Living that long would break the economy. I’m retired on a fixed income, and my planning was based on living no longer than age 90. After that, my savings will be depleted, I will live on social security alone. When I imagine young people having another 30 years to pay for social security per person, it’s just broken. We would need to work until age 95 instead of 65. What would be the point?
I think things are gonna get really ugly in the next twenty years.
We’re nearing a point where artificial intelligence can replace a lot of white collar and logistical jobs, which would skyrocket unemployment rates and lead to widespread riots.
Don’t get me started on what a leftist pipe dream universal basic income is. The guaranteed income UBI would give would either bankrupt our economy or be such a pittance that nobody could live off of it
I did number crunching on how much it would cost to pay every UK adult a guaranteed basic income that could theoretically pay for rent in most cities outside of London, assuming £800 pcm and 50,000,000 adults. That would cost £480,000,000,000 a year, or almost 2.5 times our entire welfare budget, of which about £100b alone goes into pensions.
And before you suggest automation and wealth taxes would pay for UBI… good luck with that. We can’t even get the rich to pay their fair share of taxes right at this moment.
Given how much politicians serve the rich, I think they’d sooner sic the military on protesters than actually cave in to the demands of the masses, especially when armed drones could do a lot of the gruntwork. The wealthy don’t care if you’re destitute, starving and living on the streets.
It’s a more radical version of welfare capitalism. Socialism is about worker control of the means of production. This would mean all the factories and agricultural land and cloud servers, etc would be owned by the people who work there. UBI is simply keeping the poor alive through subsidies. We do it already through all sorts of things. For example food prices are heavily subsidized. It’s just taking that idea and taking it to the logical extreme.
It’s not leftist at all. Leftists may support it because it will improve the living conditions for the bottom class. But fundamentally it does nothing to put the means of production into the hands of the workers. A leftist idea would be for example forcing all private companies to become cooperatives.
I agree with you that things are going to get ugly very soon. Our society simply isn’t equipped to handle this dramatic transformation that is coming. I think we will likely see some sort of serious war going forward as well. I’m just glad I live far enough away from the likely nuclear bomb targets where I probably wouldn’t die immediately, lol.
I think UBI is really the only solution that will be able to maintain our current capitalist system and way of life. Anything else would essentially lead to revolt. Idle hands are the devil’s plaything. If 50% of the young people in the country aren’t working, you’re either going to see a massive prison complex or a militant revolt. Probably both.
UBI however would further our jump into dystopia. Imagine a society where the bottom 80% survive off of the government’s hand. They live in ghettos, segregated from the people who own capital. Majority of the country live in abject poverty getting only basic necessities. Starting to sound a lot like 1984…
But it is. It may not be Communist or Socialist but it’s a radical idea to redistribute wealth to the masses and effectively create a literal welfare state. Pretty much every party that supports UBI is left wing.
If 50% of the young people in the country aren’t working, you’re either going to see a massive prison complex or a militant revolt. Probably both.
I think we’ll see a full societal collapse in the next few decades, whether that’s a descent into lawless anarchy or civil wars.
Ok we should have a clear definition of what left means so this conversation is clear. My definition of left is socialism and communism. Welfare capitalism is still right wing. Please feel free to share yours and we can see where we differ
UBI is an attempt to keep the capitalist state going through this radical change. Fundamentally, nothing changes. The people with capital still control the capital. Companies still exist and make profit in a market structure.
People aren’t really suggesting this because they want to pay taxes. They are suggesting this because they are scared of the system falling apart. Do you have any other solutions? I really don’t think there’s a way to keep our current capitalist system and not have a UBI if +50% aren’t working.
If we allow the system to collapse, we risk too much. Nazi Germany style authoritarian government with the current surveillance state capacities we have is an incredibly scary thought. They’re even working on mind reading - they’ve done small scale experiments where machine learning models can listen to your brain waves and see what you are thinking.
We cannot allow fascism to have a serious resurgence. It’s too dangerous.
Maybe this is an unpopular opinion, but I don’t think working till very late age is a bad thing. I don’t expect to be sitting on my ass whole day long by the time I get to retirement age. What I do think is a bad thing is if by that time I am financially struggling to get by.
My great grandma died at 101 earlier this year. She had ran out of money a while ago, but she had so many descendants at that point that everyone took turns caring for her. One of her daughters lived with her and the other 6~7 children all pitched in.
She never had to stay at a home. That’s a nice thing about being old as shit, assuming you had at least some children. Your descendants exponentially increase allowing you to draw money from a significant pool of people.
I flew into the country to visit her for her 100th birthday and there were almost 100 people there, majority family members.
By properly taxing companies and rich individuals? Besides, those leaving to 120 would most likely be among the richest of us. Do they really need a pension at all?
Well I, for one, would like to live for as long as I want. I understand the sentiment here, though a little depressing, is against that concept. I understand people’s reticence toward extending a painful life, particularly if that comes with strings attached. Life extension would need to be paired with a basic income and the rich will need to foot the bill.
I think we can all agree that George R R Martin should be put on this regimen immediately. We’re going to need 16 or more years for this dude to finish the series.
Because a world in which people live to 80 tend to live well till 65, And a world in which people can live to 120 might open up the possibility of living well to 90.
Stretching out life expectancies tends to stretch out the length of quality time too.
I’m close to your age and I’m excited for the next 40-50 years. It often surprises me when I get perspectives like yours. I have to remember people have different opinions on things I take for granted.
We can have a tendency to project our views onto everyone else and assume everyone thinks the same thing. False consensus effect
I think people are fundamentally different because of some stuff that happened in childhood. There are people who are negative about the past and positive about the future. I fall into this.
There are others that are positive about the past and negative about the future. Maybe you’re here.
Are you suicidal? Longer life does not mean living as a cripple, we can extend our health if we research more. And exercise and lower calorie diet seems to improve health a lot. A 70 year old who exercises and eats lightly will be healthier than a 30yr who eats like an American and drives without walking much.
I gave up on it when it turned out one of the figureheads of anti-aging researched ended up being a huge creep and everyone involved rushed to defend them. 💀 It’s like, nah if these are the kinds of people who are going to be prevalent in a post-death world, i’d rather die.
That’s not even accounting for those doing eugenics pseudoscience injecting baby penises into their faces thinking it will make them live forever. No thank you. It’s a good thing that shit has a zero% chance of working and has a not-zero% chance of doing the opposite.
Let’s see if we make life expectancy consistently go up again before we start talking about 120. I could just as easily see it fall to 60 before going up to 120.
Putting aside world inequality and the grim future that awaits us for a sec, medical science keeps moving forward… It took us 13 years to even sequence all the human genome (which was a tremendous effort done by many universities and researchers). Predicting the structures of proteins was an immense problem in biology that was finally solved with AI like 2~ years ago. mRNA vaccines were a super theoretical thing many years ago, but served us to fight covid. There’s a growing number of scientists (like david sinclair) that aren’t afraid of openly taking immortality as an academical challenge and publish research without fear of mockery
People forget technological progress is driven by an exponential growth, seeing all the things we have discovered in the past decades I can’t help but be optimistic about treatments or medicines available for the general public that slow down aging
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Living that long would break the economy. I’m retired on a fixed income, and my planning was based on living no longer than age 90. After that, my savings will be depleted, I will live on social security alone. When I imagine young people having another 30 years to pay for social security per person, it’s just broken. We would need to work until age 95 instead of 65. What would be the point?
Man, if only we had some sort of military funding to divert to social programs…
We spend as much as the top 10 countries combined on defense.
Infrastructure - dangerously old Healthcare - non-existent Education- death spiral Social health - All measures worse every year
Don’t know, we tried nothing and are out of ideas thanks to the vice grip of lobbies and bribes Eisehower himself warned about.
Think we should moved towards post-scarcity first…
Economy is about to break soon anyway. Technology increasing to a point of killing a dangerous amount of jobs combined with a declining birth rate…
We’re gonna have to do something in the next couple decades. There’s really no other option unless the elites want chaos… and they don’t.
Also, the point would be that you live longer. I know a lot of people hate their jobs but not everyone does. I wouldn’t mind getting another 30 years.
I think things are gonna get really ugly in the next twenty years.
We’re nearing a point where artificial intelligence can replace a lot of white collar and logistical jobs, which would skyrocket unemployment rates and lead to widespread riots.
Don’t get me started on what a leftist pipe dream universal basic income is. The guaranteed income UBI would give would either bankrupt our economy or be such a pittance that nobody could live off of it
I did number crunching on how much it would cost to pay every UK adult a guaranteed basic income that could theoretically pay for rent in most cities outside of London, assuming £800 pcm and 50,000,000 adults. That would cost £480,000,000,000 a year, or almost 2.5 times our entire welfare budget, of which about £100b alone goes into pensions.
And before you suggest automation and wealth taxes would pay for UBI… good luck with that. We can’t even get the rich to pay their fair share of taxes right at this moment.
Given how much politicians serve the rich, I think they’d sooner sic the military on protesters than actually cave in to the demands of the masses, especially when armed drones could do a lot of the gruntwork. The wealthy don’t care if you’re destitute, starving and living on the streets.
UBI isn’t a leftist idea
It’s a more radical version of welfare capitalism. Socialism is about worker control of the means of production. This would mean all the factories and agricultural land and cloud servers, etc would be owned by the people who work there. UBI is simply keeping the poor alive through subsidies. We do it already through all sorts of things. For example food prices are heavily subsidized. It’s just taking that idea and taking it to the logical extreme.
It’s not leftist at all. Leftists may support it because it will improve the living conditions for the bottom class. But fundamentally it does nothing to put the means of production into the hands of the workers. A leftist idea would be for example forcing all private companies to become cooperatives.
I agree with you that things are going to get ugly very soon. Our society simply isn’t equipped to handle this dramatic transformation that is coming. I think we will likely see some sort of serious war going forward as well. I’m just glad I live far enough away from the likely nuclear bomb targets where I probably wouldn’t die immediately, lol.
I think UBI is really the only solution that will be able to maintain our current capitalist system and way of life. Anything else would essentially lead to revolt. Idle hands are the devil’s plaything. If 50% of the young people in the country aren’t working, you’re either going to see a massive prison complex or a militant revolt. Probably both.
UBI however would further our jump into dystopia. Imagine a society where the bottom 80% survive off of the government’s hand. They live in ghettos, segregated from the people who own capital. Majority of the country live in abject poverty getting only basic necessities. Starting to sound a lot like 1984…
But it is. It may not be Communist or Socialist but it’s a radical idea to redistribute wealth to the masses and effectively create a literal welfare state. Pretty much every party that supports UBI is left wing.
I think we’ll see a full societal collapse in the next few decades, whether that’s a descent into lawless anarchy or civil wars.
Ok we should have a clear definition of what left means so this conversation is clear. My definition of left is socialism and communism. Welfare capitalism is still right wing. Please feel free to share yours and we can see where we differ
UBI is an attempt to keep the capitalist state going through this radical change. Fundamentally, nothing changes. The people with capital still control the capital. Companies still exist and make profit in a market structure.
People aren’t really suggesting this because they want to pay taxes. They are suggesting this because they are scared of the system falling apart. Do you have any other solutions? I really don’t think there’s a way to keep our current capitalist system and not have a UBI if +50% aren’t working.
If we allow the system to collapse, we risk too much. Nazi Germany style authoritarian government with the current surveillance state capacities we have is an incredibly scary thought. They’re even working on mind reading - they’ve done small scale experiments where machine learning models can listen to your brain waves and see what you are thinking.
We cannot allow fascism to have a serious resurgence. It’s too dangerous.
Maybe this is an unpopular opinion, but I don’t think working till very late age is a bad thing. I don’t expect to be sitting on my ass whole day long by the time I get to retirement age. What I do think is a bad thing is if by that time I am financially struggling to get by.
What happened to having hobbies? Working and languishing till death are not the only two possible options.
My work is a hobby, so there’s that
This. I’m already retired and I’m plenty busy doing what I like with my time.
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My great grandma died at 101 earlier this year. She had ran out of money a while ago, but she had so many descendants at that point that everyone took turns caring for her. One of her daughters lived with her and the other 6~7 children all pitched in.
She never had to stay at a home. That’s a nice thing about being old as shit, assuming you had at least some children. Your descendants exponentially increase allowing you to draw money from a significant pool of people.
I flew into the country to visit her for her 100th birthday and there were almost 100 people there, majority family members.
So you’re saying to dine on billionaires before that happens? 😏
By then it’ll be quintiillionaires and everyone will be a billionaire
How are we supposed to afford paying pensions that long if people retire before 70?
By properly taxing companies and rich individuals? Besides, those leaving to 120 would most likely be among the richest of us. Do they really need a pension at all?
That’s just not happening.
It should be though, we need to demand change rather than just saying “oh they’ll never do it” and giving up.
Who the hell wants to do that?
Is this the sign up? I’m in
Imaginable as possible? Ok, maybe.
Imaginable as tolerable? Please God no.
I don’t want to live to 120. Idk how I’m gonna be able to retire at a reasonable age.
Well I, for one, would like to live for as long as I want. I understand the sentiment here, though a little depressing, is against that concept. I understand people’s reticence toward extending a painful life, particularly if that comes with strings attached. Life extension would need to be paired with a basic income and the rich will need to foot the bill.
I think we can all agree that George R R Martin should be put on this regimen immediately. We’re going to need 16 or more years for this dude to finish the series.
I too want to see the completion of George’s masterpiece,
Elden Ring.
Just because you’d live long enough, doesn’t mean he would
Wild Cards?
But why would you want to
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I’ve not been enjoying the last 30 all that much, I don’t think I want another 90 or nearly that far even
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Because a world in which people live to 80 tend to live well till 65, And a world in which people can live to 120 might open up the possibility of living well to 90.
Stretching out life expectancies tends to stretch out the length of quality time too.
We should just die at 30 again huh?
I’m 30 now, having a hard time looking at the next 40-50 and thinking I want that. Definitely not 90
I’m close to your age and I’m excited for the next 40-50 years. It often surprises me when I get perspectives like yours. I have to remember people have different opinions on things I take for granted.
We can have a tendency to project our views onto everyone else and assume everyone thinks the same thing. False consensus effect
I think people are fundamentally different because of some stuff that happened in childhood. There are people who are negative about the past and positive about the future. I fall into this.
There are others that are positive about the past and negative about the future. Maybe you’re here.
Are you suicidal? Longer life does not mean living as a cripple, we can extend our health if we research more. And exercise and lower calorie diet seems to improve health a lot. A 70 year old who exercises and eats lightly will be healthier than a 30yr who eats like an American and drives without walking much.
I gave up on it when it turned out one of the figureheads of anti-aging researched ended up being a huge creep and everyone involved rushed to defend them. 💀 It’s like, nah if these are the kinds of people who are going to be prevalent in a post-death world, i’d rather die.
That’s not even accounting for those doing eugenics pseudoscience injecting baby penises into their faces thinking it will make them live forever. No thank you. It’s a good thing that shit has a zero% chance of working and has a not-zero% chance of doing the opposite.
Just give me something for the pain and let me die
deleted by creator
More bad news
Let’s see if we make life expectancy consistently go up again before we start talking about 120. I could just as easily see it fall to 60 before going up to 120.
Maybe in some ultra rich country, certainly not in the declining West though.
Putting aside world inequality and the grim future that awaits us for a sec, medical science keeps moving forward… It took us 13 years to even sequence all the human genome (which was a tremendous effort done by many universities and researchers). Predicting the structures of proteins was an immense problem in biology that was finally solved with AI like 2~ years ago. mRNA vaccines were a super theoretical thing many years ago, but served us to fight covid. There’s a growing number of scientists (like david sinclair) that aren’t afraid of openly taking immortality as an academical challenge and publish research without fear of mockery
People forget technological progress is driven by an exponential growth, seeing all the things we have discovered in the past decades I can’t help but be optimistic about treatments or medicines available for the general public that slow down aging