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