Quality in dentistry has been going down.  The custom work of crowns, quality of fillings, and etc, have been going by the wayside for cheaper options that the consumer doesn't grok the downstream expenses of.  Generally the chain dentists don't even present options.  I found this out recently after getting some miracle filling that just seems so easy and cheap as "technology has improved" but I would have happily paid for gold or amalgam and a more professional job.  Hadn't had one in about 28 years, so I took their sales pitch as fact.  I also understand that Crowns are similar, and vary in expected lifetime, quality, etc.  I made a contact in the industry who actually runs a shop making them, but she informs me the industry is running the other way, towards cheap and will need replacements down the road.

But on the business side, the "Blue Oceans" Strategy (see the book) of removing options, cutting cost, removing details, and making off with a ton of cash like Yellowtail Winery is an easy sell.  It's just that with eyes, teeth, my body, etc, I would prefer a different model.  It's hard to be educated enough for all to be caveat emptor and up to recently I at least trusted a dentist when I walk in.  Now I don't even know how to buy quality or who to trust.

Interesting case.  Are there other cases where VC-run businesses have similar issues, perhaps in other industries?  I would like to see and understand a pattern if possible.

>UBI may reasonably give people at the bottom of the market sufficient money to become participants.

The incentive is still going to drive a businessperson to come up with a way to take that money from those people (as it is now).  So the rent seeking could expand to include something like slum-lording trailer parks in areas which are even further from possible employment, potentially locking those residents into a radius where no one around does anything but pot and video games.

Meanwhile, since there is more money available to the middle classes, can't I just sell/rent them a house with more bells and whistles?  Maybe they're discerning customers with an extra thousand dollars, so we build the house on 16" centers again instead of 20" and sell them their new, wonderful, higher-quality lifestyle.  Or maybe we just put a thousand dollar countertop on the same crummy house.

Or is something more fundamentally changed by UBI in the basic system underlying rent-seeking and inflation (in essence, the dynamics of capitalism)?  To me, rent-seeking is only a specific incarnation of that greater dynamic of exploiting whatever source of income you can by whatever advantage you have within the system to take money from whoever can and will give it to you, and not as distinct as people make it out to be.  The only thing UBI fundamentally changes in this equation is who can render funds, and how much they can render.

This is probably true in an internal sense, where one needs to be self-honest.  It might be very difficult to understand when any conscious person other than you was doing this, and it might be dicey to judge even in yourself.  Especially given the finiteness of human attention.  

In my personal life, I have spent recent months studying.  Did I emotionally turn away from some things in the middle of this, so that to an outside observer I might have looked like I was burying my head or averting my eyes?  Sure.  Was I doing that or was I setting boundaries?  I guess even if you lived in my head at that time, it could be hard to know.  Maybe my obsessive studying itself is an avoidance.  In the end, I know what I intended, but that's about it.  That's often all we get, even from the inside.

So while I agree with you, I'm not sure exactly when we should cease to be agnostic about parsing that difference.  Maybe it's something we can only hold it as an ideal, complimentary to striving for Truth, basically?

It's also possible that an opposing effect happens where your shouting into the void about dragons connects in some vague way with my belief in the Ilithids, which I then end up coopting your dragon evidence into my own agenda.  Especially if you find anything close to material evidence.  Heck, your material evidence for dragons now gives all kinds of creedance to Ilithids, beholders, gnomes, and all sorts.  So the gnome people and everyone else is now coming out of the woodwork to amplify your work on dragons.  And I think this would be regardless of the specific nuances your attribute to dragons.  I would expect those nuances to get smooshed in the fray to cite your once-and-for-all-proving-dragons strategy.

I mean, if Pons and Fleischmann was true, for example, I bet it would get trotted out with all kinds of half-baked theories on free energy, along with Tesla's name.  And the reason I'm making this bet is because these already do get trotted out into such discussions.  

(Not that I would ever read those reports or have done any such research into repressed Pons and Fleischmann evidence or Ilithid conspiracies)

I don't think higher income people are spending as much %% of their money on goods and services, so everyday goods and services may not be protected as much from the "printing money" effect.  Much of the shift in those prices comes from the increased spending power on the bottom margin, as the rich already have all the food and such they want anyway.

If you're already using that money to invest in stocks, then UBI probably inflates basic good prices (as it gives the lower income brackets more money and additionally reduces the labor supply to make them, as we saw in 2020 it might not take much to shake that out of balance).  So it's inflationary on labor.  It seems inflationary on markets as the mid-end will buy stocks (again, see 2020), so we get higher interest rates, which again prices the lower end consumers out of the market for houses, cars, and such.  My guess is this further destroys anyone in the middle.

In addition to what you have said here, you cannot save up your time.  It's questionable if you can save up your pats on the back (which you might just as well give away very liberally, and your reward could be as simple as the meaning or help it created for someone else).  Perhaps you can save your attention, but usually that is going to be between you and your work and internet/media habits more than human interaction habits.  

There could be some extreme cases where someone is hogging an undue level of time and attention (and at that point, you need to set boundaries as the issue likely lies within you as much as your friend).  Which segues into, I think the whole point OP is missing, "It takes two to tango."  There's something complex in the interaction between two people.  If it was "worthwhile" or "you got something out of it" it is often due to the influence of your own actions, words, reality field as much as anything they willfully "did" or "did not do."  And if it seemed like a waste of time, well, at least 50% of that interaction was you!

Your statement "The things that are given in a friendship are things that when you give them, you still have them. This is unlike buying a loaf of bread, where I am little concerned to support the baker, nor he me." is correct.  To reach a little further into it, likely looking at things transactionally will skew human interactions in a specific direction, self-selecting for other people and interactions of a certain type.  Strangely, for the person who believes in transactional human interactions, I suspect due to that skewing, looking back it will appear that their perspective was "correct."  Transactionalism being a kind of self-reinforcing or even self-feeding pattern.

I think this might be akin to the conversational results that would be achieved in social interactions between a habit of steelmanning vs strawmanning.  In steelmanning, you would understand things better, but also in my experience you can draw out the best of the other person's thinking, intentions, etc.  The entire interaction typically changes.  Especially if you are talking to someone from an otherwise embattled group.  Often they drop the whole thing after awhile and you're talking to another human with about the same needs, wants, and motives as any other decent person, and there's something to connect to.

As you said, paying of attention and pats on the back in a transactional way seems dysfunctional.  But it's also selective for partners who themselves are either very transactive or very giving.  It's likely someone could leave ten years of doing it that way thinking they were "right."  And if all you care about is one level of tangible results, it might be "an effective strategy."  It's only a partial analogy, but just like the ideologue who goes around looking for every hole and inconsistency in dissenting views (the highbrow version of strawmanning) will have been "right" about all those idiots out there.

Does this vary on market at large scale as it does for medium scale?  USA vs Asia, for example was 2-3x difference in price in concrete 10 years ago.

Wouldn't it be easier to use a platform anchored in the ocean somewhere?  If there's some law that it technically needs to have "land" you could dredge some sand like the Chinese did in their reclamation projects.  Have a carrier-sized piece of land (and turn that into your central park) and build everything else on elevated platforms.

Yes you have to spend a lot to maintain that structure and surface, but I am still not convinced the ice structures require any less work to maintain.

Getting land somewhere else is still probably easier and cheaper.  Have you looked into Svalbard?  Are there any places that have notoriously sleepy governments and you could just make a compound there and do your experimental society?  This ice structure thing seems pretty capital intensive, which makes me think buying land is still a better bang-for-the-buck.