Matthew Skala: “So there’s a thing that seems to be related to the unimaginably extreme decrease in clothing prices: the decrease in prices has gone hand-in-hand with the shifting of labour, mostly to machines but also to human beings in other countries, away from the end users. Instead of your clothing being made by you or the women of your family, now it’s made by machines operated by strangers very far away, and that is why it’s so much cheaper, and also why you (or, again, the women of your family…) have lost the skills and even the mental models associated with it.

I don’t know what exactly that has to do with education and health care. But I note that very much of the decrease in clothing costs seems to come from automation. In what way is automation relevant to education and health care?”

“…the arbitrary nature of Communist state, overseen by the Communist party, prevented it from ever developing a responsible and impersonal machinery of Weberian bureaucracy. Such a machinery that follows well-known and rational rules cannot be established if the power is arbitrary. And without such a machinery, the project of modernization is doomed.”

“But the place where Like diverges from typical human vanity is the way it powers Facebook’s increasingly omniscient News Feed algorithm. Facebook takes into account thousands of factors to determine what posts to prioritize in people’s feeds, but Like is one of the most straightforward ways that users convey positive sentiment to the company’s algorithms. A Like isn’t just a digital pat on the back — it’s an ambiguous upvote that drives a piece of content to more eyeballs. Like is presented as a simple, rewarding interaction point, but the ways in which it dictates what we see are opaque.”

Peter Augustine Lawler: “The key objection to niceness amounts to the fact that it’s not really a virtue. You can’t rely upon it as the foundation for the duties required of friends, family members, or fellow citizens. A nice person won’t fight for you; a nice person wouldn’t even lie for you, unless there’s something in it for him. A nice person wouldn’t be a Good Samaritan, if it required genuine risk or an undue deployment of time and treasure. A nice person isn’t animated by love or honor or God. Niceness, if you think about it, is the most selfish of virtues, one, as Tocqueville noticed, rooted in a deep indifference to the well-being of others. It’s more selfish than open selfishness, because the latter accords people the respect of letting them know where you stand. I let you do—and even affirm—whatever you do, because I don’t care what you do as long as it doesn’t bother me. Niceness, as Allan Bloom noticed, is the quality connected with flatness of soul, with being unmoved by the relational imperatives grounded in love and death.”

“The discussion was based on a proposal to add three new articles in the Swiss constitution:

1. The national state is required to establish an Unconditional Basic Income.
2. The Basic Income has to ensure all Swiss residents a life in dignity and participation in public life.
3. The legislation [created by the Swiss parliament] has to set the necessary rules accordingly, especially to organize the financial part.”