>Her savings long gone, and having never done much long-term financial planning
And so again we are expected to pay for the mistakes of others. What incentive is there to save if you know you have a social net to save you anyway?
Yes, I understand, it is a terrifying way to live, I wouldn't wish it on anyone, but if we deincentivize personal responsibility, what stops this from becoming a larger problem? How can this be sustainable?
Edit: please do not mistake my attempt at objectivity for callousness. One must divorce personal feelings of pity and empathy for individuals when discussing matters which affect hundreds of millions of people. There comes a point where there are more people requiring assistance than we are capable of supporting, and part of the solution is to discourage recklessness.
The thing is a lot of people run out of money for many different reasons and a lack of "personal responsibility" is only one of them.
All it takes is one big crash to wipe out years of long term financial planning. Illness of oneself, a spouse, child or parent can easily crater life savings. Sometimes people just live too damn long. And yes, sometimes people lack "personal responsibility."
To some extent, yes, you are expected to pay for the safety net of others. You never know when YOU might need it.
I understand that there are legitimate reasons that someone may need assistance.
My problem is with this nonsensical mentality that, without any actual statistics, people automatically assume that anyone struggling is a victim of circumstance. Or worse, that they have somehow been abused or stolen from by those with money. Which, by the way, I believe I'd a relatively new outlook in the history of the U.S.
The danger is that it encourages people to live haphazardly and in the long run is not sustainable. And, quite frankly, I have no desire to pay for people who lived selfishly in their own time.
Ayn Rand, arguably a strong proponent of "personal responsibility", required welfare at the end of her life. She made some justifications for how she could live off of welfare but still did it.
When times are personally good it's easy to make arguments about what people should do, but when you're in a situation with no support things feel a lot different.
Are you sure that the problem doesn't actually exist in Europe and Canada? Are you sure it isn't offset by a culture where the young are expected to care more for their elders?
Awesome, but to me this stuff is also terrifying, and I can't quite place why.
Something about dissecting intelligence, and the potential that our own minds process things similarly. Creepy how our reality is distilled into these uncanny valley type matrices.
Also, I suspect it says something that these images look like what people report seeing on psychedelic trips...
I remember friends telling me back in 88 [1] about driving round London from one rave to another high on MDMA & LSD. Back then I thought driving on acid was insane. This sounds like driving while the car is on acid! Which is a terrifying thought...
No, the acid simply lets you see "how the sausage is made". You get temporary access to intermediate layers that should probably remain hidden (and for good reasons).
With AI it's trivial to get access to the inner workings of the intermediate layers.
Weird how you haven't considered population density, or housing safety regulations, or the state of the economy, or the average productivity of immigrants looking for a better life at the turn of the century compared to the homeless in modern cities...
Almost as if comparing NYC 100 years ago to modern Seattle is total nonsense.
Right, the solution is to give addicts more money to buy drugs. I suppose that'll solve the problem when they inevitably OD and we can stop wasting our money on them.
I'm not speaking from an ivory tower either, like many UBI supporters seem to do. I grew up with friends who were addicts. Ive known people who died of overdose. Plenty of kids are more than happy to throw away their lives smoking weed and shooting up, especially if they're getting their shit for free.
For the record, I support responsible drug use. But UBI is not the answer for the problems in our society, because it will hurt many if not most of the people it should protect.
Giving addicts money to buy drugs will simply push up the price of drugs.
UBI would instead need to give everyone above the drinking age something like a monthly ration of 2 ounces cannabis, 2 psychedelic doses of a regionally appropriate entheogen, and 750 mL neutral grain spirits, all from local production facilities. If they want more, or better quality stuff, they'll just have to spend their pocket money on it, or get a QA job in the industry.
Also, giving the actual drugs out can influence the market, such that people may be encouraged to use drugs that are more socially manageable--in contrast to opioids. Honestly, I'd rather hand out free weed than free alcohol, but you just know the agricultural lobby will heavily influence the composition of the UBI goods ration. If they can make your fuel 10% ethanol, they can certainly convince the government to distribute some of that distilled corn alcohol for human consumption.
I think maybe the thing to do would be to give away treatment.
You also pick really weird amounts. A casual drinker can kill a fifth in a weekend without really disrupting their life, while they range in price from ~$5 (after taxes!) to $25 (Smirnoff is $14 here).
Almost no one would use 2 ounces of marijuana in a few days and it has a street price in the hundreds of dollars.
I reasoned that someone might use 1/4 ounce in a month. But I also thought that the stuff the government would pass out would probably be grown in less than ideal conditions, and inattentively processed, making the ration weak, with lots of stems and seeds. So you would have to give out 8x as much (and thereby also encourage recipients to learn how to do organic extractions). I didn't give much consideration to the cost, because they don't call it "weed" for nothing, and much of the current expense is due to prohibition.
750 mL works out to about 17 shots of 1.5 oz. each, but I also figured it would probably taste like it was made from stale tortilla chips in most of the US, and would therefore mostly go into mixers, averaging 4 drinks per week. The people who really enjoy their alcohol would be springing for commercial vodka, and there would also be plenty of people who would be getting that ration and not drinking all of it. Many drinkers would probably be relying on a beer or wine ration, but I don't really consider those to be "drugs" below a certain %abv, and UBI beer would probably be around 2.5%abv, with the wine around 4%abv. The beer would taste like a business handshake between Bud and Miller, and the wine like Welch's made out with Manischewitz on their friend's couch.
And for the peyote buttons, mushrooms, DMT or whatever, I thought two trips in a month might have been pushing it, especially for people that were still trying to have normal jobs with their UBI. Good for two of your four weekends, with maybe a couple sketchy Mondays when the machine elves follow you to work.
I don't see why we couldn't directly provide pure pharmaceutical grade narcotics to addicts for them to consume in safety, as part of a compulsory programme to attempt to cure the addiction. Eventually I hope we will come up with a drug to reset the brain, but in the meantime I wish we could have an outbreak of maturity and recognise and treat the addiction in a sensible way, rather than contiuining with the obviously failed war on drugs and all the bad things that flow from it. Imagine if we destroyed a massive part of global organised crime's income at stroke.
The US classifies all hallucinogens and psychedelics at Schedule I, so obviously no researcher that values their academic career can study the use of psychedelics for the purpose of curing addiction. But anecdotal reports suggest that a heroin addict may be cured of opioid addiction by using kratom to alleviate the physical symptoms of withdrawal, and ibogaine to "reset the brain" to no longer desire heroin.
Politically, people would prefer to believe that rehab centers actually work. Using illegal drugs classified as "the worst, most dangerous drugs in existence" to cure addictions to other illegal drugs with a lesser classification may be perceived as... a bit hypocritical.
Maybe some of us prefer not deincentivizing work and creating an even larger subpopulation which is entirely dependent on government and won't be employable for generations?
We live in a reality where resources still require effort and capital to extract from the environment. A society can only support so many through welfare before it collapses.
The subject is a little more nuanced than watching people die out of some kind of jealousy.
Everyone is happy to sentationalize the amount of energy that the bitcoin network uses, but no one ever mentions how much energy use is acceptable.
Nor does anyone seem to attempt a thorough cost/benefit analysis. How much energy from financial infrastructure could bitcoin free up?
Edit: vague comparisons like these really bug me, because while they make problems seem large by comparing them to A WHOLE COUNTRY, they actually offer little in the way of information. Most of us know nothing about Ecuador's energy use in comparison to any other country or industry, except perhaps that it is relatively small. But I guess it gets you the clicks...
But you're ignoring the fact that bitcoin is about more than simply moving money. There is value in security and decentralization.
Further, GDP ignores consumption, it is gross product, not net product. Further indication to me that comparing bitcoin to power consumption of a small country is inappropriate. Apples to oranges.
Edit: after reading a couple articles on wikipedia, I'm confused. Gross implies product before subtraction of consumption (I.E. revenue), while wikipedia claims that GDP factors in so called intermediate consumption, which would make it more like a net value (I.e. profit). Do we have any economists browsing? Genuinely curious.
Porn and spam don't have an incentive structure to redistribute wealth weighted towards the earliest adopters -
they're otherwise not really comparable unless you narrow in on one point, such as energy use.
That was one of the final straws for me. I don't think anyone should trust Facebook with enough information to completely take over someone's real life identity.
FB feels authoritarian in a very Orwellian way, and it is even scarier that, much like Orwell wrote, nobody seems to care. We might not be burning books a la Bradbury, but we seem to be burning away our rights to privacy as a complicit society.
Just wondering. You say "of course", but the amount of negativity relating to what we are talking about that Facebook gets compared to other giants like Google or Amazon is incredibly slanted. Mainly in tech or geek centric sites like this or many reddit subreddits. So it's not always an obvious thing for me if someone is cool enough with Google but not Facebook.
I successfully use Bing for 95-99% of my search engine searches. I haven't made the time to get off Gmail. It'll take a while. I don't believe getting off Google is any harder than getting off Facebook for many people. Because if you're not using Google search or Android with Google apps, Google's utility isn't that high for you. Gmail also isn't miles ahead anymore.
Unfortunately I'm so into the Alexa ecosystem I'm nowhere near away from Amazon.
While I suspected the same, after reading the article, the author does not conflate the bursting of the crypto bubble with the price of BTC.
After this realization I was able to set aside my indignation and observe that the author makes a good point in that most other Cryptos and "blockchainy" startups are doomed to fail, while BTC as he claims will likely recover (he makes some mention of a v-shaped price trend in BTC when the bubble bursts.
And so again we are expected to pay for the mistakes of others. What incentive is there to save if you know you have a social net to save you anyway?
Yes, I understand, it is a terrifying way to live, I wouldn't wish it on anyone, but if we deincentivize personal responsibility, what stops this from becoming a larger problem? How can this be sustainable?
Edit: please do not mistake my attempt at objectivity for callousness. One must divorce personal feelings of pity and empathy for individuals when discussing matters which affect hundreds of millions of people. There comes a point where there are more people requiring assistance than we are capable of supporting, and part of the solution is to discourage recklessness.