I'm (again) shocked that so poor article on UBI triggers any serious discussion: I mean, where's a math behind it? For US alone 1400usd for each adult and 500usd for kid would generate...4,95 trillion fucking dollars annually!
Won't any BUI proponent explain simply HOW (realistically) can it happen?
It’s fascinating, even terrifying how the AI perfectly replicated the exact cognitive distortion we’ve spent decades trying to legislate out of human-to-human relationships.
We've shifted our legal frameworks from "no means no" to "affirmative consent" (yes means yes) precisely because of this kind of predatory rationalization: "They said 'no', but given the context and their body language, they actually meant 'just do it'"!!!
Today we are watching AI hallucinate the exact same logic to violate "repository autonomy"
That's super-interesting experiment, but I wouldn't start it in such a large country as USA.
Why won't humanity test it on a smaller scale?
In Belgium (Ostbelgien) the German-speaking community has a permanent sortition-based Citizens’ Council wired into the parliamentary process; In Ireland they've already run national, randomly selected Citizens’ Assemblies on high-stakes constitutional topics.
These are basically production prototypes - maybe we should ask ourselves why they don't push it further?
This sounds like the 'Future Time Reference' hypothesis by Keith Chen (2013). It’s indeed a fascinating idea, but it’s essentially an example of Galton’s problem (treating related cultures/languages as independent data points).
What makes this story (scientifically) great is that Chen himself co-authored a follow-up study just two years later [1] to rigorously test his own theory.
When they re-analyzed the data using mixed-effects models to control for cultural phylogeny and relatedness, the correlation between grammar and savings pretty much disappeared.
They concluded the original finding was likely a spurious correlation.
It turns out that cultural history drives both the language we speak and our saving habits, rather than the grammar causing the behavior.
That sounds less like “70-hour weeks” and more like admitting only ~30 of those hours matter - everything else is vibes and calendar theater. Which kind of proves the point: forced 996 optimizes for visible suffering, not actual output or upside.
i would disagree with your dismissal of it as theatre. it's not forced, and it would probably be worse if I skipped those meetings :). meeting customers is not the same mental load as focused coding but it's still work that needs to be done
I say this as someone who loves SF and deeply mourns its decline: I think the genre painted itself into a corner by focusing too much on "Hard SF." In my view, an obsession with technology has often been a crutch for weaker storytelling. The genre works best when it serves as a pretext to examine the human condition—like Vonnegut or P.K. Dick did.
By betraying the ideals of humanist writing in favor of technical accuracy, SF has been cannibalized by genres that actually focus on the inner lives of individuals, such as the booming "romantasy" sector.
"Hard SF" is the defining characteristic of the genre, though. Soft SF is just another name for fantasy/magical thinking. Which is fine on its own but not really what sci-fi is about.
I wouldn't blame the demographic shift on female readers; I’d blame the accountants.
The publishing industry hasn't been killed by women, but by risk aversion. Truly groundbreaking SF requires betting on bold, novel, and often weird ideas. Financial departments and algorithms inherently favor safe, repetitive patterns (like romantasy formulas). You can't simulate the next "Dune" or "Neuromancer" on a P&L sheet, so publishers stopped trying.
Won't any BUI proponent explain simply HOW (realistically) can it happen?
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