Universal basic income and universal healthcare so I (and everybody else) don’t have to worry about a job, being able to work, retirement, disability, and employers will have to offer meaning, increased quality of life, and actual respect to attract employees.
These social safety nets would be a huge win for worker’s rights too. If you can tell a job to go fuck itself on the spot, they can’t operate without treating people right.
UBI paid for by liquidating billionaires
UBI paid for by
liquidatingliquifying billionairesthe logistics of this are a little iffy. People don’t really melt, they burn
They don’t need to be melted, they can be forced through a fine mesh instead.
We need to utilize the expertise of the hydraulic press channel for this task. Spaghettifying billionaires sounds very therapeutic.
You really can justify just about anything when you’re one of the good guys
They will be the luckiest of all.
Heat is not the only means of liquidation. If you apply sufficient pressure, they will indeed melt.
Take 1 trillion dollars from the billionaires in total, now distribute 1K to each person each month? Sounds great but you run out of money in only 3 months. Then what?
Enjoy the fruits of liberated market. /s Honestly though you assume that the only value of liquidating assets from billionaires is getting their dollar amounts moved from on bank to another. There is a reasonable assumption that freeing up that capital to be enthusiastically invested or utilized to meet demands would provide more economic growth than it sitting in large hoards being spent in most risk adverse ways or in near total whimsy.
There is also a reasonable assumption that taking away people’s money would result in a decreased expected value from future money, leading to a decrease in the motivation to produce that we currently enjoy.
Let’s say a person goes from having nothing to having $1M in the bank. How does a person do that? Well, in a free market they do that by providing $1M worth of value to other people.
Should that person, who we know is capable of providing serious value, go on to try to have two million? It would be good for our society if they did, so we’d better hope they do.
But if our history includes a day when all the billionaires had everything taken from them, this means that they now have to ask themselves if there’s any danger of going over the threshold, become “evil” in the eye of society, and stripped of their rights.
Suddenly being rich is quite dangerous. It alters the incentives. Assuming a very straightforward connection between potential reward and motivation, it could be very bad for the economy to liquidate the richest people’s accounts.
It’s a fairly ahistorical assumption that wealth accumulattion is done mostly through wealth creation. Anticompetitive practices, rent seeking, and maximize value extraction are all common practices for incumbent market leaders.
You basically create precedent to give away excessive wealth in order to influence it’s effects on the world instead of reinvesting it purely in mechasms of control of wealth.
Sounds great but you run out of money in only 3 months. Then what?
We won’t because billonairs don’t hold the knowledge to run factories, they just monopolize infrastructure and collect a toll. We won’t run out of money because the production is still there.
Then maybe our source of money should be that production, and not the personal wealth of billionaires?
Like, if you make a car that runs on diesel, and there’s a gallon of diesel in the world, you’ve made a car with 1 gallon of fuel.
If you make UBI that runs on the contents of billionaires’ bank accounts, and there’s three months’ worth of money in those bank accounts, you’ve made UBI that works for three months.
One that would leave me not thinking about it anymore
Laid back, with my mind on my honey and my honey on my mind
I don’t have a solid answer.
Money alone isn’t going to make me happy. Yeah, it removes a lot of one type of stress. But it can also be a trap. Like, I’m doing solidly okay in my job, but it’s enough that I can’t easily quit and start over in a different career, even though I stopped caring about this one a decade ago. And a high-paying job can come with a lot of other stressors, things that keep you working harder and longer hours than you otherwise would.
$100k would probably seem pretty good for a long time, given where I currently live. If I had to live in NYC, I’d probably say more like $500k.
I live in a third world country, if I can get 3K USD per month I believe I’ll pretty good.
Third world countries don’t exist. You’re being over-exploited.
we all know what they meant and we all know that they are
Words can convey negative connotations. Why perpetuate negative colloquialisms that serve to preserve hierarchies of world order? “Third World “ is a constructed designation meant to oppress. Stuff matters, even if it doesn’t to you.
I never said it didn’t, this just isn’t the right place and in this context it does not matter. It’s a term we all know the meaning of and that’s what’s important.
I wouldn’t say I’m sorry for making you think about the context behind the meaning of words, but because you have had to spend so much energy on this, I apologize.
Money has long ceased to provide happiness. >80% of my salary ends up in a savings account, no idea if I’ll ever touch it.
Take a vacation
Oh I travel a lot, we get 30 days of paid leave. I’ve also changed countries for work 9 times over the last 22 years already, so you could say traveling is part of my work, in a sense. Travel doesn’t really make a noticeable dent in my savings though.
Get into warhammer? 😂
Yeah that would be one way to get rid of excess money for sure… I could also develop a severe coke addiction, come to think of.
Out of curiosity, you able to share what you do for work? What little you’ve described sounds really interesting.
In the end it boils down to project management.
I’ve always tried to be more of a generalist than a specialist and wanted an international career. So I started with a vocational training as a banker, thinking that finance works pretty much the same all over the world. In Germany where I’m from originally you learn banking as a trade, not at university, so you basically work full time in a bank and attend classes at a vocational school for about 2.5 years and then graduate with a diploma in banking.
I’ve then started a bachelor’s in business administration (again very generalist on purpose) in evening & weekend classes while continuing to work in the bank, and then by chance the university I attended opened a campus in Luxembourg. Since that’s full of banks I just thought I’ll try my luck and was eventually hired by a wealth management office there and could continue my degree more or less seamlessly (had to take one semester break for the local students to catch up).
In the job I did all kinds of stuff from back office, trade support, some customer facing roles, a bit of compliance and KYC, and eventually they asked me to support with a major IT implementation project since I had working knowledge of 2/3 of the inhouse departments, so that was my first stint into project work. Took about 2 years and was big fun.
By the time I was about to graduate I was however fed up with all the rich people and decided to try my luck at the opposite end of the spectrum, reached out to a ton of NGO’s, development agencies etc., and eventually got a job as a project consultant for a microfinance holding operating local microfinance banks in Africa and Central Asia. They basically brought me on as domestic staff in the respective countries (Liberia, Nigeria, Kenya, Tanzania, Madagascar and Georgia) to implement projects locally. I’d take on operational roles during this period (head of finance, deputy COO, head of IT security…) to have the required local authority, and would after project implementation phase myself out and hand the project over to daily operations there. Typically I’d be 6 months - 2 years in country, depending on the complexity. At that time I also started to work on a part-time MBA, since in many countries it’s getting harder and harder to receive a residence permit with only a bachelor’s. Didn’t aim for the stars here, I wanted a cheap and easy degree, and managed that in about 3 years.
Afterwards I joined the holding’s head office and actually devised the projects and coordinate with other consultants in the target country to help them implement it, but that got boring soon. In my spare time I ventured into the medical field as I had seen a lot of crap down in Africa, got certified in medical entrepreneurship and ISO 13485 auditing (medical device quality management systems), and ultimately a German startup wanted to open a factory in China and approached me if I wanted to help set it up. They were basically looking for someone with entrepreneurial spirit and track record of succeeding in foreign countries, not really an industry expert as they had enough of those in-house.
So we’ve embarked on a fact finding mission in late 2017, and ever since early 2018 I’ve been living in China now, first as local CEO of the factory, and then doing what I always did - hiring teams, setting up facilities, and making myself redundant. I basically stepped down through the ranks from CEO over CTO and COO to regulatory director, then procurement manager and will soon leave China as a supply chain auditor. Which is ideal since I will only interact with suppliers, making me location independent. I’ll essentially work from home or at the supplier’s site from now on, and have chosen Malaysia as my new home starting April/May. Just waiting for the paperwork to be out.
I’ll be a grossly overpaid auditor, basically… But they wouldn’t dare cutting back after I was fundamental in setting things up to begin with :-)
I make 120k in a medium sized city where the median income is about 75k. I’m pretty content, tbh. I also don’t buy shit i don’t need. Most of my expenses are my hobbies. I do have a lot of hobbies. But I still make enough every two weeks where I’m able to stash it away in a savings account.
Now if I only knew how to and had the balls to invest beyond retirement accounts.
Investing tip #1: don’t take advise from strangers on the Internet
Investing tip #2: get a zero commission trading app, like Fidelity or TD Ameritrade, and just squirrel away a bit of each paycheck/monthly/whatever into a low expense ratio, broad market ETF, like VOO (https://etfdb.com/etf/VOO/#etf-ticker-profile)
Start slow, but contribute regularly. Keep enough cash in the bank for emergencies, and don’t bother even thinking about trying to “time the market” - just set it and forget it.
Yeah I think my issue had always been no knowledge of how to pick even the right etf. For example, how did you even land on that one?
Criteria for that one: low expense ratio, so you aren’t losing (much) money to the fund manager, large market cap, so you are less succeptible to shock, and the ETF probably isn’t going anywhere, and as a S&P 500 ETF, it holds stocks from all 500 businesses in the S&P 500 (weighted by the respective market cap of said businesses), so it’s not tied to any single sector, making it more resilient for long-term investment.
The more money I make the sooner I can stop working.
So bigger salary = bigger happy. Always. There’s no number that is “enough”.
I enjoy my job, so working 20 more years isn’t that onerous.
But I’d rather retire tomorrow than work for anyone else.
Honestly? If I won the lottery today I would still work. I really really enjoy my work. It keeps me focused and motivated. My problem is having my livelyhood tied to the wims of a chaotic prideful coke filled VC
There’s no number that is “enough”.
A quadrillion dollars per minute ought to be enough for anybody.
Putting that much money into circulation would cause hyperinflation and then a gallon of milk would cost 10 quintillion dollars and you’re back to square one.
>Putting that much money into circulation would cause hyperinflation
so dont circulate it.
$13k/yr post tax, just depends on how much work I’d have to do for it
around three fiddy
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ah no stress, no costs… perfect to increase the population and put more strain on the system.
I’ll wait for you to solve the overpopulation crisis while giving us all a first-class work free experience.
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That won’t stop population growth. Remember… the stress of work is gone. Now we all can have big happy families if we want without ANY pressure to ever juggle all those stressful conflicting priorities that take up familial resources. Voluntary contraception would not keep population stable or provide a sustainable ecosystem. I personally would have at least six kids. My wife would want more than that. You are free to be childless if you so choose of course, but statistically proven biological imperative drives us to procreate as-is, it’s literally human nature.
The biggest problem will quite literally be real estate. Unless you can picture a fully urbanized earth where everyone lives in tiny little cubby holes and not much else as being some kind of utopia. Even then the land on earth is finite.
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Eh? Why does birth rate drop in countries with top economies versus those that don’t?
Developed countries tend to have a lower fertility rate due to lifestyle choices associated with economic affluence where mortality rates are low, birth control is easily accessible and children often can become an economic drain caused by housing, education cost and other cost involved in bringing up children. Higher education and professional careers often mean that women have children late in life. This can result in a demographic economic paradox. sauce
In order to maintain that high quality of life you have to work a shitload and to get those high paying jobs you have to spend years of your life upskilling and competing for better jobs.
Remove the economic factor and give everyone that astounding QOL and boom… we can breed without worries of providing and we don’t even have to stress about maintaining our QOL. We can all be stay at home parents who just raise our kids if we choose to.
I can’t afford a 4-6+++ bedroom house in the Greater Boston area where my friends and family are without having soul-crushing long commute times. I need a commute because I need to work to put food on the table and pay for rent. Remove the barriers and keep at least even QOL and I will not work, i’ll instead devote my time to doing literally anything else.
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We’re talking about a potential utopia where education is available to everyone, not restricted to first world countries. If you bring everyone UP to western world QOL and they are educated, you have to consider it in that aspect.
The immigrant fertility rate thing is because they come from a place with low expected QOL so they don’t think they need the american dream with air conditioning, going out to eat or having nice things and instead go with more kids because they were raised that way. The second generation gets used to say american QOL and wants to have those same nice things the neighbors have- after all they grow up in the american school system meeting other kids right?.. so you need to work to get those high QOL things and suddenly you’re in the situation I have described: needing more professional attainment to keep up the expected QOL and delaying children.
Does that make sense?
Do you have any kind of evidence showing that free of all financial constraints people will not have children in a mid-high COL area?
People with the lowest income have the highest birth rate.
Seems to me like lots of wealth is the solution to the population crisis.
Also with Star Trek technology we can let people live in the holodeck.
If we’re gonna go to sci Fi then you could solve overpopulation with FTL travel, terraforming, and farming, and we’d just spread out across the galaxy and then galaxies until the universe experiences heat death, I assume that solves it.
“This transporter will help us solve overpopulation”
“How’s that work?”
“Stand right here”
Also like. Overpopulation isn’t really an issue. Every country that has modernized and increased education, distribution of goods, and gained some sense of reasonable health care has seen a reduction in births
We’ll all be long dead by the time interstellar travel is here for a handful of individuals, and we may even be dead before we find another planet that could be habitable in a million years time.
You’re realistically targeting ultra-long-term solutions, all of which ignore the fact that we’re trashing this one pristine planet right now by filling it with billions and billions of souls more than it can sustainably support.
Indeed, I’m just having fun, that’ll never happen
The real solution is right under our noses. We need to shrink humanity.
Any hard science fiction clings to the fact that taking people off the earth is a luxury only afforded to the most influential and powerful, unless you have critical skills to do a job that they can’t find with space residents.
Imagine what would be needed to ferry a million people off the earth in one year. Then imagine that there are 20-50 billion souls eager to have that luxury off-planet destination life. The math never adds up.
Imagine what it would have taken in 1800 to build an iphone. Now imagine there are hundreds of millions of people wanting that same luxury. The math doesn’t work out.
Not the same scale. If we had the same technology back then it would probably be possible, but the population has exploded since. If we still had 1/8th the people we might get that, but there’s no way we can produce a billion iphones every time an upgrade comes along, let alone 8 billion.
Standards have to drop for real even equity compared to what we are used to in the west. This would be true even if we took everything from the top 10% (which globally seems to include nearly all of the US, even us middle class working peons.)
I eat a lot of french fries. So maybe about 50lbs annually.
Anything over $100k is plenty to live, travel, and invest with if you don’t plan on having kids. There’s a point where it’s time and experiences that are more valuable than the money, so I’d prefer fewer working hours or more engaging work than simply just salary increases. I’m certainly happy to receive bonuses and raises, but as an engineer who has never made under $100k/yr the money doesn’t change anything about the way I live and enjoy life (note that I don’t have expensive tastes and carefully watch for lifestyle creep).
There’s a point where it’s time and experiences that are more valuable than the money
I think what you mean is there’s a point where free time and experiences are more valuable than food and shelter.
Money isn’t balancing against these things. Money is the thing the brings you things of value. It’s not Money vs Y. It’s money spent on X vs money spent on Y.
It isn’t just the salary though. I am convinced that there is enough wealth to go around so nobody has to live in fear any more.
$80,000 / yr before taxes
