The danger I see with UBI, is (in addition to possible inflation, etc.) is that commentators on HN tend to be of higher education, curious, and simply "hackers". Most people here would love to be payed money so they could sit and program some cool OSS, start a new company or simply change the world.
For them, UBI is fantastic. How many more Googles/GNUs/Apples would there be if engineers could quit existing companies and form, all while guaranteed basic sustenance.
The problem is that there are a lot of people who don't care for that. You pay them money, they'll sit playing Video games, sports, or simply bum around.
And then you start having issues convincing people to go for higher education (even assuming its free).
Wait, what about lower education?
Go to school, get good grades, or else you'll ... get a livable wage anyways?
Why should I write essays when I can play video games instead?
Then, until everything is automatable, you still need to get people to work under the hot sun, picking potatoes.
If you have a livable wage without it, why would you go? And how much will the farmer need to pay workers to go?
A thought experiment: Assume a near-future world where automation can provide a decent standard of living for everyone. Further assume there is a part of the population that just slacks off. Would you be in favor of some sort of punishment to make those folks conform to your standard of not wasting their lives?
My main point is that people tend to view everyone as themselves. So intellectuals tend to view everyone as intellectuals.
So we think that if only I'd have guaranteed income, I'd finally get around to fixing Firefox, or making an Open Source Google, or whatever. Therefore, it would be better for society if people would be free to leave "useless work" and innovate instead.
But once you see the "real world," you realize that it's not going to happen. Most people would just sit at home playing CS or chatting on FB.
Now once humanity is retired, and of no more use (singularity), then sure, why not. It'll be the AIs innovating everything, running everything, and no one will be doing anything useful anyways.
But until that point, I don't know if we can realistically afford three quarters of the population to just go into early retirement.
I'm one of those who views UBI as a way of dealing with productivity explosion implied by (some models of) the singularity (as opposed to a form of welfare.) It seems a realistic option, and more desirable than e.g. slavery or genocide, once things are getting closer to the limit, eh?
In other words, "those proles are so lazy that as long as they don't starve, they'd PREFER being poor"? People living on only UBI will still be relatively poor.
Look at all the lengths people throughout the ages have gone to to make money. People LIKE money. They like it so much they are willing to work for more of it, even when they already have enough to barely survive.
The problem you point to is self-limiting. Regardless of the nominal level of UBI, it won't provide a satisfactory income unless a sufficient number of people remain working to provide the goods and services required to provide a satisfying style of life for the UBI-only recipients and sufficient additional value to workers for them to continue working. Prices will adjust to make this the case.
As the quality of life provided on UBI-only declines, the incentive for additional productive work will increase.
(of course, lots of people now continue to expend additional effort beyond what is necessary for a minimally livable existence, so I don't see this as likely to be a great problem.)
My biggest concern with the UBI is that looking back at societies with UBI (such as the upper class Europe of the Middle Ages through the 19th century), for every Newton or Voltaire were many more unknown nobles who spent their life grooming their mustaches.
I don't believe our society is that much better now.
In a sense, but in this particularly case it operates as a negative feedback control mechanism which prevents the actual feared problem from occurring, so is hardly a "tragedy".
> My biggest concern with the UBI is that looking back at societies with UBI
There are no societies with UBI to look back on.
> such as the upper class Europe of the Middle Ages through the 19th century
A benefit restricted to a particular social class is not a UBI (or, at least, not much like what modern UBI proposals target, and not likely to serve as a guide as to what one can expect from them), nor, even ignoring that aspect, did the upper class of Europe through any of that time have anything remotely resembling a UBI, which is a flat, equal, unconditional grant to all members of a society.
Now, in much of that period, individual nobles had (either by definition or just disproportionately, depending on the particular time and place) either claims to income from substantial properties or family connections to those who did and who would support junior family members with, often quite conditional, support, but that's more the position of a wealthy capitalist or their associates in the modern era than that of a UBI beneficiary.
>The problem is that there are a lot of people who don't care for that. You pay them money, they'll sit playing Video games, sports, or simply bum around.
Which is cheaper than housing even a small number of them in prisons. One of the hopes is that by eliminating much of the desperateness from poverty, we'll save a bundle from the accompanying reduction in crime.
> People over a certain age get a UBI (in many countries).
> Maybe extrapolate from what they do...
People over the age for drawing public pensions (whether or not those are UBI-like; most I'm familiar with are not) are probably not representative of the broader population in their decisions with regard to engagement in the labor market, entrepreneurship, etc., and how those decisions are impacted by changes in available resources.
> The NSA (or anyone else who can MITM https, such as my workplace, college, etc.) can effectively turn it into http, and see the content.
To be clear, unless NSA has some massive capabilities we haven't dreamed off, properly implemented HTTPS cannot be MITM'ed (via SSL stripping, or other means) by anyone who lacks access to your local machine. Specifically, by properly-implemented SSL, I mean:
1. Serving https only, no http
2. HSTS
3. Certificate pinning
The situation you mention regarding workplace computers is a little different from the NSA, since they have the explicit authority and ability to install root certificates on your local work computer. Without those root certs (like if you use a personal computer at work), they lack the ability to MITM your connection, assuming the above.
If I'm the NSA, I'd already have stolen Protonmail's HSTS pinned cert's private key (possibly by burning a zero day getting into one of their web servers, possibly by "asking nicely" to some tech employee there for whom I had appropriate leverage).
But yeah - short of nation-state or very high level LEO (who're just piggybacking on their local NSA equivalent), HSTS with pinned certs is as close to "secure" as we have right now.
Yeah, but "stealing" them isn;t the NSA's only avenue to acquire them. With Lavabit they just said "give us the keys so we can snoop all we want" - I suspect very few of us would be able to resist like Levinson did (as in, shut your company and livelihood down, and hope they don't throw you in jail for doing so). (Fortunately, most of us won't have users with as much heat coming down on them as Snowden, but if you're building _anything_ privacy related you owe it to yourself to consider how far you'd go to protect your users if one of them turned out to be another Snowden...)
"stealing" is the only path the NSA can take in the case of ProtonMail, due to their servers being hosted in Switzerland and not within the borders of a nation that has a strong relationship with the US intelligence community.
I'd bet good money that the NSA can outsource this to their friends/counterparts/lackeys in any of five eyes, nine eyes, and fourteen eyes countries - and through less official channels involving local or flown-in thugs, pretty much everywhere else. They probably can't easily get Huawei's or Baidu's private keys, but I bet there's tens or hundreds of thousands of Protonmail sized companies in China/Russia/everywhere else that they _can_ strongarm the owners or sysadmin staff into handing keys over.
Or maybe I'm just in a way too "the whole world is fucked" mood today...
Another thing in the security tool chest is SubResource Integrity. If your JS is hosted on a CD you can put a hash of the expected JavaScript within the HTML script declaration. When the browser downloads it, it'll verify the hash before executing it.
Is there any advantage in using a functional language when programming non-mathematically related code?
I see how it can help write Neural Networks, AI, financial code, etc. But if you know Python,Ruby,PHP,Java and Lisp (well), why would you choose to write a blog, webstore, webmail client or social media* app (which probably is about 90% of what people actually do) in Lisp over the four three?
I'll tell you why I would chose the first four:
1. Large community.
2. Many more libraries.
3. Easier to hire.
*Except for (perhaps) a small spam-block/feed ai module
Yes. Functional programming (although it isn't necessarily a trait of Lisp) has, in fact, little relation to math (despite what many people believe). It's also very far removed from the field of AI right now (not for any particular reason, but there's no more specific reason to switch to Lisp for AI than there is for desktop or web apps). The reason you'd use Lisp is quite simple -- it saves time and makes programming easier. Macros are the biggest time saver in the world, and you don't realize how much time you waste writing repetitive code until you get to use them.
As for your 3 reasons in favor of the other languages, I think the first means almost nothing at all. Lisp is much easier (once you grasp it) than many other languages, so I think the fact that you'll get less answers on StackOverflow is irrelevant. As for the second reason, as long as you have one library that works for what you want -- say some library for writing web servers -- it doesn't really matter after that. There's rarely any reason to reinvent the wheel here, and there's always someone that attempted such a common task before you. Just because you don't have 3,000 different choices like in Java, doesn't mean that you won't find high-quality code for what you need to do (in fact, I'd argue that Lisp code has a much higer quality on average than Java code). As for hiring, I think Paul Graham has already given the best comments on this. Simply put, a good programmer can be taught to write good Lisp, even if they don't know it by the time you hire them.
I'd say web's request -> response model is pretty well suited to functional programming.
It seems popular amongst JavaScript programmers at the moment as well. React, which appears the current hotness, is based on making a functional interface to the DOM.
Although actually, I'd say the main reason to use a Lisp for web gunk is the macros rather than the functional programming. The tree structure maps very naturally onto HTML generation. There are some really nice libraries (in particular I'm familiar with Clojure libraries) which make the server-side part of a web app really neat. You can basically skip the whole 'templating' bit.
