Technically it isn't. Life needs entropy for variations and evolution. Also, life doesn't fight. It's identities that fight to maintain themselves. Life just keeps on living.
Do you walk heel or toe first [1]? I would assume that lego bricks only hurt when moving heel first since humans had to deal with stony environments for quite some time. Not that you should stop cleaning up but this could be another technology to deal with the bricks.
That's the question. The inhabitants of that place will use global services. Should that tiny place get a cut or should it tax its inhabitants directly?
Build it. There is a global market of parents who will buy it.
But on the other hand, why not accept the toys on the floor? You are fighting entropy for no reason. You sleep at night, you will work tomorrow during the day, and when you look again, the toys are in an equally dispersed state. Why not let them stay in that state for days until you need to hover?
This can only be the first step. Since this is a political move, why not change the law and restructure taxes? It's difficult for cities to tax value creation if that value is created globally, in a data centre, somewhere on the planet.
Why should the city that just happens to host the data centre be able to tax the profits that are created in that data centre? Or worse, why should a company choose any city for its headquarters and pretend that the value is created there?
On a global scale, which society or political entity should have the right to tax profits that are created on the internet? How should cities be financed if most of the commerce in the city happens on the internet, outside of the city limits?
Of course it is easier. But putting nature first would create the difference between how nature works and the way people think. I was wandering if we would be better off if we remove the difference by removing nature itself.
>>you need people to decide who is eligible for welfare and who isn't.
>>In an UBI society, those people could do something else
I meant that the administrative layer could be used for other processes than managing welfare.
Why bother how many people don't work? There are 9 billions on this world. Even if 8 billions don't work, you can still run societies with 1 billion.
>we're not close,
Check how many people have to work on farms to create food. We are at a point where providing basic stuff is possible.
>unless you're talking about 4 square meters per person and 2500 calories of nutrious slime with no extras.
Why not? It doesn't have to be slime. Fast food, cereals, sweets, people actually crave cheap food. On the other hand, offering healthy cheap slime with all nutritions, if you look at soylent, that's something people are actually paying for.
Likewise, 50 square meters don't have to be expensive.
With UBI, you cannot make scarce resources affordable to everybody. On the other hand, you can make UBI affordable by reducing the costs of basic goods. If people can live on $100 a month, in a society with an average pre-tax income of $3000, then one working person can take care of 10 non-working citizens.
>Drop UBI and replace it with a job guarantee and you'll have my attention.
There is no way that a government can create meaningful jobs. How cruel is a society where 90% of people only earn the money to buy nutrious slime after having worked on a meaningless job for 8 hours? Allow those people to stay at home and come up with better ways to spend their time. Even if they just play video games, that's less corrupting for the entire society than forcing them to shovel gravel from one ditch into another. They are essentially prisoners and a society is best judged by the way it treats its prisoners.
Life will be better for everybody because the people who work, they know that it is their choice.
>Martian surface temperatures vary from lows of about −143 °C (−225 °F) at the winter polar caps[14] to highs of up to 35 °C (95 °F) in equatorial summer.
Evolution has local optima. Octopus and dolphins kind of have the intelligence to create civilizations but they are stuck in water. Dolphins never have the time to re-evolve feet because predators will hunt them down. There are C3 and C4 plants [1] but without technology, it is very unlikely that C3 plants become C4 plants.
Enter technology, and food production can be optimized. Combine those processes with others, and you can create plants that don't exist yet but are much better at creating food.
Technology doesn't mean that plants are outright destroyed. But it is very likely that new processes will be more efficient. To hedge against the threat of not knowing, seed banks will be kept. A risky move compared to keeping nature alive, but I doubt that anybody in power will maintain a rain forest over using the area for more efficient means of energy and resource creation.
Maintaining nature only makes sense if we are interested in knowledge as the primary driver. But the primary driver is power. Like Alexandria and Baghdad, there is no way that knowledge will be maintained when it stands in the way of power.
We don't have to remain human. I am pretty sure that at one point, consciousness will be transferred onto machines. The economy won't justify keeping entire human bodies alive.
>then we're far beyond UBI already. In most of Europe, you'll receive an apartment, food, clothes, utilities,
Where can you live that life without being an outcast? People in need get Basic Income, but it is not Universal. You have to trick the system if you want to get it indefinitely.
>As far as I understand, the point of UBI is to go beyond that because these basics are seen as limiting.
Of course they are limiting. That's why UBI works. As you have analysed correctly, you would have to enslave other people if you want more.
Thus, people don't stop working, because there is always something that isn't covered by UBI.
>Primarily, they stop working. We already have too many who are quite alright with the welfare they receive and prefer not to work. I really don't want to expand the number, because it just increases the work load for the rest.
Don't forget that you need people to decide who is eligible for welfare and who isn't. In an UBI society, those people could do something else and reduce the work load for everybody else. Basic resources are cheap and get cheaper with more automation. At one point, you will be able feed the entire world from the work of a few persons.
Unneeded efforts is where all the technology began. Some ape grabbing a stick instead of shoving more leaves into his mouth. Investing time and resources, thinking, that's where technology starts.
We use technology to create more food than nature provides voluntarily. Plants have become technology and we will use them as long as their synthesizing processes are more efficient as pure technological ones.
But at one point, it will be more efficient to go full synthetic. If you kill all life, all fungi, all bacteria, everything will be dead matter, and like rocks on Mars or frozen seals at the poles, nothing will move in an uncontrolled way and everything will be in line with the way humans think.
For sure, we have killed precious knowledge and as you say, we will never get it back. But that's due to humans being short-sighted and acting in a non-technological way. Like guns, it's not technology that is destroying the rain forest and reducing biodiversity. It's humans who follow their natural urges.
Why would you have to import money? You can have your own currency within the city. You only need external money for external goods and services.
The premise of UBI is that it creates a more productive society. If there is no possibility to be self-sustained, why implement it? However, if there is the possibility, then funding is possible because you can sell future surpluses for external current currencies and get the city going.
As far as I know, there have been ancient UBI societies, like Persia and Egypt where everybody received free grain.
Don't forget that luxury is the tool of kings to show their power. On one hand, kings live in luxury, but they still keep working. On the other hand, not working stops being a status symbol and a luxury if common people do it by default in a UBI society.
UBI is like heat pumps: you don't use the energy of the wall socket to create heat or cold, but you use it to move energy from one area to another. That way, you create a net surplus. With UBI, people stop worrying. All that mental energy is used to create value. The insight needed for a UBI city is the ability to tax it.
>The major problems in the world are the result of the difference between how nature works and the way people think
If we eradicate nature and replace it with technology, will we reach a state without problems? If we turn all planes and forests into photovoltaic power stations and use chemical processes to generate food, and everything becomes an image of our thinking processes, will life be good?