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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: March 29th, 2025

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  • In my view, it is more the difference between something that is pretty good vs something that is perfect. After all, supposing you are getting paid the same hourly rate, would you rather get paid for 20 hours of work, or 0?

    Taking the example of ridesharing, for example - if you are looking for a job, and it is all restricted to traditional cab companies, they might not be able to afford to pay you full time plus benefits to work for them, so you get $0 working as a cabbie. And the result is that there are fewer people driving cabs, and therefore higher prices for cabs, and therefore fewer people taking cabs (and maybe driving drunk). The result of requiring full time pay for all rideshare drivers isn’t that all the drivers get full time pay - it is that a lot of them get laid off.

    In either the case of having UBI or not having it, presumably you would prefer to be making some income over no income?



  • Otoh, rideshare offers far more flexibility for workers. And they created legitimate value via the user-friendliness of their apps. And as much as it is bemoaned, the star rating system made taking a cab far more pleasant.

    I’m honestly quite confused by this idea that every job in the economy must provide the job-holder with full and unequivocal economic security. In my view, many jobs simply are gigs. They need to get done, but the nature of the work means that they will never be a super-consistent source of income. And that’s okay - many people are quite happy to piece together their income from multiple sources in order to have more flexibility.