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Your statement is completely ideological and blank of any actual argumentation.

Answer the question:

Is it bad to "suppress speech" that is a threat to "free speech" itself?


Yes, it is.


It's an example of ideological self-destructive universal.

Take freedom of speech, social justice, progress,... as an universal and it's ultimately destructive (to believers and itself).


The concern is about an epistemic gap: We proabaly can’t know how to identify speech that is harmful to free-speech, and the cost of getting it wrong is likely to be tremendous in almost all cases.


It isn't. Speech that advocates the removal of free speech rights is unlikely to be successful and actually lead to the removal of free speech.

Speech is only speech. It cannot do anything by itself. The only way speech can affect the world is by urging people to do things that they would not have done otherwise.


Isn't that the whole point of the experiment?

You need to understand how people react to the idea of "not doing anything and still get paid".

Do they give up? Do they get depressed? Do they create things? Does entrepreneurship increase? Violence rate?... These are all interesting questions


> "not doing anything and still get paid"

That's not what UBI is about at all. UBI is about getting paid no matter what you do. Which could be doing nothing. Or it could be studying or practicing or learning a new career or even working. The fact that UBI doesn't disincentivize spending ones time in a certain way (whether that's economically productive or not) is hugely important.

This is an aspect of where there's a huge misunderstanding about UBI due to competing economic theories. There are some people, a lot of people, who believe very strongly that the economy is fundamentally coercive. And, more so, that coercive economies are natural, beneficial, and overall desirable. A lot of that thinking has certainly been baked in to a lot of conventional wisdom, culture, laws, and regulation in the economy of western countries for centuries. There are other people who believe that the economy is or at least can be fundamentally cooperative, and more importantly that a cooperative economy is more beneficial and desirable and no less natural than a coercive economy. And this is where UBI comes in, because UBI is essentially how you bootstrap a more cooperative economy. One where people work not because they are coerced to participate in toil due to the alternative being starvation and privation but instead because they enjoy the work or are fairly compensated for it and treated well.


>"not doing anything"

refers to "not performing a comercial activity", which means the same thing in my native language.

If you read my whole comment you can clearly see that's my point:

>Do they give up? Do they get depressed? Do they create things? Does entrepreneurship increase? Violence rate?


> Do they get depressed?

I think this is a huge factor that isn't getting enough focus. When people's jobs are replaced by automation and they are on UBI, how do they achieve self-worth? A lot of people get their self-worth from their work, even if their job is monotonous and relatively low-skill. We may be able to replace a low-skilled worker's wages with UBI, but we can't replace their feeling of self-worth. Not everyone can become an artist and even if they could, that may not be enough to give them a sense of purpose. In the long run, this may be a much bigger question than whether or not we implement UBI.


If there are conditions, it's not universal. The distinguishing feature of universal basic income in comparison to traditional welfare was that it doesn't have the disincentives to work caused by means testing. If you add means testing back in, you've defeated the purpose.


No. As I said previously [0], means testing is not the problem per se. The problem is a particular simplistic way of doing means testing, which is what mathematicians call a step function: below a certain income value you get 100% of the subsidy, and above it -- even very slightly above it -- you get zero. So there's a point where increasing your earned income very slightly results in a massive decrease in your total income.

It's very easy to describe and administer such a subsidy, but it has a terrible bug, which is obvious and everyone has known about it for decades, but somehow we haven't mustered the will to fix it.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13202659


You are advocating partial basic income, not universal basic income.

Your argument has a place, but it's tangential to my point.


This is terrible, but isn't it also a reality in the West?

Privacy laws getting loose, private business making deals with the government, social acceptance based on a "state of emergency".

Only difference is that the infrastructure of "Western digital totalitarian states" is run by private corporations.


Everyone is rating their citizens. Internet has become a too dangerous place for ordinary people.


Putting the blame on MBAs is laughable.

MBAs and their professors simply replicate and regurgitate an ideology that is outside their own awareness and control.

Lutheranism itself is more to blame than the whole faculty of HBS and SBS combined.

It's a problem of universals, not individuals.


Lutheranism itself is more to blame than the whole faculty of HBS and SBS combined.

Why?


Isn't it ironic they're both facing the same privacy concerns they helped to create?


I'm sorry, but this looks like a selfish, one-sided view.

>The plaintiffs suing Facebook's board include pension funds, like the Employee Retirement System for the city of Providence, Rhode Island, and individual investors

It may be "founder-friendly", but it's hurting thousands of Average Joes.


In the article one of the main points is protecting Zuckerberg's long term control, in the event that he "spent 2 years in government". If that's not telegraphing intent, I don't know what is.

So it appears pretty clear that there's a bigger career game being played here, and it isn't even strictly about stock.


I can see the point, but it could also be argued that a large part of the value of FB is created by the control of Zuckerberg. FB can move much faster without having to move everything past shareholders. And the shareholder's primary interests are making money.


Yes, that's absolutely true if you decide to remain a private company. Your obligations change once you decide to go public - pros and cons.


Actually, these obligations apply to private corporations as well as public corporations. It's just that the chance of a shareholder suit is much higher in a public company.


Aren't you obligated to make the highest returns for shareholders? In that case, wouldn't performing an action that slows down the ability of a company to innovate break that promise?


>Aren't you obligated to make the highest returns for shareholders?

Actually no. As recently as Burwell v Hobby Lobby, the Supreme Court said:

"Modern corporate law does not require for-profit corporations to pursue profit at the expense of everything else, and many do not."

http://caselaw.findlaw.com/us-supreme-court/13-354.html


Point taken. I should be more exact: is maximising shareholder return a higher priority than maximising shareholder input?


That's a meaningless goal without a specific time frame. And of course, the moment you do specify a time frame, you also define the range of what you'll actually do in ways that flatly contradict what you'd do with different timelines.

For example, if you're trying to maximize cash on hand in the very short term, you simply stop paying your bills and declare bankruptcy when creditors attack. But if your goals are further out, this becomes the exact wrong strategy. Whatever your goal may be, you need a time frame to determine what is and isn't a good use of resources in realizing it.

Conversely, anyone who says "maximize shareholder value" without specifying a time frame is either a fool or a grifter. You can imagine how well things go when these types get together and "agree" on something this dangerously unbounded as a fundamental operating principle.


You get a lot of leeway. There is basically a rebuttable presumption you are acting in the companies best interest. But I wonder if that presumption should be weakened in the cases where the CEO has dictatorial powers over the company without a corresponding share of equity.


Even if you own a majority of voting shares, it's a basic principle of corporate law that you still have to treat shareholders equally, you still have to act in a way to maximize shareholder value, and you still have to consult the board & shareholders on the same issues. Owning 51% of voting shares doesn't turn the company into your private fiefdom.


There are specific laws to protect rights beyond the realms of "speed".

Apply your line of thought to democracy and you'll see what's the problem.


The comparison to democracy is a red herring. Facebook isn't a government, it's a company.

If you want an accurate government analogy, look at the military: it has to move fast to succeed. You only run a war by committee if you want to lose.


Why even have an analogy. There is a perfect Example of Michael Dell wanting more control, and getting together with others to buy dell back, and its no longer publicly traded. They can not have to worry about shareholders, when the (for example) decide to buy EMC..


And if you want to run a company without having to deal with shareholders you can stay privately held.


I used an analogy to simply demonstrate every entity (e.g. government, corporation, military,etc) must follow specific rules while making decisions.

Go radically against these and chaos will erupt. It's both unintelligent and ideological to take speed as an absolute.


What about bootstrapped, self-funded, youtube channels that became huge?


There was a really good article about this (wish I could find it) about how the majority of these aren't making much, if any money. From the outside it appeared that the artists are rolling in cash; from the inside, they were still working waiter/waitress jobs to make ends meet.


Yeah I heard from one YouTuber (over email) that only ~1000 worldwide are currently making a living solely from their YouTube career. And that includes certain successful channels that employ 20+ people.


I remember the one you're talking about: http://fusion.net/story/244545/famous-and-broke-on-youtube-i... (first hit for 'Youtube star waitressing')


Although not a numerous, there's some data in the following website:

https://www.indiehackers.com


Data that is mostly outliers in an industry with 90% failure is not data at all.


Capitalism isn't revolutionary or creative. It is destructive.

It's not shiny or different - it doesn't have to. As long as it makes X more productive, it will help people in the long-term.


In my country, unlike the US, it's legal to use psychological tests for hiring purposes.

Still, as I grew my company, I've realized how inaccurate they can be. Some of the best performing testers couldn't demonstrate a long-term perspective or broad set of knowledge/opinions.

Whereas they were terrific at solving puzzles, they couldn't accept or recognize a puzzle itself.


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