market.

But yes, saying "X should be free" gives the impression that X is just sort of floating in the air, and it never is. Even with natural resources like water, it has to be cleaned and funneled through a complex infrastructure which requires a lot of labor and resources to maintain, and that has to come from somewhere.

"Not quite communism, but yeah higher taxes, and honestly nobody really minds all that much" is a lot of countries in Europe, including the one where my brother lives. Funny how people pole vault over that.

When people say "X should be free," they mean "X should be free at point of use," with it being paid for at some other juncture by some collection of people or entities that can afford it, with some moral judgment being chosen and applied to inform who is expected to pay for it, and when, and why.

All services paid for by tax money fall under this concept, as do some risk-pooling services like health insurance, always with the caveat that the effectiveness of this mechanism runs on its being funded sufficiently to meet the demands placed upon it; underfunded services provide mediocre or insufficient results and often depend on gatekeeping to reduce access, which undermines services further and also siphons money from the service itself.

The question of just what should be provided (how much food? what quality food? what variety? should it be provided as food or as money with which one can only buy food? what restrictions on type or brand? should it be utilized to disperse surpluses? to enforce healthy eating habits? to direct recipients towards foods whose industries or brands pay for that direction?) is much of the province of politics, but there is no functional difference between paying for school lunches to be free and paying for school to be free.

Behind the scenes, this is a game of causes and effects and of investments and considerations: the utilitarian justification for something to be free at point of purchase is that some benefit is derived from the arrangement.

The convenience of being able to travel freely on roads without being charged by road usage per-mile and per-road, and for not having one's freedom curtailed by road structures designed around monitoring and charging for road use (toll roads have specific, limited access and egress points, limiting one's ability to get on and off them and also creating a captive market for whatever small collection of gas and food suppliers are allowed to set up directly on the toll road) makes it economically and socially convenient for roads to be free at point of use and paid for some other way, via gas tax (which corrollates with personal road usage) or income/property tax (which feeds off gains made possible, in great part, by road usage).

Risk-pooling institutions offer the ability to disperse the blows of adverse fortune which could descend on anyone, turning the possibility of a natural disaster or a crash or a cancer diagnosis from financial ruin into a series of monthly payments, and buffers society from the effects of sudden devastating poverty on a not-insignificant section of its population.

Schools are free because an ongoing supply of educated, work-capable adults are a useful economic resource.

School lunches, when provided, might be free because students do better when fed, or because children are healthier when fed, and healthier children take less medical care and children who get better knowledge out of their free public schooling are a better return on that investment.

Or it might be a moral investment under the banner that children are valuable and precious and should be cherished and provided for and not made to suffer too much for their parents' economic deficits, shaping and reaffirming the social contract(s) under which society operates. This also has value.

School lunches and other food programs in particular, as well, help disperse food surpluses that could otherwise lead to a drop in prices, devastating for the industry that produces them. In addition to feeding children, it acts as a price stabilizer, a valuable economic service.

It can be argued, as well, that anyone suffering an inability to pay for the basic necessities of life has been robbed already, by personal economic exploitation such as underpayment, or denial of access to work they can do, or overcharging for those basic necessities (high rents, for example), or some personal disaster having destroyed their ability to work (disability, mental health), and the recipients of that money that should have been theirs should be made responsible for providing to them what it has deprived them of the ability to buy themselves.

Finally, there are the economic effects of free provision to consider. Most notably, when something is available for free, it becomes impossible to use someone's desperation to overcharge them for it. It also removes "I can't afford that" as a downward pressure on the prices of things. Types of demand will adjust. Increases in consumer demand as people spend freely on something else what they were once forced to spend on necessities will create job demand, which will create more opportunities for those in poverty due to unemployment or in the most low-wage and low-status jobs, which will force employers who utilize on low-wage labor to reconsider how valuable those jobs are and adjust wages and business practices accordingly.

Poverty is a problem in the flow of money. It occurs when income is diverted away or cinched off from a population, whose needs are thus unmet but who then also cannot pass money along the chain of economic exchanges that constitutes a functional and healthy economy. Who cannot, due to decreased input, exert a healthy level of demand for needed and wanted services and products, and pay for them; that is, cannot provide output.

In a healthy economy, money flows. Its purpose is to facilitate the exchange of goods and services, each person taking part as consumer and, when healthy, adult, and able, as producer. When people are denied access to their roles as producers (by high unemployment, for example) or undercompensated as same (poverty wages), their role as consumers is circumscribed, and they cannot provide the draw on the economy that is consumer demand, and a portion of the economy stagnates.

When given something free at point of purchase, this important economic role is restored to them, and the people around them have the economic impetus to provide them with goods and services; the money flows through many hands on its rounds.

Free at point of use services perform a vital role in the economy, streamlining commerce, freeing up economic chokepoints, and providing pump and suction to stagnant places in the economic waters.

Where it comes from is a matter of politics, but it can be siphoned off from someplace where the loss is less painful, or taken from someplace considered unnecessarily glutted to no useful benefit, or invested by those who stand to benefit from the larger situation, or recovered from those entities who have stolen value from the benefitting population and exacerbated their poverty in the first place.

But it needn't be slavery, communism, or magic.

We are as a global society currently in a really weird space we haven't yet worked out the bounds of, where it is now physically possible, through mechanization, for a small minority of the population to perform all the labor that is strictly necessary to maintain the entirety of society.

Even one hundred years ago, we weren't yet at the point where that was actually feasible.

For the entire rest of human history, it was basically nonsense. Farming or otherwise producing food, and producing the material for clothing and bedding, has consumed the bulk of the effort of the majority of people all of the time forever.

The only way you got a significant number of people doing anything else with the bulk of their lives was if they managed to extract additional labor from all the people doing the food-related work, to support them--a specialized artisan can do this by making better versions of some product than the food producers could make for themselves and swapping, therefore improving total efficiency through specialization.

Sometimes religious officials are a sort of supernatural specialized artisan; sometimes administrators are, effectively, a type of specialized artisan, since organization is very much an important skillset. Occasionally professional fighters could realistically be described that way, as security specialists.

Very often these three groups wind up in a position to extort more and more labor and value out of the food producers and achieve lives of leisure. This has been the cause of most hierarchical civilizations ever; to achieve complex centralized societies has always required some form of exploitation, though claiming land and extracting rent is a rather more common schema than anything that can be described as outright slavery.

(Though like. If you take the big zoom approach across the many and varied labor arrangements of history 'being a landlord' and 'holding chattel slaves' do strictly belong at opposite poles of the same kind of relationship, with various types of serfdom somewhere in the middle.)

The grain subsidy for Roman citizens living in Rome could never have been extended to the whole empire because it relied, necessarily, on using the power of empire to concentrate enough surplus food supply inward to be able to distribute it at the heart of the empire at no cost, because this was the government making an investment in its own security.

This remains the easiest and cheapest way to allow for things to be provided free at point of access--you shift the cost to less valuable people far away.

To an extent, any such distribution in a wealthy nation in our present economic system works exactly like that. In the same way that absurdly cheap machine-made cloth is turned into just-as-absurdly-cheap garments by underpaying actual humans in less powerful countries to sew it. (And then a huge profit is turned on markup at point of sale, which still works out to the citizens of wealthy countries getting ludicrously cheap clothes.)

The thing is, though.

At this point in history, where we are now, production of 'cloth' and 'grain' have been so thoroughly optimized that this is no longer the actual logistical boundary controlling all of human society.

It is no longer necessary for the majority of the human race to labor in some degree of unfree misery, in order for cities to even exist.

There is literally no precedent for this scenario. We find ourselves in a sort of economic post-history.

It hasn't even been two human lifetimes. We have not come to grips with what is actually possible. We as a society, or network of societies, have absolutely not adjusted to this still-ongoing seismic shift in reality, and things are super extremely weird right now as a result, and it remains to be seen what the end result of it all will be.

But consequently people like the first replier who want to insist this is a very clear and straightforward 'solved problem' are living in denial. How resource distribution can work, and what justice and so forth look like, when the traditional basic arithmetic of labor has been fucking obliterated, is still very much something we are in the process of trying to figure out.

Capitalism-as-ideology is very much getting in the way of doing the figuring, by enforcing arbitrary definitions of resource scarcity etc and making fake math play out as though it's real, in order to prop up the absurd fiction of perpetual economic growth.

It is true that entrusting gathering and distribution of resources to any one entity has never not led to corruption and abuse of this role, over the long term.

(There are a number of historical societies that put a lot of admin work into the hands of slaves specifically to make it harder for the people doing that work to divert resources and distort regulations to their own profit and empowerment; we seem to be trying to make computers fill that role presently but unfortunately 1) they remain too stupid to actually perform administrative tasks unsupervised 2) every time they get better at Tasks we come up with something else for them to do that they can't quite manage. Not that the slave solution was actually that effective either, even if it were ethical.)

It's also true that this is not at outcome at all unique to communism, and that capitalism has very much settled into the 'racket' stage of all such systems, where the power loci have worked out how to stop competing against one another and instead form a conspiracy against the public.

In gamedev we call this a "soft layoff".

How it works is the studio puts you on a project that they have no intention of actually moving forward on, gives you nothing but low-stakes busywork, which in turn tanks their employee's morale doing work on an obscure project that never seems to go anywhere, and then they either go insane wasting their life away or they leave the studio. One AAA studio I know has a 10+year long project dedicated just to this and they get a lot of brownies points from the industry because they 'never do layoffs' (read: everyone just gets forced to quit instead of getting laid off). Sometimes this is the role of an R&D department, who might be more or less valued depending on the company's interest in the work.

People in the replies are like "how is that a bad thing doing nothing and getting paid it sounds like a DREAM job", and while for some people it sounds great on paper, in reality you're commuting an hour to a job that you're stuck at for 8 hours a day 40+ hours a week that you studied for years to get into and know you're being underutilized in is soul-crushing in its own right. It's humiliating, frustrating, aggrivating and disappointing. You put bread on the table, but comes at the cost of wasting your life away in a stagnant position where you can never emtionally get invested in again because everyone else leaves and your work is continually worthless. I think the grass is always greener, but keeping busy but having work that is at least valued as a baseline is more important to some people.

And this, once again, is why we need Universal Basic Income. It shouldn’t require people hoping by pure random chance they get slotted into a sinecure they don’t mind taking full advantage of to have a comfortable life.

People should be able to quit whenever they want to and still have a means of living.