On the "glass half full" side, even if the price hasn't gone down, tech's managed to offer better products for the same price, which in itself is a positive.
- Streaming is a much better experience than cable. I can watch anything I want whenever I want on whichever device I want. I don't need to rent a cable box. I don't need to schedule a technician to come to my house to start my service.
- Uber / Lyft are a way better experience than taxis. I can call the device from my phone wherever I am. I get price certainty up front instead of the miserable experience of sitting anxiously watching the number on the meter go up. The app handles payment and I don't have to mess with the driver telling me the card reader is broken and he wants cash. The driver's GPS is integrated with my ride and I both don't have to tell the driver where to go and worry about them taking the scenic route to drive the fare up.
Anyone who wants to go back to the world of cable / taxis is looking at the past with rose colored glasses. Tech has absolutely made both of those products better.
>Uber / Lyft are a way better experience than taxis.
Not anymore always. Here in Eastern Europe they're really screwing over the drivers, which are reassorting to creative measures to pad their missing revenues by screaming over customers, like driving in circles in one spot and getting you to cancel so they're an pocket the cancellation fee, and other such schemes.
Uber was great when they were still flush with VC cash from all the negative interest rates. Not anymore.
And to the extent it’s true it’s because they’ve been allowed to circumvent laws that were deliberately setup to limit the number of cabs on the street, and by flooding those streets with Ubers and Lyfts there’s a lot of research that shows that congestion and traffic has gotten much worse.
So even if a specific Uber/Lyft ride might be better, the residents of a city have a much worse overall experience.
And that’s without getting into how many of these drivers barely make ends meet, whereas driving a cab was a path to the middle class for millions of cab drivers for decades.
On the other hand they don't always capture all of the good things each. I agree with all of your points. Except now my drivers don't want to go off track, even when I request it. The app doesn't provide a way to let me select the route I want. So I am at the mercy of the app which picked the "best" route. Which happens to he the same one everyone else is taking during rush hour and takes twice as long as the route I would rather take.
Taxi roulette was not a fun game to play: a) will it show up? b) will someone else take my cab? c) will the driver get angry if I attempt to use a card? d) does the driver know where they are going?
> MusicGen, which was trained with Meta-owned and specifically licensed music, generates music from text-based user inputs, while AudioGen, which was trained on public sound effects, generates audio from text-based user inputs.
Meta is really clearly trying to differentiate themselves from OpenAI here. Open source + driving home "we don't use data we haven't paid for / don't own".
This is purely a function of everyone remembering the RIAA's decade-long campaign to prevent people from taking the music they had rightfully stolen. As far as I'm aware LLaMA was trained on "publicly available data"[0], not "licensed data".
Furthermore, MusicGen's weights are licensed CC-BY-NC, which is effectively a nonlicense as there is no noncommercial use you could make of an art generator[1]. This is not only a 'weights-available' license, but it's significantly more restrictive than the morality clause bearing OpenRAIL license that Stability likes to use[2].
My understanding (IANAL) [1] is that copyright licenses have no say on the output of software. Further, CC licenses don't say anything about running or using software (or model weights). It's therefore questionable whether the CC-BY-NC license actually prevents commercial use of the model.
You're correct, but no one has had the balls (or the lawyers) to clarify this in court yet. Expect to see hosting providers complying with takedown requests for the foreseeable future.
I don't remember the details (or outcome) but there was a lawsuit a few years ago involving CAD or architecture software and whether they could limit how the output images were used because they were assemblages of clipart that the company asserted were still protected by copyright. Something like that. A lot of "AI" output potentially poses a similar issue, just at a far more granular level.
In copyright law the use of the work itself is considered a commercial benefit, so "noncommercial use" is an oxymoron. Consider these situations:
- If I use AudioCraft to post freely-downloadable tracks on my SoundCloud, I still get the benefit of having a large audio catalog in my name, even if I'm not selling the individual tracks. I could later compose tracks on my own and ride off the exposure I got from posting "noncommercially".
- If I run AudioCraft as a background music generator in my store, I save money by not having to license music for public performance.
- If I host AudioCraft on a website and put ads on it, I'm making money by making the work available, even though I'm not charging a fee for entry.
I suspect that a lot of people reading this are going to have different arguments for each. My point is that if you don't think that all of these situations are equally infringing of CC-BY-NC, then you need to explain why some are commercial and some are not. Keep in mind that every exception you make can be easily exploited to strip the NC clause off of the license.
If you're angry at the logic on display here, keep in mind that this is how judges will construe the license, and probably also how Facebook will if you find a way to make any use of their AI. The only thing that stops them from rugpulling you later is explicit guidance in CC-BY-NC. Unfortunately, the only such guidance is that they don't consider P2P filesharing to be a commercial use.
So, absent any other clarifications from Facebook, all you can do without risking a lawsuit is share the weights on BitTorrent.
EDIT: And yes, I have made stuff just to make stuff. I license all of that under copyleft licenses because they express the underlying idea of 'noncommercial' better than actual noncommercial clauses do.
Do you think that non commercial use simply doesn't exist or something?
Because non commercial use isn't some crazy concept. It is a well established one, that doesnt disclude literally everything.
Also, you are ignoring the idea that Facebook will almost certainly not sue anyone for using this for any reason, except possibly Google or Apple.
So if you aren't literally one of those companies you could probably just use it anyway, ignore the license completely, and have zero risk of being sued.
The issue with “non commercial” is that no, it’s not well established. Licenses with a NC clause are so problematic to be practically useless. If you just want to use something at home privately you don’t need a CC license… a CC license is for use and redistribution.
Funnily enough in the UK they actually tried to fix this. The music industry argued that the lack of a private copying levy made legalized CD ripping into government confiscation of copyright ownership... somehow. The UK courts bought this, so now the UK government is constitutionally mandated to ban CD ripping, which is absolutely stupid.
I knew CD ripping got reversed but not the arguments against it, definitely stupid as not giving a monopoly is not the same as confiscation (seems like a very straightforward reasoning). No doubt done Tory got a 'management consultancy' gig with the RIAA from that one.
I like that it makes software like iTunes contributory infringers for enabling mass copyright infringement.
I miss that blog. It was a little crazy and the comments were a flame war shitshow, but man it was fun to read sometimes. Even if I vehemently disagreed, it got me thinking.
Whatever happened to esr? Did he just get too paranoid and clam up?
Noncommercial use is not well established in copyright law, which is the law that actually matters. I know other forms of law actually do establish noncommercial and commercial use standards, but copyright does not recognize them.
As for "Facebook won't sue"? Sure, except we don't have to worry about just Facebook. We have to worry about anyone with a derivative model. There's an entire industry of copyleft trolls[0] that could construct copyright traps with them.
Individuals can practically ignore NC mainly because individuals can practically ignore most copyright enforcement. This is for the same reason why you can drive 55 in a 30mph zone and not get a citation. It's not that speeding is now suddenly legal, it's that nobody wants to enforce speed limits - but you can still get nailed. The moment you have to worry about NC, there is no practical way for you to fit within its limits.
Noncommercial licenses are taken up in "GREAT MINDS v. FEDEX OFFICE AND PRINT SERVICES, INC 886 F.3d 91 (2nd Cir. 2018). Thé court explains they are enforceable and are basically just a category of contract. So, as long as the contract is clear, it’s probably enforceable.
> My point is that if you don't think that all of these situations are equally infringing of CC-BY-NC, then you need to explain why some are commercial and some are not.
What “NonCommercial” means in the license is explictly defined in the license, and if you think either those examples, or more to the point, every possible use ever so as to render ‘NonCommercial’ into ‘no use’ as you have claimed, you need to make that argument, based on the definition in the license, not some concept of what might be construed as commercial use by general legal principles if the license used the term without its own explicit definition.
> if you don't think that all of these situations are equally infringing of CC-BY-NC, then you need to explain why some are commercial and some are not. Keep in mind that every exception you make can be easily exploited to strip the NC clause off of the license.
You're right: those are all equally infringing CC-BY-NC. I don't see a problem.
Yes, but you can easily make noncommercial use of an art generator.
Obviously, you can't host a commercial art generation service with a noncommercial-use license, and (insofar as art produced by a generator is a derivative work of the model weights, which is a controversial and untested legal theory) you can’t make commercial art with a noncommercial license, but not all art is commercial.
"Noncommercial art" is not a thing in the eyes of the law. Even if you don't intend to make money the law still considers the work itself to be commercial. That's why CC-BY-NC has to have a special "filesharing is non-commercial" statement in it, because people have made successful legal arguments that it is.
You're probably thinking of "not charging a fee to use", which is a subset of all the ways you can monetize a creative work. You can still make money off of AudioCraft by just hosting it with banner ads next to the output. Even a "no monetization" clause[0] would be less onerous than "noncommercial use only", because it'd at least be legal to use AudioCraft for things like background music in offices.
[0] Which already precludes the use of AudioCraft music on YouTube since you can't do unmonetized uploads anymore
> “Noncommercial art” is not a thing in the eyes of the law
The definition of “NonCommercial”, the oddly capitalized term of art in the license, is not a matter of general law, it is a matter of the license, which defines it as “not primarily intended for or directed towards commercial advantage or monetary compensation. For purposes of this Public License, the exchange of the Licensed Material for other material subject to Copyright and Similar Rights by digital file-sharing or similar means is NonCommercial provided there is no payment of monetary compensation in connection with the exchange.”
> Even if you don’t intend to make money the law still considers the work itself to be commercial.
Even if you do make money, if the use is “not primarily intended” for that purpose, it is "NonCommercial" in the terms of the license.
> That’s why CC-BY-NC has to have a special “filesharing is non-commercial” statement in it, because people have made successful legal arguments that it is.
It has the filesharing term in it because it permits that particular exchange-of-value as a primary purpose.
> Even a “no monetization” clause would be less onerous than "noncommercial use only"
How would a clause that prohibits monetization entirely be less onerous than one which prohibits it only as the primary intent of use?
> it’d at least be legal to use AudioCraft for things like background music in offices.
It is legal to use it for that purpose (in a for-profit enterprise, I suppose, one might make an argument that any activity was ultimately primarily directed at “commercial advantage”, but in a government or many nonprofit environments, that wouldn’t be the case.)
In their example audio clips they have a "perfect for the beach" audio track. With your understanding of the NC license, would a resort or private beach club be able to play a similar generated music track at their poolside bar or something along those lines? Their primary intention of the bar isn't to play the music, its just an additional ambiance thing; they're trying to sell drinks and have guests pay membership fees, people aren't really coming because of the background music.
> With your understanding of the NC license, would a resort or private beach club be able to play a similar generated music track at their poolside bar or something along those lines?
A resort, probably not, ambiance is, at least arguably, a marketable commercial advantage; a private club in the “mutual benefit organization” sense (rather than a “business selling memberships”, which is just like a resort), probably, because their interest, even indirectly, isn’t making money.
The fact that Meta is able to lie and call their restrictive licensing open source is nearly as misleading as "OpenAI."
We need to do better than to repeat these claims uncritically. The weight licenses are not "open source" by any useful definition, and we should not give Meta kudos for their misleading PR (especially considering that they almost surely ignored any copyright when training these things - rules for thee, but not for me).
"Not as closed as OpenAI" is accurate, but also damning with faint praise.
Just some general piece of advice: it's not productive to constantly be giving out the worst criticism you possibly can when someone does something that's not terrible but still unacceptable. Doing so just tells the companies that nothing satisfies the community and that they should stop trying.
Instead, it's better to mention what they did right and point to how they can make it better.
Meta says to imagine you can: "Imagine a professional musician being able to explore new compositions without having to play a single note on an instrument. Or an indie game developer populating virtual worlds with realistic sound effects and ambient noise on a shoestring budget. Or a small business owner adding a soundtrack to their latest Instagram post with ease."
Research does exist you know. This is immensely helpful for a huge number of people in academia.
If you want to build a company, perhaps you should do what everyone in the industry has done for millennia, copy the movements performed and optimize them while doing so.
It's likely partly a PR/branding exercise as well.
In the new world that Meta sees, of VR/AR and AI, Meta is in a position already were people don't want them to have much power in this world, because they don't trust them over privacy etc, meta is trying to pivot to become more trustworthy so they make genuine moves in this space.
That, or this is an ongoing research lab (FAIR) that has existed for ~half a decade and has advanced the state-of-the-art in AI further than Apple, Microsoft and Google combined.
> all of which are also spending a fuck load on internal AI research.
But their internal research stays internal. Sometimes, they put out "papers" which are glorified advertisements, often going as far as hiding the model architecture just to keep their competitive advantage.
If all three of those companies have something to show for their research, none of it is at the scale or level of accessibility Pytorch, Llama and now Audiocraft offer.
> "Meta is really clearly trying to differentiate themselves from OpenAI here. Open source + driving home "we don't use data we haven't paid for / don't own"."
Isn't Meta settling lawsuits for this right now? In addition to violating user privacy (another lawsuit)...
Meta is attempting to destroy competition; that's it. Similar to how they paid a fortune to lobby against Tiktok for the exact reasons Meta is under active investigation (again). The irony.
They are doing PR damage control with an influx of AI stuffs due to the ridicule of metaverse and the recent revelations of threads (for which they are playing the long AI game) -- [are not concrened about all threads and IG and other accounts being linked via their internal LLMs we will never hear about?
Yes. Meta is in the business of commanding as much of peoples time as possible. AI is more or less the biggest danger to this model (apart from legislation, theoretically, but let's not kid ourselves). Making AI a commodity is in their very interest.
Nah, this is just the modern tech playbook:
First you open source stuff, then you can monitor all the related development happening and whenever you see areas of interest/popularity, you simply clone the functionality or buy out whatever entity is building that interesting stuff.
They're not, they're playing a longer Microsoft style game to corrupt the meaning of open source, and releasing models under their terms to undermine competitors.
I don't have a direct answer to your question, but in thinking about these issues here's a quote I heard that has always resonated with me:
> When I was a young man, I wanted to change the world. I found it was difficult to change the world, so I tried to change my nation. When I found I couldn't change the nation, I began to focus on my town. I couldn't change the town and as an older man, I tried to change my family. Now, as an old man, I realize the only thing I can change is myself, and suddenly I realize that if long ago I had changed myself, I could have made an impact on my family. My family and I could have made an impact on our town. Their impact could have changed the nation and I could indeed have changed the world.
“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”
I used to admire this but have come to realize it is true in certain context only, while the GP one is much more humble
The key word here is change v/s progress.
The classic example of this is commuting via car v/s bicycle. The staggering amount of resources dedicated to solving this problem can be termed as progress with better infrastructure, cars (self-driving even) - contrast it against the change that those who can change to commute via bicycle.
We can only know progress in hindsight and only at things that can be quantified. It is self-serving in that sense, when you exclude the non-measurable.
It's possible to be humble without surrendering completely.
I'm rather aware that change is difficult.
It's far more difficult if you give up before you begin.
And it's helpful to have an understanding of the problem and its space (see my long comment to this thread, and the failure / success chain). Often the obvious / simple solution won't work, though again, if you simply give up you'll never recognise that and seek other options.
If you hit a mountain that you cannot climb or tunnel through, you simply go around it - you don't try to move it or worse start a movement to move it.
It is not about surrendering or giving up. There is difference between when you have to stand up for something, when you find yourself in a situation where you have to go beyond yourself and where you "want" to be a hero. This myth of the hero needs to die. Think about it, a society that doesn't need heroes is a better one.
I am not sure if you realize but there is nothing humble about starting a social movement to "change the world" - which is what the original question was about.
Engineered v/s emerged - one is hubris, the other one is just is.
I wish one could ask all the successful people who "started" a social movement (as opposed to one that emerged), whether with the hindsight of how it played out over the decades, would they still have done it.
To paraphrase the life comment - change happens while you are busy wanting to create it.
Your allegory of the mountain is precisely what I'm getting at.
Attempting the physically or logically impossible, or the effectively counterproductive. The point is to identify a problem, an achievable preferred state, and to work toward that.
Note that even towering mountains, given time, technique, or resources, can be overpassed, leapt over, or tunneled through. And that there are projects which take generations. The Swiss Alps are now laced with roads (rail, cable, and automobile), overflown by aircraft, and pierced by tunnels.
The best heros aren't of the Charge of the Light Brigade variety. They're the ones who identify a viable method and exploit it --- Odysseus and his Horse, Turing and his cipher-breaking tools, Gandhi and his Salt March.
A social change that doesn't need to be engineered ... doesn't require heros. One that won't happen without a specific concerted effort, or which might tip in any number of directions with some vastly preferable to others, do. I'd argue that part of the genius and heroism comes from recognising such loci, recognising the societal magnitude of the task, and searching for a solution space. As with scientific, engineering, and business innovation, even failures teach lessons, and diversifying investments over multiple strategies --- not in the blind sense of blindly inspiring cannon fodder to charge into fire (the Light Brigade, again), but to seek out more favourable options and avoid obvious low-probability / high-risk attempts --- is all but certainly the way to go.
And again: declaring defeat in advance, or throwing up ones hands and declaring that "all is foreordained" won't get you there.
I do advice research (see again previous) and marshalling and conserving your own energies. But not doing nothing at all.
Even slow moving water and the blowing wind can, in time, cut through or wear down that mountain.
>> And again: declaring defeat in advance, or throwing up ones hands and declaring that "all is foreordained" won't get you there.
I am not sure why what I said comes across as defeatist :).
>> I'd argue that part of the genius and heroism comes from recognising such loci, recognising the societal magnitude of the task, and searching for a solution space
I agree.
Thank you for the thoughtful responses and the references.
I read the Salantar quote as ... largely defeatist, despite the twist at the end.
There are people who've left their mark who haven't followed that specific track, and the implied suggestion that it is the only and/or best method ... wants for evidence.
If you consider that you are one of the tools that you're applying to change, then it makes sense to keep that tool functional. Look out for yourself, first, that you may aid others and larger efforts.
A useful example to me comes from the field of ag engineering, and a story I was told at Uni. The practice often makes use of minimal capital and equipment to accomplish major changes. One example is riverbed engineering.
One approach is the US Army Corps method of bulldozers, earth-moving equipment, dredges, concrete, and explosives.
The preferred method of the ag engineer in remote and low-income regions is the gabbion --- a cage made of wire holding stones. Placed in the streamflow, these use the power of the water itself to reshape the streambed in the desired manner --- directing water to or away from a bank, speeding or slowing flow, enhancing or slowing erosion. It's an application of an intervention to maximum effect with minimum effort.
(That's not to say there aren't problems which bulldozers, diesel, dynamite, and portland cement can't solve far more quickly. But where you're bootstrapping from a minimal position, the gabbion method has merits.)
And that's the essence of what I'm suggesting. Study the problem area, see where behaviour is most strongly influenced, and modify that point. Let the energies within the system do the rest. Judo and ju-jitsu work similarly. I've heard RMS's creation of the GNU GPL described as an example of "ju-jitsu law" --- it takes copyright and uses precisely the law's own strengths to work against it. A certain amount of change was accomplished.
Another great concept comes from the field of navigation by Charles H. Cotter: "The Art of ship handling involves the effective use of forces under control to overcome the effect of forces not under control."
Ship's captains don't recede within themselves to control their ships. They master the craft, learn the practice, read conditions, and act to maximum benefit. There's the natural "ship of state" metaphor, and ... it's not entirely applicable (countries are far more complex than ships, and tend not to have a unitary chain of authority). But the notion of working on the possible remains.
For a simple, easy to understand overview of git, nothing beats The Git Parable [1]. Every time I talk to someone starting out with Git I recommend they read it first. Once they understand Git through that lens, usually I find the rest falls into place.
This is my go-to video for anyone looking to learn git. It won't teach you the various commands on the command line but it shows you what is actually happening inside git when you perform various actions. It made me transition from "I know how to run these commands to operate git" to "I know what git is doing, so I can reason about the system and adapt to unusual circumstances". Now when someone makes a mistake in my company's git, I am the person people go to for help.
This sort of gaming is rampant on Amazon. My own experience:
A friend of my wife introduced her to a woman who was a representative of a well known brand for home goods/kitchen gadgets. If you bought an item off Amazon of their brand, the woman would Venmo you for the value of the item provided you left a review. It went unsaid but understood anything less than five stars would mean the relationship was over. They also had a few other rules about your Amazon account to "qualify" (had to be personal, you had to review a certain number of other products, etc) to try to bypass any flags getting raised.
That's the Internet today. All important review sites have these problems. Most businesses today live and die on customer reviews, so they do everything they can in order to maintain high rating. There's obv a lot Amazon and others can do to fight it. But it's a very hard problem, as your example suggests. The worse part is doctor reviews. Some people pick their doctor based on fake reviews.
That's why when I buy things I usually look into the negative reviews first, then the time period of the positive reviews (many reviews too close is usually a red flag), the total number of reviews a product has (e.g., some items have too many reviews), and also search the product on other sites to see maybe there's something I missed. I also rarely order something from a seller with < 90% rating on Amazon. For something like picking a doctor, I always go with recommendations from people I know. I also check online reviews, but only read the negative ones.
The frustrating thing is, Amazon could do this kind of analysis themselves. I mean, it's a similar problem to what Google faces with people trying to game search results, or get spam through filters. And while they obviously struggle and it takes serious resources, they are mostly successful. Really seems like Amazon just doesn't care since they don't have enough competition to give them sufficient motive.
Agreed. Went on the search for knife sharpening tools on Amazon, and quickly discovered that some looked like copies of others. The copies would look identical in the pictures, and have a huge amount of 5 star reviews. Then as I drilled into it I saw a large amount of problem reports.
Decided to just not buy anything from Amazon that day.
(Have found them really useful for other things though. And Prime Shipping in Australia is great.)
I had the same experience with an acquaintance. Their reasoning is that given how Amazon's algorithms work (and how much they favor review count), it is impossible for any new product to get noticed at all unless you spend money to get those first set of 5-star reviews. It's basically an advertising budget.
> “At what point do we take responsibility for enabling hate filled bile to spread across our services?”
As long as there's so much money to be made, Facebook has no incentive to. As long as they know they can give you and other developers the generous salary/options/perks and you will complain at an all hands but not actually leave, they have even less incentive to. Talk is cheap, even from employees, and the executives at Facebook know that.
I don't like it anymore than anyone else, but hate filled bile is profitable. Hate filled bile can earn you money. It can earn you votes. It can earn you power.
While FB may not care about votes or power, they are in business to earn money. They have expenses, as HN User gavman alluded to. Until better ways to make money present themselves, we can expect most social media firms to flirt with controversy. Because things haven't changed much from the newspaper era with respect to the bleeding doing the majority of the lede-ing.
The article also does not mention the definition of "children". Under 10? Under 18? Under 21? If you count teenagers hanging out and spreading it as children, the number for very young children could still be as low as we thought and there are no new revelations here.
These are extreme percentages at these young age groups. Now to compare these numbers internationally we certainly need to know the cofactors.
Are these all obese or diabetic, or are these healthy teenagers? If they were healthy, it points to a different virus strain. If obese, it points to the well-known national sugar problem.
Also it could point to less exposure to common cold antibodies, this is the south. Common cold antibodies are believed to be the cause for the low IFR percentages worldwide.
The one question about UBI I haven't seen a satisfactory answer for is what's stopping landlords from raising rents to match the UBI? If everyone suddenly has an extra $1000/month, what's stopping my landlord (together with every other landlord in my city) from raising my rent next year by $1000/month? It's very plausible this would not show up in small scale pilots where only a small percent of a population received income, but would show up at scale when everyone does.
Unless UBI comes with a massive overhaul of zoning restrictions and a shift of the housing supply, I don't see how this doesn't end up as an indirect way of increasing income inequality by routing the UBI from poorer tenants to wealthier landlords.
Unless we decide to print money, not everybody will end up with an extra $1000 / month. The money that would be paid out in UBI will either come from taxes or from efficiencies gained by dropping the patchwork of benefits programs.
My expectation is that if I receive $12k / year in UBI, my tax burden will likely also increase by about $12k / year - maybe less, probably more. I don't think UBI would have any significant effect on me unless I lose by job (or decide to quit, which is an advantage of UBI).
I think the scenario you describe might affect poorer people, though. It really depends on how much the other social programs are walked back under UBI. If a poor family gains $1k in UBI but also loses $1k in other welfare programs, then landlords will likely not be able to raise rent without also losing tenants.
> The one question about UBI I haven't seen a satisfactory answer for is what's stopping landlords from raising rents to match the UBI?
Collectively? Anti-trust law. Individually? Competition among landlords. Also, for some tenants in many places, rent control.
> If everyone suddenly has an extra $1000/month,
Everyone doesn’t, unless the government is just printing money for UBI and also not replacing other programs. If it's borrowing, that money came form somewhere. If it's taxing, it came from somewhere, too. And UBI proposals tend to involve replacing, either in part (for some transitional models) or entirely means-tested welfare, which also means a bunch of money came from somewhere (from recipients and, and this is a major motivation for UBI, from the administrative infrastructure that means-tested programs have.) Compared to before the policy, the result is nothing like “everyone has +$UBI/month”.
What’s stopping anyone, anywhere from raising their prices by some arbitrary amount? There are lots of examples of inelastic goods that most people would continue to buy if the prices went up. Why aren’t the prices on those things higher? Generally the answer is competition, and there is still competition among landlords even if everyone suddenly has more disposable income.
There are plenty of cities with plenty of housing going vacant. In Baltimore, for example, it is a city designed for a million people with about 600k in residence. Houses go vacant, neighborhoods loose value, and the city dies. Why?
A large part of it is the lack of financial resources that the residents have. The lack of financial resources is directly related to redlining and the fact that Baltimore is a majority black city. But whatever the reason, money is what is required.
At $1000 a month, someone could take that UBI and spend half of it on a loan of $100k (30 years). That's a lot of capital and it could provide an individual with a home in Baltimore. A family would have even more capital to work with. This gives a great deal of flexibility and a lot of resources in neighborhoods without any. Further development would take place, giving these neighborhoods the kinds of businesses that wealthy white neighborhoods take for granted (such as grocery stores and banks).
What the UBI does is not just provide some financial amount right now, but a guarantee of future payments regardless. The risk of default would be far, far less and the promise of sustained financial reward for investment in these areas, without booting out the current residents, would be far greater.
If one also couples the UBI payments with a more aggressive tax on the wealthy, particularly on the ownership of multiple residential properties, then one could really damp down prices. From what I have read, several cities with massive housing price increases such as Vancouver and NYC have vast amounts of essentially vacant places because wealth has flowed into these places as wealth investment instead of living investment. But that policy is a separate one to consider, to be sure.
This country has plenty of resources. If we give people a minimum amount of money, those resources can start to be divided up much more equitably (peacefully, profitably) without the overt (and corrupting) hand of government deciding who gets exactly what.
Supply and demand. Prices would likely go up, and you're right to point out that a chunk of it would go to landlords - but unless there is collusion, these landlords are competing with each other to find the fair price in the market.
UBI is generally trickle-up economics, and I think that's a good thing. That extra money is most important to the least wealthy people, and they will naturally spend it in their communities.
It encourages people to get out of the damn cities!
There's a reason why it costs a king's ransom to rent a hovel in a city: finite space. Nothing you do -- not density, not UBI, not anything -- can create unlimited space out of thin air. Fortunately, we've got plenty of space, just not in urban centers.
We need to learn how to use space rather than let it use us.
That's technically true, but horizontal space can be parceled out somewhat independently, vertical space can't, and that's a big deal. You're right that it's a political stumbling block rather than a physical stumbling block, but city housing is expensive everywhere, so it seems appropriate to treat it as an empirical law rather than something that can just be hand-waived away.
I'd support efforts to build vertically in a heartbeat, I just don't have high hopes for them.
Cities are economically efficient. If your praise for UBI is that it reduces economic efficiency (reducing your ability to pay for UBI) then I think you're going off course.
No, paying poor people to compete with each other for city space is not efficient. In terms of efficiency, it's about on par with stacking cash in a pile and burning it.
City space is finite. We ration it for a reason. We could ration it differently, but we'd still have to ration it. Increasing density doesn't make it affordable to pack everyone in a single place (see: NY). Pretending the problem doesn't exist and throwing money at housing projects doesn't make it affordable to pack everyone in a single place (see: SF). The only way to make progress on the actual problem is to figure out how to deal better with being spread out.
Increasing density helps a lot. The US mostly has lost the skills and will to do density. New York mostly stopped building enough to keep up with demand.
Look at Asia to see how to tackle these problems better. Eg Singapore.
Yes, it's not completely clear whether they'll have the political stomach to actually go through with letting the leases lapse at the end of their life.
It would probably have been better to use Land Value Taxes instead of relying on limited leases.
Great question. This is THE show stopper for UBI as presented by any proponent today.
The only way to implement it is by stopping the runaway rent inflation by implementing a counter-force to rent price increases. One such technique is battle tested Land Value Tax which was responsible for massive successes of Asian Tiger economies such as Singapore.
This problem has been understood more than 100 years ago by then popular economics movement following economist Henry George who almost made it to mayor of New York and whose book (Progress and Poverty) coined the term Progressives (in the original anti-trust meaning).
They realized that after you curb the ever inflating rent prices, people can finally be freed up of all excess income being eaten away by land monopoly (city landlords) and other monopoly businesses of that era.
Once you have the money necessary to fund UBI through Land Value Tax for example (which is able to raise more than current tax system with ZERO negative impact to the economy), you then realize that the main problem you were designing UBI for (massive rents eating away your paycheck) went away. So as a government you then reinvest the so to be UBI money into eg. infrastructure, such as city development, roads and networks so that private business can thrive on top of that. Congrats you've now become the economy #1 in the world (this is how asian tigers got so successful).
The only country successfully implementing this at scale today seems to be China, although more so for their expansion in Africa than domestically
(eg. acquiring prime city land by helping constructing subway systems in key metro areas).
An optimist would predict that some people will spend the extra $$$ on a car and a move to the suburbs; others will choose not to work at all, moving to cheap areas to live frugally; and others will find house building much more profitable as rents rise, motivating them to build more.
A pragmatist would say you're completely right, based on my country's many failed attempts to lower house prices by handing out money to house buyers.
Not just rent either. Prices will rise across the board. The thing no one ever seems to mention when talking about wealth redistribution in purely financial terms is that there isn’t some untapped reserve of housing, groceries, transportation, or any other good that’s just waiting for more money to buy it. If we give people more money to buy these things, it might spur more production for some things that have an elastic supply, but it’s more likely to inflate prices. Billionaires don’t use their wealth (generally) to consume millions of times more bread than the average low-income person.
If you give more people money to buy things, it’s more likely to spur production than raise prices in most cases. If there’s more demand for groceries, it will probably be met with more supply rather than higher prices.
That assumes no supply-side restrictions. With housing in big cities it's often supply-side restrictions that cause the rise, like zoning.
For instance: affordable housing. If there were fewer zoning restrictions on micro-studios, housing developers might be able to pack more units in to get the same amount of profit per sq-ft. Instead zoning means that you get the most $ per sq-ft building luxury apartments.
One thing UBI has over housing vouchers is if it's not tied to location people can live where it's cheaper.
What currently stops landlords from raising rents such that no renter has any disposable income? Surely my landlord isn’t simply convinced that I am paying them every cent that I could possibly afford to pay them.
As much as it has been tortured and mutated there are still market forces driving things. Supply of housing stock, supply of renters, their ability to pay at all levels of the economy from jumbo mortgages down to section 8 housing are all factors driving the marketplace.
This was discussed by one of the game's creators in the Ultima Online episode of Ars Techica's War Stories (around the 5:10 mark) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KFNxJVTJleE
- Streaming is a much better experience than cable. I can watch anything I want whenever I want on whichever device I want. I don't need to rent a cable box. I don't need to schedule a technician to come to my house to start my service.
- Uber / Lyft are a way better experience than taxis. I can call the device from my phone wherever I am. I get price certainty up front instead of the miserable experience of sitting anxiously watching the number on the meter go up. The app handles payment and I don't have to mess with the driver telling me the card reader is broken and he wants cash. The driver's GPS is integrated with my ride and I both don't have to tell the driver where to go and worry about them taking the scenic route to drive the fare up.
Anyone who wants to go back to the world of cable / taxis is looking at the past with rose colored glasses. Tech has absolutely made both of those products better.