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> DUBLIN, Feb 10 (Reuters) - Ireland rolled out a permanent basic income scheme for the arts on Tuesday, pledging to pay 2,000 creative workers 325 euros ($387) per week following a trial that participants said eased financial strain and allowed them to spend more time on projects.

What about giving cleaning ladies 325 euro a week so they can spend more time on projects?
@theorytoe @lain
i feel like my 2nd sentence explains the first.

depending on an employer for sustenance is not a virtue.
in an ideal, utopic world, ability to secure consistent work is not directly tied to survival. not necessarily done through giving everyone money, that seems a bit unimaginative tbh, but would you not agree that one of the responsibilities of a government, if we are to be subjected to a government in the first place, is to ensure the safety and happiness of the population it oversees?

the issue is trying to jump there while maintaining our existing systems, which in no way support ubi as a viable concept. not even speaking about where the money is supposed to come from or how it is supposed to benefit a society to randomly give 1300 euro/mo to 2000 people -- the culture, attitudes toward work, attitudes of employers, the way the economy functions, etc etc etc all oppose ubi as a concept at their core, which is why these dumbass populist initiatives all fail

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@mirq @theorytoe @lain the brain of a human is built to need suffering to a significant extent to thrive. thriving is a counter contrast to suffering. without knowing any suffering direct or proxy, a human soul is nothing and fails to grow. the goal of UBI is to minimize suffering, but it is a temporary solution ; an endgame reset to wider spread depressions, more suicides, longer and more sufferings statistically than just not doing that.

to remove what is the last great basic motivator to action from humans, is a great gamble. a gamble that has so far in a 100+ small scale tests failed time and time again.

that is the part im sure we agree on to an extent

the part i did not agree to a significant extent is explained in the following:

the government ensures the safety and continuation of a people by increasing large scale stability against other states (basically a state is a apex predator of the food chain, a conceptual continuation of humans as the apex predator). the methods of keeping stability are irrelevant if there is no outside pressure to a government. it is the people's job to force the government to remain on course towards not becoming draconian mafia-like in its methods.
Every man is his own fate's smith, and pours his own luck. Every man MUST commit to SOME work directly tied to the survival of himself and his surroundings. I disagree the consistent work, the past 10 years have clearly shown me that anyone who still believes in the concept of consistent work as the school systems still parrot, have to be the luckiest ones to secure such a lucky job. Be you an artist, be you a paper pusher, be you a programmer, be you a cashier; your ability to continue your career no longer is hinged on your supervisor and CEOs business choices. Changing a job every 1 to 3 years is the norm for having the most stable job. Maybe this opinion is a bit too harsh on cashiers, because unironically i think that might be the most stable job that is not going to be replaced in a lot of places, while offering almost no career path, atleast in home country and other autism-prone countries people hate and are upset by the use of self-serve-cashiers (at home, the usual comment is "why do I have to do someone else's job for free without any compensation?").

recap on my disagreements: "consistent" work is too inconsistent and an outdated concept, replaced with consistent learning; governments are not to ensure happiness but rather stability (minimize wars, maximize safety); average joes should be the counter to authority (maximize happiness, minimize state intervention), i enjoy humans thriving but all UBI(-styled) thoughts i view as a downgrade, a removal of motivators towards success. the free market is a infinite balancing act fight between avoiding and breaking up natural monopolies (self-destructing feature of free-markets) and personal and entrepeneurlike freedoms to succeed solely on one's own terms (and fail on one own terms)

timed (a year or so) jobless benefits based on paid jobless tax (state-wide insurance, so total failure isnt punished while extreme laziness isnt rewarded) are the best functioning UBI-adjacent feature there is and honestly can ever be. Despite, even then some slip through this UBI system, but the pressure of the time and the humiliation rituals are enough to get the majority of lazy-asses to stop being lazy-asses after losing a job and progress in life, instead of stagnate and rot.
@lebronjames75 @theorytoe @lain
no worries - my own posts aren't academic masterworks either, i'm aware i type like a dipshit

i skimmed your reply because i'm on my way out of the house & don't have the time to give you a thoughtful reply matching your effort right now, but i will when i'm back. but i did want to quickly say that I think we agree on a lot, and I wanted to apologize for immediately jumping to being a dickhead to you
@lebronjames75 @theorytoe @lain

this came out pretty long but if you want the short version just know that i agree or don't disagree with most of what you said, and then i guess just read the last paragraph? i dunno, i'm not gonna make a proper tldr lol

----

>the brain of a human is built to need suffering to a significant extent to thrive.
I'm not sure if this is empirically true, but this is something I also believe, yes. Maybe not suffering specifically, but challenges that must be surmounted, that are in the way of a need or desire, which can sometimes express as suffering.
But it doesn't necessarily have to be suffering related to bare minimum survival

>an endgame reset to wider spread depressions, more suicides, longer and more sufferings statistically than just not doing that.
I'm not sure I follow exactly - are you saying that UBI would lead to more depression suicide etc?

>to remove what is the last great basic motivator to action from humans, is a great gamble
Would humans not be motivated to improve their situations regardless? in this utopia i envision, ubi is not anything more than ensuring one can afford a roof and basic food. one would still need to work to ensure their wants are met, or that their children get a good education, or to travel and see the world, and so on. there are still challenges, but they are not existential.

I'm in a mood now, that I wasn't in when I was writing initially, so I feel the need to add some exaggeration to vent frustration: if one would not be motivated to improve one's situation in those conditions, then one should be turned into fucking paste and fed to pigs.

Of course, that is also part of what I mean when I say much work needs to be done before something like UBI could even begin to look viable - attitude & culture need to change.

>a gamble that has so far in a 100+ small scale tests failed time and time again.
Yes, I touched on this too. But I believe it has failed because it is being forced by small-minded populist freaks trying to win elections or some other popularity contest. to my knowledge, no implementation of UBI has been anything more than "pick an insignificant number of people and give them money with very few strings attached for a random period of time until we run out of funding." Obviously this accomplishes nothing, because as I mentioned, an entire system reset, bottom-up, including cultural, is needed first. Something which would take decades if not centuries.

>the government ensures the safety and continuation of a people by increasing large scale stability against other states
I agree that this is how the world functions at present, yes, and that this is one of the roles of a government

>it is the people's job to force the government to remain on course towards not becoming draconian mafia-like in its methods.
Yes. there is and probably always will be an eternal war between the government and the people it governs.

>[paragraph about consistent work and tangent about cashiers]
lol, yeah that's probably a spot-on observation about cashiers. i agree with literally everything else in this paragraph except:

>Every man MUST commit to SOME work directly tied to the survival of himself and his surroundings.
must he?
i mean, again, in the present world, in the present culture of humanity as a whole, he must. yes.
though i am absolutely one of the people who can and will flee any country i occupy rather than fight for it - i recognize that this mindset is generally harmful to the survival of nations, and for whatever reason i do feel trepidation about that (i'm sure you've seen those euro street interviews where Da Youts say they'd lay down and die if their country was invaded rather than fight, yeah?). i'm unsure I actually care about that at this point, though.

i'm slowly realizing that the part of me that would care, only cares because Change Bad and Stability Good. However, what the fuck does it matter where the pedophile oligarchs ruling my nation come from, if they're all pedophile oligarchs who hate me and will not actually even try to fulfill any of the duties of a government to its people? tangent, sorry.

>governments are not to ensure happiness but rather stability (minimize wars, maximize safety)
I agree - it was a mistake for me to mention happiness as the role of the gov't. it's not and i misspoke

>average joes should be the counter to authority (maximize happiness, minimize state intervention)
based, no notes, fully endorse.
death to authoritarians

>i enjoy humans thriving but all UBI(-styled) thoughts i view as a downgrade, a removal of motivators towards success
this is definitely the core of our disagreement, i think. the motivator part.
well, as i've said, i agree that that is the case /now/. this is why i expressed distate for ubi systems implemented /now/ without any prerequisite work.
i just don't think that it necessarily must be this way. i don't think it necessarily was always this way.
it just is this way /now/.

>the free market is a infinite balancing act fight between avoiding and breaking up natural monopolies (...) and personal and entrepeneurlike freedoms to succeed solely on one's own terms
i don't disagree

>timed (a year or so) jobless benefits based on paid jobless tax (state-wide insurance, so total failure isnt punished while extreme laziness isnt rewarded) are the best functioning UBI-adjacent feature there is and honestly can ever be.
yes, currently, i agree. this is very generous.
i work in a social-work adjacent field in a US state with pretty damn good social support systems.
it's still ass. it's a mess. people who need help are left by the wayside due to arbitrary reasons, yet somehow drug-addled do-nothings are continuously rewarded with more attention and resources. i've had a motherfucker get a job that earned more god damn money than i do, and throw a fit when i told him that he now no longer qualifies for free health insurance. instead of letting me help him find an affordable paid plan (which he could afford because i can afford it and his rent was 4x less than mine while his pay was a couple hundred dollars more), he threw a fit and said he'd quit his job.
i don't know if he actually did, i convinced management to discharge him from our program before he had the chance, since he no longer qualified due to the income anyway.

all this to say is i get it. just because i have an ideal in mind, does not mean i don't recognize the reality we live in today, or that i am blind to how people are today. it just means that it is something that i believe would be an overall good thing if the work is done to get there, and its not something i would likely see in my lifetime even if suddenly some country somewhere decided to get its shit together and started actively working toward this goal.

hope i'm making sense.

p.s. don't call me a commie again those people r gey
@mirq

UBI bad emotion increase question: Yes, such is my belief

yeah everything you wrote makes sense to my head

i view the "gov vs people" war as a positive thing, an act of balancing mob horror with authoritarian horrors into a window of "actually this isnt the worst", as long as no one side (more specifically i view the balancing war between big corpo vs big state vs big anarcho/da pipul but i think the big corpo part was irrelevant earlier) doesnt gain a majority overpower over the rest.

i retroactively take back and apologize for my commie words, this was a nice post to read

i have nothing else to add or comment on specifically
@lebronjames75
Gotcha, I can see the logic

The balancing act description makes sense to me too, seems right.

Tbh, my real, true ideal utopia can literally never come to fruition without some sort of armageddon decimating the human population as a prerequisite so it's not even worth thinking about lol

Yes, this was nice. Sorry again for going straight to being shitty