The current proposals and tests are not about that kind of money. It is in the word 'basic': you can buy food and and a small room, not 'travel and adventure'.

If you can buy food and a small room, you can buy food and petrol for your van. If you already own a bike, a biking holiday can now be your permanent lifestyle.

Sure, those people exist, that is fine. Some people do that now and far beyond their 20s: just hitch/bike/van around and do the odd job for a few days and live off that the rest of the time. There are communities where I live who allow anyone to come in and clean and cook together so you can stay and eat for $0. That is without basic income so it will happen with too. Thats a tiny minority. Most will get bored, loney, fed up etc if they even 'dare' to start such a life.

Ok, but thats "travel and adventure". Travel and adventure are demonstrably available to people who arent rich.

"Tiny Minority" until you no longer need a job to maintain the lifestyle. A non zero amount of people will go from not traveling, to traveling.

This is neither a criticism nor endorsement of UBI. Its just an observation.

Also, how is it bad to have such people? These are the people who go on to write interesting books or bring a different perspective to society than the one in which everyone lives the same life.

Indeed. No problem.

> Some of them can't even figure out how to spend SNAP, because there's no refrigator or pantry in the stairwell they sleep in! I had a friend who insisted on spending 100% SNAP on 100% fresh beef. He literally wouldn't eat anything else. Jeez.

Isn't this making the argument in favor of a UBI? The theory behind SNAP is they have to buy food instead of stupid things, but then they just buy stupid food.

Meanwhile someone who is actually having a hard time gets put in a bind because they'd otherwise be willing to eat day old bagels and whatever's on the menu at the soup kitchen in order to save up for what they really need, which is the deposit for an apartment. But you can't use SNAP for that and then the government is paying the same money for worse results.

Or prices will just rise.

Not UBI but this video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N_GLfxaYTYI) shows (claims) rent always rises to suck up available money. Why? Not because landlords are evil, no, because once people have more money many of them want a nicer place. There are a limited number of nicer places so the prices rise since all these new people with a little more money bid up what they're willing to pay.

The same will be true of UBI and anything you think it enables. There are limited number of planes, boats, hotels, hostels so the moment everyone can do it is the moment there's more demand than supply and prices will go up.

The larger point is that it's not about if you get UBI. It's about if everyone gets UBI