There's 200 other people on the flight that think this plane is going to crash instead of thinking this plane is going to land safely and a ransom is going to occur.
Prior to 9/11 hijackings were rare but still occurred with everybody living [1]. There is a notable truncation in the list after 9/11 of incidents per decade (across the world; so nothing special about TSA).
Both. 1.5/3 T is standard, >3 T machines (such as 5 T from United Imaging) are becoming more popular (and affordable) and at the same time ultra low field ones keep improving and now they make some things that were impossible before now actually doable such as bed-side MRI (not in clinical practice of course, but there was nice engineering proof of concept with ultra low field MRI machine that could be powered by normal power outlet).
The idea behind the recent boom in low-field stuff is that you'd like to have small/cheap machines that can be everywhere and produce good-enough images through smarts (algorithms, design) rather than brute force.
The attitude on the research side is essentially "por qué no los dos?" Crank up the field strength AND use better algorithms, in the hopes of expanding what you can study.
I know nothing about the "industry" of MRIs, but from the physics side, (everything equal) more Tesla is better - at the end of the day, harder magnetic field gets you a stronger signal
No matter how many janitors, cooks, etc you have you'll never invent a rocket. Most hard working people are just doing societal plumbing not inventing. So losing a bunch of them won't impact the technological advancement of your society.
But, I still think there's a flawed premise here. Loosing a janitor to UBI means that they can occasionally help their friend with rocketry or some other pursuit they have interest in. Providing UBI means that geologists don't need to hoard data because they won't starve if they don't get a cut from it's usage. The people involved in technological break through are often doing it for self-interest or fame and don't stop once they've hit some financial breakpoint.
We're long past the point where we barely need anybody to work to actually feed/house everybody and at this point it's all gravy. For obvious reasons we couldn't feed/house everybody if they wanted to solely live in NYC but IIUC no UBI proposal is about that; UBI lets you live in below median-desired places without additional income.
But knowledge and academic research and industry R&D are key for progress though. All of which require hard work.
You also don't balance equations in your examples. Your janitor goes to help a friend with rocketry, which seems like a net gain, but someone else now needs to stop helping a friend to replace that janitor's position. Otherwise researches at that facility where janitor had worked will have to do janitor's work instead of doing their own. You call work cooks and janitors are doing worthless for progress, but researches (or children in school) need to eat, need to have functional workplace/classroom, etc. While they might not make progress directly, they enable other people to make progress.
> We're long past the point where we barely need anybody to work to actually feed/house everybody
Why would we need UBI then? The price of food and of housing everybody would be dirt cheap, if that were really true. Value of anything is completely relative (which I find that many people have trouble grasping). If something requires very little work, then it will be very very cheap in an ideal free market.
> But knowledge and academic research and industry R&D are key for progress though. All of which require hard work.
Do you think that the people who do valuable research are doing it purely because of financial motivation, or is something else going on there? The point I was trying to make is that giving people a basic income so that they won't literally starve if they don't work isn't going to completely eliminate all motivation to work. Some people will be motivated because they want more money than what UBI provides (as I think there's pretty ample evidence that desire for more money is something a lot of people seem to have independent of how stable their situation is), and plenty of people will be motivated to work for the myriad of other reasons that already motivate them. There's an argument you can make that the money from UBI will be enough to change the decision some people have, but exactly how many people that will be and the effects that have on society will depend quite a bit on how much money is being given. To me, that means the question isn't a binary question of "would UBI be good", but a spectrum of potential amounts of money (with $0 being the choice of "no UNI" that's presented as half of the original binary). Maybe there's a compelling argument that the value should be $0, but I've yet to see an argument for it that actually engages with it as a spectrum in the first place, which is why none of those arguments end up seeming particularly compelling.
Of course money is not the only thing that motivates people. But there's a lot of empirical evidence that it matters. A lot, unfortunately. And I say unfortunately as I would rather have it matter less. But me whishing it doesn't change the data.
UBI is a high concept pitch, that is memorable and catchy, but AFAIK it's not well supported either by psychological models or by empirical economics data. It gives some social safety net. Problem is that it gives a rather weak safety net. We can actually do better.
Can I ask you why exactly does it need to be UBI? If another system (more complex, with less sexy pitch) could provide a bigger safety net and have a more positive economic impact, wouldn't you rather choose that?
> Otherwise researches at that facility where janitor had worked will have to do janitor's work instead of doing their own.
Or facilities optimize to produce less trash so they can handle the newer trash load with less staff instead of paying extra.
> The price of food and of housing everybody would be dirt cheap ... then it will be very very cheap in an ideal free market.
We don't live in an ideal free market.
Food is extremely cheap to the point that the USG (effectively) sets price floors which prevents it from falling further. People do live on $3/day.
SROs not in say NYC are cheap as well. Everybody trying to live in the same major cities will never be cheap.
> Why would we need UBI then?
Activation Energy - Many people have no choice to work a dead-end or low-paying job because they cannot afford to take a break to find higher paying work more suited to their skills.
Opportunity Cost - The geologist example from above where you need to hide information from others so you don't suffer.
Societal unrest - Literally right now there's a president in the US whose base is upset about how the technological progress was not shared with them to the point they want to throw away any current advantages to go backwards in time.
> Or facilities optimize to produce less trash so they can handle the newer trash load with less staff instead of paying extra.
You are breaking the principle of keep all other conditions constant. If it's possible to optimize, why didn't they do it before? They were already motivated to maximize profits. Optimization is also an additional work which you are conveniently ignoring.
> Food is extremely cheap to the point that the USG (effectively) sets price floors which prevents it from falling further. People do live on $3/day.
Food prices sometimes fall below costs because agriculture is volatile. It's not proof that food is inherently "extremely cheap" to produce. Also, absolute prices cannot be easily compared between countries and low quality food has negative health effects.
> Activation Energy - Many people have no choice to work a dead-end or low-paying job because they cannot afford to take a break to find higher paying work more suited to their skills.
If basic needs are so cheap that UBI can cover it, then doing low-paying job part time should also cover these basic needs. Something in your logic is not adding up.
> Opportunity Cost - The geologist example from above where you need to hide information from others so you don't suffer.
Opportunity cost is the loss of other alternatives when one alternative is chosen. Geologists not needing to hide information, because they don't need that money to survive is opportunity cost how? And even with UBI they would still benefit, if they get that additional money.
> Societal unrest - Literally right now there's a president in the US whose base is upset about how the technological progress was not shared with them to the point they want to throw away any current advantages to go backwards in time.
> You are breaking the principle of keep all other conditions constant.
We've added a change; of course the world will change! But yeah sure if we introduce UBI and hold the rest of the world the same then UBI will have an unobservable effect.
> If it's possible to optimize, why didn't they do it before?
I mean people aren't actually rational so there's a million angles there. However, the cost of a janitor is going to go up with UBI as the opportunity cost has increased.
> then doing low-paying job part time should also cover these basic needs. Something in your logic is not adding up.
No, I just don't think you understand the world around you. Have you never heard of remote nomads? Plenty of people work full-time for parts of the year or part-time all of the year.
> Geologists not needing to hide information, because they don't need that money to survive is opportunity cost how?
Giving the information away for free costs you the money that you could've gotten for charging for it. When you need that money to survive then you have to restrict access. When you don't then you're able to volunteer it.
If we want to have any meaningful debate on what effect something has, we need to try to separate what are the reactions/side effects caused by it and to try to avoid additional confounding changes that were not caused by it. Trying to undo the negative side effect you don't like by, for example, introducing new technological innovations, or in your case a new optimization even though there is no increase in anything that would help do develop this new optimization, is making a confounding change.
While speculating what might happen in some particular cases can be fun, the real questions that need to be answered are regarding the macroeconomic effects of UBI. Starting with what % of GDP will be needed for UBI that will cover all the basic needs (food, housing, healthcare, etc.)? And then focus, not just on what few good Samaritans might do, but on how households, firms, and governments would respond at scale: labor supply, wages and prices, inflationary pressure, taxes, effects on productivity, growth, etc.
But I think our discussion has run its course. While we clearly have different opinions, it was still fun and I hope we both learned something. Be well!
> So losing a bunch of them won't impact the technological advancement of your society.
This reminds me of Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide, where a civilization decides that phone sanitizers are useless, until removing them quietly collapses everything else. Declaring work “non-essential to progress” usually just means we don’t understand its role.
The original poster was the one that questioned the funding, so talking about funding is on topic. The illegal aliens issue is why they need so much funding. USA has a bigger illegal alien issue than any other developed country, so to fix that it makes sense they need more funding to try to solve it.
It is questionable that they need that much money, especially when it appears that a lot of the workforce is being used to suppress protests and work more or less as a private army of the convicted fraudster that Americans apparently thought it would be wise to provide the nuclear codes to.
Keep in mind, if you defined ICE as a military, it would be the thirteenth largest on the planet [1]. I have yet to see an argument or study that indicates that our immigration problem is costing us more than Poland's entire military, and I have seen a lot of evidence that immigration is a net positive in the US.
You could say something like "BUT, BUT, BUT HE'S ONLY GOING AFTER THE ILLEGALS YOU WANT ILLEGALS HERE HAHAHA WOKE LEFTY OPEN BORDERS <insert other idiotic conservative buzzword>", but determining whether or not the person in question is here "legally" clearly has not been the priority of this current administration and its weird militarization of ICE.
By definition a US citizen is not an illegal alien. OP is right to question if ICE should have an unlimited budget when they're clearly using that budget on things that are _not_ immigration (illegal aliens).
Not only did they correctly hold a Yes bet about Maduro they also "correctly" made a bet about the US invading Venezuela and then they _sold_ it early at 18c for a profit as opposed to holding it to maturity (which would've been a "no").
They also did this the correct hold vs sell-early on 4 contracts.
How do you define maturity time here? Is it when the incident occurred (in this case the downfall or the invasion)? Otherwise why is there a buffer between the time this incident took place to the time the contracts matured?
It's maturity is ideally the date listed in the contract (i.e. by Jan 9th) but may extend for 10 days in case a report's publication was delayed.
That said, you can sell contracts to other users (which is typically what happens ...) so when people buy a Yes contract for 5c they're not buying from Polymarket; they're buying it from somebody else. This allows you to make money before maturity. The reason for this is that you can mint YES+NO contracts by paying Polymarket $1 which nets you 0$ as you spent $1 and between the Yes and No contracts Polymarket pays back $1. But if you spend $1 for a YES+NO and sell the No for 50c to another user and the Yes for 70c then you net 20c or alternatively you sell the No for 5c to another user and hold the Yes to maturity and get the $1 back from Polymarket.
Although to be clear, I don't exactly know all the inner workings of Polymarket so it could be the case that they've started to act more like a House than a Market and they're actually putting money on the other side of the contract (IIRC, Kalshi is starting to do that for Sports-based contracts either that or having a partner company do it as opposed to actual users).
The word "near" doesn't appear in the constitution you say? Well, I guess your next of kin will have to wait for the court to decide what near means.
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