What could the positive effects be of not being free to buy "South Park: The Stick of Truth" in Australia? I think South Park itself is one positive effect of not inhibiting free speech just because it offends.
The AU governments' censorship of video games spans decades and no clear upside has emerged yet!
In addition to video games we also censor television, books, porn, the internet and music. Slippery, slippery slope... it's now illegal for doctors to talk about the facilities and treatment they observe working with attempted-illegal immigrants detained indefinitely by the AU government.
I tried to write the long answer and it turned out as a wall of text composed of parenthetical caveats. Then I tried to right the short answer and it turned out as a medium length yet confusing answer.
The truth of the matter is that people are barely evolved ape/chimps and do pretty much whatever suites them as long as they don't get their ass kicked for it.
I agreed with you at first but reading through Urbit's docs and the vox article linked in thread clarified the relationship between the system design and the author's political ideology.
Many of the design choices did not make sense to me until I understood that the author basically leads a thought current around a return to aristocracy.
With that, there does seem to be some reason to avoid the software simply because it may be designed to produce a particular political outcome.
If everyone is given money for a specific product and suppliers are universally aware of exactly how much people can spend on that product then, yes, that can happen.
However, under UBI, I think suppliers of goods and services would still be faced with the basic issue of not knowing exactly how much consumers value any given product and competition would still exist so prices would likely still be set by supply vs demand.
All solvable problems though, no?
If no one has to wash dishes in order to survive then you will have to offer a quite decent wage to get people to wash dishes else pay someone to finally make the washing of dishes completely automated.
Supply and demand should dictate that the worst issue will end up being the rising cost of having a night on the town.
Same thing for any other currently low value jobs. We will have to adjust to paying people properly, even above minimum wage, to do things that suck.
I view this as a desirable outcome when considered against the current situation in which only the most glamorous jobs tend to pay well, even if the job is not necessarily most helpful.
so a minimum wage? great, so i'll pay half the dishwashers twice the previous wage for twice the work. or, if automation is possible, i'll pay one guy a minimum wage to look after dozens of dishwashing machines. result is less people working.
Not quite the same as a minimum wage. It's not enforced by bureaucrats, but by potential employees each individually deciding they have better uses for their time to do the work you're asking for the price you're offering.
If your workers are willing and able to do twice as much work in the same time for twice as much pay, you should likely make that switch anyway - at the least it'd save you bookkeeping, and it would be a better use of the workers' time.
And if people systematically decide that they have better things to do than a particular job, and we automate that job so we don't need people doing it, that seems like a win to me.
Whether it means less people working overall depends on how big these effects are, what the effects are on demand, and whether we couple it with other changes like a decreased minimum wage (which could lead to more people working on things which are more pleasant/fulfilling but less highly paid).
