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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 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
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.
The day I got signed on for 120k was the day all my financial anxieties went away. I’m not rich by any means. My rent is still stupid high. My bills never stop coming in. But I can finally afford furniture. I can finally afford to visit my family when I want to. I don’t worry about min-maxing at the grocery store. I’m not “happy” but it’s the closest I’ve ever been
Being able to walk into a store and drop 50 dollars on something on rare occasion without having to have a panic attack and spend the day before doing in depth financial analysis and math, I cant imagine how much healthier my life would be without that stress.
120k what? Bananas per hour?
That is far too many bananas. You wouldn’t even be able to sell them fast enough.
Bananas are for eating my friend
Congratulations! I’m surviving but without furniture lol.
I’ve got a little bit of disposable income, but just had to go out of network for a surgery because my insurance is weak.
I don’t really have financial worries either though. What’s weird is I make just under $50k now, but the most I ever made was $110k, and at that time I had financial stress. Now is the first time I’ve ever gotten off the paycheck-to-paycheck cycle.
But my financial success currently stops at furniture, so I know exactly what you’re saying. I’ve got a futon, a 5x7 rug, a table, a dining chair, and an armchair. The futon and the rug are the only ones I paid for; the rest was free from craigslist. I carried that damn furniture for miles. Well I had a vehicle for the armchair.
Next thing, after my savings recovers from the surgery, is a 7x9 rug to fill the other half of my main living space, so I can cut down on the creaking boards. Then padding for under the rugs. Then finally another dining chair so I can invite someone over for dinner.
I eat a lot of french fries. So maybe about 50lbs annually.
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.
I am fine with my current salary. None of the problems I have are due to having too little money. It is more that I have hardly any time to spend that money and live a fairly lonely life. None of that would be fixed by a higher salary, which is why I have little motivation to try to get promoted.
Money buys time friend
Not if it’s a salary
What?
$1,000/week UBI.
I mean
It’s not exactly a lot of money, but I would definitely stop working the stupid delivery job and just focus on education if I had that.
What would you like to be educated in?
I meant I’d keep working in education, but I would also keep seeking education of all sorts. IT and science mainly.
a 1500monthly UBI would be life changing to a lot of people.
and probably allow people to meet basic needs if they cracked down on corporate greed and its fake inflation.
The inflation isn’t “fake” and it’s not a result of greed. The greed has always been there, during periods of hyperinflation and during periods of stability.
The thing that changed is the competition, which naturally counterbalances the greed, has been reduced during the pandemic.
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
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?
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.
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.
the 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
300 million per week
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.
I remember a time when someone making “six figures” was extremely wealthy. Now six figures just seems to be the baseline for even having a chance at tackling home ownership in suburban areas. 120k is probably ideal. I don’t likely need more than that and it should be enough to pay for a comfortable lifestyle.
Getting there is the tricky part.
120k what? Bananas per hour?
No, you’re confused. K is the currency, they only need 120 of them.
You are not as funny as you think you are.
I’m not trying to be funny. As a non-American am I supposed to assume that everyone is talking about US dollars? Why don’t people just specify units?
Yes you are. Whether you like it or not, that’s the default.
Says who?
OPEC
None, what I need is UBI.
What if UBI was your salary for living under a system of laws
I get your point, but I disagree, because otherwise it wouldn’t be universal.
