Money Matters

Thinking about the future of money and work.

Links:

• The Niche of One Store is expanding with new direction, and almost everything is under $10. It’s the perfect way to expand your mind in small doses.

• There are other options than Amazon this holiday season, and this story will take you down memory lane.

---

I have an advantage that many don’t have.

I don’t have to go to a 9-5 job anymore. I made the right moves to no longer need that for my survival.

I do what I do now without that pressure of having to make ends meet. I get to indulge my interests instead of focusing on making an income flow, which paradoxically, makes it easier to make money doing this.

Which makes me think about Universal Basic Income (UBI) and AI.

First of all, I’m proof that getting money without having to toil daily for it doesn’t make a person lazy or stupid. I spend my time writing this newsletter, building a business of my own liking, educating myself and seeking further knowledge.

So, that whole argument is bullshit. Lazy people will be lazy regardless of being forced into doing labor. Productive people will be productive.

But watching how corporations are using AI to justify cost cutting measures (i.e. firing people from their jobs) gives me visions of what the future will be.

• These corporations are firing people, which means they don’t make money, which means those people can’t afford the products which the corporation sells to make money, which means the corporations will eventually not make any money. That’s a problem.

• When AI and other technologies start taking more and more jobs (and this WILL increase exponentially over the next half century), what are we going to do about all the people that have no way of taking care of their needs? Are we just going to let them die? I imagine the billions of people this will affect will not like that idea at all and may have something to say about it.

There’s really no way around it: a major societal restructuring will have to happen.

I know there’s a lot of the conservative types out there that think, “Well, who’s gonna pay for it???!!! We don’t have the money for that!”

I will gently explain this: Money isn’t real. It’s a social construct we’ve all agreed on to trade goods. It’s just little pieces of paper with some ink on it that we’ve decided has some value so we can buy our Milk and Kit-Kat bars.

Regardless of what anyone thinks, some major changes are going to happen to the human race soon as a whole.

You can’t fight the future.