Patri Friedman

Being a fictional story, the dropout lifestyle is unfortunately glorified - expertise in the fakely epic dropout virtual world is transformed, via a tournament for control of the VR world, into real-world riches and power.

This is not a commentary on justice or morality or any aspect of what "should" be. It is simply an observation about the world as it is, namely that it ruthlessly culls systems of the form "people can vote themselves welfare to play video games instead of working".

While ppl like @slatestarcodex somehow both understand Moloch and believe in UBI, I feel very strongly that basic game theory dynamics make "UBI + Universal Vote" clearly untenable. SocSec/Medicare already threaten to bankrupt the world's richest country through these dynamics.

Not that accurate long-term analysis has much to do with democratic policy - I'm not writing to influence legacy states. Rather, to explain to remainers and potential exiters why we must & will exit from the states whose decaying orbits will inevitably result in fiery death.

Federal-level voting has less than 1 bits/year of bandwidth. (0.5 reps + 0.25 president + 0.166 senators) If voters cannot coordinate a swift overturning of the two parties, they can totally just decide not to do UBI. If voters can coordinate it, repr. democracy is ~ obsolete.