"Welfare"

[Diogenes]

Even if that is true, under the existing system we get nothing back, and by giving people something for nothing we encourage indolence. The "workfare" recipient would be free to apply to other jobs if they find one that say pays more than minimum wage, as well as the gov free to contract out the employee to private enterprise. There is all this talk of decaying infrastructure in the U.S. and the supposedly exorbitantly high cost of fixing them. Wonder what 10-40million or so new minimum wage workers would do...surely they could paint bridges and overpasses, fix potholes, pour cement etc. Wonder if the cost estimates are based on paying the existing public works employees who no doubt make allot more than minimum wage to fix them?

You could not afford the cost of accidents. With the legal system working as it does, one injury would wipe out the program, but I agree with the idea that people should not be at their ease on welfare.

[williatw]

Even if that is true, under the existing system we get nothing back, and by giving people something for nothing we encourage indolence. The "workfare" recipient would be free to apply to other jobs if they find one that say pays more than minimum wage, as well as the gov free to contract out the employee to private enterprise. There is all this talk of decaying infrastructure in the U.S. and the supposedly exorbitantly high cost of fixing them. Wonder what 10-40million or so new minimum wage workers would do...surely they could paint bridges and overpasses, fix potholes, pour cement etc. Wonder if the cost estimates are based on paying the existing public works employees who no doubt make allot more than minimum wage to fix them?

You could not afford the cost of accidents. With the legal system working as it does, one injury would wipe out the program, but I agree with the idea that people should not be at their ease on welfare.

A government agency/program put out of business by a lawsuit? You mean like homeland security? DOD? HUD?. How many times have people given parole comitted heinous crimes? Ever heard of the parole board or state government being sucessfully sued for that?

[Diogenes]

Even if that is true, under the existing system we get nothing back, and by giving people something for nothing we encourage indolence. The "workfare" recipient would be free to apply to other jobs if they find one that say pays more than minimum wage, as well as the gov free to contract out the employee to private enterprise. There is all this talk of decaying infrastructure in the U.S. and the supposedly exorbitantly high cost of fixing them. Wonder what 10-40million or so new minimum wage workers would do...surely they could paint bridges and overpasses, fix potholes, pour cement etc. Wonder if the cost estimates are based on paying the existing public works employees who no doubt make allot more than minimum wage to fix them?

You could not afford the cost of accidents. With the legal system working as it does, one injury would wipe out the program, but I agree with the idea that people should not be at their ease on welfare.

A government agency/program put out of business by a lawsuit? You mean like homeland security? DOD? HUD?. How many times have people given parole comitted heinous crimes? Ever heard of the parole board or state government being sucessfully sued for that?

Actually, States do get sued for false imprisonment. I've read countless stories of this happening. I've read of others where states are sued for neglect, workers comp, etc.

[williatw]

Your right they do get sued & the suits sometimes win...but I suppose I should have emphasized put out of business by the lawsuit. After all the tax payers are the ones on the hook for the suits. Its not like a private company that can be lawsuited to chapter 11. A bullied student in public school commits suicide, after numerous compliants by their parents not addressed. If that were a private school, you could probably sue them to oblivion, a public school, you might get a settlement, but the public school goes on. The cost are just passed on to the tax payer.

[Teahive]

The only real answer is to work out technology to make everyone self-sustainable enough.

Developing the technology is not sufficient, though. You also need everyone to have free access to it, as well as a minimum amount of land and resources per person.

Resources is doable by recycling/efficiency IE technology.
Free access I don't know about - e.g. does it need to be free if standards of living are raised so much higher thanks to so much better techs of all kinds? And then you have the demographics: people aren't going to pass up on voting themselves "free" (or cheap enough in practice) access to these means of living the good life.

Well, if they can sustain themselves using the technology as well as their own small allocation of resources, where's the problem?

To sustain yourself you can produce your own goods or trade something you have for something you want. But what if all you have to offer is your muscles and brain, and no one is buying? Rising living standards are meaningless if you can't access them.

[Betruger]

I'm going to seem thick but can you rephrase that? I can't figure out how you get to asking those questions.

Well, if they can sustain themselves using the technology as well as their own small allocation of resources, where's the problem?

I dunno, you tell me? What's the "problem statement" as you see it?

To sustain yourself you can produce your own goods or trade something you have for something you want. But what if all you have to offer is your muscles and brain, and no one is buying? Rising living standards are meaningless if you can't access them.

How do you figure the economy would be so much less fluent consequent to ever-improving technologies across the board?

Developing the technology is not sufficient, though. You also need everyone to have free access to it, as well as a minimum amount of land and resources per person.

Free access to technology... Like what.. Cell phones? What technology do you foresee remaining indefinitely inaccessible? How do you envision some limited set of, but widely affective techs like (just from the hip) water treatment, energy source like Polywell, material techs like various carbon products (graphene, CNTs etc), organ regeneration, cheap room-temp SCs, crazy cheap/powerful CPUs (seems far from reality but imagine something like One Laptop Per Child with same power compared to today's as today's are to Apollo hardware, loaded with e.g. Khan Academy, distributed cheap or free (charity) to third world kids en masse, etc), and so on, not being enough to directly and indirectly raise living standards significantly for everyone?

Sure the politics are still seriously in the way of e.g. getting these things to the worse spots in the third world, but compare today to decades or a century+ ago. Almost invariably you've got at least some trickle down. I keep bringing it up, but it's IMHO one of the quintessentials: when we get to working out something like SENS, there'll be no stopping a worldwide "demand" for it being accessible to basically everyone.

With some growing pains, it should be in roughly the same era that we finally colonize off world and give ourselves room for inevitable overpopulation. Because even if most sensible people will realize that with no aging, time is on our side, there'll still be a serious proportion of the world stuck on classic homo sapiens reproductive MO.

[Teahive]

I dunno, you tell me? What's the "problem statement" as you see it?

Maybe I misunderstood what you wrote. I'll try to explain. Your initial statement I replied to was:

The only real answer is to work out technology to make everyone self-sustainable enough.

The way I understand "making everyone self-sustainable" is that everyone would be able to obtain the basic necessities of life through their own economic activity. This requires people to have at least one of
- productive property, e.g. a farm,
- saved goods they can consume or sell off, or
- employment.

A significant part of the population has very little of the first two. And I think technological advances are on a trajectory to make it increasingly harder for people to sell their manual labor. Robots will outperform humans in many areas to the point where employing humans would not be economic even at zero wages. Some people will not be able to keep up getting ever better education and training to avoid this fate.
I'm not sure whether this is what you meant by "less fluent"?

For someone who can get no employment nor has any significant posessions, often the only way to become self-sustainable is to be given access to productive property. But since they have nothing in demand to give, there is no point in asking them to give back anything (material). In essence the productive property (plus the knowledge and technology that goes along with it) would have to be provided free of charge.

You mention charity, and I certainly don't expect the "trickle down" due to it to disappear. But charity that just provides the basic necessities, as too often is the case, does not enable people to be self-sustainable as per the definition above.