"Lump sum in cash" is the most flexible and equitable system. But then - and that's a major problem with UBI - you end up with people who spend it irresponsibly and then need help to survive. So you end up with UBI in addition to all the existing social safety nets.

The study showed that people used the money in unusual ways, spreading it around and sharing it, usually in ways that benefited the economy, but would not be allowed by a more heavily-regulated system like food stamps.

another problem is that if i earn extra money i can't combine it with the basic income to eg afford a better apartment. everyone would be stuck with the apartment given.

you end up with people who spend it irresponsibly and then need help to survive. So you end up with UBI in addition to all the existing social safety nets.

i don't believe that. if you spend your income irresponsibly you are out of luck. change your habits. wait until the next payment and do better. if you can't do that then a social worker will help you.

Suggesting it's "unfair" if you don't need specific help ignores the purpose of a safety net. How a society supports those facing hardship is a measure of its character. Worrying about potential misuse at the lowest rungs seems disproportionate when compared to massive government spending elsewhere. Ultimately, denying essential aid based on assumptions about how a few might misuse it is counterproductive and lacks compassion.

You can probably come up with policies that penalize real estate investments, but (a) it will just cause the investors to chase some other asset class, instead of redistributing wealth; (b) unless scarcity is addressed, it's unlikely that housing prices are going to drop. Landlords extract profits from the assets they hold, but they don't cause there to be fewer homes or apartments available.

I've always marveled at how it's 100% accepted to talk about poor people employing six dimensional chess and dubious strategies to scrape undeserved pennies from the system, but it's somehow unthinkable to even so much as contemplate the possibility that rich people are pulling obvious levers to extract millions. The double standard is absolutely wild.

It's one of the few things that are real (ba-dum-tss). And given that demand for housing is inelastic, it'll absolutely absorb any extra money injected into the system as UBI.

Put differently: whatever you set UBI to, it'll always be just barely enough to cover rent on a shack today and not enough tomorrow.

One workable version of UBI was Communism (as implemented in the Soviet Union, not in modern-day China). There you explicitly take the fundamentals like housing out of the economic system and make it a crime to exchange them for money. Prices of staples are tightly controlled, and excess income is to be used for aspirational expenses. It turns out though that it's hard to implement in practice because without a way to regulate demand - the supply side tends to fall over.

what you describe doesn't sound workable to me...

But that aside: even if we want to alter the deal, there are good ways and bad ways to do this. Jobs are important because they are a big part of your life and because you need one to pay the bills. So you should try to avoid "haha so long" / "oops, clicked the wrong button, come back" kinds of situations.

Yeah, that is definitely "for worse". The point of hiring someone to do a job is to get something useful done. Not to hand out do-nothing sinecures to lucky lottery winners. I have friends who have transitioned from private to public sector and they unanimously complain about how useless the government lifers are. This is your tax money that is being spent.

and if you aren't getting what you're owed for that money you have the ability to vote out the people responsible for that and elect people who can deliver what we're asking for. Try voting out the CEO of walmart.

Believe it or not, when a bunch of incompetents aren't dismantling them, most government agencies get their work done. There are a lot fewer "do-nothing"s than you think and a lot of hard workers who are proud to serve their fellow Americans.

In my lifetime I've gone from paying a few cents to dollars per minute for phone calls (on the high end for international calls), to being able to have a video call with anyone, anywhere in the world for essentially free.

TVs have gotten bigger, lighter, and cheaper. Cars are more powerful, have better gas mileage, and are much safer. Air travel quality has declined, but so have prices. New video games have consistently been around $50-$60 since the 1980s. If they kept pace with inflation, they should cost $140 to $150 now. The phone in my pocket is about 1000x more powerful than the top of the line desktop I couldn't afford in the 90s and even before inflation it's about 1/3 the price.

Food has more variety and is cheaper. Craft beer was not a thing 30 years ago. Coffee was Maxwell House freeze dried garbage from a can, not fresh roasted beans.

I'm sure there's more. The government is responsible for basically none of that.

The most hated companies tend to be the ones who have been causing harm for years if not decades and impacting vast numbers of people: Purdue Pharma, Nestlé, BP, Facebook, Monsanto, Comcast, Johnson & Johnson, 3M, etc. Several of the most hated companies have been directly responsible for killing millions of people. This isn't about "angry reviews online", sometimes it's about getting away with fraud or even murder.

> In my lifetime I've gone from paying a few cents to dollars per minute for phone calls (on the high end for international calls), to being able to have a video call with anyone, anywhere in the world for essentially free.

Your calls also used to be much more private, but now the software, devices, and services you use are spying on you and your communications to varying degrees in ways that would have been illegal when you had a landline. Call quality was also vastly better ("you can hear a pin drop" vs "can you hear me now")

> TVs have gotten bigger, lighter, and cheaper.

They also take multiple screenshots of every second to spy on what you're watching, they push ads on the screen even when you're playing video games or watching DVDs, and have microphones and camera collecting your personal data.

> Cars are more powerful, have better gas mileage, and are much safer.

Cars are also spying on everything you do and reporting your driving habits to your insurance company who will jack up your rates if you drive at night or take a corner too hard.

> New video games have consistently been around $50-$60 since the 1980s. I

You aren't counting the fact that parts of games (including parts important to the story) are often paywalled off and the cost of games can end up in the hundreds if not thousands of dollars if you include the DLC (for example the total cost of the Sims 4 is $1,235) or the games which require ongoing subscription costs, when in the 80s there were countless free player-made mods/maps/skins/expansions etc. Also video games are being used to build psychological profiles of you which then gets sold to data brokers and used to push ads at you (https://www.wired.com/story/video-games-data-privacy-artific...).

> The phone in my pocket is about 1000x more powerful than the top of the line desktop I couldn't afford in the 90s

The PC you had in the 90s was your computer. On your phone multiple third parties like your phone manufacturer, your carrier, and the OS maker can all access your phone remotely at any time, view/modify/add/delete files, applications, and settings without any notice to you at all. They have privileged levels of access to your device while you are left with a locked down account without full access to "your" device. Your computer in the 90s was designed to work for you, but your cell phone is designed to collect your personal data for other people.

> Food has more variety and is cheaper.

Food prices are at historic highs right now and that food is less healthy than it used to be as companies have been able to strip away regulations. The same scientists that the tobacco industry paid to lie to the public and government about the harms of smoking are now being employed by the food industry to convince the government that their additives are harmless (https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2015/04/17/400391693/ho...) and people are eating worse now than they did in the 1980s which shows in the amount of obesity and disease. I have to admit that we have much more variety than we did. That seems to be on the decline in recent years though and people are increasingly finding empty shelves at the stores.

Some things are better today than they used to be, but many things are actually much worse. Every new technology that does something convenient for you is also being used against you in some way.

Yeah, things can spy on you to target ads. If this bothers you, block ads. They can target all the ads they want at me, I'll never see them.

Call audio quality might have been better, but video quality was nonexistent. My mom can see her granddaughter from the other side of the world and that was simply not even possible 20 years ago.

You can still root your phone and most computers are still your own, if this is important for you. For the vast majority of people, they don't even understand what the settings mean and it is a relief that they don't have to deal with them. The average consumer experience compared to editing autoexec.bat and fiddling with .ini files to get a game working on Windows 95 is a vast improvement.

You're living in a serious bubble if you think people hate the company they most readily associate with shampoo or scotch tape.

Almost all "most hated company" rankings can be broken into two categories: the ones many consumers had direct negative experiences with (Equifax, Comcast) and the ones they were told by the media they should be upset with (Anheuser-Busch).

Patents, sure. They're abused and come at a cost to the society. But all we've done here is created a culture where, in some sort of an imagined David-vs-Goliath struggle against Disney, we've enabled a tech culture where it's OK to train gen AI tech on works of small-scale artists pilfered on an unprecedented scale. That's not hurting Disney. It's hurting your favorite indie band, a writer you like, etc.

If companies can’t gatekeep our artistic culture for money, we’ll be better able to enjoy it.

Which any CIA fork would not be able to keep since it violates FOIA laws.

Edit: yeah, the "methodology" page confirms this.

So just don't include them, rather no info than completely incorrect LLM hallucinations

They're about 95% accurate, so not completely incorrect. I think the value of the correct ones is higher than the few incorrect ones. I manually review and fix them, but for just a fun tool, it's not practical to write 5000 eight-word bios.

If you look at any 2-4 year period, the ranking tends to be quite different. Well, Paul Graham is there pretty consistently, but everything else changes.

Like jvns.ca drops off the list entirely for 2025, but was consistently in the top 5 until last year.

It's the same thing that happened with computers. Billions of people use them, but most just want to access Facebook or use MS Word, not learn OS internals. It's a different world from where we used to be 30-40 years ago, and that's fine. We design simpler, more intuitive products for them.

If a product meant for that group can't be used effectively by the target audience, I think the fault is with the designer, not with the user.

Where do you get something like an ESP that's one tenth the price? ESPs are cheap and you can run Arduino, ESP-IDF directly, or fringe environments (I had some ESP8266 running NodeMCU because Lua made more sense to me than Arduino).

My point is that people who are attracted to Arduino are, by and large, not the kind of people who want to geek out about the inner workings of the MCU, and there's nothing wrong with that.

I'm pretty familiar with the microprocessor architecture of the 8-bit era that I grew up in, and have done a fair amount of hardware hacking. As things have gotten more complex, I've let some things slide, such as the complexity of pipelined architectures.

Arduino is not even syntactic sugar any more. All it retains of its origins, that I'm aware of, is the weird setup() and loop() schtick. And you have limited control over what happens before your code starts. But with most Arduino compatible boards, you have full access to the vendor supplied libraries, and can go as deep as you want. These days my preferred platform at work is Teensy 4, and at home, the wireless enabled boards. I think Paul Stoffgren is some kind of 100x engineer.

But life is short. Over my 61 years, I've carefully rationed the brain cells that I devote to innards of technologies that will soon be obsolete. I read the Turbo Pascal manuals cover to cover, and The Art Of Electronics, but I never cracked Inside Macintosh. I've decided that I will simply not learn anything about any OS that is not Linux, and superficially at that.

I program desktop computers in high level languages, despite total abstraction of the innards.

I think the relative portability of Arduino code has been a huge boon for hobbyists because it encourages the formation of a community of people who can share code and knowledge, even if they're not all using the same processors, and despite sometimes needing to tweak code when porting it from one platform to another. This was also the case with early FORTRAN. Portability across processors revolutionized scientific computing.

If you're going to write a blog about how the ESP32 doesn't connect to the strongest AP so you need to pin it to a specific BSSID in your router settings... Maybe you shouldn't be writing that blog. If you haven't taken at least a moment to check documentation and see that the behaviour you want is already an option that can be selected by changing literally one line in your ESP32's WiFi config. Instead this pseudoscience proliferates.

Instead of spending x2 the initial effort to fix the root cause, you spend x1 the initial effort to implement jank and then spend x10 the effort down the line maintaining the jank.

Sounds like a "good enough" shitty solution to me, which is kind of the whole point of DIY.

It's literally one word to change in his WiFi config to get the behaviour he wants. It's already implemented. Who can't "deal" with that?

  wifi_connection_config_t config = {
    .ssid = "my_home_wifi",
    .password = "secret123",
    /*
      implicitly initialised to default:
      .method = CONNECT_TO_THE_FIRST_AP_THAT_RESPONDS,
    */
  }

  wifi_connection_config_t config = {
    .ssid = "my_home_wifi",
    .password = "secret123",
    /* explicitly initialise: */
      .method = CONNECT_TO_THE_AP_WITH_THE_STRONGEST_RSSI,
  }

This is why many environmental activists see cheap, abundant energy as problematic. It would mean less air pollution or less climate change, but it would allow humans to "consume" more of the ecosystem.

To be clear, this isn't my worldview. But as with most other movements advocating for social change, the underlying ideology is usually more complex than it appears.

There's no way we're going to convince the middle classes of the central economies to reduce consumption to that level, or even to convince people in that class of development economy to stop aiming for more.

What if there is 200% tariffs on junk they shouldn't be buying anyhow? What if a new car becomes so expensive that the idea of having to replace it in 3-5/years induces outrage and class action lawsuits? What if you were only allowed to own one residence? What if out of season foods were fantastically expensive unless you had a community "garden"?

I know, HN, straight to -4. I'll meet you down there.

You have to pitch things the correct way, and it would really help if it wasn't treated as an "Ideological" thing but an ecological and humanitarian thing.

It is not okay to shove our pollution, poor wages and working conditions, and so on, to another country, nor its population. Arguing that it's okay if Chinese and vietnamese and indian folks are treated poorly, have poor health outcomes, and so on, just so long as we get shein and temu and amazon and walmart...

The "there's plenty for everyone, consume buy purchase, it's ok!" is just a lie. you can't do that without harming someone else.

Is it different now?

https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/syr/downloads/report/IPCC_AR6...

i don't know, you tell me. And billions are in poverty now so i'm not sure this is a productive conversation. 44.9% of the global population is under $6.85 per day. 740mm try to survive on less than $2.15 a day.

45% of the earth's population is 3,700,000,000 or so, which, if my counting of commas is correct, is "literally billions of people"

The people in extreme poverty are not the people you are making the argument for. Changing your consumption isn't going to do a thing for sub Saharan Africa and latin America, as a matter of fact increasing consumption of goods from those countries will improve their quality of life.

If you are ever in South Africa contact me, really. I'll take you to those people in povery, tell them yourself how you think Americans spending less money is going to change their lives in any way.

You will probably find some peoplewho are just trying their best to make it through the day. You will also find a lot of their lack of wealth comes from a lack of education.

You want to make a lasting difference, stop donating to feel good charities or animals or nonsense. Find an organisation that is focussed on improving education in these areas and donate to that.

Because nothing kills corrupt governments quite like an educated voting base.

another way to look at this is, we export our pollution to another country until their citizens get tired of the pollution, and thus charge more for production. So we pull up stakes and move on to the next country that's too poor to complain.

But i guess bootstrapping economies by dumping toxins everywhere on the planet is ok.

The goal should be to bootstrap sustainable, clean technologies, not the same 1800s era industrialization that coats the land in a fine sheen of toxic waste.

> do you know that for sure?

Yes. I absolutely loathe modern washing machines. The irony is that they don't actually save any water because I end up running them multiple times. One of these days I will hopefully get around to gutting mine to replace the control box with an RPi. It's a lot of busy work for something that ought to function well to begin with.

> Your bill is gonna be higher,

Maybe not with a modern mini-split setup. Those are genuinely better than anything that came before them. As a bonus, they remove the failure mode of "blow up your house" that all gas appliances inherently carry.

You can also power them with solar, removing your day to day reliance on the grid.

i have an HE2 (which everyone, universally hates) and it cleans clothes fine with 1 load where you can't even see the top of the water most of the time. You have to load high efficiency top loading machines different than your grandparents loaded their speed queens. You must not put anything over the impeller. everything must go around the edges before the water starts. the impellers in HE washers don't agitate around the torus of the tub, they agitate like the electric field on a torus around the tub, so they go bottom, bottom middle, upper middle, upper, upper outer, bottom outer, bottom; in a loop. if you put stuff in the middle to start, it'll just swish that back and forth and never clean anything. Sometimes stuff won't even get wet, or you'll have dried soap stuck to your clothes.

secondly, don't use fabric softener. If you must use something because of your water quality, use vinegar.

If you need to wash sheets, curtains, blankets, comforters and the like, you can't put them around the outside, because the HE washers do that cycle differently, too. You have to gather the fabric like a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bindle sack, start with the sheet or whatever flat, fold all four corners (or whatever) into the middle so they all meet in the middle. Then pick it up by the four corners (or whatever) and place it in the washer with the middle of the sheet down and the four corners on top. Like a bindle sack. use the "sheets / heavy duty" cycle for sheets and the like. that's what it's for.

please, let me know if this solves your issues.

Yes, there is a need to stop the small minority of humans that will not be good stewards of the planet, the people and creatures on it, and its atmosphere. I'm fine with being labelled an authoritarian.

oh and to answer a possible question about "what is 'good science'", i'd start with looking at scientists that have been doing science for at least a couple of decades, with no factual retractions on their record, or on the record of those they mentored (those who actually wrote the papers?). As an ancillary - their work must be reproducible, ideally by an competing institution - and it should go both ways. if Harvard always poo-poos UC Davis' research publications, then they shouldn't be surprised if the CSU and UC systems scrutinize Harvard's work especially.

to analogize to something i often hear, "We already have laws about that, just enforce them" - we already know what outstanding, excellent science looks like. Reinforce that.

on https://www.mapmypolitics.org/ i show as a lower left centrist, maybe 1 question away from "social Libertarian". I answered as though i were running the country, not as though i were living under the country i was describing. So questions where an answer is my ideal, but is impossible under the current system i answered that way. "Trade should be regulated to prevent unfair competition" was my answer, because "we pay our slaves - er... workers - 5 cents a day and don't care if they die" is unfair competition, to my reasoning. so is "we can provide cheap goods because we pollute the air, land and water, and ship cheap stuff to other countries they 'want' and pollute their air, land, and water, too." A couple examples, there.

Which Western nations have a fertility rate above replacement?

Some of these differences won't be "degrowth" but changes, like shifting to high speed rail and buses over personal cars. Reducing meat in our diets. Giving nature some breathing room. In other words, a different way of living that might take some adjustment but would also be perfectly fine.

Furthermore, we need to consider developing societies. If we continue to consume finite natural resources unsustainably, we cut into the share that could be used to better the lives of the poorest societies on Earth.

I'm not involved in XR though. However, I think it's important to present a highly materialist viewpoint. It's not only about morality, but about ensuring as many people as possible can live decent lives in a renewed balance with nature.

What do you do? Obviously, the first thing you do is make sure the expenses go down. Cut down the unnecessary, slim every operation to what is really required, stabilise the curve so the slope becomes less steep.

Only then can you start thinking of investments in increasing efficiency by means of technology or long shots.

All of this carries over to humanity; we need to achieve a sustainable curve.

And unlike, say, India, getting that number down is much easier (people resist being killed, but freely distributed contraceptives would likely by welcomed by women).