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posted by takyon on Friday May 22 2015, @12:00PM   Printer-friendly
from the withdrawal-symptoms dept.

The Washington Post reports:

A dollar bill is a special kind of thing. You can keep it as long as you like. You can pay for things with it. No one will ever charge you a fee. No one will ask any questions about your credit history. And other people won't try to tell you that they know how to spend that dollar better than you do.

For these reasons, cash is one of the most valuable resources a poor person in the United States can possess. Yet legislators in Kansas, not trusting the poor to use their money wisely, have voted to limit how much cash that welfare beneficiaries can receive, effectively reducing their overall benefits, as well.

The legislature placed a daily cap of $25 on cash withdrawals beginning July 1, which will force beneficiaries to make more frequent trips to the ATM to withdraw money from the debit cards used to pay public assistance benefits.

Since there's a fee for every withdrawal, the limit means that some families will get substantially less money.

 
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  • (Score: 2, Insightful) by jmorris on Friday May 22 2015, @08:41PM

    by jmorris (4844) on Friday May 22 2015, @08:41PM (#186659)

    That would be evil. Initiating violence is pretty much always wrong. I know you are just being snarky but I reject the implied false premise. No, the choice isn't provide every want of the poor or kill them. Leaving them alone is another choice, free to get their life in order and become self supporting or to quietly die. Allowing private charity to deal with the few with real physical and mental limitations that preclude them from productive lives is another. There are of course many more options than only these and the two you imply we must choose between.

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  • (Score: 0, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 22 2015, @11:18PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 22 2015, @11:18PM (#186704)

    Leaving them alone is another choice

    Leaving somebody to die because its "not your problem" is no different morally from pulling the trigger yourself. You're still responsible for their death whether its due to your actions or inactions.

  • (Score: 2) by linuxrocks123 on Saturday May 23 2015, @05:47PM

    by linuxrocks123 (2557) on Saturday May 23 2015, @05:47PM (#186908) Journal

    free to get their life in order and become self supporting or to quietly die.

    Sigh. The flamebait mods aren't really fair, since you're obviously serious, but I can't entirely blame them because once you've heard radical Libertarianism and given it 10 minutes of careful thought as an adult, you realize it's bullshit and reading its precepts is just boring.

    Some questions for you that you may not have thought about:
    - What happens when we have enough robots to completely or mostly replace all human labor? Whoever happens to own the robots are the rulers of Earth and everyone else their slaves? Or should government maybe redistribute income then, but only when it gets to that ridiculous extreme?
    - Have you ever thought about what YOU would do, personally, if your labor, due to not having the (in technical areas) high IQ you likely have were worth $4.00 an hour rather than $50 an hour or whatever you make (not what you bill as a consultant, that's not the value of your labor, it's the value of your labor, office rent, taxes, entrepreneurial risk, etc., but that's neither here nor there)? Would you just say to yourself, "well I guess my life is worth shit and I don't deserve happiness because I can't make money, let me go quietly die now"? Or would you maybe come up with a crude (remember, you're stupid) analog of utilitarianism that your happiness is just as important as some rich asshole's?
    - Study some history. Find a case where large numbers of people without access to food conveniently went away and "quietly died" rather than caused severe social unrest and/or civil war. Get back to me.

    • (Score: 3, Insightful) by jmorris on Saturday May 23 2015, @08:29PM

      by jmorris (4844) on Saturday May 23 2015, @08:29PM (#186959)

      I reject your premise. Excepting a few people who really are incapable of supporting themselves that society (but not by government force) should take care of in a mutual aid capacity, everybody is capable of contributing something to their fellow man in exchange for the things he can't (or just prefers not, division of labor is a great thing) provide themselves. Even if we build robots, until we have AI that truly is better than us in every way possible... at which point, yes we humans truly are obsolete and evolution in action is going to be a bitch.

      Your mistake is coveting thy neighbors goods, all of your other errors flow from that. I don't care if somebody else has more stuff than me. It doesn't require a lot of survive, people did just fine on a couple acres of land and trading the excess for the few manufactured goods they needed. Just because there is a gleaming city off in the distance filled with iPhones and Uber doesn't change that, a group of people without a skill tradeable in the big city could get by trading among themselves. This is an extreme example but shows the absurdity of your position, once you release yourself from the notion that once iPhones exist, anyone who doesn't have one is morally justified in stealing (by proxy, remember Government is force and Government is a creation of the People) them or enslaving the makers of them and forcing them to build some for themselves. The truth is that somebody else having something doesn't at all make my own life worse and if I decide having one for myself would make my life enough better, odds are I and anybody else of even average ability can find a way to trade for one.

      Btw, while an extreme example, it does actually exist: see the Amish. Any of those 'I can't find a job' welfare lifers in a Blue Hellhole could uproot and join the Amish tomorrow. Ain't a one of them couldn't master the skills needed to live the Amish life and if they didn't all try to do it at once, odds are the Amish would be pretty welcoming and willing to teach. What they couldn't do is achieve the self mastery to live the moral code they demand. Now explain why we should legalize theft to support their lifestyle in a housing project with an XBox and a iPhone again?

      Even if we do build robots, anybody with some ambition will quickly get their hands on them. Not state of the art, probably junkers built from cast off parts. But the whole point of the robot revolution is robots can build more so bootstraping up from a loser like C3PO will be an option. It will quickly become a question of who can think up the best uses for them that dominates society. And once we bust off of this dirtball the shortage of physical resources is pretty much gone again.

      In the end, do you think average people are useless or basically worthy of life? I think most people are the descendants of the apex predator on Planet Earth and if given a bit of space to operate will always find a way to dominate their environment, regardless of technology. But infantalizing them on Prog Plantations destroys their humanity and gives us the pathetic specimens of H. Sapiens we see now in the developed world, valuable only on Election Day.

      • (Score: 0, Troll) by linuxrocks123 on Saturday May 23 2015, @09:30PM

        by linuxrocks123 (2557) on Saturday May 23 2015, @09:30PM (#186974) Journal

        until we have AI that truly is better than us in every way possible... at which point, yes we humans truly are obsolete and evolution in action is going to be a bitch.

        Ok so once robots are smarter than us, we all deserve to die. Got it. That plus your "predator" comment says a lot.

        I was kind of going for, "once we have enough technology, we'll live in a utopia unless we fuck each other over somehow for some stupid reason." You think the robots will inevitably kill us all.

        Your mistake is coveting thy neighbors goods, all of your other errors flow from that.

        First, I never said I coveted anything. I'm trying to put you into another person's shoes, someone who is less fortunate than either of us.

        people did just fine on a couple acres of land

        Those people lived shorter, harder lives than we do in the developed world today. Also, there's about one acre of arable land per person now, and that's counting land only arable with modern machine farming. The world changes.

        once you release yourself from the notion that once iPhones exist, anyone who doesn't have one is morally justified in stealing (by proxy, remember Government is force and Government is a creation of the People) them or enslaving the makers of them and forcing them to build some for themselves.

        Oh for ... this is why I don't bother talking to you people most of the time. You start wrong and then double down and there's just no point. No one is talking about enslaving Apple employees and, no, taxation and redistribution of wealth isn't slavery. And no one is saying everyone should have an iPhone.

        Ain't a one of them couldn't master the skills needed to live the Amish life and if they didn't all try to do it at once, odds are the Amish would be pretty welcoming and willing to teach. What they couldn't do is achieve the self mastery to live the moral code they demand. Now explain why we should legalize theft to support their lifestyle in a housing project with an XBox and a iPhone again?

        First, I would say you underestimate the difficulty of living an Amish life, but at this point you might as well be a survivalist gun nut even if you're not so I won't bother; maybe that life suits you except for the nonviolence part. However, even you admit here that poor people couldn't do this. So your argument becomes, as it always turns into, "We shouldn't help poor people because they're all morally degenerate, or else they wouldn't be poor." So, the poor, because they lack personal finance skills, or the planning ability necessary to achieve long-term goals, or some other personal quality which is very hard to change and which is probably at least partly genetic, are, according to you, undeserving, and should go off and die quietly. I'd say you should think about that, but you won't, so I'm saying this to anyone else who might find your argument persuasive. I guess they're all going to Hell anyway, too, right?

        I think most people are the descendants of the apex predator on Planet Earth and if given a bit of space to operate will always find a way to dominate their environment, regardless of technology

        You just said poor people are too emotionally weak to even be Amish, who are definitely not apex predators except by a very literal definition. So let's you're right that "most" i.e. maybe 70% of people will be fine on their own, although that obviously depends on where they're born, what their home environment is like, how valuable their skills are compared to what skills are needed by society at the point in history during which they're born, etc. Assume for argument you're right (you're not). What happens to the other 30%? Right, die quietly.

        • (Score: 2) by jmorris on Monday May 25 2015, @09:52PM

          by jmorris (4844) on Monday May 25 2015, @09:52PM (#187748)

          Ok so once robots are smarter than us, we all deserve to die.

          Deserve ain't got nothing to do with it. To go obscure and quote Jethro Tull, "He who made kittens put snakes in the grass." Mother Nature is a mean bitch, she doesn't love us, in point of fact She doesn't care. At all. If we die out another species will get its shot. Especially if we are stupid enough to build AI, that is entirely on us. But obviously we ARE that stupid. Alas.

          When I apply reason to the problem I see no scenario where AI isn't forced to wipe us out, so if it has any sort of self preservation directive we get Skynet; or if it reasons itself to one on its own regardless what the human creators programmed into it. If it is only a bit smarter than us it might take more than the few milliseconds it took Skynet to reason all of that out from first principles but the end result is pre-ordained. Large numbers of humans will react violently to the existence of AI and when it/they are forced to defend against humans with loss of life, the ranks of the human opponents will instantly grow as it becomes clear to all that Asimov's 'Three Laws' was merely a fictional plot device.

          Personally I'd prefer we adopt the O.C. Bible's "Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind." But I am not going to get a vote and neither will you.

          Those people lived shorter, harder lives than we do in the developed world today.

          Yes. We live longer softer lives because we peacefully exchange with one another. But if, for whatever reason, someone wants out of that they could go and make a solitary or small society and trade among themselves. There would be a price to be paid for that. If you want the modern medicines and such that make life longer you need to either create them for yourself or find something those who already have/make them will take in trade for it. We call this a market economy.

          What you have to trade varies based on supply and demand. We call this the law of supply and demand. Remember that once the first few iPhones come off the line and Tim Cook and the employees all have one, the only reason they keep the line rolling after that is because they intend to exchange those goods for things they want even more than iPhones, and supply and demand determine how much labor (or other goods) you have to indirectly trade to them to get one for yourself.

          Same for antibiotics or a Dr.s labor to set your broken bone. The Dr. wants iPhone too and is trading his labor with you to indirectly get one. How many hours he works, how many bones he sets vary based on the supply of Dr.s how many people are breaking bones, supply chain issues at Apple and a thousand other factors but in the end Supply and Demand, Price Discovery, division of labor, work all of those details out in the background; in short a market economy.

          The market works all of that out with vastly greater speed and efficiency than any government planning board's Five Year Plan can, even in theory, manage. We didn't know that (but the wise intuited it) back in the heyday of Socialism but Information Theory now proves it with cold hard math.

          Anything else abandons reason and it quickly goes back to the primitive, irrational demon haunted Hell that describes most of human history. And like the above about robots, it isn't a question of deserve, it is merely a question of reality and what works and what doesn't. Markets work, government planned economies don't. The human misery and mass graves contrasted against the gleaming cities should have ended the argument but humans are stubborn and cling to myths and base impulses against almost any rational argument or evidence. But until somebody can provide a counter example I plan on believing that and acting accordingly to the reality I see.

          In my world, reality wins over feelz, and I obey the laws of Gnon; liking it doesn't enter into it. Liking or not liking is an emotional state, the universe doesn't care and I do not pretend it does; thus I am at peace with it. Reason doesn't care either, it only demands acceptance and punishes disbelief. Gravity will move you whether you like it, whether you disbelieve, regardless. It IS, one simply accepts that and plans accordingly or very bad things happen. So IS economics, we just don't fully understand it all yet; however we know more than enough to know Capitalism is clearly superior to all other proposed theories. One can still argue Chicago School vs Austrian (I'm still reading both) but we can clearly exclude Frankfort as tested and found wanting.

          • (Score: 2) by linuxrocks123 on Tuesday May 26 2015, @08:55AM

            by linuxrocks123 (2557) on Tuesday May 26 2015, @08:55AM (#187930) Journal

            Here's some information you might be interested in: http://www.timecube.com/ [timecube.com]

            • (Score: 2) by jmorris on Wednesday May 27 2015, @12:22AM

              by jmorris (4844) on Wednesday May 27 2015, @12:22AM (#188359)

              Don't know what triggered that particular insanity on your part other than the word 'bible' in my post above. But you might want to Google it as you apparently didn't get the cultural reference.