sorry for casterly rocking

Made this post about 15 minutes after the repair guy who fixed the pump on my dishwasher packed up his tools and left, as the dishwasher was whirring along doing my dishes from that morning.

Corporation stole your life's work? Well if there were UBI you wouldn't mind!

Robot stole your job? With UBI you wouldn't need your job!

Not enough help for disabled people? If we all had UBI that would replace disability payments!

Corporations conglomerating into a few huge unregulatable cartels which hike up the prices of everything forever? Just tax them and do UBI!

Like, yes UBI would certainly help those problems. I'm not at all saying it wouldn't.

But if we do not actually fix society in a few key ways, we're going to end up right back where we are now.

For instance, if we had UBI nationally (instead of just in test areas), these big colluding megacorporations would simply raise the prices of everything to recapture the money. The only limit in the money they extract from us right now is how much we have. If we had more, they'd take more, and monopoly gives them the ability to do that efficiently.

UBI isn't going to hire a special ed teacher in my kid's school or make your apartment ADA compliant.

UBI shouldn't be a consolation prize for destroying a job someone loved. Humans like to work, and we like to benefit from our own work. I do not want to have my industry demolished to be done worse by a word salad machine, and be compensated by a check.

And of course, with corporations so huge they can buy politicians, they will soon vote the taxes down and UBI back out.

We need, for starters:

robust anti trust

money out of politics

regulations that protect ordinary people without a lawyer

I predicted, in sketching an anti-Sikh panic, that political parties would cave to pressure “Enthusiastically in Reform’s case, awkwardly and abjectly in Labour’s.” Just as I was finalising edits to this article, Andy Burnham, currently the party's preferred successor to Starmer, was asked about removing the exemption that allows Sikhs to carry small ceremonial knives. “I think it needs to be looked at” the supposedly centre-left alternative replied. He even managed the “awkwardly and abjectly” part, waffling about how forcing a minority to choose between a religious duty and leaving their homes would have to be done “carefully.” Never mind that legislating based on one incident is virtually never a good idea. Never mind that the knife used to kill Nowak was nothing like the small kirpan most Sikhs carry. Those in power just cannot seem to tell the fascists no.

But none of this is inevitable. “What’s next? British commentators ask in shock. Will the mainstream media be discussing global plots to replace the white race? Yes. That’s what comes next. I’ve been saying this for some time. It’s less ‘pattern recognition’ and more ‘recognising there is a pattern.’ If we don’t start to coordinate a response it's that, then concentration camps, then death camps.