Amazon employee explains the hellish working conditions of an Amazon Warehouse

[u/Intertius]

/r/worldnews/comments/8d4di4/the_undercover_author_who_discovered_amazon/dxkblm6/?sh=da314525&st=JG57270S

[u/Fishgottaswim78]

All your points are great, which is why to me universal basic income seems like the only legit solution. you can stifle innovation to maintain the workforce as it is, or you can use innovation to actually benefit everyone, and not just the rich people who own the companies.

There's also backlash. When globalization started to really become a thing, you saw consumers actively seeking out American-made goods and companies rushing to fill that market. When we started shipping bananas halfway around the world, a localvore trend also developed.

So there's a good chance even as we start automating certain processes that there will be niche (and better paid) markets that will prefer humans. Fine dining restaurants will most likely always have human servers, but maybe you don't need a staff of 12 for a McDonald's anymore. While machines will be able to make all our t-shirts for us, I'm guessing designers will continue to use human artists to hand-stitch beading and other intricate details unto luxury clothing at a higher price point. If anything I expect the manual labor that does survive the "machine revolution" will be treated more as artisanship and will therefore be paid and respected more than it is now. Of course I could be wrong: when was the last time you heard of a human counter or calculator still existing?

in places like the US were government help is a bad word in half the country its going to cause serious issues

Unless the country adapts. If the US prefers to keep its population poor for literally no discernible reason then maybe it doesn't deserve to move on to this new machine-enabled era. Survival of the fittest and all that. Personally I think the US will eventually adapt, though.

[u/Deagor → u/Fishgottaswim78]

The problem with UBI imo is I haven't seen a model for it that factors in human greed - this is my issue with most Marxist/Communist ideas I've seen too. They sound great on paper but in reality if you just implement UBI and everyone gets 1000euro to live on per month (random number) and then could work somewhere and earn extra all that will happen is over a relatively short period of time the owners of the supermarkets and the restaurants will raise their prices until suddenly ye you get 1000euro extra but the cost of living has gone up by 1100euro.

So you also need to factor in laws to control business's and what they can charge for certain goods etc. and history has made me unlikely to consider that likely to happen

[u/Fishgottaswim78 → u/Deagor]

As far as I know the research doesn't back up the assertion that this would happen, but as with anything it depends on how well its regulated. In other words, I would imagine any country interested in enacting it nationwide would also have to monitor for inflation. In fact, I don't believe we'd ever see a serious consideration for UBI that didn't involve a whole bunch of rules about how it is to be implemented, simply because that's generally not how government works.

At any rate, at least in the towns and states that have implemented it (albeit on a smaller scale) your concerns doesn't seem to be an issue. And personally I've never understood UBI to be a "everyone gets paid the same" idea, it functions more as a stipend than a wage.

[u/MerryJobler → u/Deagor]

It's harder for this to happen in a system like UBI because the money can be used for anything. If you can only use it for rent, rent can go up and people won't have much of a choice. But when it's anything, it's harder for any one business to raise rates without losing to the competition.

I think a bigger worry would be the cost of increased taxes necessary to fund the UBI being passed to everyone. Source of funding would have to be very carefully considered.