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khallow (3766)
This gets back to what I said about us gradually becoming a two class society. You have one group of people that are utilizing the countless tools this society offers to enrich themselves and they are seeing rewards like never before. And then you have another class of people who sit around, play on the internet all day, complain they don't have as much as other people, and are increasingly overtly asking governments to take it from other people and give it to them.
Looks to me like the developed world has changed. It's not so much a society of haves and have nots, but rather a society of does and does not. What remains a mystery to me is why the "do nots" think the rest will bother to support their lifestyle -not whether they should (I think I understand the moral argument here such as it is), but rather will.
For example, in the course of my work, I routinely run into people who are in their twenties and have never worked a job in their lives. Not only are they unprepared for a job, they usually are unprepared for interacting with people different from themselves (particularly, guests). The good sign is that most can and do learn. Then there are people, sometimes very advanced in age (60s, for example) who have yet to do that.
I imagine a lot of the support for UBI comes from people who just want to keep avoiding that particular thing. It probably also explains some of the people here who have so much trouble with other peoples' viewpoints.
My take is that nowadays, the most advanced societies of the world are spending considerable effort to create adult babies. We'll see how that turns out, but my small view of that doesn't look pretty.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 29 2020, @04:42PM (1 child)
You might want to consider what kind of people in their twenties are hanging out with you in the welfare office.
Their "lifestyle" is not actually supported like you think it is.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday November 29 2020, @05:00PM
I don't hang out in the welfare office. Narrative needs a rewrite.
I didn't say it presently was. I just think it's a bad idea to go that way.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by fustakrakich on Sunday November 29 2020, @05:04PM (5 children)
And the submissives, in the (possibly unwitting) support of their oppressors, are very passive/aggressive
But... poverty is caused by obstruction, not "laziness". When people are allowed to enjoy the fruits of their labor, they will happily produce more labor, but not if they believe someone will come and take it away and kill their first born [wikipedia.org]
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday November 29 2020, @05:18PM (4 children)
Laziness is self-obstruction.
Ok, so what does an old salt tax have to do with anything? India isn't paying that salt tax now.
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Sunday November 29 2020, @07:32PM (3 children)
You are so... white!
Leave to you to blow off the parable... We have our own ways of destroying self sufficiency [wikipedia.org] and protecting favored industries [politico.com], and we have the marijuana tax [cbp.gov].
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 29 2020, @08:31PM
I'll see your self-serving CBP post and raise you a racist scumbag [wikipedia.org] post.
Give me an 'F' -- F!
Give me a 'U' -- U!
Give me an 'S' -- S!
Give me a 'T' -- T!
Give me a 'Y' -- Y!
What's that spell?!?
MORON!
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday November 30 2020, @02:44AM (1 child)
The even more obvious parable is that of security. Government also provides security. But it can provide a whole lot less security, if you don't pay your taxes, knowwhatimean?
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Monday November 30 2020, @03:08AM
*You should share all those judges and politicians you have in your pocket. We're willing to pay a fee, after all, we're not communists...*
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 29 2020, @06:57PM (107 children)
Automation and wealth inequality.
Khallow you always ignore wealth inequality. If people have too little money to spend then no amount of hard work or genius will make their business successful. Automation has made such gains in efficiency that humans lose their jobs. You whine about lazy people as the policies you support rip the futures away from millions of people.
Since you are one of those taxes-are-theft and regulation-is-murder types there is no point engaging you further. Stop victim blaming and look at the systems creating the problems.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 29 2020, @07:32PM (4 children)
Oh grow up. You act like there's some shortage of jobs driven by AI. There is more opportunity and more jobs available than ever before, but people aren't taking them, because we've become a fat, lazy, and entitled society. Even if you lack the mental skillset to pursue software or engineering, you can do things like plumbing. And there you get PAID to learn during an apprenticeship and can look forward to earning upwards of $30/hour.
The only system creating problems here is whatever is causing people to become so lazy, stupid, and generally weak. Social media? Educational indoctrination by jaded profs realizing post-grad degrees mean nothing in and of themselves when 1/8th [wikipedia.org] of the country has at least a masters? Whatever it is that's causing testosterone to plummet? The massive over-prescribing of various psychotropic drugs? The generally increasing baseline level of comfort? Bunches of sociopaths colluding for greater power and actively aiming to create a more weak and docile population?
Lots of possible reasons, but you rambling on about automation is just dumb. Whatever the problem is it's damn sure not because 'robots are taking all the jobs.'
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 29 2020, @08:15PM
ok boomer
(Score: 2) by Pino P on Monday November 30 2020, @09:16PM (2 children)
Or even if you have that skillset, and companies just aren't hiring programmers in your combination of language and geographic area.
Provided you have the mental skillset to drive and money for a car and driving school. Where does someone who just graduated into a recession get those?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 01 2020, @04:26AM (1 child)
If somebody is unwilling to move to find good work, I have little pity. But in today's economy, an increasing number of jobs are moving online meaning even that inertial tendency is no longer such a problem. And all that failing, now a days you can also self publish so unimaginably easier than ever before. $100 gets you access to Steam/Google/Apple with market sizes in the billions. If you can build *anything* at least some people might want, you can do phenomenally well. This is even more true if you're in an area where there are no local software jobs which probably suggests extremely rural + extremely low cost of living.
If somebody doesn't have the mental skillset to drive, they are likely literally retarded. And what to do with these sort of people is an interesting question in its own right but tangential to any discussion on normal people since the situation is not comparable in any way.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday December 02 2020, @05:49AM
There are other reasons that someone can be unable to drive. Mental illnesses such as anxiety disorders or epilepsy can result in an inability to drive, but still have someone who can otherwise work in many fields.
But the real question here is how many people are we talking about? It makes no sense to create near universal entitlements merely to handle small numbers of exceptions who aren't helped enough by the entitlement.
(Score: 0, Troll) by Runaway1956 on Sunday November 29 2020, @10:02PM (75 children)
The nation is busy importing labor, because we have so many lardass couch potatoes who won't work.
Build the wall, stop all importation of labor, and cut welfare. You'll find out how much people like working. Wages won't be affected for a few years, then we might expect them to start rising. So what? That's a very large part of how we've grown the economy all along.
Abortion is the number one killed of children in the United States.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 29 2020, @10:47PM (1 child)
How many of those people won't work because their wages have been driven down so much by imported labor that they "make" more on welfare?
I'm not saying you're wrong, I just think there are feedback loops involved as well.
I also wonder how many white people are deciding to "go Galt" in a society that hates them. (No, I'm not saying millions have read Atlas Shrugged; it's more a subconscious mental shrug of "why bother?")
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Sunday November 29 2020, @11:59PM
Well, you've nailed a part of the problem. The wages HAVE BEEN driven down. Today, if you can get welfare, you can "make" more than an honest person working those idiot 20 to 38 hour workweeks.
Cut welfare, stop importing cheap labor, and things will work out soon enough.
Abortion is the number one killed of children in the United States.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 29 2020, @10:59PM (30 children)
Sorry, your racist stupidity isn't helping with anything.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Monday November 30 2020, @12:05AM (29 children)
Racist? What are you trying to say? Are there more $demographic on welfare than other demographics? If that be so, why don't you identify that demographic? White? Black? Latino? Asian? Please, educate us all.
You could start here if you felt like it - https://brandongaille.com/39-stunning-welfare-recipients-demographics/ [brandongaille.com]
Abortion is the number one killed of children in the United States.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 30 2020, @12:26AM (28 children)
Just your anti-immigrant rhetoric which is a very reliable indicator, along with your long history of dog whistles. Please keep spamming discussions with your rightwing propaganda, it is a good way of finding out what crazy shit conservatives are trending.
(Score: 2, Troll) by Runaway1956 on Monday November 30 2020, @01:00AM (27 children)
You're too ignorant to understand racism. Anyone who doesn't share your political views, goals, and agendas, is by default "racissss". You need to either crawl back under your rock, or get an education. Idiot.
Abortion is the number one killed of children in the United States.
(Score: 0, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 30 2020, @03:30AM (11 children)
Fucking redneck hillbilly white trash Arkansas racist! I think that says it all. He cain't even spell the word, for Pete's sake!
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 30 2020, @04:24AM (3 children)
Yup. That does say it all. You're a racist, or something close to it. You don't like rednecks. You don't like hillbillies. You don't like white. You don't like Arkansans. It's the white bit that makes you racist. The rest of it just makes you a bigot.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 30 2020, @05:44AM (2 children)
Well, who does, really? They are just so, well, ignorant and racist, and unproductive! And it is because they think, "At least I ain't a n***r", which is a pretty low bar, when it comes to impoverished and really uneducated Americans. Trash of trailer parks, losers supreme, the scum of the rural areas, not very upstanding citizens. So we do not hate them because they are white, we hate them because they think of their selves as white, when "trash" is the operative modifier here. Redneck hillbilly white trash Arkansawsian racist fucking assholes. Nobody likes them, not even their own mothers. The whole thing is nearly as embarrassing as having an alt-right incel in the family. Who? Never heard of him, don't know him. And the US Navy has any record of a Runaway1956 having ever served in any capacity. Racist fuck.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 30 2020, @03:32PM (1 child)
Kind of a Freudian slip there, huh? As in, being a nigger is a pretty low bar. No, no, don't explain it away. You can't. That IS the Democrat view of black people. Keep 'em on the plantation, because they can't do better on their own.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 30 2020, @08:42PM
Well at least I ain't a Run***ay! Can't explain that away! Or even run it, way.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 30 2020, @04:52AM (6 children)
Wow, how do you deal with your cognitive dissonance there?
I love how you attack somebody for his race, region, and creed - and conclude that he's a racist. It really is an embodiment of what modern "liberalism" is turning into. A large group of fascists who increasingly simply project every single one of their traits outward. No, everybody else is a racist. No, everybody else is a sexist. No, everybody else is a fascist.
It's funny but also scary. The Nazi's didn't run on a platform of 'gas the Jews', they ran on a platform of 'we're being oppressed by the Jews.' Even as they shipped them off into little concentration camps to be killed, the victim complex and projection of their own sins continued with seemingly infinite tolerance for cognitive dissonance, similar to what you display here.
If you have any semblance of a connection to reality left, try to actually think about what you've become.
The establishment media is now running articles pondering [nytimes.com] how Trump got so many votes. And this is why. You're probably going to label me some comparable pejorative. But here's a little secret for you: I am, or at least was, a "liberal". But people like you are what I now think of when I think of said word, and the thought of counting myself among you is absolutely nauseating to me.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 30 2020, @04:59AM (5 children)
Tone troll alert! You are all such proud martyrs, how do you persevere in the face of such prejudice? Truly Republicans are just better people *eyeroll*
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday November 30 2020, @05:38AM (2 children)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 30 2020, @07:01AM
Is anyone not trolling?
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Monday November 30 2020, @09:19PM
Whaddya mean "those"?
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 30 2020, @05:47AM
FTFY? Actually, didn't fix it, just made it worse. Now all these redneck incel motherfucking proud boy hillbillies are just going to have to deal with the fact that they are assholes and no one likes them. The will ultimately fail to persevere. Trump was their last blow job.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 30 2020, @11:16AM
You deserve to be tone trolololed nonstop until you are deaf and blind. You are already stuck deep in the cave anyway.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 30 2020, @05:06AM (14 children)
Gotta love your whiny nonsense. It has nothing to do with your backwards politics and everything to do with your own words. Such as your civil war 2.0 hystetics and willingness to support police murdering black people cause "thugs" and a variety of excuses for every black death while freaking out about the tiniest scratch on conservatives. You can lroject your own flaws all day, but objective reality such as your own words is not something you can spin except to your fellow nutty martyrs.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 30 2020, @05:36AM (4 children)
Here's a fun one for you. What you might notice after January 21st is that you're suddenly going to stop hearing a peep about 'police murdering black people'. And BLM will all but disappear, perhaps making a limited appearance before the 2022 midterms, especially if the DNC does not win the senate.
So I guess they were right. All you needed to do was elect the right guy and police violence would just magically disappear! Or, alternatively, that a large part of the issue was not some sort of a systemic problem - but rather the misrepresentation of an extremely small scale issue. The vast majority of times criminals are killed by police, it is because their life or the life of bystanders was imminently endangered. But due to the nature of living in a country with 340,000,000 alongside large numbers of folks with criminal tendencies - you're going to get enough of these rare outlier, genuinely bad scenarios, like George Floyd to try to make it look like something other than what it is. You take one George Floyd case and then run propaganda implying that ~900 people killed by police per year and disproportionately made up of similar cases which is simply completely fake.
Beyond this, not understanding people are going to treat innocent people being harmed vs criminals being harmed is just due to indoctrination. If anybody who engaged in violent crime was instantly wiped from existence, the world would be a vastly nicer place. We don't do this because human rights - yet the existence of said human rights do not preclude the truth that these people are a severe net negative on this planet. I'll never shed a tear for a violent felon, but it's a travesty when people who have done nothing are attacked.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 30 2020, @05:51AM (3 children)
Oh, oh!! This is soooo true, in a QAnon and election fraud sort of way! Just like how the Covid-19 completely disappeared after the election! Ha!
Wait, it didn't? And it is in fact peaking in Red States, with stupid Trump supporting Governors? Oh, dear, time to rethink that whole, Fake Nudes, thing.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 30 2020, @06:23AM (2 children)
The question is not one of whether issues are fake, but whether their presentation in the media is consciously and actively misrepresented. Under Biden you'll continue to see what will likely be an increasing rate of people being killed by police, but the media will shift the narrative dramatically which will lead to the people who believe their bullshit to comparably thinking the issue has changed. It has not, and will not.
COVID is an interesting one and yeah I expect we're also going to see a dramatic shift in tone there. As you, perhaps inadvertently, mention - how states respond to the virus is one of the few issues that's almost entirely up to the states themselves. The media's ploy of blaming the federal response for COVID is entirely nonsensical. The federal response of shutting down international borders and funding vaccine research is pretty much the extent of what they're capable of, and we hit on both quite early.
Paradoxically the media will likely end up becoming honest on both cases now - there's a very near 0 number of blacks being maliciously and unjustifiably killed by police, and states seeing bad outcomes from COVID are (so far as any government accountability is concerned) solely because of the decisions of those states. But the honesty is completely arbitrary. When it benefits the establishment to tell the truth the media tells the truth, when it benefits the establishment to lie through their teeth the media will happily say 1+1=3.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 30 2020, @08:32AM (1 child)
Dramatic shift in tone, and an increase to a half a million US Citizens dead, due to Republican malfeasance and incompetence. Yes, quite a dramatic shift in "tone".
I have said it before, the Republicans are DeathEaters, they want to reign death and destruction upon America, for no better reason than to "stick it to the Libs". But your tactics have sadly blown back upon you. It is the Trump Rallyers, the Mega-church idiots, the "Freedumb, my economy" morons that are being decimated by this virus. Virus don't care about how your racist wacko ideas do not get respect in the mainstream media. Virus is kind of a Honey Badger. Honey Badger doesn't give a shit [youtube.com]. And more of you are going to die.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 30 2020, @11:19AM
Read another book, you dummy.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Monday November 30 2020, @05:46AM (8 children)
Complete and utter bullshit.
Let us do a little mind experiment. Some white guy age about 30 has a rap sheet with 50 violent crimes. He's already spent 8 years of his adult life in prison. He is a convict, and therefore prohibited from possessing a gun. He resembles the description of an attempted robbery suspect, so the cops approach him on the street. He fumbles around, pulls out a weapon, aims it at or toward the cop approaching him - and he's shot dead, dead, dead. No problems, right? Dude's a violent sumbitch, and he attempted to violently end a cop's life, no one is going to mourn him except his immediate family.
Same scenario, but he's a black this time. He tries to shoot a cop down, cop gets the first shot off, and now it's a black dude lying on the street. You would have me to believe that some injustice has been done to the black dude, right?
Bullshit.
I reserve my outrage for the innocents who are killed. Tamir Rice. Are you willing to say his name? I'm still not convinced that Trayvon Martin was truly innocent, but Zimmerman handled the whole thing wrong, and should have been convicted of manslaughter at least. Are you willing to say Trayvon Martin's name? John Crawford III, basically SWATTED after he picked a plastic toy gun off of a store shelf in a Walmart. Shot dead, without warning, for carrying a piece of plastic around inside the store that sold those pieces of plastic. Akai Gurley, shot dead in a stairwell by a rookie cop, for no apparent reason. Rumain Brisbon shot and killed by a dumbass cop who says he mistook a pill bottle for a gun. Helluva pill bottle, even in poor lighting. Freddie Gray, who mysteriously suffered a spinal cord injury while in custody.
I can go on to cite any number of people who suffered from various mental/psychological conditions who were killed for little more reason than failing to follow orders. Some of those may have posed a threat to someone, but not all.
Atatiana Jefferson, standing inside her own home, when she was shot by a cop investigating an open front door.
Most recently, Breonna Taylor. Buncha rat bastards kicked her door down, and gunned her to death, without so much as asking her to come along to the police station peaceably.
There are more, but those should be enough for you to get the idea. Innocent people being killed is outrageous. Guilty people who pose a threat to people around them are far less outrageous. And, color doesn't matter one tiny bit.
The ball is in your court. Name some black people for whom you think I should be outraged.
Be careful now. Let me repeat that I have no outrage for violent people who threatened people around them. I have little outrage for some people who were simply stupid, and did things like resist arrest. You name their names, I'll get back to you.
Abortion is the number one killed of children in the United States.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 30 2020, @06:02AM (2 children)
50 violent crimes would have him doing far more than 8 years. Even if every one was a misdemeanor (unlikely if they're violent offences), they would be upgraded to high court misdemeanors and stacked due to an obviously unrepentant and unreformable character.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Monday November 30 2020, @07:49AM (1 child)
Maybe I exaggerate. Maybe not. We all know idiots who should have gone to prison, but were scolded and turned loose again and again. It all depends on who you know, and who you blow. The other side of that coin is the poor young fool who screws up one time, and gets a decade or more in prison.
Abortion is the number one killed of children in the United States.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 30 2020, @10:51AM
Personal story? After being beat by sixteen cops? Or was it sixteen times by one cop? Runaway did not know the right people, being a Yankee Philly transgenderplant.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 30 2020, @07:30AM (4 children)
Tamir Rice was felony child abuse, for giving a pellet gun to a mentally dim kid.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Monday November 30 2020, @07:42AM (3 children)
I call bullshit on that. The felony abuse is on the part of the Dem "leadership" of Cleveland and the police department. The mindset that allows "OH! NIGGER WITH A GUN! BANG BANG BANG . . . . . . . BANG BANG BANG!" The plantation, Boss Man!!
Abortion is the number one killed of children in the United States.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 30 2020, @11:06PM (2 children)
Sme real disgusting projection, but that is all you have left these days. So desperate to not be exactly as horrible as you've been accused of being that you rant like a crazy person and blame the people trying to make things better. Would it be too shocking for you to find out that most cops are Republicans? Or how the police union prevents reforms?
Nah, that would require you to stop sucking down propaganda and to grow a spine instead of being a crybaby.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Monday November 30 2020, @11:17PM (1 child)
I don't even know how to project. That's apparently a Dem trait. How many years do you get out of one lightbulb?
Abortion is the number one killed of children in the United States.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 01 2020, @10:55PM
Depends on usage, I would guesstimate that the last four years cost you about thirteen years of usage. If your mom is still alive you can see if she can gestate another one for you otherwise you might crap out by 2022.
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Monday November 30 2020, @01:58AM (15 children)
The economy "grew" on forced labor.
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Runaway1956 on Monday November 30 2020, @03:07AM (8 children)
Hmmmm. Until about 1860, yeah, a helluva lot of forced labor, and not just the black slaves either. After 1865? Yeah, you can make a case for it, but you'll have to make that case. Then, how about after 1945? You'll work to make a case for the last 75 years. Yeah, I know, there is STILL forced labor. Ask Vice President hopeful Harris, who was part of ensuring that poor black men were kept on the fire gangs in Cali. But, post-WWII economy wasn't "built on forced labor".
Abortion is the number one killed of children in the United States.
(Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Monday November 30 2020, @05:31PM (7 children)
That's about 25% of the entire history of our nation you just handwaved away.
And that's assuming that all slavery ended within two years of the Emancipation Proclamation and that Sharecropping wasn't just forced labor with a new name.
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Monday November 30 2020, @05:42PM
Sharecropping, and the prison system, created to chase down runaways.
When your demographic is only 15% of the population, don't expect a fair shake from the other 85
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Monday November 30 2020, @06:33PM (4 children)
The whole point, since I have to spell it out, is that forced labor is something from the past. Today, no one can force anyone to work. It's been a near impossibility since about 1865.
Abortion is the number one killed of children in the United States.
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Monday November 30 2020, @09:26PM
:-) Now who told you that little white lie?
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 2) by Pino P on Monday November 30 2020, @09:27PM (2 children)
Allow me to quote the Thirteenth Amendment, with my emphasis:
Overcriminalization, zero tolerance, mandatory minimum sentences, the prison-industrial complex, all rooted in providing "a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted" as a way to circumvent the Thirteenth Amendment.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Monday November 30 2020, @09:55PM (1 child)
All true. But if I understand prison life half as well as I think I do, real work is held back from prisoners, to be used as a "reward" for good conduct. That is, prisoners compete for job opportunities, for the most part.
Abortion is the number one killed of children in the United States.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 02 2020, @03:56PM
It's not the work they're after, it's the pay or location. A job that pays $1/day is very preferable to one that pays 0.10/day, especially when your underwear have been taken and commissary charges $20/pair. Any job that lets you outside of the premises usually comes with an opportunity for cigarettes or drugs to be obtained.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday November 30 2020, @11:50PM
75% > 25%, and it's the most recent 75% too. And this AC [soylentnews.org] destroyed the idea that the US was built on forced labor.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 30 2020, @06:42AM (5 children)
There's a really fun little bit of trivia here that exposes some problems with that hypothesis! In total (so from 1525 to 1866), how many slaves were brought across the Atlantic? And, in total, how many made their way to what was or would become the United States? How many made their way to South America? I suspect > 99% of Americans would get the answers completely wrong, even given multiple choice.
The answer is that in total about 12.5 million [pbs.org] Africans were shipped to the New World. Of those, 10.7 million survived the voyage. And of those 10.7 million, a total of about 388,000, less than 4%, made their way to the United States. The other 96+% ended up in South America.
Now isn't it a rather unusual suggestion to suppose that forced labor is what drove the economic growth of the United States? If it were true, why has the United States skyrocketed past all of the countries where 96%+ of the slaves went to? But it gets even better as well since you can even look inward. The states where the vast majority of slaves, few as they were, ended up working at were the confederate states: Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, New Mexico, North/South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, West Virginia. If the forced labor economy had any meaningful impact whatsoever on the state of the nation today, why is that literally 0 of these states are now even in the top 15 of the country in terms of economy/capita?
If anything there seems to be an extremely strong *inverse* correlation between utilization of slavery and economic growth.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Monday November 30 2020, @03:45PM (4 children)
Point. The US did not exactly skyrocket above all other countries in the western hemisphere, until after WWII. We had advances over the course of a couple hundred years, sure. We were probably outperforming everyone else, to some degree. But, we weren't the economic and military power house until post WWII.
Another point. The US screwed the pooch when it was decided that the offspring of slaves would remain slaves into perpetuity. Even freedmen were tricked, hounded, even kidnapped into slavery, for no other reason than being black. We didn't see that form of persecution anywhere else. Even in North Africa and the Middle East, there were routes out of slavery. Just adopt the local religion, live an honest life, and your children and grandchildren could compete against free men and women as equals. We screwed the pooch there.
Abortion is the number one killed of children in the United States.
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Monday November 30 2020, @05:33PM
I'm not even singling out the US. Before mechanization, forced labor was the global norm. The North Atlantic slave trade (the foundation of Wall Street) just turned the trade itself into big business. Slaves became a commodity like livestock and minerals. The machines just took away the profits. Abolition is never accomplished on "moral" grounds, it's strictly business.
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday December 01 2020, @01:38PM (2 children)
The US didn't magically go from just another backwater dump to superpower overnight.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Tuesday December 01 2020, @03:08PM (1 child)
It was almost magic, though. Prior to 1900, the US was never anything special on the world market. We did exercise some rather undue power over Central and South America, we did bully Mexico, but we were no economic powerhouse.
WW1 started us down the road toward being a superpower. But, it only started us. WWII is what made it all come together.
Euros will often remind us that we were able to assume dominance in manufacturing because most of Europe was a shambles at the close of WWII. I've not seen many Asians telling us the same, but it would be true if they bothered to say it. The United States was unique, in that we waged war around the globe, without ever being directly attacked in our homeland. Our industrial machine didn't merely survive, but it expanded dramatically during the war. Canada might have taken advantage of the same circumstances, but population probably prevented that more than anything else.
The US owes it's superpower status to WWII, more than anything else.
Abortion is the number one killed of children in the United States.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday December 02 2020, @07:27AM
The US was indeed something special. For example, after the US Civil War, the US had a larger population [thoughtco.com] than the core [wikipedia.org] of the UK and a comparable level of industry.
Many people remind us of many things that aren't true. For example, another "Euro" thing is the assertion that US politics is thoroughly conservative, ignoring that the European yardstick is very skewed in other directions.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 30 2020, @04:21AM (25 children)
Oh but they do work! They do the most important work of all: they vote for the hand that is feeding them!
Who is more valuable for one in power? Is it a replaceable peon doing menial work, or a minion helping him keep that power?
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Monday November 30 2020, @04:30AM (24 children)
You've made your point. Sadly. The Dems are still farming those plantations, and it's not just black folk on them.
Abortion is the number one killed of children in the United States.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 30 2020, @05:09AM (23 children)
The plantation narrative has to be the worst sort of projection you assholes have. Just own the Republican neo-nazi problem already, lretending it doesn't exist is a bullhorn for your idiocy.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by khallow on Monday November 30 2020, @05:16AM (13 children)
(Score: 3, Insightful) by aristarchus on Monday November 30 2020, @05:55AM (3 children)
Some neo-nazis have been pointing out to us how people are becoming infantilized, and how men are becoming feminized, and how khallow is becoming more fluffy, by the day, in his cushy Federally funded job, where he gets to hang out with young and lithe 20-something untermensch.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday November 30 2020, @02:09PM (1 child)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 30 2020, @03:47PM
Aristarchus work at posting something meaningful? He gets all the welfare attention he could want without working.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by fustakrakich on Monday November 30 2020, @05:54PM
He has a "hideous hermaphroditical character, which has neither the force and firmness of a man, nor the gentleness and sensibility of a woman." -- Thomas Jefferson on John Adams
The only real deterioration is in our prose, and they probably felt the same about theirs when they read glorious tales of murderous rampage in the Roman senate.
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 30 2020, @07:03AM (8 children)
Strange.
Liberals are capable of admitting and condemning that some protesters turned into rioting looters but conservatives just cannot admit Republicans have a serious infestation of white supremacists.
Best of luck with those mental issues.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 30 2020, @07:46AM (6 children)
The problem is one of semantics. How would you define "white supremacist"? For instance I believe that we should strive to become a colorblind society that ensures equality of opportunity for all people regardless of color, creed, or other individual characteristic. No individual ought ever be treated in one way or another solely because of these characteristics.
Am I a white supremacist?
Many people on the far left wing of regressive liberalism, which is becoming more mainstream, would say yes. After all my view implicitly argues against things like consideration of skin color in hiring or enrollment, which runs contrary to the progressive ideal of equality of result - now increasingly often dog whistled for as "equity".
Yet if you ask anybody not indoctrinated into radicalized politics about my worldview, not a single would ever classify me as a white supremacist as it's a complete non sequitur. And indeed I do think the conservative side of politics is being increasingly "infested" by people like me, but that's only because I'm a liberal who will never support judging people, neither to condemn nor elevate, based upon their skin color. And such a worldview is increasingly unwelcome in whatever the democratic party in the US is turning into today.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 30 2020, @08:35AM
So, white privilege, and don't know it? OK, Boomer.
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Monday November 30 2020, @03:31PM (4 children)
Are you sure your view doesn't mean you just want there to be no scrutiny of the hiring process, such that subconscious or hidden racial biases are free to run rampant?
Progressives don't seek equality of result. They seek to reduce the negative effects of unfair forms of discrimination which is a barrier to achieving equality of opportunity. Everyone also deserves a baseline safety net to protect them from destitution--a world away from equality of result.
Master of the science of the art of the science of art.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 30 2020, @03:51PM (2 children)
Yes, I'm certain my view is not your strawman of such.
Now my question for you. How exactly will you know when all of our "subconscious and hidden biases" are gone and hiring is done objectively? Even if you won't admit it, the progressive view is that unless there is a perfect equality of result then there must be some sort of secret bias. The ideology implicitly appeals to a blank slate hypothesis which is not only contradicted by all available evidence, but effectively refuted by substantial scientific advances over the past ~70 years in fields such as genetics.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Monday November 30 2020, @08:09PM
There will be an algorithm with it's own hidden biases, but that will be alright because authoritarians say it's alright. Too bad for those of you who possess gene z which is deemed to be associated with $unwanted traits. Like magic, the next genocide will be all scientifical and fair and unbiased!!
Abortion is the number one killed of children in the United States.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 30 2020, @08:10PM
Ha! There was no straw man about your position but you erected one of your own. A conservative hypocrite? Noooooo
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday December 01 2020, @01:50PM
Focusing on unfalsifiable stuff and eternal problems is not a good way to demonstrate that you "seek to reduce the negative effects of unfair forms of discrimination". Here, how can one show that they have no "subconscious or hidden racial biases"? When does the "scrutiny" end? And what's the set point for the alleged "baseline safety net"? Why should it be higher rather than lower? Where's the analysis of cost versus benefit?
It reminds me of the zoo sign warning visitors that animals don't know where the food ends and the finger begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 30 2020, @03:48PM
Care to explain that shit?
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Monday November 30 2020, @05:52AM (8 children)
Simple true or false. Do Democrat run cities have huge populations of black folk who are disarmed and helpless? Do Democrat run cities maintain a high school to prison pipeline, largely composed of people from the black population? Do Democrat run cities have huge populations, predominantly black, who live in rundown, rat infested, decaying neighborhoods?
Clean up the plantations. Haul the garbage away, fix the buildings, get rid of the rats, allow law abiding citizens to arm themselves so they can defend against the gangs who actually run the neighborhoods.
The plantation narrative seems to trigger you - because it is true.
Abortion is the number one killed of children in the United States.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 30 2020, @06:02AM (7 children)
Fuck you, Runaway! Fuch you and your Meth and Opioid infested rural slums! Haul away the garbage and the junked cars, fix at least the roofs of the derelict buildings, especially the barns, and outhouses, git rid of the coyotes and raccoons, and stop so many crazed crackers from carrying around firearms for no good reason other than micropenile malfunction. M'kay? It's not the plantations, it is the racist small white farmers that are the problem. Addicted to Farm Subsidies, and Oxycontin. A drain on America. Predominately white, and stupid, and Fox News viewers.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Monday November 30 2020, @07:44AM (6 children)
Can't answer the question, so you answer with stupid insults. You obviously know that I'm right.
Abortion is the number one killed of children in the United States.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 30 2020, @08:39AM (4 children)
You stupid fuck! You have nothing but stupid insults, so why should I waste my time with rational argument and facts on such a lard-ass trucker redneck hillbilly racist? What the fuck was your question, other than, "Aren't we racists right about how the libs are more racist than us?" News, you fucking shit-for-brains Republican, reverse racism is not a thing. Never was. Affirmative action is affirmative. If you don't like it, you can fuck off. Fucking stupid racist motherfuck form the cold dark state of Arkansas! You are, and I suspect will forever be, deplorable.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday November 30 2020, @11:53PM (3 children)
It'd be a good look for you? Seriously, why ask such a stupid question when you could have just not posted at all?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 01 2020, @08:00AM (2 children)
Shut up, khallow. You're in over your head, again.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday December 01 2020, @12:55PM (1 child)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 03 2020, @01:00PM
You can't run out of something you never had in the first place.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 30 2020, @06:54PM
lololol
You are desperate for validation but your worldview is based on fake news and a serious lack of morality. Keep it coming moron, let history have a record of Republican idiocy.
(Score: 1, Disagree) by khallow on Monday November 30 2020, @03:33AM (25 children)
Of course, I ignore wealth inequality. You should too. It's a ridiculously [soylentnews.org] broken [soylentnews.org] metric.
If you can't be bothered to read the links, here's the TL;DR. Here's what wealth inequality misses:
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 30 2020, @06:05AM (20 children)
khallow, that thing we talked about, you're doing it again. You wanted me to remind you.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday November 30 2020, @01:51PM (19 children)
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Monday November 30 2020, @09:46PM (18 children)
Context is for humans. Your economy is pure animal, truly natural. Single cell ameba operate on the same principles. Eat everything that's smaller than you
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday November 30 2020, @11:26PM (17 children)
While that excuse is still a waste of my time to read, it is at least creative.
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Tuesday December 01 2020, @06:18AM (16 children)
There is no "excuse", and it is not "creative". It is a simple fact of of your natural, animalistic, predatory systems. It appeals to the beast, and it serves well, but for humans it's pathological, psychopathic
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday December 01 2020, @12:59PM (4 children)
In other words, it's the two minute amateur, pop psychology time! When you learn what "pathological" and "psychopathic" means, and how they don't apply just because a system is allegedly "pure animal, truly natural", then maybe you'll be able to start to contribute to this discussion.
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Tuesday December 01 2020, @05:51PM (3 children)
Your denials only reveal your failure of comprehension. Is your refusal to understand and accept the truth economically motivated?
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday December 02 2020, @05:27AM (2 children)
More reality motivated. It doesn't matter how much I deny your delusions. Reality trumps this all. Your labels mean nothing to reality.
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Wednesday December 02 2020, @06:10AM (1 child)
It's all in your head. You pick the reality that comforts you
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday December 02 2020, @06:55AM
And I see you still have nothing to back that up with. I've already said what needs to be said.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday December 01 2020, @01:53PM (10 children)
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Tuesday December 01 2020, @05:46PM (9 children)
"wealth inequality" Please, enough with the buzzwords.. It is a simple result of your predatory animal system. Kinda wrecks your narrative, but I'm not too concerned about that.
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday December 01 2020, @06:27PM (8 children)
"predatory animal system" is just more buzzwords.
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Tuesday December 01 2020, @08:07PM (7 children)
Nope, that would imply mass media use, but unfortunately for you, it's just your nature. No human thought required. As amusing as it is to watch you try, you cannot separate yourself from your animal heritage.
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday December 02 2020, @05:30AM (6 children)
You're sufficiently "mass media" for this purpose.
Applies here.
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Wednesday December 02 2020, @06:14AM (5 children)
Wrong again. It is the most accurate description of your system that you will ever find. It is sub-human, learned from the animals, monkey see, monkey do.
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday December 02 2020, @06:54AM (4 children)
Sorry, I'd have to be wrong first, to be wrong again. And I can't help but notice that you don't articulate, once again, what you are really thinking here. I bet when we peel this onion to its pitiful core we will see once again what an utter sham your arguments are.
For a glaring example of this failure to communicate, you have yet to describe why "sub-human" systems are supposed to be worse than "human" systems. You're just spewing ignorant labels.
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Wednesday December 02 2020, @03:05PM (3 children)
You are frequently wrong, goes without saying. There's nothing to articulate to a person that won't listen and misreads what is written, just not worth the effort to repeat the painfully obvious to people who won't benefit.
Your system is predatory, of course it will be "unequal". A real human being recognizes that and will try to correct the inadequacies. You, are just a bankers minion, saying what the boss tells you to say.
There's really nothing to articulate to the propagandist except "liar"
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday December 02 2020, @03:32PM (2 children)
So it is asserted.
So it is asserted.
So it is asserted. I sense a pattern here. Unfounded assertion after unfounded assertion.
So are you that "liar"?
Rather than waste more of my time on your tripe, let's consider the only minor kernel of truth in your entire post:
What you fail to recognize here is that real human beings do just that every day. The "predatory" system gives them the tools to correct the inadequacies of their lives and needs - just like it is supposed to do. You need food? You just buy it. You want something better from life? Take it just like billions of other people do, no doubt predator-style.
The whole point of our economics systems is to correct the inadequacies of our existence. Need food or shelter? Need education or faith? Well, you make those things happen through the many little systems that enable you to do just that.
(Score: 2, Touché) by fustakrakich on Wednesday December 02 2020, @03:39PM (1 child)
You wanna get rich? Stop being poor... So easy for you, the little prince
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 2, Funny) by khallow on Thursday December 03 2020, @01:34AM
It's just as easy for the rest of us, little prince.
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Monday November 30 2020, @12:31PM (3 children)
You know as well as I do that there's an extremely strong correlation between those two things. And that sure as hell ain't the fault of the poor.
Master of the science of the art of the science of art.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday November 30 2020, @01:54PM (2 children)
You don't so know, same with me, that there's any sort of correlation at all! It's amazing how often things are assertion with confidence when they should be considered cautiously, if at all. Here, there's so much trouble with the concept of wealth inequality, that it doesn't measure anything constructive at all, much less give you useful correlations with anything.
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Monday November 30 2020, @03:18PM (1 child)
The correlation is obvious simply because there's not only great wealth inequality: the richer are also rich and the poorer are also poor.
It doesn't have to be that way. That's why the inequality bothers people. If we fix the corruption that leads to this widening gap and possibly help to mitigate it with a functional UBI, then the poorer needn't be poor. The rich can still be rich.
Master of the science of the art of the science of art.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday November 30 2020, @11:28PM
Except of course, when that's not true. Again, the obvious correlation isn't a correlation. You haven't even established, for a glaring example of the failure of this approach, that there is growing wealth inequality due to my second point.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 29 2020, @07:16PM (75 children)
UBI is a proposed compromise to keep this bloated, awkward system running in the near future. The desirable outcome for right wingers is suffering or destruction for those who are incapable of finding a nice within the modern economic system.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 29 2020, @07:51PM (23 children)
The "modern economic system" is a free market. The "niche" you're looking for is doing literally anything that other people find valuable. And it doesn't need to be some niche. You think everybody likes working? No, most do it because it keeps the gears of society turning.
There is literally no economic system that will arbitrarily support those unwilling to participate in 'the system'. In capitalism you suffer your own personal consequences which, taken to an extreme, could be starvation. But in many ways that's much better than what happens in the social economic systems people think they want. These systems rely deeply on coordinate labor and end up turning to draconian measures to enforce it. See, for instance, even the current president of China Xi Jinping [wikipedia.org]. In his early life he was forced to work in a village. He ran away and was arrested in a crackdown on "deserters" and sent to a forced labor camp to dig ditches. The little parts of Glorious Communism that most indoctrinated into this stupidity fail to consider. But hey then Xi learned to play the game, became a member of the government party, buttered the right bellies, started on the path to becoming more equal than everybody else, and the rest is history.
(Score: 2) by shortscreen on Sunday November 29 2020, @08:49PM (11 children)
It doesn't just have to be valuable, it has to be competitive with the offerings of the millions of other people already doing the same thing.
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 29 2020, @09:09PM (8 children)
Your customers also need to have enough disposable income to spend on your service or product. The average US citizen has enough trouble saving up a few thousand dollars with the wages that have been stagnant for decades.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 29 2020, @10:09PM
This lie again?
US census figures show that the percentage of the US population in the bottom levels of the income spread has dropped markedly since the '60s.
(No, wait, that can't be right, the US census is a big propaganda machine in the pockets the Great White-Wing Conspiracy, marching at the orders of the Drumpfenfuehrer (Orange be his name) in chief!)
Seriously, can we stop pushing the demonstrably false we'll-all-play-Hunger-games narrative? It's a distraction from real problems.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday November 30 2020, @05:19AM (6 children)
As the other AC replier noted, this is already true.
In other words, wages that have been keeping up with inflation, meaning disposable income isn't much different now than it was then. The narrative is broken.
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Monday November 30 2020, @03:44PM (5 children)
Nah. I'll just leave this here [longtermtrends.net]...
Master of the science of the art of the science of art.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday November 30 2020, @07:25PM (4 children)
(Score: 3, Informative) by acid andy on Tuesday December 01 2020, @12:25AM (3 children)
The trend is that house prices were affordable for much of the Baby Boomers' working lives, relative to incomes, until the start of this century when the ladder was effectively pulled up, a huge house price bubble inflated whilst wages of working and many middle class people were allowed to stagnate. This bubble never really fully burst and you can see from the graph that it's expanding again.
Master of the science of the art of the science of art.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by khallow on Tuesday December 01 2020, @12:53AM (2 children)
And then the bubble popped shortly after. Again, not much of a trend. And keep in mind that a key tool for keeping present day home prices up is banks keeping real estate off the market (namely, that banks can keep a house on the books at an inflated price, as long as they don't try to sell it). There would have been a substantial decline in home prices, if all the homes built prior to 2008 had returned to the market.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by acid andy on Tuesday December 01 2020, @03:02AM (1 child)
It only briefly dipped below the 1979 peak and now the ratio is around 30% higher than the Baby Boomers' average and still climbing.
I know. The market is being artificially propped up, to the detriment of all the would-be first time buyers. If you scroll down the page of that link you can see this situation is even more exaggerated in the UK, but the vested interests and direction of travel are broadly the same.
Master of the science of the art of the science of art.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday December 01 2020, @04:13AM
(Score: 2) by fliptop on Sunday November 29 2020, @11:19PM (1 child)
Adding value can provide leverage in being competitive. Case in point, the desktops I sell run around $700. That's using top-shelf components, lots of ram, fast hard drives. All the components I buy come w/ a 3-year warranty, which I pass along to my clients. If the client needs Windows it comes w/ a base system, installed, updated, w/ free anti-virus and anti-malware. No crapware gets installed. The sale also includes delivery, getting it working on their network, and configuring any peripherals like printers. How can I compete w/ the likes of WalMart, which sells barebones systems for $300 loaded w/ crapware, needing (sometimes critical) updates as soon as it's sold and a 90-day warranty? My clients see the value in having someone local deliver, install, and warranty the unit for 3 years. It makes me competitive in a very cutthroat industry, even if the price of my desktop is more than double what they'd pay at WalMart.
To be oneself, and unafraid whether right or wrong, is more admirable than the easy cowardice of surrender to conformity
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 29 2020, @11:37PM
"No crapware gets installed."
Pardon me, but Windows is crapware.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 29 2020, @09:07PM (9 children)
Oh, you think we actually have a free market? That's adorable. You think people will be successful just by finding something useful that other people want? I've got some beachfront property to sell you in the middle of Kansas.
People aren't lazy. They just don't like being exploited for the enrichment of others. People's economic success really isn't based on their ability to work hard and provide a useful service. It's based on being lucky enough or the willingness to be dishonest enough to attain a level of success that allows them to exploit others.
Whether you work to serve the government in actual socialist societies or you work to serve large corporations in "free market capitalist" societies, you're still a cog in the wheel, working to serve the machine. You don't work to serve your interest, you work to serve the machine. It may be a different machine, but you're still serving the machine.
I want equal opportunity, where each person's success really does depend on them working hard and providing a useful function in society. We don't have anything close to that.
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 29 2020, @09:22PM (7 children)
Don't pop khallow's little bubble like that, he might go into shock!
(Score: 2, Touché) by khallow on Monday November 30 2020, @03:48AM (6 children)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 30 2020, @06:10AM (5 children)
Not so much that people disagree with you, khallow, but that most sane people disagree with you. And that is not because they don't like you, or are not "woke" or any such thing: it is just because you are wrong. Seriously wrong. Wrong on basic principles. If you were to see that (not likely, I know) it would pop your bubble, and you would have to deal with reality.
But on the other hand, if that happened, you might be able to make some arguments in good faith, instead of spewing ideology as you have been so far. Poor khallow!
(Score: 2, Touché) by khallow on Monday November 30 2020, @02:05PM (4 children)
So what? I expect such disagreement. I don't buy, BTW, that you are one of the sane.
Once again, you can't state details. If it's wrong, then how is it wrong? If it's spewing ideology, then how and what? I can't attempt to correct such things, if you don't state what the problems supposedly are.
I consider that evidence that your position is not rational. My take is that the problem instead is that you can't handle disagreement on your fundamental and perhaps ideological principles, and just don't have any rational counterargument to make. But you have to say something anyway.
(Score: 0, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 30 2020, @08:23PM (3 children)
I, and I presume many others, are tired of arguing with you because you ignore facts and use shaky narratives and assumptions to dismiss said facts. Your primary concern is the stock market, ours is the quality of life for the aveage person. There is no point in giving you any rational arguments because you flipflop immediately with rightwing rhetoric when the facts are inconvenient.
You serve the 1% and rational discussions are your billy club. Like all conservatives these days you are a hypocrite demanding virtuous behavior from those who disagree with you as you shove a knife into their back.
Now I just call out your bullshit and occasionally drop some clues as to what you're getting wrong. Discussion though? Ha! Not worth the effort engaging rightwing lies and half-truths.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday November 30 2020, @11:45PM (2 children)
Like what? Again no evidence to support your claims.
If it really were, you'd think I'd mention [soylentnews.org] the stock market more often. That's a search over SN comments which have "khallow", "stock", and "market". The newest post, aside from this one was in March 18 of this year. The next two by me are October 3, 2018 and then October 29, 2017. The search algorithm may be missing "stock market" posts by me, but the search results are a strong sign that I don't bring up the subject much, even in reply. That's evidence not shaky narratives.
And just because you have concern for quality of life for the average person doesn't mean you have a clue. The subject of my journal, infantizing people, is a good way to harm their quality of life. After all, bad things happen to people. If your people doesn't develop skills of resilience, which are mostly learned by experience, then they aren't going to recover well.
Ah, yes, a variation of the "You must have an altar to Mammon on your office desk because you disagree with me" argument. Sorry, you're not even wrong here. And of course, I must be hypocritically, figuratively knifing people because of said disagreement. Again no details of these alleged activities. They're just asserted without even the slightest effort at justification or description.
I'm not conservative either. Just saying.
There's a simpler explanation here. You can't communicate and have nothing to communicate. It's just another empty narrative like the rest of the crackpots, conspiracy theorists, and blowhards all who have nothing to say, but they have to endlessly tell the rest of us why they're not going to tell us their little bit of nothing.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 06 2020, @10:05AM (1 child)
Read the report hypocrite douche.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday December 06 2020, @04:57PM
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 30 2020, @04:41AM
Yes, we obviously have a free market. You're so face deep in your own nonsense that you don't even understand what the alternative is. Want to create a business, produce a product, and sell it as you see fit? You are completely free to. I do agree that all of the taxes and regulations we have are severely damaging the market, but it's still there. By contrast in socialist systems none of this is true. For instance Venezuela has had a massive shortage of just about everything, including stuff like chicken. Chicken is basically grass meat. What I mean by that is that they're about as difficult to grow as grass. Give them some land and they'll take care of themselves, more or less. And, depending on breed, they can be ready for slaughter in as little as 3 months.
In a capitalist system if there's a shortage of chicken there is a huge motivation to fix the problem, because the solution is simple and the rewards are immense thanks to the free market. But in Venezuela, not just anybody is allowed to farm chicken. And to ensure everybody has equal access to the chicken, prices are not controlled by a market but by "society" which has the price set dirt cheap. So it does succeed in one thing - everybody has equal access to chicken, it just so happens that that access is basically 0.
Social economic systems are obviously far better than capitalism in theory. The idea that nobody ever need go without and society could, as a whole, work together towards a greater future is something that few would oppose in theory. The problem is that theory != practice. In practice these systems simply do not account for the fact that motivation is largely driven by reward. When you get, more or less the same, regardless of how little or how much you contribute to society it creates a major motivation to do the bare minimum. This is why shortages are invariably linked with socialism come communism. And then to respond to the shortages you invariably see a aggressive response from the government which trends towards authoritarianism - the next general feature you invariably with such systems.
---
I think when some people speak of socialism they probably don't even know what it is and are thinking of places like Scandinavia. Scandinavia is 100% capitalist. But they're a whole lot smaller than the US which has helped them to sidestep many of our problems. For instance Norway's entire population is about 60% the size of New York *City*. As regions grow larger and more diverse, you lose track of 'you and me' and instead increasingly rely on third party sources for information about what's happening in society. These third party sources then can and do invariably end up being corrupted. And similarly as we grow apart from each other it also becomes much easier to screw one another over. In a capitalist system this may be price fixing, wage fixing, or just generally predatory behavior. In a social economic system this is people refusing to work which causes the entire economy to collapse often with catastrophic after-shocks. And there's no political system that can really solve this problem. Perhaps breaking up into little micro-nations could be a solution and indeed that was what the US was originally envisioned as, but as everywhere - gradually you get political opportunists who see the grand unification as something to be desired, even as it invariably leads to simply objectively worse outcomes.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday November 30 2020, @01:59PM
It's not the "unwilling to participate" that is a problem. If someone wants to live off-the-grid on their own resources, it's no problem for almost every system (except for the paranoid ones that need to control every possible risk and person). The problem comes from the parasites. Any system will collapse, if there are too many parasites feeding without giving back. The present systems throughout the developed world create plenty of these parasites as is. UBI though has the potential to create enough parasites on a unified platform that they could form a voting majority.
(Score: 3, Touché) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday November 30 2020, @12:19AM (50 children)
No, it's not. Compromise is when you don't get what you want and I don't get what I want. UBI is you getting what you want and me being forced to pay for it. You can fuck off and die with that kind of "compromise".
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 30 2020, @12:28AM
Hi dumb dumb, thanks for adding no substance as usual. Not even worth deconstructing your bullshit.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by fustakrakich on Monday November 30 2020, @02:04AM (12 children)
So you don't like UBI... You have a more humane way to treat the surplus population?
Or let them eat cake?
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 2, Informative) by khallow on Monday November 30 2020, @02:48AM
Don't break the economy. Then there's no such thing as a surplus population.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 30 2020, @05:17AM (2 children)
Your question is exactly how we got to where we are today.
While I think behavioral sink [wikipedia.org] has many flaws, I do think it exposes a sound underlying issue. What happens if you give any animal, including ourselves, a comfortable space free of risk and with minimal requirements imposed upon them? You may start with only a few but over the years the numbers will increase exponentially. Taken to an extreme these people become the majority. And these people, free from the consequences of their actions for all their life, are now expected to direct the future of a nation and society given the nature of democracy. And nations and societies, unlike the fantasy these people have lived, are not immune from the consequences of its actions. The outcome is as painful to imagine as it is inevitable.
But perhaps it will be a fitting conclusion what I think will ultimately be another relatively short lived experiment in democracy. We aimed to take the Greek system and improve upon it by structuring a democratic republic. And it did longer than the relatively more open Greek experiment for such improvements, yet it has gradually descended into something not so different. It's rather interesting reading the critiques on democracy of the great thinkers of the past as it feels as though it could be a contemporary thinker writing, surely only with hindsight, on the past 50 years of our system.
One solution could be that the price for a UBI is sterilization, but society will complain that such an act would be unacceptable. Even as the alternative will instead see the entire collapse of society itself.
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 30 2020, @06:13AM (1 child)
Sucking up to the incels, now, are we? Guess it makes sense, they have nothing to lose in that department. What about a set life span. Replicant style?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 30 2020, @10:04PM
I thought incels wanted to have sex, but fail to ever achieve that goal? Why would they be behind sterilization, which would lower the pool of sexually active people into a smaller, even more select group?
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday November 30 2020, @08:42PM (7 children)
Let them quit being surplus by being useful. It's not like there are a finite number of ways to be useful.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 30 2020, @08:50PM (3 children)
There are a finite number of ways, you're being lazy as usual. There is also a finite amount of money and much of it is silod away in offshore bank accounts. As for being useful, while there are finite ways to do so there are quite a few ways humans can be useful but many of them do not privide monetary rewards. UBI would help solve that problem as someone without gainful employment could volunteer or spend time improving themselves. Most people want their lives to have some meaning, very few would sit on a couch for very long.
Ugh, why'd I bother, just more fuel for your TAXES ARE THEFT EVERYONE BUT ME IS A LAZY BUM narrative.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday November 30 2020, @09:17PM (1 child)
Nope, infinite. A ray going one direction from a point to infinity is still infinite. Nothing limits creation of new ways to be useful.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Tuesday December 01 2020, @05:07AM
All hail the perpetual exponential growth and the free energy.
Also, we'll conveniently abolish the law of thermodynamics to allow Earth remain solid in spite of consuming unlimited supplies of energy.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 01 2020, @04:45AM
What you're saying betrays a major lack of understanding of basic economics. Money in our contemporary fractional reserve banking system is not finite - it is literally infinite, or at least it grows towards infinity with no end. I can explain how money is made but it's surprising nuanced. And it's not (primarily) made by literal printing. It's made through the mathematics of what happens when banks are legally able to lend more money than they can cover. The term you're looking for when searching for data on this is "monetary supply". Here [stlouisfed.org] are some data from the Federal Reserve.
What you might notice is that in the past decades we've begun to "print" money at a rapidly accelerating rate. And our response to the virus has sent this into crazy overdrive with us "printing", this year alone, about 800% more money than literally existed in 1975. How we're allowed to get away with this gets into a lot of complex geopolitical issues (and also even hits on our never-ending wars) but basically comes down to other countries use the USD as the money they tuck under the bed in case of a rainy day. But this dependence on the USD means we become somewhat protected from the consequences of our own actions.
This is why the main way China plans to dominate the US is very simple and very overt. They are trying to become a more desirable world reserve currency (which is the term for what I described above). If that happens, the US economy gets to experience the consequences of our economic decisions for the past couple of decades, and we'd basically implode overnight. This is also why you're already seeing, and will continue to see, more corporations becoming more and more friendly with China. Should China succeed, and increasingly it looks like not a question of "if" but "when", they will economically dominate the world similar to how the US has for the past ~8 decades.
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Monday November 30 2020, @08:56PM (2 children)
The work has to be suitably gratifying...
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday November 30 2020, @09:20PM (1 child)
Don't say stupid things. Find me a garbage man who loves his work. Or anyone who has to work with sewage. It only has to pay well enough that someone will do it. Gratification in their work is irrelevant to grown-ups.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Monday November 30 2020, @10:07PM
Um, I never said adequate payment, including delayed payment in the form of pensions, is not suitable... A lot of people are getting stiffed on that though. So future generations are going to tell them to fuck off.
And some people are just more marketable than others, for various reasons. Does that need to be spelled out for you?
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 2) by Arik on Monday November 30 2020, @04:14AM (35 children)
Currently we pay a huge bureaucracy to play social worker and administer funds to those that need them. If we eliminate all the social workers and just send people checks and it costs less money, why would you object to that?
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 30 2020, @04:08PM (24 children)
It sounds reasonable, but you are actually eliminating a lot of middle class jobs doing that. This increases the wealth disparity by moving all those people into the lower class. All those bureaucrats will also now have to survive on your UBI.
In my view the major problem is the view that anything less than 60 hour work weeks is slacking off. This is bullshit. One adult should be able to support a family on 40 hours a week.
We should be encouraging people who can afford it to drop out of the workforce, retire early, take a gap year and tour round the country, go back to college and learn something they are interested in, etc. Anything to drop the labor oversupply down to where the employer-employee power balance is not so one-sided. Give the workers a base to negotiate from, instead of the current "take a pittance or piss-off and starve" system.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday November 30 2020, @07:30PM
Not that there's anything wrong with that.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday November 30 2020, @08:53PM (7 children)
The problem there is twofold.
First, the actual cause of labor values dropping so sharply since the 60s or so is women entering the workforce en masse. I don't think you want to tell them to get back in the kitchen. Regardless, it's a problem that will solve itself over time. It's just not a fast process at all.
Second, if you want to speed things along in regards to supply and demand levels causing wages to rise again, the answer is never going to be remove labor. If you want more people employed, create more employers. Yes, that means you have to stop making life impossible for small business and approving every merger and buyout you see. You also need to get folks trained in some marketable skills. Minimum wage was meant for teenagers and worthless idiots. If you're still working at it as an adult, you have failed utterly at growing the fuck up.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 30 2020, @09:15PM (2 children)
Regulations are not the problem, the primary source of wor for small businesses are the big box stores undercutting prices along with the increasing wealth inequality due to repealed taxes on the ridiculously wealthy and global labor competition. If there aren't enough people who can pay your small business then SHOCKER you will go under. Time to leave your fairy tale land of imagination and simple logic.
Oh yeah, and most jobs are underpaid with minimum wage jobs not even able to support a single person. If such jobs exist perhaps it is the country that failed to grow up beyond the modern aristocrat's dream of feudalism. Wage slavery is the popular term, and again your fairy tale land of infinite wrll paying jobs just doesn't mesh with reality.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday November 30 2020, @09:24PM (1 child)
No. You're only addressing small retail outlets. That isn't even a quarter of small businesses. What's killing all small businesses right now is making them run at 25% capacity or shutting them down entirely. They do not have endlessly deep corporate pockets, so this bullshit kills them way more quickly and effectively than it does big businesses.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 01 2020, @11:18PM
Which is why your GOP buddies should be nailed to the wall for giving away so much money to the large corporations, and holding up a new relief package so they can grant immunity to irresponsible employers while giving the bulk of the money to large corporations. Again.
Some churches even got relief https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-updates/2020/08/03/898753550/religious-groups-received-6-10-billion-in-covid-19-relief-funds-hope-for-more [npr.org] which seems like a really big nono with all that separation of church and state which is especially egregious seeing as how churches don't even pay taxes.
I do agree that the lockdowns are hurting small business disproportionately, and I would like to remind you that if YOU assholes didn't downplay the severity or mock the recommended safety precautions then we would have been able to re-open with much higher capacity. Sorry you parroted the bad leadership and shot your small business owners in the lungs?
Does the current explosion in cases and the 250k+ dead Americans mean nothing to you? Or just your sociopathic need to be right keeping you from admitting you were wrong? Or worse, that you consider the deaths a necessary sacrifice to keep bank account numbers looking good? AGAIN I remind you that following safety procedures would have kept infections low and allowed a re-opening that would have seen us near fully re-opened right now.
I await breathlessly your excuses and hand waving about how being wrong actually makes you right O.o
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 30 2020, @10:04PM (3 children)
It's one of the main causes, automation and overseas outsourcing make it worse. There is a vicious cycle effect, in that an oversupply means that wages drop, so many people have to work more hours to get by. This increases the labor supply and puts more downward pressure on wages. It's been bad enough for long enough that employers have come to expect it. Look at any area where there is a skill shortage, never is the answer to increase wages or salary. It is just inconceivable that supply and demand might apply to labor. Instead there are constant calls for the government to "do something", provide more training or import H1-Bs.
I don't think it will. Women are not going back in the kitchen, and nobody reasonable thinks they should have to. Automation is just going to continue to improve. A big kicker is that the COVID lockdowns are going to make many companies realize just how much of the work their employees do is unnecessary to the business. They might wait until it's politic, but I expect a big wave of middle manager and paper-shuffler redundancies soon.
All of my suggestions reduced labor while arguably improving people's lives. A UBI would encourage that.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday December 01 2020, @12:01AM (2 children)
Except that wages didn't drop and people didn't work more hours. Something wrong with the narrative!
Is there anything government can't do?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 03 2020, @08:04AM (1 child)
Of course they didn't. Nobody is working two or three jobs to try to keep a roof over their kids and food on the table. They just invest a few million in a term deposit and live off the interest.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday December 06 2020, @05:40PM
We already have wages are "stagnant" right? Well, wages and benefits are not! Those actually track [heritage.org] productivity fairly well.
And people aren't working more hours on average, contrary to your assertion. The US, for example, declined from 1830 hours worked per year in 2000 to 1780 hours worked per year in 2019.
Something wrong with the narrative!
(Score: 2) by Arik on Monday November 30 2020, @10:04PM (13 children)
They're well educated people who should have little trouble finding employment.
"We should be encouraging people who can afford it to drop out of the workforce, retire early, take a gap year and tour round the country, go back to college and learn something they are interested in, etc."
I don't disagree with any of that.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 01 2020, @06:33AM (12 children)
That just displaces someone else who would have got that job if not for the well-educated ex-bureaucrat taking it. Eliminating positions means that someone is going to be unemployed.
The supply of labor exceeds the demand for labor. You can concentrate the excess on a small group (the unemployed) and hope that it is evenly spread over time (ie, if everyone changed jobs each year, and spent two months unemployed between jobs) or you can spread it by working less hours per week (bitterly fought by employers), or have the current system where it is just concentrated on a small group of unfortunates.
(Score: 2) by Arik on Tuesday December 01 2020, @08:26AM (2 children)
You seem to be working from a fallacy of inflexible demand, or to put it another way you're assuming a zero-sum game. But it's not a zero-sum game, when more capital and labor is available more projects become doable, more jobs appear to be filled.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 01 2020, @11:20PM (1 child)
I would love a workation cleaning up and fixing state/national parks, or doing any number of things that aren't currently viable in this capitalist economy.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday December 02 2020, @05:36AM
Draining the Aral Sea also isn't currently viable in this capitalist economy. Nor is Roman Republic-style proscription. Sure, there are some minor virtue signaling projects that are unrealistic under today's world (and your behavioral limitations like apparently being unable to work towards attaining your goals). But so are a vast number of really bad things. When one only considers one side of the balance sheet, by definition one gets an unbalanced view of reality.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday December 01 2020, @01:33PM (8 children)
Sounds like the basic principles are broken here. We wouldn't have a small unemployment rate (aside from a few recessions) if that were true.
Spending two months a year unemployed and collecting unemployment would result in a long term unemployment rate of at least 16%. That doesn't happen.
And there's a huge reason that employers (and a lot of other people) fight shorter mandatory work weeks - because it introduces huge costs into employing people and creates far less value per worker (which in turn means lower wages per worker).
Funny how such lists of employment dilemmas ignore the obvious. If you want to increase the price of a good in a market, you can as above cut the supply of the good (here, reduce the amount of work that a worker can do either by shorter work weeks or enforced downtime). But there's a second option, increase the demand for workers. One of those ways is to stop destroying the value of workers with the above schemes.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 03 2020, @01:24PM (7 children)
You're treating labor like a storable retail commodity. In reality it is more like a primary producer growing fruit. If you grow ten tons of peaches this week, you need to sell them now. If you don't they will rot and you get nothing.
Hence you drop the price until they sell, because anything is better than nothing.
Labor is the same. You 'grow' 40~60 hours of labor per week you can sell, if you don't sell those hours, they're gone and you get nothing.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday December 04 2020, @04:36AM (6 children)
No, I'm not.
Then where is the equivalent of the ten tons of rotting peaches? Sorry, massive oversupply of labor would look a lot different even as a perishable good.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 04 2020, @07:04AM (5 children)
The equivalence is that you cannot stockpile labor. You sell it one hour per hour or you lose it. You can however stockpile the need for labor. Just put the job off for a while.
This gives disproportionate power to the buyer and has the same effect as an oversupply. The seller is desperate, the buyer is not.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 04 2020, @07:28PM (3 children)
This isn't how the labour market works. It sounds all groovy, I grant you: "Brothers! The Man is locking us out! Living high with champagne and caviar while we shiver in the gutters, waiting for us to be so desperate that some of us will turn scab to feed our families! But we shall tear down the gates and commandeer the means of production in solidarity!"
Could be quite a tear-jerker of a made-for-TV movie, couldn't it? Leonardo playing a union agitator in a wifebeater, Charlize playing as his russian mistress .... money!
In reality, as many companies have found out, the people that you don't hire often end up working for your competition, building things that you could have done instead. People don't just go to work at the mill, or sit home and throw beer cans at the TV.
Additionally, while you can't store labour, you sure as hell can store the results. To extend the peach analogy above, if you don't have a market for fresh peaches, you do something else. You ferment them, and make peach brandy, or you can them, or you dry them, or sell them to an artisanal vinegar plant, or something - the same way that a steel manufacturer doesn't have to lay people off in slow months, but can stockpile goods for when the market picks up.
Just turning their back on the labour market indefinitely isn't an option for most producers. This goes double for the service industry. To use the old cliche, somebody has to pull those no-foam decaf soy lattes.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday December 05 2020, @02:05AM (2 children)
Another example of this is saving/investing. The worker can store the results of their labor as such. That is directly relevant to the claim that the worker is "desperate". Well, if you've saved several years of your wages or more, then you're not.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 05 2020, @08:10PM (1 child)
If the worker doesn't have tens of thousands in liquid funds, he's locked out of the most lucrative ways to accumulate wealth. Investing isn't taught in public schools.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday December 06 2020, @04:30PM
While it's not easy to save that much, it's not that hard either. If the worker doesn't have tens of thousands in liquid funds, then start by saving up tens of thousands in liquid funds. If you need to take that first step to start that journey, then take the first step.
Indeed. But public schools aren't the only place in the world to learn. Again, take that first step. Then you won't be just another adult infant in a world that has yet to see even the slightest need for adult infants.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday December 05 2020, @02:03AM
Let's look back at what I wrote that led to this protest:
Sorry, the perishability of labor is irrelevant. My statement is true no matter how perishable labor happens to be or not be.
Because? It's certainly not true when the seller is not desperate.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday December 01 2020, @12:03AM
Or create/grow businesses that employ more people. In a market, one can also increase the price of a good by increasing the demand for that good. That incidentally will "give a base to negotiate from".
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday November 30 2020, @08:45PM (9 children)
No. I'd still argue for neither. Less expensive or not, UBI is still astoundingly worse for the soul of America than "help when they need it".
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by Arik on Monday November 30 2020, @10:11PM (8 children)
I don't really agree. "Help when you need it" sounds nice, but in practice it creates a lot of moral hazard. A minimum income may not avoid all of the issues, but it seems like it would eliminate some of them, at least. Particularly if it's calculated on a progressive scale, so that you are always better off to make another dollar than not to do so.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday December 01 2020, @01:09PM (7 children)
(Score: 3, Insightful) by aristarchus on Tuesday December 01 2020, @07:43PM (5 children)
Brothers Gracchi? [wikipedia.org] khallow! You are just a Roman Optimate [wikipedia.org]!! And here I thought you were just a garden variety Vienna Circle Austrian School libertarian, but now I see you are a Late Republic Roman conservative, who will soon replace the UBI with mandatory Military service, the reforms of Sulla, and inevitably the rise of a Caesar. And you think you are not proto-fascist?
Americans! Their ignorance of history condemns them to repeat it.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday December 03 2020, @01:41AM (4 children)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 03 2020, @04:21AM (3 children)
Opposing proto-fascists like your self is very cost-effective. Prevents having to use lethal force against an actual fascist later on. My favorite, as you may recall, are Blockbusters, 2,000 pounds of Hi-explosive that removes fascists.
(Score: 2, Touché) by khallow on Thursday December 03 2020, @06:03AM (2 children)
You know what's even more cost-effective? Opposing proto-fascist unicorns. You don't even need to get out of bed for that one.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 03 2020, @12:46PM (1 child)
You sleep with proto-fascist unicorns?
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday December 03 2020, @02:29PM
(Score: 2) by Arik on Tuesday December 01 2020, @09:35PM
As long as that doesn't move too quickly, I'm not sure it matters or is a bad thing. In fact, as long as we're stuck with inflationary currency, it's a necessity.
To slow that movement, the thing should be setup carefully with all the formulas tied to real economic activity as much as possible, and calculated. Ideally via Constitutional Amendment, so that Congress /can't/ simply vote to increase it.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 29 2020, @10:28PM
> You have one group of people that are utilizing the countless tools this society offers to enrich themselves and they are seeing rewards like never before. And then you have another class of people who sit around, play on the internet all day, complain they don't have as much as other people, and are increasingly overtly asking governments to take it from other people and give it to them. ...
Why not do both? I do. Run a tiny company part time during the week (I've recently turned 65, but have been semi-retired for years now) and play on the internet the rest of the time. While I'm slightly annoyed by taxes, I took good advice from a sig on the green site years ago, it was something like, "happy to pay taxes, with them I buy civilization".
My workers (very few) are well paid and share in any minor windfalls that our little company might happen across, from time to time.
The only fantasy I want from the government teat is my own private jet(grin)...or maybe a Mercedes Benz? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qev-i9-VKlY [youtube.com]
.
If you like this idea, the only tip I have is to make it through the first ~5 years with a good reputation. Assuming your product is something useful (or you are able to adapt to a changing marketplace), it gets much easier after you have a reputation. While many companies are wedded to the grow-or-die mantra, I'm proof that this isn't necessary, we've stayed small and are happy (even without that corporate jet.)
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Arik on Sunday November 29 2020, @10:48PM (24 children)
Also, it would improve conditions in the labor market. It's not actually a good thing when people are so desperate for a job that they'll accept terms they find repugnant, simply out of necessity. It's obviously bad for the laborer, but it may seem beneficial to the employer - and in a short term, shallow analysis it is. But in the long term it's bad for everyone.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday November 30 2020, @12:23AM (7 children)
Absolutely nobody was that desperate for a job until panicky asshats shut down the entire economy for a year over coronaids. We had a larger percentage of the population working than ever. Labor was what was at a premium not jobs.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by Arik on Monday November 30 2020, @04:10AM (3 children)
I don't believe that's literally true but I do believe it's an accurate reflection of your experience, as it would be an accurate reflection of my own.
But you have no idea what it would like if labor was genuinely at a premium. Demand for labor has been consistently depressed since the 15th century, if not much earlier. Ruling classes absolutely detest the idea of a free market for labor.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday November 30 2020, @09:06PM (2 children)
No, it's literally true. Unemployment was so low that wages would have been skyrocketing (relatively) had we not done our best to destroy the economy. There is not an effective corporate conspiracy to depress wages. It's not possible to have one if big corporations don't do most of the employing, which they don't.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 30 2020, @09:27PM
lol
(Score: 2) by Arik on Monday November 30 2020, @10:15PM
It only ever approaches zero, but never goes negative, didn't you notice that?
"It's not possible to have one if big corporations don't do most of the employing"
Sure it is, when they control the state.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Monday November 30 2020, @04:17PM (2 children)
No, we weren't yet at the point where labor was at a premium. We were getting there, but it was still a ways off. People still working two or three shitty part time jobs just to pay the rent and groceries, without any benefits was still pretty close to the "norm" for millenials.
When labor is at a premium, full time jobs with benefits will again be the "norm". Wages that allow a person to either save for retirement, or to waste a little money each pay period will be the "norm". Unionization may or may not be part of that, or probably will be part of it in some cases.
Trump might have attained that, without the the COVID. He was making progress.
Abortion is the number one killed of children in the United States.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 30 2020, @06:59PM
Holy SHIT you are dumb. We all knew you were a Trumper that just didn't want to take the heat for being an admitted MAGA moron, thanks for eliminating any doubt. Only a true moron would have typed out those words or thought Trump was good for the US.
You are a dumb bulb that somehow consumers twice the energy of a bright one.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday November 30 2020, @09:09PM
The hell we weren't. Unemployment, both the bullshit numbers DC uses and actual percentage of people able to work, was astoundingly low. The effects just aren't immediate. Employers need time to realize they're going to have to pay more if they want to fill jobs and we hadn't been there long enough for that to become an accepted fact of life yet.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 30 2020, @01:05AM (15 children)
I'm with you on the inefficiencies. I don't think that anybody accused the US government of efficiency.
Unfortunately, for UBI the sums just don't work out well.
Universal - everybody in the nation. Let's round down to 300 million (though if you include every hominid with a pulse it's probably nearer 350 million).
Basic - enough to cover _all_ the needs. Food. Shelter. Clothing. Medical. The works. We can ballpark it as federal poverty line (a flexible number, but $10K/year isn't far off, allowing for households) plus premiums for PPACA plus deductible for same - works out to around $6K per person, making some assumptions for kids and households again.
Income. This is to be dispensed as cold, hard currency (OK, maybe virtual currency - whatever floats your boat).
We'll ballpark it at $16K/person/year.
Near as dammit, 5 trillion buckaroonies, every year.
OK, well, you say we're going to have savings. And this, you'll notice, replaces everything. Social security, medicare, medicaid, food stamps, unemployment - the works! I'm sure we can rustle up that money easy.
Social security: a trillion! Give or take some details. It's actually less, but not by much. All right, we're cooking here.
Food stamps ... kinda weak, really. Maybe $70 billion. OK, moving on.
Medicare - three quarters of a trillion. Not bad, not bad, but we're not quite up to two trillion yet. Keep looking. Especially because a bunch of it comes from the states.
Medicaid - oof, only about $600billion. Oh well, we're over two trillion, and we'll be losing the enforced subsidy (by the healthcare industry) of medicare and medicaid, so really we should count a bunch of that back in, but I'm feeling generous.
What else is going on? Housing assistance? Um, that's about $50billion.
What else ... we're only about at $2,5 trillion and we have a long way to go ... unemployment! How much is that? Not too much, as it turns out, and we're still more than two trillion short.
Now, before you go all fact-checker AHA! you have to remember that we're not just balancing this against taxes, because income taxes come due once per year, but this income is supposed to be ready to go, day or night, so we're probably talking a weekly cash dump. In other words, we need to be able to pay this before assessing people on how filthy, stinking rich they got that year. So we're either talking another $2trillion (actually more) injected into the deficit (and before the MMT folks chime in: even if we accept your hocus-pocus wholesale, the government would still need to balance the money supply by bonds or ... taxes ... oops - and wasn't that all about full employment? Double oops!) or we're talking a fresh tax level amounting to another $8K/person. EVERY person. Including newborns. But of course they don't pay taxes, so we're talking nosebleed taxes to just catch up to the difference between poverty-level UBI and the current system.
So explain to me again where all the money comes from?
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Arik on Monday November 30 2020, @04:06AM (10 children)
I'm thinking of RAW's '79 paper "The RICH Economy" which used to be easily findable on the net, but for some reason I'm drawing a blank on the moment. It's not the first reference but it's one of the earliest to fill in any details.
It would be most simply implemented via IRS code. Fill out your tax return, if you're below the poverty line you get a check for the difference. The mailman and the banker have no way to tell if you made too little or just paid to much on the withholdings, it's the same check. The end. More nuanced variations would give you a sliding scale, so that when you earned $1 you lost a little less than $1 from the expected check - but regardless, you still have to make it to the end of the year and file your return to get it, so any theoretical incentive to refrain from generating income is counterbalanced by the practical advantage of $1 in hand versus $1 next March. A bird in the bush versus one in the hand.
You're talking about providing it for everyone, period. I'm only talking about providing it for people who, for whatever reason, failed to generate it in the previous year. I'm not surprised that makes a huge difference to the analysis. Though I'm also quite happy with smaller budgets in addition.
"you have to remember that we're not just balancing this against taxes, because income taxes come due once per year, but this income is supposed to be ready to go, day or night, so we're probably talking a weekly cash dump."
Yeah, no, not what I'm talking about.
Although, if you insist on that, the proposal could probably still be salvaged. It's just a matter of adjusting the zero level on the income tax. 10th percentile income = no income tax, greater than that equals pay, less than that equals receive check, proportionately. You just have to start calculating the taxes every week instead of every year to do it.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday November 30 2020, @05:14AM (6 children)
Found it. [ureka.org] I don't think he's paying attention to the job-creating aspects of automation though:
Big unions have since declined substantially in power and the corporations have aggressively developed automation, and jobs have done fine (with massive growth in the developing world). Government has helped in turn by creating regulations that further penalize employers. Some other mechanism needs to be employed to explain why we're not seeing massive unemployment.
(Score: 2) by Arik on Monday November 30 2020, @06:15AM (1 child)
Nice.
"Big unions have since declined substantially in power"
Police unions seem to be one of the exceptions.
"the corporations have aggressively developed automation"
Have they really though?
I don't think so much. I think they've aggressively developed cheap overseas labor, to a much greater degree, and automation, to a much smaller degree.
"Government has helped in turn by creating regulations that further penalize employers. "
That does encourage automation, but it also encourages outsourcing.
"Some other mechanism needs to be employed to explain why we're not seeing massive unemployment."
Well first off, as RAW mentions a bit, the amount of work to be done is not a set thing. It expands as the universe of things we can imagine done, and would want done, expands.
Second, are you sure we're not seeing massive unemployment? Those numbers have been fantasies for years. Anecdotally, it seems like record numbers of people near enough for me to notice have no options and no way forward.
"Play your X Box, shut up, be happy."
Hmmm.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday November 30 2020, @02:24PM
Public unions in general are the exception [stephenkoppekin.net] (at least in the US).
Why ask? For example, my position, a field auditing position for a resort, used to be done by several people on paper. In the future maybe 10-20 years down the road, the company will probably do most of this auditing from their headquarters. Freight transportation systems are heavily automated. And of course, so much is done by computer now that used to be done by networks of people.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 30 2020, @06:15AM (3 children)
Aristotle never said any such thing. Enough of these libertariantards trying to re-imagine history they are ignorant of! Illiterate posers! Rand Paul level idiots!
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 30 2020, @06:50AM (2 children)
Yes, he did. Politics book 1, part 4. [mit.edu]
I would recommend reading more of the classics. Their insights, especially in our increasingly chaotic present time, are almost unimaginably wise. I say unimaginably simply for the fact that they wrote in what was really an entirely different day and age, yet were somehow able to peer, with a rather substantial degree of insight and clarity, into the issues that we face today 2400 years later in a world that, technologically, they seemingly should not have been able to imagine even in their wildest dreams.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 30 2020, @08:50AM
But, that's Fake Aristotle! Where is the Bekker paged reference?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 30 2020, @10:09AM
To paraphrase a much more eloquent quote by one of my favorite philosophers: The times can change quickly; mankind cannot. Time flows freely; man chooses not.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 30 2020, @06:42AM (2 children)
OK, so what you're talking about is:
Not universal, but means-tested, and then only to people who are in any position to file any kind of taxes - probably lets out a lot of homeless right there, to mention just one underserved group.
And not delivered in the kind of way that would be useful for actually paying for day-to-day living expenses. Just a lump sum at the end of the year, assuming that exposure and starvation didn't kill you first - but then you couldn't use it to replace everything else from social security disability dependent payments through to pelosicare insurance deductibles.
So you just want to give a select group of people a crapton of means-tested money in addition to the current safety net (because I'm sure you don't mean them to go without food because there's no SNAP system and they're being paid annually). So, yeah, unless that is really your plan (in which case hahaha good luck passing THAT turkey through congress) we're back to regular EBT or similar payments.
But you want to rescue that by weekly tax payments? I'm sorry, the foregoing idea was sober, well-reasoned and feasible. THIS is the real turkey. I can actually see genuine revolution rising from an effort to implement that. Or didn't you get the memo on how much people love being reminded of taxes? You figure someone who just spent the week in bed with the flu is going to be just pumped to go figure some taxes? Just regular ol' W2 is a pain, but what about someone who has a business? More than one business? Investment accounts? I can't WAIT to see you propose this at a Rotary meeting...
And regardless of whether it's weekly taxes (insane) or annual, then you have to figure out the zero-point on your tax chart, because if you set it too low, you're taxing people who in the current system would not even bother filing (yeah, THAT will go over big) and if you set it too high, you end up with a huge confiscatory system, resulting in tax dodges that make the current shenanigans look like a penny-ante game round the back of the barroom.
So which is it?
Non-universal?
Useless to most people?
Weekly tax filings?
And where's your zero point? Poverty line? Four times poverty line, like Pelosicare subsidies?
Inquiring minds want to know.
(Score: 2) by Arik on Tuesday December 01 2020, @09:26AM (1 child)
You seem confused, the homeless are already required to file taxes.
"And not delivered in the kind of way that would be useful for actually paying for day-to-day living expenses"
That's right, it's not emergency aid and it's not intended to remove all incentive to work.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 01 2020, @05:11PM
People are not required to file federal income taxes in the USA if they have no tax liability. They can, at their option, but it's not a requirement. It's likelier that some of them that have occasional work might file to get things like the EIC - but again, not a requirement.
If UBI isn't emergency aid, and not useful for people who've just lost a job, you can't use it to replace lots of social programmes, which means that all your vaunted savings go up in smoke.
In that case, where do you find the five trillion you'd need?
(Score: 2) by Arik on Monday November 30 2020, @04:24AM (3 children)
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 01 2020, @01:23AM (2 children)
So I read the document.
A $100K reward for automating your job away is stupidly small, and also largely pointless. There are very few jobs of that simplicity. The skills it would take even to replace a coffee bar espresso puller (let alone one of the stripper-driven ones) would baffle a team of engineers for five years, let alone one.
But whatever. Moving on.
Stage two (UBI) falls prey to the exact same funding problems already spelled out above.
Stage three is just the UBI taken to the level of wholesale income redistribution to the point of total leveling, meaning that actual accumulation of resources to achieve anything different becomes effectively impossible.
Stage four is distracting everyone with education. Because that will satisfy the world's crack fiends at last.
I'd actually hoped for a really uplifting read, but no ...
(Score: 2) by Arik on Tuesday December 01 2020, @08:19AM (1 child)
Well, that was '79, if we adjust for inflation that would nearly $400k today.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 01 2020, @05:05PM
Deck chairs on the Titanic. Hiring a team of engineers for five years is going to cost you of the order of millions, to say nothing of machining and prototyping costs.
$10 million might maybe be credible. $400K? Go find suckers elsewhere.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by aristarchus on Sunday November 29 2020, @11:13PM (3 children)
I am quite sure that khallow does not know this, being all fluffy and whatnot, but this complaint is one of the classic features of fascism. Soyboys, latte-drinkers, kids these days! Yukio Mishima relayed a report from a traditional Chinese medicine doctor, who said that in the "good old days" you could tell the gender of a person just be feeling their pulse, but now days he could no longer distinguish the pulse of man from that of a woman! Oh, noes! How the mighty (buzzards, too, but birds are always harder to sex) have fallen!
And as well with the infantilization of the population at large. Guess we need some of them there Übermenschen to keep us all in line, and use the combined power of capital and the state to save Western Civilization from these deleterious influences! Maybe join the Boy Scouts, Proud Boys, or Hitler Youth, eh?
(Score: 3, Funny) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday November 30 2020, @12:25AM
No we're not. You haven't even tried buying me a drink yet.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday November 30 2020, @02:50AM (1 child)
I'm quite sure you don't know this either.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by aristarchus on Monday November 30 2020, @03:22AM
That's what I was talking about, the Dunning-Koeger Fluffiness Effect, or DKFE, for short.
(Score: 2) by RamiK on Monday November 30 2020, @12:07AM (4 children)
1. Automation-driven job-displacement.
2. Incentives for carbon emissions and excessive consumption overall.
While the issues it introduces in the housing and food markets aren't a few, they were addressed by the post-Republican Rome for hundreds of years so we can at least say they're mostly manageable.
Regardless, as sad as it is to see the opportunity pass by, ironically most nations will respond to the post COVID-19 recession and unemployment with cash stimuli to industry and small businesses with the odd war or two so no one will be doing much more than talking about UBI for a while...
compiling...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 30 2020, @07:08AM (3 children)
Republican is a political party in America, Republic is a system of government. Let's not conflate the two. Even if you did not intend to do so, many may not understand what you're saying. Rome went from being a Republic to being a dictatorship.
And the issues that a dictatorship can and cannot handle are radically different than those of a democracy. A democracy with an UBI would simply create funding for people to perpetually lobby the government for even more money. And in a nation increasingly driven by people who care more for their own political power and wealth, than the health of the nation, they would rapidly acquiesce all the way to the breaking point of the economy. It is paradoxical but perhaps appropriate that the only places a UBI might work in a democracy are those in which the electorate would be both intelligent and wise enough to reject it - such as Switzerland. [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 2) by RamiK on Monday November 30 2020, @01:55PM (2 children)
The term "Republican" is from the French républicain and was noted in English use around the 17th century in reference to both French republicans and Roman figures like Brutus about a century before the American Republican party came to be. It's still being used as such in contemporary text books, journals and newspapers.
Everything else you've mentioned falls under the "issues it introduces in the housing and food markets" caveat I've mentioned. i.e. It's a given UBI will weaken much of the middle and lower classes purchasing power eroding the foundations of the republic and democracy. We know what happens when the state is forced to intervene in the markets to prevent food and housing from inflating by fixing prices or fixing UBI to food and housing costs like is currently being discussed under the "livable wage" criteria. It's nothing new and happened all across history as monarchs and states of emergency came and went. However, even if we can't completely mitigate the issue, it doesn't change the fact it's the only viable solution to carbon emissions and automation unemployment that doesn't necessitates dystopian measures starting with the regulation and taxing of every form of trade and industry.
In other words, UBI is the most "free market" solution on the table since at least it keeps most of the free market to manage itself with the exception of food and housing.
compiling...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 30 2020, @04:25PM (1 child)
The reason I nit-picked the terminology is not because it was wrong, but because it was likely to mislead. If you tell the average American to describe "post-Republican Rome" what do you think they're going to think you're talking about? Granted the average poster on here is not the average American, but I still don't think we're especially well informed on average.
My critique was not about inherent market changes and people *needing* more for the same over time, but about human nature and people *wanting* more, to no end. You may say initially that the UBI will be fixed to some value, but that will rapidly change upon lobbying. For instance Alaska saw the inverse of such with their UBI. [wikipedia.org] Their permanent fund was growing rapidly at the same time that their government was wasting money like there was on tomorrow. And so the government voted, changed the rules, and looted (and continue to loot) the fund which over the next decade or two will likely be run dry due to rule change after rule change.
It's this issue of never-ending greed, corruption, ineptitude, and so forth that must always be considered in any economic discussion. It's precisely these sort of issues that, for instance, take socialism from a utopia in theory to a complete dystopia in practice. Systems need to function even in the presence of corruption, greed, and ineptitude. And it's for this very reason that a large scale UBI will never work in a large democracy.
(Score: 2) by RamiK on Monday November 30 2020, @08:22PM
You're missing a fundamental detail: UBI will be so wide spread and pervasive that it will be supported by a huge voter base and, like the military-industrial complex, will have entire economic sectors depending on it. In fact, at times we'll be facing the opposite problem where there will a lot of pressure to add more funds to UBI from the consumer and services markets at the expense of military expenditure. This is why Rome stopped expanding at a certain point: The military couldn't get enough funding for expeditions since the bread and circus (which was actually mostly just food and housing with the circuses being a fairly minor expense) for the parasitic cities limited the available funds to just enough to keep the borders safe.
Another way to state the above is to say UBI also addressed the emergence of the police state by introducing competitive special interests groups to the military-industrial complex.
TL;DR the adversarial democracy mechanisms of checks and balances are still there setting one group's greed against the next and making sure UBI won't grow too much or too little. The system will have its flaws and there will be periods of economic problems just like there are now. But the base line will keep people fed, clothed and housed at least. And that's an improvement.
compiling...
(Score: 2) by Gaaark on Monday November 30 2020, @01:38AM (1 child)
About 10-15(?) years ago, my wife and i watched a movie. At the start you see a lady in a motorized wheelchair going up the side of a mountain road, drinking from the bottle and tossing the bottle away when done. Her chair stops working and she gets on her cell and calls for (privileged) service. Up comes a black helicopter. Next thing, she's swinging below the helicopter, wheelchair and all and she's taken to a 'concentration camp' where people are forced to 'justify their existence'.
An old guy worked his entire life and now he's old: he is given a pension and thanked.
An artist who took government money but produced nothing is given nothing.
I think a woman who was raised on welfare and raised welfare children herself is tossed off welfare and told to get a job.
I like that, except that there are exceptions.
I've worked my whole life and so has my wife. She's off work right now with covid because if she got it she could die. Is this right? We have no problem with it because we've both contributed tons.
If i was suddenly to become disabled, i would think i could get help (doesn't mean i couldn't work): I've contributed lots, so something like UBI would be something i think i've earned.
UBI for nothing..... as i said, there may be some exceptions, but i think 'free money' should be earned: do something. Clean up around your neighbourhood, or volunteer at an old folks home or SOMETHING.
Like Workfare was here in Ontario (Canada): I liked that. The problem now is that minimum wage was extended to places that hired people like my son to do jobs that were not worth minimum wage and paid them LESS than minimum wage, so they laid off all those people and now they are on 'pensions' instead of 'earning a wage'. Sad. Nice thought, but not enough thought.
Let's say, UBI with
benefitsexceptions.--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 30 2020, @03:43AM
I think the Title of the Movie was, "Republican party platform, 1999." And years after.
(Score: 4, Informative) by dry on Monday November 30 2020, @06:46AM (5 children)
Canada had an experiment in basic income back in the late '70's, more like what Arik was talking about, basically a guarantee of cdn$16,000 a year. They took a small rural town of about 10,000 called Dauphin, Manitoba and ran the experiment for 5 years until a change in government cancelled it and archived the results, which were dug out in about 2008 and studied.
Seems what it did was improve the well being of most of the community. Bread winners worked slightly less, some who had abusive jobs, like a bad boss abusiveness, did quit and mostly found other work. Kids got their teeth fixed. Mothers stayed on maternity leave longer, which likely created a better next generation, teenagers stayed in school instead of working to help support the family, once again helping their future. People opened small businesses, which mostly did well until the program ended. People were healthier, with hospitalizations dropping by 8.5%. Basically quality of life in a rural town improved for most all.
Now some would argue that society should strive for people to have a good quality of life, others would argue, tough, if you had bad luck like being born in a dysfunctional family, well you deserve it for not pulling yourself up by your bootstraps. The experiment ended when the right wing took government, much like the more recent Ontario experiment.
Bedtime here, so just this link, Google will find more. https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20200624-canadas-forgotten-universal-basic-income-experiment [bbc.com]
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 30 2020, @08:53AM (4 children)
There's a lot of ways you can detect bad science. When you get enough data about something you're going to find something that improved, even if completely spuriously. There are several tell tale signs of this happening. One is a focus on an unexpected datum. So for instance the article you reference discusses the 'shocking' change in healthcare outcomes. The next is failure to provide context to numbers, which the article also does. It states that there was an 8.5% reduction in hospitalizations. Okay, but a single number in a vacuum doesn't tell you anything. What was that compared to other comparable places at the same time?
I found data [secure.cihi.ca] to provide some glimpse into the answer there. Turns out since the 70s hospitalization rates in Canada have been plummeting surprisingly rapidly. It's *extremely* likely that that 8.5% figure is not even statistically relevant, let alone some shocking figure. The fact the article and the researcher's focus ended up being on this datum suggests that most of the other data were generally not so good, which is why instead of providing data the article returns to long-form, evidence free, anecdotal narrative.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 02 2020, @12:14AM (3 children)
That is just disingenuous. The article presents way more than just that single datum. They had 100% school enrollment, people opening businesses, and increased in preventive medical care. And if you look in the study, which focuses on the health aspects ("Our primary outcome variables relate to health care utilization"), the 8.5% drop is statistically significant when compared to other groups. There are other health effects in there too, some of which are surprising if you actually look. You can also look at the economic indicators measured by the Canadian Government for more positive and direct economic effects.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday December 03 2020, @01:46AM (2 children)
Again, how does that compare to the rest of Canada? Most places, for example, would have near 100% school enrollment as well, people opening businesses, and I bet increases in preventative medical care due to the aforementioned nation-wide forces that resulted in lower hospitalization. Context is ignored.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 03 2020, @05:44AM (1 child)
As the paper itself says, it is significantly different. It even has some pretty graphs too.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday December 03 2020, @06:05AM
Just like the reduction in hospitalizations?
(Score: 3, Insightful) by DannyB on Monday November 30 2020, @04:31PM (2 children)
Why would Republicans complain about UBI and adult babies?
They happily support an adult baby [youtube.com] as president.
Republican is a religious cult. Evangelical is a political party.
The anti vax hysteria didn't stop, it just died down.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 30 2020, @07:02PM (1 child)
Conservatives read "separation of church and state" and said
NOT ON MY WATCH!
Seriously, churches pushing political agendas goes against the core values of the United States. Now churches are terrified because young people have seen the bullshit and are leaving en masse. Poor stupid hate filled humans, clinging to power and oppressing their fellow citizens because they simply do not know how to Live and Let Live.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 01 2020, @01:00AM
This is so wrong it's hard to know where to begin.
First, let's get a line from the feminist movement: the personal is the political. They mostly meant in terms of how relationships are managed, but the same principle applies here. Want to call one thing good and another evil? That's political. Want to declare one day a week for rest? That's political. Which day it is? That's political. In other words, churches always, inherently, simply by taking moral positions, unavoidably take and, through their adherents, push political positions.
That was always in the mix, and well understood by the framers of the constitution. This goes double because of the history of church and state back in the british isles.
What was their compromise? They prohibited religious preferences, by prohibiting an effective establishment of religion, and that was incorporated on subsidiary jurisdictions by the 14th Amendment in the wake of the civil war.
Now, let's take a look at the most famous recent religious liberty case at hand: the Colorado baker who didn't want to bake a cake for a nontraditional couple's wedding. He won. Why did he win? Because he was right to force the wicked sinners to kneel before his altar? No, because he would have baked them any damn cake they wanted and let them decorate it themselves, but the Colorado commission failed to remain neutral in their judgement with respect to religion, and thus the supremes shot it down 7/2. It wasn't even a close call.
Here's the quote that they took from the commission's deliberations as illustrative of the tenor of discussion: (refer to the supreme court judgement yourself if you need references)
"I would also like to reiterate what we said in the hearing or the last meeting. Freedom of religion and religion has been used to justify all kinds of discrimination throughout history, whether it be slavery, whether it be the holocaust, whether it be - I mean, we - we can list hundreds of situations where freedom of religion has been used to justify discrimination. And to me it is one of the most despicable pieces of rhetoric that people can use to - to use their religion to hurt others."
So, yeah. There it is. The Colorado commission is hardly a conservative stronghold, but they were firmly in the camp of binding their governmental judgements to assessments based upon religion, and an attitude to religion.
Live and let live? I think they missed that memo.
So let's see an end to the reich-wing, white-wing conservative christian terror rhetoric? It's really not matching the facts on the ground.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by turgid on Tuesday December 01 2020, @08:52PM (17 children)
That's a very simplistic view.
It takes all sorts to make a world, as the saying goes. There are those too young or too old to work. There are those too sick or too disabled (physically or mentally), those in jail and so on. On top of that, yes there is a small percentage of those who won't work. But you miss out one other important group too: those who work very hard for little reward. We call them poor people.
In more enlightened times, this was recognised and societies put in place mechanisms and systems to care for those who were too young, too old, too sick etc. to work to support themselves. Children can't choose their parents, and the elderly often didn't have the opportunity to earn enough to save for a personal pension. Indeed, for a long time women didn't go out to earn money at all. They were expected to be full-time home makers.
Welfare States and Social Security were invented and it worked quite well in some places, with social housing and medicine, free education for children, sickness and unemployment benefits.
In recent years, the anti-poor rhetoric has dominated on the mainstream media, and also on "social" media of late to the point that hitherto enlightened countries have regressed to where they were socially in the early part of the 20th Century (the UK, for example).
Unfortunately, as automation improves, there are fewer jobs to go round. Instead of expecting people to work less, to lower the retirement age, to allow disabled people a dignified existence subsidised by the Welfare State, we harry and hound them into work. There have been several cases of very ill (sometimes terminally) people being forced out to work for very poorly-paid jobs to save the tax-payer a pittance and to provide an unscrupulous employer with more cheap labour.
This is completely the wrong approach. With all this automation, we should be paying people to learn, to study in universities and to go to vocational colleges. We should be paying people to retire early, to free up the more interesting and rewarding jobs for the young people coming up. We should be providing our sick and disabled with a dignified and fulfilling life. We shouldn't be threatening and cajoling them into menial work, We should be building more social housing, not selling it off for a quick profit.
There is value in society over and above money in the bank hoarded by a few individuals. Everyone's quality of life could be raised a great deal if we all gave a little more, and I don't mean charity. I mean coming together as a society to create structure and predictability, to invest in each other and ourselves.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 0, Flamebait) by khallow on Wednesday December 02 2020, @06:18AM (16 children)
Sorry, I don't buy that anymore. If you're not a member of the small groups you just mentioned, then you don't need much "reward" to live well.
We have increasing automation for centuries, and yet the "there are fewer jobs to go round" never happened. The world presently is moving billions of people into better paying work that is tied to the global economy. It's time to ask why your perception doesn't mesh with reality?
Similarly, how many is "several cases of very ill people"? Why should we create vast, society-spanning programs that harm hundreds of millions to billions of peoples' ability to deal with life for a handful of hapless people? It's time to do a little cost/benefit analysis. So far you have yet to mention much in the way of benefit.
(Score: 2) by turgid on Wednesday December 02 2020, @02:43PM (15 children)
If you don't see any benefit in simply having your fellow human beings around then...?
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 0, Flamebait) by khallow on Wednesday December 02 2020, @03:22PM (14 children)
Don't waste my time with insipid, fake morality. That merely signals to me that you ran out of argument.
Like everything else, fellow human beings have costs as well as benefits. Making adult babies greatly increases the costs of those fellow human beings. I'd rather increase the value and resilience of my fellow human beings than make a bunch of needy dependents who eventually will run afoul of someone's cost/benefit analysis.
I grant that there are people who can't support themselves. I don't grant that it'll somehow be better to make more of them.
(Score: 3, Informative) by turgid on Wednesday December 02 2020, @03:43PM (13 children)
There was a certain Austrian gentleman in the 1930s who had similar opinions to yours and he found himself Chancellor of Germany. He set about murdering about 12 million of his fellow human beings whom he reckoned failed the cost-benefit analysis.
Let's not forget the lessons of history.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 02 2020, @04:36PM (4 children)
Except that's not what happened at all. Why can't topics like this be discussed without being derailed by emotional appeals and ad hominem political name calling? Why must we discuss things like we're politicians instead of rational adults?
(Score: 2) by turgid on Wednesday December 02 2020, @04:41PM (3 children)
It is what happened. It's a slippery slope.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday December 03 2020, @02:28PM (2 children)
(Score: 3, Insightful) by turgid on Thursday December 03 2020, @08:44PM (1 child)
It's not Godwin's law when the comparison is apt.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 1, Disagree) by khallow on Thursday December 03 2020, @11:20PM
(Score: 0, Flamebait) by khallow on Thursday December 03 2020, @01:34AM (7 children)
Thread Godwined. I'll note that your opinions are similarly similar to Hitler's. Maybe you'll find yourself Chancellor of Germany too! It's time to exercise that brain a little rather than engage in ridiculous arguments.
However, having said that, I doubt that would have happened, if we had a bunch of self-sufficient Germans who didn't need a big, strong leader to tell them what to do, and not so incidentally, who to kill.
Let's also not grotesquely misapply those lessons of history either.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by acid andy on Thursday December 03 2020, @12:25PM (6 children)
Ohhhhhh, so it's all the fault of the poor. If only they got off their lazy asses. Priceless! Absolutely priceless!
Sitting there blaming and resenting people for being poor doesn't fix poverty you know.
Master of the science of the art of the science of art.
(Score: 0, Flamebait) by khallow on Thursday December 03 2020, @02:26PM (2 children)
Are you therefore claiming that the poor can never be at fault for anything? Hitler didn't murder 12 million of his fellow human beings personally. He was supported by a substantial portion of Germany, including the poor.
Creating resilient people in a robust economy who fix their own poverty does.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by acid andy on Thursday December 03 2020, @02:42PM (1 child)
Most humans are capable of doing horrific things, given certain pressures and motives. That's why they need their bread and circuses and really a basic level of respect and quality of life.
Why hasn't any government managed to do that yet then? You can't just ignore the ones that aren't resilient.
Master of the science of the art of the science of art.
(Score: 1, Touché) by khallow on Thursday December 03 2020, @11:19PM
So are you willing to give them that, or does it default to Adolf?
(Score: 1, Insightful) by khallow on Thursday December 03 2020, @02:39PM (2 children)
For me, the biggest problem is not economic, but democratic. Why should all these helpless people be let anywhere near a voting booth? They might put an eye out! Herr Chancellor, I hate to concern you more, but this is another Hitler moment. Well, let's hope that we can create more responsibility in our people to shut down those future Hitlers!
(Score: 3, Touché) by acid andy on Thursday December 03 2020, @03:54PM (1 child)
If a thread's worth Godwining, might as well go all out, huh?
I know you are but what am I?
Master of the science of the art of the science of art.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday December 03 2020, @11:21PM
Indeed. So you have anything constructive to say about that?