Except that doesn’t work as there remains a systemic shortage of jobs on offer.
The societal deal with the private sector is that it employs everybody at a rate that allows an individual to live in return for the chance to make a profit. A job guarantee ensures that the private sector overall cannot shirk that responsibility.
If the private sector does its job, nobody will be employed on a job guarantee.
An income subsidy does the same thing at lesser cost. Whether that subsidy is a UBI or a wage supplement is to some extent a political choice: we got the EITC instead of a proper UBI (managed as a "negative" income tax bill for low-earning folks) largely due to political objections to the notion of getting money "for doing nothing".
Yet the state pension tells us that isn’t the case. The state pension is a UBI allocated by age rather than physical area. We have millions of data points showing that when people receive sufficient to live on they stop working.
The result is political pressure to remove the state pension or increase the age at which it is received.
If UBI worked as you suggest then the resulting increase in productivity would drive the state pension age down not up.
The evidence is against you. Giving people money reduces productivity and makes it more difficult for firms to get the labour they require, and at huge cost to the state that uses up the finite taxation space there is available.
You have to work if you want to get paid. Otherwise you will get fired. The obligation of the state is to provide you with a guaranteed alternative job offer, not a guaranteed income.
It’s up to you if you take up the state’s offer or not.
The UBI removes the motivation to work and turns everything into volunteering. The result is a rise in the “reservation wage gap” - the amount the private sector has to pay to get people to work for them.
The reservation wage gap with a job guarantee is near zero - which is more economically efficient.
Additionally the job guarantee acts as a powerful spend side automatic stabiliser that is temporal and spatially efficient - which removes the need to manipulate the base interest rate allowing it to return to its natural rate of zero. This allows permanent cheaper mortgages and business loans.
One issue is that there's X% (debatable) of people who can't work for reasons that are complex or hard to explain. For many, even if they are physically able, you kinda don't want them to.
I mean, people who will create negative utility in a workplace or cost more in supervision expense than you get from them as output.
They create hazards for others by being drunk or on drugs on the job, or by harassing or bullying others, injuring themselves or others, causing personality conflicts or dramas due to trauma or unresolved mental health issues etc. I don't mean this as a value judgment, it's just like some people really aren't in a place in life where they can function well in work settings.
I'm not sure how you "guarantee" something that is dependent on complex situational decisions.
That confuses two points. Employees sell labour hours. At the basic living wage those hours are interchangeable between all people offering them. Even to the extent of age or infirmity. That’s what “unskilled labour” means.
The conversion of those hours into labour services is why the private sector is allowed to profit. If they want “better quality hours” then they have to bid up the price of those hours.
That should be market determined, rather than being administratively set as the gap between unemployment benefit and the minimum wage. You’ll be surprised how well the private sector can use hours once they see people doing the basics of turning up on time and doing something.
When we sentence offenders to “community service” we give them a job as rehabilitation, along with all the support mechanisms to straighten out lives. If we can do that for offenders, we can do that for everybody.
I don't just have LLMs spit out code. I have them spit out code and then I try that code out myself - sometimes via reviewing it and automated tests, sometimes just by using it and confirming it does the right thing.
That upgrades the code to a status of generated and verified. That's a lot more valuable than code that's just generated but hasn't been verified.
If I throw it all away every time I want to make a change I'm also discarding that valuable verification work. I'd rather keep code that I know works!
I suspect that is where we will be going next - automated verification. At least to the point where we can pass it over the wall for user acceptance testing.
Is it possible to write Cucumber specs (for example) of sufficient clarity that allows an LLM agent team to generate code in any number of code languages that delivers the same outcome, and do that repeatedly?
Then we're at the point where we know the specs work. And is getting to the point where we know the specs work less effort than just coding directly?
I think the nuanced take on Joel's rant is this: it was good advice for 26 years. It became slightly less good advice a few months ago. This is a good time to warn overenthuastic people that it’s still good advice in 2026, and to start a discussion about which of its assumptions remain to be true in 2027 and later.
We're not writing code in a computer language any more, we're writing specs in structured English of sufficient clarity that they can be generated from.
> writing specs in structured English of sufficient clarity
What does "sufficient clarity" mean? And is it english expressive enough and free of ambiguities? And who is going to review this process, another LLM, with the same biases and shortcomings?
I code for a living, and so far I'm OK with using LLMs to aid in my day to day job. But I wouldn't trust any LLM to produce code of sufficient quality that I would be comfortable deploying it in production without human review and supervision. And most definitely wouldn't task a LLM to just go and rewrite large parts of a product because of a change of specs.
You'll get the same software in outcome terms. Which is what we want.
Tokens are cheaper than getting an individual to modify the code, and likely the tokens will get cheaper - in the same way compilation has (which used to be batched once a day overnight in the mainframe era).
Non-determinism is how the whole LLM system works. All we're doing with agents is adding another layer of reinforcement learning that gets it to converge on the correct output.
That's also how routing protocols like OSPF work. There's no guarantee when those multicast packets will turn up, yet the routes converge and networks stay stable.
I think this fear of non-determinism needs to pass, but it will only pass if evidence of success arises.
That doesn’t mean manufacturing is down, if new output is automated.
The trade deficit is shrinking, and which necessarily means there is more domestic flow as foreign hoards of dollars are liquidated. That flow has to go somewhere.
> That doesn’t mean manufacturing is down, if new output is automated.
You are correct. Of course, if new output is automated, then the purported goal of the tariffs (more manufacturing jobs!) is defeated.
The fact that any new manufacturing will of course be automated shows how little thought went into designing these tariffs and how transparently false the administration's promises are.
> The trade deficit is shrinking
This is totally irrelevant. The size of the trade deficit does is a red herring.
The trade deficit is shrinking because fewer goods are being imported. Producing countries are finding alternate markets that are outside of the US' punitive tariffing.
What has been the impact on the distribution in the firm. Have more staff been hired, have more supply contracts been handed out, have worker bonuses increases or has it all flowed to the bottom line?
This is the other side of tariffs that few discuss. It may put import prices up, but it also increases the domestic flow of income.
Which means that those who rely solely on imports pay the cost and those who make the domestic supply get an increase in income as an offset.
We've doubled (or more) in headcount. Mostly in the 'special projects' area (complex shippers, partitions, pallets, parts movers, etc) and truck drivers (we have our own trucking company)
Our prices are primarily pegged to what brown paper is (used to make corrugated) which ebbs and flows. Our prices were affected a little because a lot of pulp and raw material comes from Canada (they sell soft wood incredibly cheap... it's actually been a point of contention in our treaty for decades) but the cost change has been fairly slight (close to inflation).
Labor prices have gone up a decent amount and so has health care. We've found savings in increased efficiency due to scaling up production (there are some big fixed costs wrt machinery that becomes a smaller piece of the pie with increased production).
Nobody imports boxes... cost of transport is more than the product which is why almost all box makers have regional plants.
On the surface, there's absolutely zero connection between public debt and private (personal) savings. If there's a hidden connection, you're going to have to explain it, because it's not clear at all how they are one and the same.
What is a gilt or a Treasury? It is a private saving certificate bought by people in exchange for bank deposits they have previously accrued.
Those bank deposits are transferred to Treasury by deleting the bank deposit and by the bank transferring central bank credits back to the Treasury.
Where did those bank deposits originate from? From the government transferring central bank credits to the payee bank and the payee bank then crediting the deposit account.
If the individual chooses to hold the bank deposit, then the bank itself will purchase the government security with the credits it received from the central bank when government made its payment.
By only doing projects for which there is sufficient political support across the board, not the ones that are supported by a tiny vocal minority of the electorate.
Either we live in a democracy or we do not. Democracy determines the correct path by wobbling between two incompatible options - implementation and repeal. That which is implemented by one side, but not repealed by the other survives as the appropriate path.
There is no alternative to this - without abandoning democracy and universal suffrage.
Remember that democracy is the worst way to run a country, except for all the other.
It would be far better if we could get a government in who would use Brexit freedoms to scrap VAT and all the other sales and import taxes. They are an administrative nightmare and both unnecessary and ineffective. Stick to simpler taxes.
The problem is that we have one side who loves all things EU and the other that loves all things neoliberal - both of which are obsessed with sales taxes for some reason
VAT is not really all that complicated and accounts for around 15% of the UK tax take. Moving that to income tax would mean a substantial redistribution from working people to pensioners and incentivise moving more production abroad.
Import taxes are pretty complicated but unilaterally removing them would mean we would have nothing to negotiate tariff free access to foreign markets.
Vat is stupidly complex. Try doing an international conference for example. Not to mention the impact on imports as the OP discovered.
Quite why people think tax stays in one place is beyond me - all costs are passed on and tax is no different. Putting the tax on employer NiCS for example would result in roughly the same business collection and payment, but with a significant reduction in administration and the tax gap since PAYE collection is more efficient.
And quite why obtaining foreign items more expensive is seen as a negotiating point could only be brought up by somebody who hasn’t thought through how floating exchange rates work. We want more stuff coming in and less going out. That’s how you win in international trade. Exports are a cost remember.
As we see from the US, it is the local population that pays the cost of import tariffs and taxes. The currency exchange rate fixes the rest.
A single country's tax policies don't exist in a vacuum. Let's take as an example a new car that costs £36,000 including 20% VAT. If the UK removed VAT and put the cost on employer NICS then British built cars would still cost roughly £36,000 but foreign built cars would now cost £30,000 and what little of the British car industry is left after Brexit quickly ceases to exist as the multinational companies that run them shift production elsewhere to remain price competitive.
Trump's broad based tariffs are dumb because much of what is being tariffed is not really manufactured in the US anyway. But used in a more targeted manner they can help ensure a level playing field for your country's products in the countries you have trade agreements with. Otherwise what incentive is there for another country to negotiate a trade agreement that gives equal access to says cars manufactured in either country?
Fixed exchange rate thinking I’m afraid. Try it again but with a floating exchange rate - understanding that importers into a currency area pay the local area costs of exporters from that currency area. Reducing the tax thereby means there is more sterling available for exporters to earn.
You will find then that the exchange value is a function of productivity not currency numbers.
Moving VAT to employers NICs will impact those operations that use a lot of labour and few machines. That favours those operations that have higher productivity.
Therefore the physical cost of exports will reduce and the value of imports to the local population increase.
If that reduces the number of exporters then that is of benefit to the nation, as there are more people available to work on domestic production.
With floating exchange rates you don’t need “trade deals”. The exchange rate sorts it all out for you.
Putting rocks in your own harbour is always a silly idea. If other nations play dumping games then you fix that with subsidies not tariffs.
There is more sterling available to FX, which is where the exchange rate is set. The tax flow has been moved one step along. So the uk importer doesn’t pay the tax (on the goods), the uk exporter does (on their staff). That changes the sterling flow across the boundary and shifts the exchange rate. Quite where it settles between importers paying more and exporters receiving more is market/productivity determined.
Those processes have to be eliminated, yes. Now let's get back to talking about long term grid storage. Piggybacking storage on emissions that have to be eliminated obviously isn't a solution.
It's more expensive than hydrogen because you need to capture and store the CO2 of combustion. Extracting CO2 from the atmosphere as part of the cycle would be even more prohibitively expensive.
The societal deal with the private sector is that it employs everybody at a rate that allows an individual to live in return for the chance to make a profit. A job guarantee ensures that the private sector overall cannot shirk that responsibility.
If the private sector does its job, nobody will be employed on a job guarantee.
reply