A spiral we are 1000 years into? This little distortion seems to matter to you in a way that the much larger distortions created by governments don't. I don't understand.
There are some pretty revealing comments here. People seem to think only money has value.
Then there are people who see art only as a rich person's pursuit. It can be, but it doesn't need to be.
I am reminded of Daniel James also known as Gwyrosydd, his bardic name. He was a Welsh language poet, who wrote probably the greatest Welsh language song, Calon Lân (means 'a pure heart'). People throughout Wales sing this song 130 years later. It is a proud continuation of a bardic tradition in Wales going back probably thousands of years. It also encompasses the Welsh culture of choral singing, noted in early recorded history.
Daniel James spent his life slaving away in an ironworks, making crucible steel. John Hughes, who wrote the tune worked in an office there.
I like to imagine what they could have done had they been at leisure to work and perform all day.
Go Ireland, great scheme. I wish we had it over here in the UK.
When Nirvana first moved from their small Washington town to Seattle, they were able to pay their rent + everything else from working minimum wage jobs for 2 weeks a month. They had time to practice music and pursue their art.
In an era where working a full time job is not enough to pay the cost of living, arts and culture no longer exist except as hobbies for rich kids. Seattle successfully exterminated their entire arts, music, and culture scene by raising the cost of living sky high.
I live in a fairly expensive city in the UK. Working minimum wage for 2 weeks will pay for a room in a flat share, plus my households food and required bills.
It’s not much of a life but the same still stands in many cities.
Citation needed. "Cobain thought Seattle was too expensive a place to live. He couldn’t even afford his Olympia apartment, and was evicted for not paying rent while he was recording Nevermind.”[1] "They supported themselves through food stamps, sleeping on porches."[2]
> In an era where working a full time job is not enough to pay the cost of living, arts and culture no longer exist except as hobbies for rich kids.
In Ireland _today_, we are in an era where working as a nurse, paramedic, firefighter, teacher, etc have become unable to pay the cost of living, leaving them to exist only as hobbies for the rich kids who can be subsidised by their parents or immigrant labour willing to be exploited to avoid deportation.
Is health not wealth? Education? Safety? Or does only the arts deserve this subsidisation?
The problem with a UBI is not the UBI itself, but the fact that landlords could just raise their price.
You need to solve the contradiction within the economy in order to make UBI works.
The current way our taxation policy work is to tax labor and capital, which is the basis of our economy, while flinching away from taxing land, which derives much of its value from the surrounding economic activity rather than an owner's effort.
By the way, the UBI is an old idea. In the 19th century, it was known as the Citizen's Dividend.
> What part of your idea was supposed to stop that happening
The part where people see their money burning away paying maintenance and tax on deteriorating assets.
Why are people holding assets unused?
Because they don't believe that the city will allow sufficient development to allow them to purchase like-assets in the future if they chose to reinvest and the carrying cost is minimal because council taxes are trivial relative to the value of the asset. If my research is correct, Kensington council taxes are under 10k USD per year.
That's because, in the places where housing is expensive, it's expensive because a _LOT_ of people want to live there. It's a pipe dream that you can out build demand in these places. Reducing prices of housing in nice places to live (by any means, including building) will only result in more demand up until that insatiable demand is satisfied.
Nice places to live can't support all the people that want to live there.
Because demand is, for all intents and purposes, insatiable, the dollar value of housing/property isn't based on supply and demand because supply can't practically be increased to affect demand. Instead, the price is related to what a prospective buyer can afford to pay _every month_ and, thus, is related to interest rates. Interest rates go down, prices go up to the point where a prospective buyer's mortgage payment would be the same.
People who bring up the (un)affordability of housing are never talking about Oklahoma, they're talking about the Bay Area, Southern California, New York City, Seattle, Portland, etc. All places that are so desirable, they can't practically support everyone that wants to live there.
Baby steps. Everyone deserves it, but getting there in one step is politically impossible almost everywhere in the world. Nobody’s saying only the arts deserve subsidies. It’s just easier to justify. But if we want everyone to have basic income, we need to applaud whenever it happens, even if it’s a small subset, and argue they deserve it and that we should have more of it. Complaining about the unfairness of artists being subsidized demonstrates and adds to the political difficultly. If we accept that it’s unfair for a subset, then we might never get basic income since the rich don’t need it and many don’t want it.
Ireland’s affordability problems are almost exclusively centered around its housing crisis and they need to just commit themselves to over-supply induced wealth destruction for the landlord class and older generations. Thankfully, there demographics also support such a move.
>Go Ireland, great scheme. I wish we had it over here in the UK.
It's a bad scheme, it divide's your population into people who have to create "wealth", and people who create "art".
Yes creating art (or preserving rare potatoes[1]) should be supported by your government if it's not survivable in a capitalistic society, however having different rights because of your occupation is not better then the middle ages.
What fraction of that time goes to subsidizing the exponentially wealthier? We could just tax the hell out of the rich and and make better lives for the vast majority of us, while wealth hoarders still get to “win” at the game of life.
It's the same as cities/governments spending on free public basketball courts/tennis courts/running tracks. I come from a country with none of those things, and the difference that makes on the average fitness/skill level of the population is massive compared to places where those things exist.
Both basic income, and public sporting infrastructure have a significant (but not unreasonable) upfront cost, but the payoff in even 2 years time will be massive. Provided the economics check out, there's no reason to not give it a shot.
>Or it divides them into people that create cultural wealth and people who create mere monetary wealth.
That's what i meant with the potatoes, the government pays for the field with the rare potatoes, and the standardized potatoes make wealth.
>So you do agree that art should be supported by government I see, so how would you do it?
With free housing (art community's), tax free stuff (for small to medium sales etc) like it's done today. And to be honest i think 99.5% of artist dont do a full-time-art-job, most of them do other stuff too...and that's good.
Is my friend who plays the didgeridoo in his free time now an artist if he declares it's suddenly his full-time occupation?
One example, why exclude people like Geo-scientists who sometimes dont even get any money (except they work for big-oil or the state).
On a base your are right, not everything that's good for societies is compatible within a capitalistic system. But this is just a complete wrong step.
>But giving housing or tax breaks needs lots of admin. Isn't that less efficient?
Art community's are most always self managing, i would argue finding out who makes art is much more complicated.
>Giving housing forces people to live in certain places.
No one is forced to take free housing or being an artist, if you want something for free you have to play by rules.
>like the people don't know what they need
True, but why are people who are artist different from anyone else, that's my critique. Why is creating art more important then preserving art, being a scientist, a rare-potato-farmer, a retro-game-preserver...or a small town politician?
> True, but why are people who are artist different from anyone else, that's my critique.
I don't think it is helpful to frame it in terms of, 'sure they should get it, but what about other people doing public good? Since the others can't get it, the artists shouldn't'. How about saying, 'this is a great start, how do we get a broader scheme for other philanthropic causes'?
> Is my friend who plays the didgeridoo in his free time now an artist if he declares it's suddenly his full-time occupation?
Is this really a risk, given UBI is generally minimal? Anyone who wants to live on it full-time to support their art, whatever it may be, is welcome to it. It's not like they're sitting back and getting rich, here.
> One example, why exclude people like Geo-scientists who sometimes dont even get any money (except they work for big-oil or the state).
Because "UBI for everyone who deserves it" is a much harder, bigger step, and fighting against small wins because they don't include literally every single outlier case you can think of is absurdly non-productive, not to mention that it's a vacuous counter-argument.
> create cultural wealth and people who create mere monetary wealth
the wealth in this case isn't monetary, it's material production, the productive work of people who create material objects, including your food and shelter. If it was about monetary stuff the government would just print the artists whatever amount of money they need. But that money has to be spent to buy from those who produce the stuff the artists need to live. Who's sponsoring the wealth producers?
The UBI money gets spent by the artist though, some on food, probably more on rent. The rent money probably gets hoarded by the landlord, the other goes to people selling real objects. That is real money back into the economy.
Guess what helps provides a reason for people to want to keep the world running?
We've seen what happens to pieces of the world that prioritize economic production over everything else, and it isn't pretty. We have a number of laws and regulations preventing that sort of production at all costs behavior.
Your either don't understand or don't want to understand what people are commenting about here. Of course nobody thinks that only money has value. If only money had value, why would anybody exchange money for, say, a bread?
What many people are wondering about, is whether the value of the money paid by tax payers to artists, equals the value of what they give to the tax payers in return.
Because if it would be equal, then one might wonder why they apparently are not able to sell their art for the same amount of money.
You don't have to wonder whether or not it returns value to the tax payer. The Irish government already monitored the pilot program for two years, publishing all of the details and findings. [1]
"The headline finding from this social CBA is that for every €1 of public money invested in the pilot, society received €1.39 in return"
This came about as a mixture of greater economic activity from participants, cultural impacts that saw public-facing artist activities increase, and improvements to wellbeing of participants that reduced their requirement for psychological interventions by the state. The state also predicts that the further roll-out of this program will benefit consumers with lower prices for artistic works, as there will be more supply overall.
The scheme has been quite popular here in Ireland. Given the history of Ireland when it comes to art (both in the sense of spoken and written word, and in other mediums), it makes sense to introduce a scheme like this to safeguard and uplift those who produce art.
Thanks for linking the CBA. I hadn't seen that before
> "The headline finding from this social CBA is that for every €1 of public money invested in the pilot, society received €1.39 in return"
Okay, so if you read the CBA, the net fiscal cost of the pilot was:
* Gross pilot cost (2021–2025): ~€114 MM
* Tax revenue: ~€36 MM
* Social protection savings: ~€6.5 MM
* Net fiscal cost: ~€72 MM
So for every €1 of public money invested in the pilot, society received 37¢ in fiscal return. So it's an unambiguous fiscal cost, a net loss.
Of the "Total monetised benefits", €80 MM of the benefit was in "wellbeing gains", as measured by the WELLBY test, which is calculated based on a single survey question:
> “Overall, how satisfied are you with your life nowadays, where 0 is "not at all satisfied" and 10 is "completely satisfied"?
The €80 MM in "wellbeing gains", which is the sole decided of whether this pilot was a net positive or a net negative to society, is because on average, the 2,000 pilot scheme participants had a very approximate 0.7–1.1 increase in score when asked the above question during the pilot as compared to before the pilot. Each 1 point is deemed to be worth €15,340.
That's it. There's no economic return - it's a proven economic cost. There's no proven social benefit. No demonstrated effect on art prices or availability.
The pilot was successful - if you consider it to have been - solely because the artists who received payments as part of the pilot had an improvement in Wellby satisfaction score when they were asked via survey. If you remove this factor, the pilot was an abject failure.
I think you two are using different definitions of society.
In this comment society seems to mean "the government, and its tax revenue profit/loss statement"
In the previous comment society seems to be construed more broadly and encompass both non-economic activity and economic activity outside the collection and disbursement of tax funds.
> In this comment society seems to mean "the government, and its tax revenue profit/loss statement"
No, that's not correct. I specifically separated the pure economic impact from the society impact, but the only societal impact used to quantify the success of the pilot scheme is that the people paid a basic income by the scheme had higher life satisfaction as measured by a single survey question.
That is the basis used by Government to claim that it's a social benefit.
Personally, I support the arts and I think that culture, health, housing accessibility, safety, fitness, happiness, and companionship are all better measures of a society than GDP or other fiscal metrics.
Right now, we have a health, housing, and social crises desperate for resources - resources that are allocated exclusively through Euro budgets. This pilot scheme has not demonstrated any cultural or social impact at all. Only the aforementioned increase in recipient satisfaction.
Meanwhile people in dire situations face multi-year waits for operations, or dying of a treatable stroke/MI due to a lack of ambulances, or death by suicide as the mental health services are overwhelmed.
Is the WELLBY score of these artists more important the WELLBY score of parents awaiting their kid's operation for the second or third spring? Or burying their children? Or raising them in hotel rooms?
Ireland is only economically successful. We are failing our citizenry abysmally outside of fiscal terms and basic income for artists should be allocated while hundreds of more pressing needs are left unmet.
Nicely set out. I completely agree with you. I'm also pretty certain - and I say this both as a lover of the arts and as a taxpayer - that I will see no benefit whatsoever in my life, or to society in general, from the works produced under the aegis of this programme.
You know what would have been a worthwhile use of that €114 MM? Improving the pay and conditions of our naval personnel. That way, the nation might now be able to put more than one patrol boat out to sea at a time.
Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.
In this case isn't it more that:
Every sculpture that is made, every picture drawn, every bed left unmade, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.
From where I'm sitting, this is theft, its forced wealth redistribution, from people that are potentially already struggling,to people that choose to slum it as artists. Its not even means tested, this really will result in money transferring from those on the edge of poverty to rich art school kids.
There's currently 16,000 homeless / at risk people in Ireland, including 5000 children [0]. I can think of at least one better use for that money.
> Your either don't understand or don't want to understand what people are commenting about here.
From reading your comment I think this observation applies to your own understanding, not the gp's.
> whether the value of the money paid by tax payers to artists, equals the value of what they give to the tax payers in return. [...] one might wonder why they apparently are not able to sell their art for the same amount of money.
You might not see it but this is effectively equivalent to thinking only money has value, because you're describing a system whereby value is defined by money. Your dichotomy assumes anything that cannot be sold has no value, & anything that is sold is only as valuable as its price. The emergent conclusion from that formula is that only money has value.
It's worth noting that it also follows from this that value is defined by people with purchasing power. If for example the only cohort who value any given piece of art cannot afford to financially support the artist creating said art, not only is the art & the artist's work without value, but by extension so too are the perspectives, autonomy & - ultimately - the lives of that cohort without value.
You’re making a logical leap, how can you say only money has value when things are worth money? That item has value equivalent to the money given for it, therefore that item has value. It’s likely you’d be able to find people who are willing to trade some electronic device you have for another equivalent one (some iPhone for some Android) without exchanging any money. Money is just the measure of value, it’s like saying something cannot be 5ft tall without the existence of a measuring tape. Societies have existed before money they were just inefficient.
> That item has value equivalent to the money given for it, therefore that item has value.
> Money is just the measure of value
Money is the measure of market value. If you believe it's the measure if inherent value, you believe anything outside of the market has no value. E.g. that human lives have no value outside of waged labour (or heck, even slavery).
The point here is the monetary value is a model of value, not the definition of it. If you are defining an item's value by it's market price, then you believe what the gp was describing: that "only money has value" (since it defines all value).
> one might wonder why they apparently are not able to sell their art for the same amount of money.
Because the skills and effort needed to market and sell your art to an audience are not equal to the skills and effort needed to produce good art [1].
I agree that there could be other complementary or better solutions compared to this scheme. But as long as the above premise is true, not every good artist will want or be able to sell well.
[1] However you define this. Supposedly, Van Gogh was a lousy salesman, but a good artist.
Because we use taxes as a process to crowdsource funding more effectively. That's literally the entire basis for it. Might as well ask why "only the taxpayers who care about a new highway can raise funds to buy it" and then we're back in some weird, system of no central government because someone can always claim "why not just like, let people donate money" because it's a simplistic cliche that appeals deeply to people who aren't quite clever enough to work out just how much they've benefitted from the system as it's been constructed.
Then it would be a popularity contest and depend on the artists' ability to market themselves in a capitalist space. The one with the best TikTok channel would get the money. That doesn't lead to having diverse, interesting, and challenging art.
That’s not what they’re saying. Only the funding source would change; the funds would still be split evenly to anyone who meets the criteria of being an artist.
How does the government solve this problem? Why can’t a private organization replicate that? How was art produced previously without the existence of these programs?
The same way it solves all problems: poorly, yet better and more fairly than corporations do.
> Why can’t a private organization replicate that?
Private organizations are driven by profit motive. Profit motive is usually in a negative correlation with fair results in these sorts of situations. If you mean a church or non profit, then, because those don't represent a region of people, and there's no petition mechanism to change their behavior if they're bad. "We'll stop giving them money" great so you're back to my original point then: profit motive.
> How was art produced previously without the existence of these programs?
Hard to say, but there sure is a lot of it, from as long ago as ten thousand years, so personally I think it's safe to say there were lots of reasons beyond either an S Corp or 501(c) buying popular art, or a liberal democracy funding it.
I didn’t really follow your argument about non-profits.
Clearly the artists somehow managed to convince government to support the scheme, why can’t the same people form a non—profit and convince ordinary members of the public to support the same scheme in a non-profit structure?
That way we have a smaller government, lower taxes, and the people who care can directly spend their money on addressing this problem - rather than have their money going to taxes where it might be spent somewhere they don’t agree with!
Nobody has to argue about money being spent on things they don’t care about. Everybody is happy.
Nobody pays to view a mural, but a lot of people view it, and property values go up as a result. It cost the artist time, effort, and money to make it, and if you hire an artist specifically to make a mural, it's prohibitively expensive for an individual.
Better to amortize the cost across the population and have public works. Like we do for infrastructure. Seems to work just fine.
Isn't this arguing indirectly for national taxpayers to prop up the value of certain properties? Why not just have a local collaboration with a local artist and people pay directly?
There are many things that are valuable to people, but which they would rather not pay for. They include public goods and externalities, like infrastructure and education and a reasonable amount of military. It makes a lot of sense that people would rather enjoy art for free if they had the option, and since the majority of art experience can be easily duplicated and transmitted, why pay for it yourself? There is also another benefit of art stimulating further intellectual and creative development of a society, perhaps yielding second order benefits that are hard to quantify. Thus overall, it can make a lot of sense for government to pay for art as a society.
> one might wonder why they apparently are not able to sell their art for the same amount of money
"Public goods" like parks, museums, bridges, roadways, transit, nature preserves, community spaces, and public safety services produce both direct value to their immediate users as well as substantial diffuse value to their community. Direct value can be captured by user fees, tolls, subscriptions, etc but capturing diffuse value is challenging. A park raises surrounding property values even for people who do not visit the park. Good transportation infrastructure increases the value of surrounding land and and productivity per capita even for nonusers. Relying solely on user fees may force some of these entities to close or fall into disrepair, thereby reducing overall value by substantially more than it would have cost to maintain them. And in some cases shifting the cost burden to direct users substantially lowers the diffuse value, for example back when fire fighting companies would let houses burn unless their owners paid them, ultimately resulting in more overall community fire damage.
In these cases, subsidizing these public services with taxes (optimally Georgist land-value taxes) is an economically rational decision.
One could plausibly argue that artists similarly produce diffuse value e.g., raising the profile of their nation or culture, making their neighborhood a more desirable place for people with money. Not only do artists typically struggle to collect a share of this diffuse value, as renters the very value they create often ends up pricing out of their community. I could imagine cases where it is a net benefit for a government to subsidize such entities if such subsidy is less than the fraction of the diffuse benefit that ends up being collected by taxes.
I have no insight as to whether this scheme in particular is net positive, please see sibling posts for that. I'm just explaining that such arrangements are both economically rational and extremely common in high-functioning societies.
Your argument makes sense, but a park has a measurable scope. We all want it to be X sqft, with Y trees, and it will cost Z dollars. Are you going to force artists to make the specific art that the community is in need of, or can they just do nothing?
Expect something? Yes. Enforce it? Not sure for the first tranche, but make it a prerequisite for continued funding.
One big obstacle is, of course, how to define what to expect from each artist. For example, you can't expect the same level of output from sculptors and musicians. Another big obstacle is obviously the expected quality of output.
I don't pretend to know the solutions to either of those obstacles, but they should be surmountable [1]. I think it's fair to expect some output in exchange for funding, but it doesn't have to be a high expectation.
Personally, I like the idea of hiring artists as full-time with particular projects in mind [2], but intentionally leaving ~50% of their time to personal projects.
[1] Perhaps artist communities themselves could discuss ways to make this exchange work for all parties.
[2] Murals, restorations, beautification of public spaces, etc.
I don't think there's any evidence that those obstacles are surmountable, unless it's something like the Pope telling Michaelangelo to paint a ceiling. A bridge has defined scope and budget (ish) and a defined benefit attached to it, which many people will sign off on before it is commissioned, and it might take years to do, but it will also serve the local population for potentially hundreds of years in a practical way.
> Are you going to force artists to make the specific art that the community is in need of, or can they just do nothing?
My understanding is that the Irish scheme doesn't force any specific work for the three year period, though I'd expect any artist who takes a three year, ~$60k grant and uses it to do literally nothing may find it hard get a grant in the future, potentially ending their art career. Still, I wouldn't be surprised if a few recipients end up doing that, in which case it's an economic question as to whether the net loss from such freeloaders is more or less than the cost of the bureaucracy necessary to prevent them.
The economic question will be whether the Irish taxpayer gets enough value out of the art produced to warrant its total cost, including artist subsidy costs, administrative cost, etc etc.
Who gets to be an artist? I want to be an artist now. Is it people who go to certain universities with art degrees? Can any working class guy decide he wants to pursue art and get the basic income?
Another question is would Daniel James work have been as good if he wasn't working in an ironworks? In the 1800s most of the great literature was written by normal guys writing on the side, they need that experience to make great art. Heart of Darkness is never going to be written by an academic. Hemmingway doesn't write anything without his experiences in Italy, Spain and France in WWI, Civil War and WWII, if he was just a beat reporter forever, all of his great inspirations don't amount to much. Tolstoy and Doestoyevsky are notable exceptions.
Just to answer the question in this specific case: yes, a working class guy can decide he wants to pursue art (in quite a broad range of forms), and he can apply for the basic income once he can show that he is working as an artist. The artists who ultimately receive the payment will be chosen randomly once they meet the criteria to apply in the first place (which, again, is simply that you are working as an artist—exhibiting, publishing, performing, whatever "work" might mean in your case). There is a fixed number of people who can receive it in each round (I think it's 2500 people, cycling every three years), and those people are picked by lottery; if you receive it in one round, you cannot apply for the next. This, and in fact no arts funding in Ireland, has anything to do with certain universities or art degrees. This scheme is far from perfect, but these vaguely leading questions (so common to all commentary on public funding for the arts) are clearly irrelevant.
As for the second question ("would Daniel James work have been as good if he wasn't working in an ironworks"), well, life and art really are too varied to draw the kind of conclusions the following comment implies.
You're saying the quiet part out loud. Clearly we just need to pay people to "make art" all day long on the backs of taxpayers who will most likely never see the "art" or derive any value from it.
"Dad why are you working your hands off? Well... the government decided to pay people to "make art" instead of working. How come? Well... nope I have no fucking idea"
Do you think people would do the following arrangement; work for free until the business becomes profitable (which could be never), but then get a much higher share of the labor margin?
It's an interesting question, but it's too narrowly focused. Surely we can think of more risk-reward structures than just "founding engineer?" What about worker co-ops? Revenue sharing agreements? Profit sharing? Equity on top of salary? Base pay plus performance?
Capital owners aren't the only ones taking a risk, laborers do as well. Why is it that only capital risk is considered?
State funding is socialism, I thought we weren't about that here? Anyway that's basically what this Ireland thing is about.
SBA loans are given at the whim of a bank, who is looking for a very strong guarantee of return on investment. It can also come with terms that restrict business behaviors - this is HN, just imagine Bain capital gave you ten million dollars, do you then get to run your business in a way that targets a healthy, sustainable profit margin with albeit flat growth line?
Anyway that's boring and been done before. Surely after ~300 years of plain Jane capitalism we can start playing with more exotic modes of organization? Why do only the banks get to invent new financial instruments to destroy markets with?
I'm not sure why taking away money you could spend on goods or put into savings is ok when your boss does it, but not ok when the government does it. At least the government builds you a road in return.
People throughout Wales sing this song 130 years later
I wonder how far are we from a song that is entirely generated by AI and becomes as loved as a song created by a human, and is still sung/played by people decades later? It feels weird to even think about it.
If AI does get as good as humans at creating art (I think it might), what happens then? Will human generated art be still as respected/valuable? Will humans even bother creating art at that stage?
On the topic of basic income - people seem to have strong opinions on both sides. I guess time will tell, but there isn't anything wrong in experimenting, at minimum. To those who strongly oppose UBI - don't we already give bailouts, huge tax breaks, subsidies to entire industries etc, to the extent of rewarding bad behavior (criminal behavior even) - like the one that caused 2008 crash? Why is corporate handouts okay but not UBI?
I hope one day you are able to acknowledge all the people in this world that live for purpose instead of for making Lumberg’s stock go up half a point.
people working for corporations produce things, I think you'll find the incorporating docs, and the property owned do not produce things by themselves.
I wonder, can we not turn all threads into a "when will AI do this creative thing better than humans".
Humans need basic income (or at least resources) and to have culturally valuable work to do. Art and craft esp as a form of human expression seems like we should ASSUME that humans want to do this, that we as a society value the human energy that goes into it.
Yes, humans want to make art. But most humans would also want their art to be seen, appreciated at minimum. Would be nice if they can make a living out of it.
I am not trying to turn all threads into AI debate, but AI threat to art is a legit concern. If AI mass produces art at comparable quality level to humans, it would be near impossible for humans to compete for other humans' attention. If nobody sees my art, would I still make art? Maybe some humans will, because creating art makes them happy and they don't care if anyone sees their art or not. But many humans will give up
> Will human generated art still be as respected/valuable?
I would hope that humans would always value human generated art, but these days it seems that many businessmen and AI bros do not. Perhaps they are not human.
Why would I ever do work if I can just do art? I mean I have worked in the creative industries so I have successfully done art for others but why would I do art to serve others if I can just do what I want and live comfortably.
Or is it more of have to apply to be subsidized and the government chooses what art is worth subsidizing, which won’t result in good art, more just government building lobby bad art.
You can only tax people so much before it's too much.
effective tax rates
0% ... not realistic outside very unique circumstances.
25% ... feels fair to me.
33% ... still fair but yeah 1 out of every 3 days worked you start to feel that.
50% ... the border of fair and unfair. if i keep less than half of what i make, that feeling of fairness wears thin.
Now, when you are near that border of fair and unfair and then you see John Q Artist getting his whole list comped using tax money that pushes the somewhat fair into unfair territory real fast.
Now, we already have situations similar to this in most countries either from subsidies, gov't spending you don't agree with, corruption, waste, etc.
All of that should be reduced but when you see your neighbor living free while you slave away you feel that differently.
Which tax rates? We have dozens. What determines fairness is how the resources in our society are allocated once all is said and done. Income, tax rates, and even money itself is just an abstraction.
> if i keep less than half of what i make, that feeling of fairness wears thin.
How fairly you made that money in the first place and what you get in return in the form of government services makes all the difference.
> What determines fairness is how the resources in our society are allocated once all is said and done.
I propose allocating upfront the work, so that those who disagree don't have to contribute into the "done" part of those who allocate it in a weird way.
For select megacorps that have the luxury of being in a business that lets them structure themselves that way, sure.
For the laboring peasantry it's a very different story (though the actual rates vary, this goes for most "tax havens"). Ireland in particular has a high VAT so if you spend a lot of your income on consumption (which most individuals do) you will get very screwed by that.
There really is not an objective criteria to find who is and it’s not an artist. The proposed system makes a purely political decision out of who sits at a desk doing unsatisfying but necessary tasks, and who gets to sit at home and smoke dope all day and put out a painting or a song twice a year. Not very fair to the tax donkey fixing the plumbing.
Don't tax labor, or capital which helps assist labor with performing economic activity ,or at least tax as little as possible.
Instead, focus on taxing scarce resources, especially since we cannot make more of it. If it's natural resources coming out of the grounds such as minerals and oil, it becomes a severance tax.
If we're talking about occupying land, then it's a Land Value Tax.
You could also tax negative externalities like pollution or traffic congestion.This is known as a Piguovian tax.
The majority of great works created by the ruling classes of Athens or London at the height of both cultures ascendency is a major counterexample. Maybe we just had bad luck as to today's ruling class.
All form of welfare should keep a person alive, but never comfortable.
Living in a one room dwelling, with a shared bathroom is unpleasant, but safe, warm, and has a bed. Having enough for basic food, but no luxuries.
My point is, welfare(not disability, welfare) should sustain. Keep safe. Alive. Free from elements. But absolutely be something a normal person wants to escape from.
And there will always be those happy with the above, and .. well, OK.
But whether artist or whomever, basic living in hard times should be there for you.
> There are some pretty revealing comments here. People seem to think only money has value.
To be fair, the majority has been conditioned in thinking that only money should be your purpose, that's literally how capitalism works, even arts now is a product that need to be sold to the highest bidder, or manufactured in the millions to be sold.
Exactly. A sketchbook and pencils cost next to nothing. But being able to take that and turn it into an oil painting on a giant canvas costs real money.
Writing a few songs on a guitar from Facebook marketplace is cheap. Turning that into a live show is expensive and time consuming.
Writing some Irish language poems on your lunchbreaks is cheap. Doing public readings as an unknown poet is not.
> Writing some Irish language poems on your lunchbreaks is cheap. Doing public readings as an unknown poet is not.
How is doing public reading of poetry not cheap?
I have friends who do standup comedy and they just show up at open mic nights and it doesn’t cost them anything. One is good enough that now the venues are paying him a little bit.
Total accumulation matters in roof design, not single-day dumps. The mountain I'm referring to (and others like it) can get 100cm+ single day, but that's not super common.
Helsinki, for example, only gets a total of ~90cm a year. So the mountain sees more snow in a single event some years than Helsinki all year.
Just looking at a map though, and Helsinki is on the south coast. It appears Finland extends right up to the Arctic circle. I would guess they get more snow up there? Any Finns like to chime in?
Upwards of 80cm in finnish lapland, so quite a bit of snow, but not the ~2-3 meters common in the high sierras and cascades. This is mostly because the elevation is low and the sea exposure is smaller (wind blows from the pacific over the mountain and dumps snow). The Paradise Snowtel on Rainier, for example, routinely has 3-6 meters / 10-20 feet of snow in winter, and is one of the snowiest places on earth. The only place I'm aware of that has more is Aomori Prefecture in Japan and they have similar geography.
The British canal system became largely obsolete when the Railways came. Partly because the railway companies bought the canals and closed them to strengthen their monopoly. The canals were restored and reopened by enthusiasts for leisure boating, and in this is still going on. This is strengthened by the tow paths being legal rights of way, and walking them is very popular.
Canal boats had no engines, they were pulled by horses and very slow and dependent on a lot of horse care and feeding. Some of the early static steam engines were used to pump water up the canals to re-use it in locks, and there were lock keepers to employ and dredging to do, so it's not even as if the canals were a sunk cost and had almost no running costs.
I'd not be surprised that industrialists would do such a thing as buy up the competition and shut it down, but I'd be a bit surprised if canals were much competition after railways really came in?
I don't think they were competetive for most goods once the railways came, but I understand they were still working (with engines) right up to the 1960s. I guess not all goods needed to arrive quickly. I believe the canals freezing in winter added to the problems. I just checked Wikipedia and some went on to the 1980s!
Railway companies did buy and close them though. On one local one they made permanent destructive changes to stop them being easily reopened.
Another way to think about it is to stop somewhere outside of Edinburgh. Edinburgh is an easy half-day trip away. Walk 200 yards of the Royal Mile from the castle. It just repeats with the same kind of tourist shops for the rest of it. Now get back in your car and go and see some of Scotland!
But don't do the thing that American tourists do where they say "Oh we're staying in Edinburgh and on Wednesday we're going to drive up to Skye to see Dun-vay-gin Castle because it's our ancestral seat because we're totally MacLeods you know"
You won't be able to drive from Edinburgh to even Kyle and back in a day, never mind up to Dunvegan. You just won't.
I could drive you from Edinburgh to Dunvegan and back in a day but I can absolutely guarantee you're going to hate every single terrifying mile of the journey and you won't get to see much.
Which reminds me of a weekend I took a few years ago where we drove to Edinburgh from Manchester on day 1 then up to Arisaig on day 2 to camp on the beach - then back to Edinburgh for a wedding on day 3 and then back to Arisaig the next day to continue the long weekend. Then full day drive back to Manchester.
I did see a Reddit thing where some tourists were planning to stay in the Lake District and visit Edinburgh and Stonehenge, all during winter.
Could've been ragebait, to be fair - they weren't interested when people pointed out that things like weather, hours of daylight, travel time were all going to be against them (or even that the Lake District is a pretty tourist-friendly place to start with).
Apple says Edinburgh to Skye is a 3.5 hour drive, mostly along the A9. My understanding is A roads in the UK are much like USA interstates. What makes the trip terrifying and slower than what Apple says?
> My understanding is A roads in the UK are much like USA interstates.
Not in Scotland, some of them aren't dualled (just a single carriageway in each direction), narrow, windey, full of terrible potholes and animals you can hit etc... its a 5-6 hour drive in reality
The A9 is actually pretty scary in parts because it alternates between dual carriageway and single carriageway and people have been known to get that wrong and thing they are on a dual carriageway when it is a single carriageway...
I've done that and I've driven on the A9 hundreds if not thousands of times.
What's worse is that the inbuilt mapping in a lot of new cars think bits of it are 70mph dual carriageway when it's still single carriageway, and vice-versa.
Same - driven up and down there countless times, but I still sometimes get alarmed on some of the dual carriageway parts where you can't see the other carriageway and I have a momentary panic of "This is a dual carriageway, isn't it?".
Google Maps says between 5 and 6 hours and 227 miles - doing that in 3.5 hours would be averaging 65mph. Good luck with that, especially when the speed limit on the A9 itself is 60 mph for cars!
The US interstate is probably more comparable with UK motorways.
I can safely do it in good conditions in six hours and I'd consider myself a very experienced driver for that route, having driven from Skye to Glasgow or Edinburgh and back a couple of times a week for years.
Both Apple and Google Maps greatly underestimate travel times on anything other than perfectly straight motorways. If you've never driven here before you can at least double their estimate, easily - and that assumes you are at least reasonably proficient at driving on the left at all.
The A9 is the most dangerous road in Europe, and you'll be doing 50mph at most along that because there's nowhere to overtake and that's the maximum speed trucks can go at, so you'll end up in a queue behind a truck.
Depending on the route you take, you might go through Inverness, in which case once you get off the A9 most of the road you'll be on looks like this, for about 120 miles: https://maps.app.goo.gl/9L5cSejT1eyAVR2E7
Once you get to Dalwhinnie you can turn off the A9 and start heading across to the A82, which is really pretty especially in the snow but will be mostly road like this: https://maps.app.goo.gl/qv1L21jk59EEAHZs9
Notice how it's not actually wide enough for two cars? But that's still a 60mph road, although you'd be lucky to be getting up to more than about 50mph.
And you'll be driving on the wrong side of the road, in an unfamiliar car, with a manual gearbox.
Sorry it would suck for everyone, including an Australian like me. How does it not suck?
Why can't I just use my one debit card anywhere, why do I need to setup a separate card with a random app in another country, then another in another country etc.
My visa debit card allows me to travel virtually anywhere and use my own money without issue.
Anything else is just extremely inconvenient and technologically not really necessary
The vendors you'd pay with Pix in brazil are typically the vendors who may not even accept cards at all, it's pix or cash.
(Although you CAN pay with pix at many supermarkets, I'd rate it as rare. Also useable for online payments, but you take the risk in case of fraud, unlike with creditcards)
Thanks for the information, reminds me of CashApp or something like that in the US. But just to be clear the context was, at least as I understood, moving to using an app instead of using existing credit card rails via Visa and Mastercard and that's just not going to happen because it's a worse experience (in Europe).
If you don't have the ability to accept a card at all, that's a different use case.
I mean it’s an obvious decision to not accept cards if you can avoid it. You’re letting a company like Amex siphon up to 3% of your income away in perpetuity.
Business owners are forced to accept this situation because customers have your expectation. But it’s really not a good situation we’ve ended up in, letting for-profit, uncompetitive companies skim off the top of consumer spending. It’s frankly a rip-off.
Tap to pay could literally just come from your bank’s app.
> I mean it’s an obvious decision to not accept cards if you can avoid it. You’re letting a company like Amex siphon up to 3% of your income away in perpetuity.
In Brazil you can easily be paying 5-6% when accepting card payments, if not more. You'll generally get a 10% discount when opting to pay with cash in clothing/electronics/etc stores.
Handling cash comes with its own expenses too for business owners. It's not "this costs nothing" and "this costs 3%".
Selling something expensive? Well if a customer doesn't have the cash, by the time they go find an ATM (and pay a fee yay!) they probably changed their mind on the purchase.
There's a myriad of reasons to use cards (credit or debit). There's merits to using cash.
But, back to the actual discussion thread, there's no good reason to try and get tourists to use some convoluted app instead of just paying with a credit card.
Cash can get misplaced or stolen, you have to keep going to an ATM to get more of it which for most costs money (my bank pays for ATM withdrawals globally for any fee), it's not nearly as convenient as a credit/debit card though it's cheaper. Though maybe it's not since merchants never lower prices and even if everyone switched to cash prices wouldn't go down. Also there are costs for the merchant to carry cash.
I think your everyday credit/debit card is still objectively better overall, even moreso for tourists which was the main topic.
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