That interpretation seems... odd. You seem to be implying that if your policy is to give everyone a tax credit (i.e. give them money) if you win then you're not allowed to tell anyone about it.
He's also stated that he can issue the money without help from Congress, which directly contradicts the idea that it's harmless bloviating about voting in a 120th Congress to implement specific policy:
About the only type of pollution which is actually global is CO2, which is exactly the thing this kind of review has nothing to do with. If you want people to emit less CO2 then you price carbon and as a result everyone has that amount of incentive to prefer alternate means of generating electricity.
> The federal Environmental Protection Agency plans to scrap a federal requirement that states tell the public — and allow public comment — before approving air-pollution permits for industrial facilities. That includes the data centers rising across the country, as well as the power plants built to feed their enormous appetite for electricity.
> While eliminating bullshit jobs sounds great on its own merits, eliminating the wages for said jobs can actually clog the local engine by lowering wages, raising unemployment, slowing hiring, and curtailing growth.
If you get rid of BS jobs then you're not paying people to do them. Someone then gets the money you're not paying them, e.g. the company can now charge lower prices to customers who then have more money to spend. They then want to buy something else with the money and the people who need jobs then get jobs doing that.
In most cases this will actually increase consumption, because people buy more when things cost less and therefore provide more value for money. If the cost of a year of college goes down by $10,000 by eliminating some bloated administrative bureaucracy then more people can afford it, positions that couldn't previously find qualified applicants get filled and unemployment goes down, those positions pay better and people have more money to spend, etc.
> I suggest that instead of cutting “bullshit jobs”, we instead reduce working hours across the board (and penalize overtime)
Isn't this the exact same thing only distributing the hours differently?
You could be proposing one of two things. One is to have everyone work fewer hours doing the same thing they do now, but that one obviously doesn't work. Jobs like carpenter or trauma surgeon aren't BS jobs and if people spent fewer hours doing them then we'd have fewer of those things done, which would be bad.
The other is that instead of getting rid of BS jobs, we get rid of BS work. So we have fewer middle managers and have the people who used to do that instead do something productive, allowing the people currently doing the productive thing to work fewer hours.
The result of that would then be that everyone works fewer hours. But then they would have less money to spend. If you work for 32 hours instead of 40 at the same hourly rate then you take home less money. Getting rid of 20% of hours rather than 20% of employees would reduce total income by the same amount.
If the same thing happens and the company e.g. uses the money saved to lower prices then it's a similar scenario to getting rid of the jobs, except that now instead of production/consumption increasing because we got rid of inefficiency, people work fewer hours to get the same stuff because now they get paid for fewer hours but things also cost less. But that tends to be trouble because the prices change non-uniformly, e.g. the cost of financial services comes down because you eliminate some useless bureaucracy but you haven't done zoning reform so housing is still expensive. When jobs still pay the same amount that's fine, because a bunch of small businesses pay lower costs for payment processing or employee health insurance, lower prices by that much and then have to hire the people who lost their jobs to produce the extra stuff people buy with the surplus money. But if jobs suddenly pay 20% less, your mortgage payment hasn't changed.
Whereas if you take the original premise that people making less money would reduce consumption, e.g. that the savings would go into Evil Corp's money bin and never be spent, then you're in even more trouble in your case. Because you're deterring people from going back to the original number of hours in order to be able to afford the original level of consumption.
> I always wonder if anyone else considers BS jobs societies implict UBI?
BS jobs are the anti-UBI. With a UBI you get to avoid starvation even if you refuse to take a job which is excessively dangerous or degrading or low-paying, which in turn exerts pressure on those jobs to improve conditions or pay. You get more runway to start a business instead of being forced to work for someone else because you need to make rent today rather than a year from now when your new venture is off the ground. It allows you to be actually productive by your own metrics rather than getting taken advantage of for lack of alternatives.
Whereas BS jobs create the illusion of productivity. You get to avoid starvation by digging holes and filling them back in, but now you're wasting all day doing something useless instead of spending that time starting your business or going to school, so you end up stuck in the BS job forever. Which helps neither society nor you compared to you still getting the money and then letting you choose what to do with your time.
> But it's harmful for the average American because filling up the tank costs a lot more.
The fun part about this is that it shows what people actually care about.
What happens if petroleum prices go up? People use less. It's the entire premise of a carbon tax. Fuel costs more so people buy a hybrid or electric vehicle, power utilities find renewables or nuclear more attractive relative to natural gas, etc. In a market economy this is the primary way to get people to switch from something to alternatives -- which is pretty important if you think climate change is a problem.
This is obviously not why Trump is doing it, but it's the consequence of it anyway. So now we get to see what people care about. Do you like higher oil prices because it speeds up the transition away from fossil fuels, or dislike them because of who it is that caused it this time?
That's very hypothetical, but one might also ponder what under scenario Israel might attempt to sink a US battleship and murder dozens of US servicemen.
If a nuclear bomb vaporized New York and you were forced to guess who did it between Israel and Canada, the better guess would be Canada and they don't even have nuclear weapons.
They could verify your identity if you've given it to them.
But it would also be completely reasonable to authenticate the customer exclusively using mechanisms other than government ID. You can already make a withdrawal using your bank card and PIN. If you lose your card you could sign into their website using your password and request a new one etc.
Consider what happens if you lose your government ID. Your bank has much better ways to authenticate you at that point than the government does. Government ID has a major bootstrap problem, whereas patronizing a service doesn't because a new account with no money in it belongs to whoever is signing up for it regardless of who they are, and you can at that point give them a bank card and have them provide a password and email address etc. that allows you to identify them in subsequent transactions without ever needing their name.
> Banks by law require substantial PII in order to even do business with you.
And those laws are extremely invasive and should be repealed. It's offensive to have a law that de facto requires you to identify yourself in order to pay for a newspaper subscription or buy contraceptives over the internet.
But that's not the issue in this case. It's that the bank knows your name and what you buy -- already very bad -- but now you want to create a path to tying that information to everything you do on the internet.
Gift cards don't allow reloading which consequently makes them a significant inconvenience to use for subscriptions. It's sort of like saying you can pay for something by going to their offices and paying in cash. Okay, but then why does the way that 99.9% of people are actually going to do it have to be the one that invades their privacy and puts everything they do in a database?
> You could also do this with ZKPs and device integrity protection.
How has the anti-competitive lock-in scam of "device integrity protection" entered the discussion? Using ZK proofs without it has exactly the same effect.
There are far too many attestation-passing insecure devices to expect attestation to have any security value against attackers who can choose any of those devices on purpose.
"The government already has our IDs" is missing the correlation between the ID and the service. They know your face and your name but not what you do on the internet. The website knows what you do on the internet but it isn't tied to your name. It's the tying them together which is the problem.
Which is why the people trying to do it always pull out the misdirect about ZK proofs. Those don't fix anything because a system that actually preserved privacy wouldn't be able to prove that the user is over 18, only that someone is over 18, not necessarily them. And that in turn means you're setting up a rug pull. You roll out a system which is indistinguishable from the perspective of ordinary people from the one that screws them, and then that system can't actually exclude minors so what follows is calls to change it to stop protecting privacy, at which point the people trying to collect everyone's ID will be arguing that you already have to show ID.
It also presumes you would even get a privacy-preserving implementation to begin with, which a pretty credulous assumption given how these things usually go.
It's not possible to prove the user is anything ever. It probably never will be. Likely what will happen instead is that the person in the ID will become personally liable for accounts verified with that ID. Which is even more reason to reject ID verification.
reply