In my opinion, UBI is basically communism as a positive side-effect of kick ass capitalism. I tend to think of it in the Star Trek variety.
Not so much radical as a natural result of being really good at personal productivity.
It's not a bad thing to say, "we have gotten so good at being productive that we've made work essentially optional".
I tried to write the long answer and it turned out as a wall of text composed of parenthetical caveats. Then I tried to right the short answer and it turned out as a medium length yet confusing answer.
The truth of the matter is that people are barely evolved ape/chimps and do pretty much whatever suites them as long as they don't get their ass kicked for it.
I agreed with you at first but reading through Urbit's docs and the vox article linked in thread clarified the relationship between the system design and the author's political ideology.
Many of the design choices did not make sense to me until I understood that the author basically leads a thought current around a return to aristocracy.
With that, there does seem to be some reason to avoid the software simply because it may be designed to produce a particular political outcome.
If everyone is given money for a specific product and suppliers are universally aware of exactly how much people can spend on that product then, yes, that can happen.
However, under UBI, I think suppliers of goods and services would still be faced with the basic issue of not knowing exactly how much consumers value any given product and competition would still exist so prices would likely still be set by supply vs demand.
I'm merely trying to discourage the ambiguous "they" labeling. I think the author is, indeed, a bit to on about the "you should help yourself" mentality. Some people can't or won't even if money is offered and many civilized people want to see those types cared for as well.
Even so, he's basically on your side in the sense that whatever UBI ends up being proposed for law, he would probably vote for it.
Personally, I think we can definitely eliminate the some of the costs of the social programs by giving everyone a flat $30-$40k per year.
The driving difference in thinking being that I believe that the only viable way to make basic income happen is to assess average living expenses across the board and provide that amount to everyone while retaining the former programs at a much smaller scale.
One of the big issues with the current system is that there is a lot of trouble in determining whether a person really needs the assistance of a program or not.
UBI helps in that only those who can show a need beyond $30-$40k/yr need apply.
All solvable problems though, no?
If no one has to wash dishes in order to survive then you will have to offer a quite decent wage to get people to wash dishes else pay someone to finally make the washing of dishes completely automated.
Supply and demand should dictate that the worst issue will end up being the rising cost of having a night on the town.
Same thing for any other currently low value jobs. We will have to adjust to paying people properly, even above minimum wage, to do things that suck.
I view this as a desirable outcome when considered against the current situation in which only the most glamorous jobs tend to pay well, even if the job is not necessarily most helpful.
Right-wingers are mostly absent from this conversation.
The question at hand is "can we give people enough to amount to a comprehensive solution and thereby save administrative costs"?
I don't think any libertarian minded individuals actually believe in tossing out all safety nets and most likely don't care to reduce taxes on the wealthy either, at least not as a goal in and of itself.
Sorry to basically just negate your post but I do believe that you missed answering the last question in explaining details.
The poster asked, how would the provision of basic income further turn healthcare supply in the US to a negative sum game as compared to private insurance supplemented with corporate and government benefits?
Your response does a fair job of detailing some of the current issues with the US healthcare system but does not mention how basic income would make these issues worse. Would you kindly link the two for those of us who are not making the connection?
Just keep in mind that we will likely never reach the ideal balance between the voice of the people and megaphone of money.
The impact of lobbyists and money is a necessary consideration in any discussion of political solutions to problems.
"people just need information which isn't being readily provided"
The breakdown of the nutritional value of every food stuff is literally right in front of the consumer's face. I'm not sure information availability is a core issue there. It takes less time to check a food label than it does to respond to a text message or check Facebook.
If I had to guess I would say prioritization and budgeting are core issues here. It really is a very similar problem to financial budgeting. In this view we are balancing a calorie budget against time, money, emotional state, and health so the categories are different but the question is still the same as in finance.
This could also be a likely culprit since we do not tend to teach this topic well and Average Joe seems to be about as bad at personal finance as he is with personal wellness.
Perhaps more training on prioritization, goal setting, and delayed gratification is part of the solution?
I find answers such as "my brain is getting slower as I age" distasteful and unsatisfying.
One can not do anything with an answer like that. On the other hand, a somewhat careful review of the process can lead in useful insights.
Reading between the lines in this article I notice a few points that I think are important to the cause of the author's delayed progress at learning the game.
First the author describes how he set about reading all manner of strategies, variations of strategies, positions, tactics, etc. I think he shot himself in the foot with this. Humans tend to surrender when a task looks too daunting and his real goal was to keep up with a child who did not know anything about chess. None of the stuff he studied would be initially useful against a fellow novice with an innately short term focus.
Second, the author hired a coach, ostensibly to teach both him and his daughter, but later notes "I would sometimes wander into the room when coach Simon was there, watching him present her with some puzzle on the board".
So I have to wonder, what was he doing during the other occasions where his opponent was learning chess from an expert?
Third, the author's stated motive to learn was to teach his daughter; he removed that motive when he hired the coach. Without motive to drive engagement learning anything becomes extremely difficult.
Finally, after he discovered the complexity of the learning task the author then set about studying all of the reasons why he could not do well at his initial goal. This, again, is not useful in actually learning chess.
All in all, it seems like the author actually learned a lot more than his daughter did in the same amount of time. However, his lack of focus lead him to spend the time learning many things that did not help him play chess at a novice level.
This is an expected result of a storage system that has finite capacity being tasked with storing a lifetime of useful information.
Research on this topic points to the notion that the brain is pretty actively trying to ignore things and toss out information that is no longer useful. It seems that the heuristic the brain uses to determine what should be kept and what should be discarded is related to how well some new information fits with information already in memory and how often an area of memory is revisited.
If you were tasked with fitting a lifetime of useful information on a 100 petabyte hard drive, how would you go about it? When you inevitably run out of free space, how would you continue to store new information?