lackingcaffeine

Corporations and the ultra rich are pretty new arrivals in the picture and I am willing to give them the benefit of the doubt.

This is fairly naive and also misses the fact that corporations have been around for a very long time too and don't have a great moral track record either. The Dutch East India Company at its peak dwarfed any modern corporation in terms of wealth and power[1] and was incredibly exploitative and corrupt. The British East India Company caused Opium addiction in China and kickstarted the colonisation of India. Industrial capitalists created (and still create) inhumane working conditions for their workers. If you count the whole sum of human misery created by the economic demands of the slave trade it becomes harder to even confidently assert that governments or religions have caused more evil.

This is not necessarily to say that corporations have caused more evil than governments or politics, but they do have a long track record of evil too and shouldn't be given "the benefit of the doubt" any more than any other organisation with a large amount of power.

[1] http://www.visualcapitalist.com/most-valuable-companies-all-...

I can understand why people with depression are drawn towards it. The very nature of the condition leads to desperation in trying to escape it. If you have had depression for a long time and conventional therapy or medication seems to have failed any avenue which can relieve it becomes viable, whether that's micro-doses of hallucinogenics or something that previously you would have considered extreme like the zapping in the article.

I'm surprised it doesn't mention the referral system. Pretty much every Londoner I know in their early twenties who uses Uber was given an initial £10/20 (can't remember exactly how much) to spend if they referred a friend. I remember thinking at the time how much money this must cost but it clearly worked, everyone who had it was looking to give their uber code away to someone new so you could travel in luxury for free.

My concern is perhaps not with this generation but the next. I don't think anybody who is used to working and the lifestyle that it allows would seek a massive reduction in income to pursue something frivolous, but it is easy to imagine an entire group of people entering the job-market for the first time having no inclination to work for a job, when their own hobbies and interests can be sated without the need to be profitable. Which needless to say would be economically damaging in the long run

I don't agree that anything close to a majority a people are working unethically or for unethical ends. Most people are doing jobs that have some economic and societal function. This system works so well because if the product you are offering isn't needed by society then it can't exist. I'm just wondering what the consequences of this subversion will be. If everybody opens a "good business" that doesn't make a profit or is needed, the services we do need will be compromised and the money we take to build schools and hospitals will be reduced.

The ethical net gain might be good, and society's impression of jobs may be altered but that doesn't answer the economic problem of how to encourage people to work in fields that are fiscally meaningful

I think the idea of a basic income is really interesting though one aspect of it troubles me and I would be interested to hear HN's solutions to it. The trouble lies in the creative and economic relationship. If a substantial number of people reduce or stop their usual working hours and live off the income to pursue entirely creative activities, such as making a website or art, they are exempt from the usual capitalist status quo which forces a venture to be good, popular and eventually profitable (there is no standard of quality necessary as long as its overheads are not too high). This could mean a substantial number of people are neither creating wealth through work or taxable business.

One counter-argument is that by freeing up people to pursue their interests, there will be more good businesses opened as well, which will be profitable in the long run. The other is that a person would not pursue a project that is not well-received for a long period of time due to negative feedback.

Neither of these fully answers the problem though of what the system would do to stop people falling off the economic grid and the impact on GDP/taxable income this would have. Any thoughts?

Pretty ironic considering how anti-Snowden and anti-Guardian the Sun was over the leaks i.e.

http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/suncolumnists/louisemen...

Surprisingly there was a complete volte-face when it emerged GCHQ were spying on journalists too, perhaps "nothing to hide, nothing to fear" isn't as convincing when you're the one being targeted.