Set health care aside. Set how we come up with 50% of the budget to spend aside. Let just talk about the math, OK?
The total current federal budget is about $13000 each. For 50% of that budget we can pay a universal basic income of $6500.
$6500 is not a subsistence income. You could make that work in the 80s - I did - but that's a lot of inflation ago.
If you believe a $10/hour minimum wage is the minimum "living wage", then you want a $12000 UBI. That 's just under 100% of the federal budget. But there's a reason social security pays twice that. Most people with only social security already live with roommates, but it's expensive to be old. There's a constant stream of stuff you could do for yourself once, but now you simply can't, and have to pay someone to do - and it only gets worse over time.
The current SS benefits I baselined on about are precisely " a subsistence income and it likely means moving or finding a roommate (or several) if you want to subsist in the more expensive parts of the country", and that UBI is still over 100% of current federal spending. Medicare is nobodies "gold-plated healthcare" and it's still a huge chunk of the budget - it's not going to get cheaper if we expand it to more people. (And, BTW, Medicare is more-or-less "subsistence medicine" unless you have supplemental insurance, which isn't cheap).
If you're taxing back the UBI, it's not a UBI, it's something different. Maybe that could work, I don't know, but what percentage of people do you plan to tax this way? If you tax the upper half, you have to tax them twice the UBI, or around $50k/year in taxes. The median household income is only $60k, so obviously that wont work. The upper 10% can't pay $240K in taxes. The upper 1% can't pay $2.4 M in taxes. There's just no way I see that working.
There are other benefits: homeless people incur huge medical bills. In part because the only medical services available to them are those that are the most expensive to provide (emergency rooms). A UBI may reduce these huge bills.
Those "huge bills" are small on the scale of SS and Medi* (Medicaid covers many poor people, though the homeless often don't apply). Look, anywhere you think there will be savings you must first identify the existing government cost - where is it?
There's nothing you can cut in terms of government spending to "free up" more than 100% of the budget. Why is this so hard to understand?
As the AC said: all I'm saying is that ignorance causes poverty -- maybe there are other causes too, I'm not intending to address that in any way -- but ignorance causes poverty. And without curing that ignorance, you can't create wealth by giving people money (because by definition, wealth is investment, not money).
But we know how to fix ignorance. We have an entire government-funded school system to solve the problem of ignorance, and to help pass on culture from one generation to the next.
So, please, please explain why people resist teaching our children useful skills. I simply cannot understand the resistance here.
Doesn't matter what else you cut, you can't spend 150-200% of the budget (for long). Do you see this?
Military spending is only 18% of federal revenue, or 15% of the budget. Don't be confused by "discretionary spending" pie charts: those are pure propaganda. We spend almost twice as much on each of SS and Medi*.
BTW, other welfare programs that a UBI might replace are only about 9% of federal revenue, or 8% of the federal budget, so we get relatively little by replacing those.
No matter how much water I pour from my bucket into your colander, you won't have water to drink. You can only fix wealth inequality by teaching people the importance of accumulating wealth, and showing them the evidence that this is possible. (If you have any doubts, look at lottery winners as a group.)
Some individual efforts have been successful here with small groups, from the Rich Dad Poor Dad followers to the Mr Mustache followers. Lots of people from all walks of life have seen both the recipe and the example, and done well for themselves (so many scams too though: the government could certainly do something there).
But why isn't this stuff taught in school? It's shameful that we ignore one of the more important life lessons, and perhaps the most important lesson not caught up in contentious religious argument. It's an utter failure of our culture that we're not passing this basic survival technique on to our youth.
But a photo can never describe what the lens cannot see.
You've never head of photoshop? Plenty of AP stringers did, when they photoshopped up pictures of the Iraq war (some of them quite blatant - dude, don't copypaste smoke FFS), and yet the AP ran them as actual news. (Or photoshopping all the black people out of pictures of Tea Party rallies, or I'm sure people can come up with similar disgraces against progressive rallies).
Textual description can also lie about the contents of photos, which makes for good propaganda if only a small fraction of the readers can spot the problem. This happens quite often.
Well, we could also spend more and tax less (as we likely will), or spend less and tax more (as if we intended to pay off our debt). But under all the various tax schemes in the past 100 years, federal revenue has never sustained itself about 20% of GDP. It's currently just under 18% of GDP, so we could maybe squeak out 10% more revenue if we really wanted to, but that's not a difference in kind.
Here's the thing though, in the context of Social Security: * Social Security is just barely enough to live on if your medical bills are also paid for separately. * About 20% of Americans receive SS * SS is already 27% of federal revenue, or 24% of the federal budget * Medi* is 32% of federal revenue, or 27% of the federal budget
We can't pay everyone at the subsistence level SS pays out, unless we take the attitude of "we'll just print al the money we need, nothing can go wrong with that plan!". If you want a basic income in the US that provides actual subsistence living in the US, that's 150% to 200% of the federal budget (depending on health care costs). And no, universal health care doesn't meaningfully change the amount health care costs the government vs what Medi* pays, so no magic bullet there.
What country do you live in? A place where government is a force "against the wealthy and powerful"? Sounds wonderful. Never happened in all of history, but wonderful.
The government represents the interests of the powerful by definition. That's just what "powerful" means.
Now, you can choose between systems where the wealthy become powerful (like capitalism), systems where the powerful become wealthy (like socialism), or systems where those with military might become both wealthy and powerful (like feudalism), but one way or another that connection between wealth and power remains.
What I'd like, here in the real world, is a system that discourages concentration of wealth and/or power across generations of the same families, without sabotaging fundamental freedoms. Outlawing of primogeniture was an amazing step towards that (and we've forgotten than lesson, BTW). We can't seem to figure out the next step.
But, keep in mind, redistribution of income is orthogonal to redistribution of wealth. The amount you prioritize savings and investment matters more than your income stream. We talk a lot about diverting income streams (which always is in tension with basic rights). Why aren't we talking more about teaching people how to become wealthy? Is it because the people benefiting from concentration of wealth want it that way? I really think it might be.
GDP doesn't exactly track "sum of all income", but it's always close, and if it wanders too far off economists will question the metric (some just use income as the measure directly - Wikipedia goes into depth on this).
By an odd coincidence, the sum of the value of all publicly traded stock also stays close to the GDP. I'm not sure why that is, or if it's temporary, but for the past few decades it's been a reliable indicator of stock market bubbles. It's also a good sign that money that goes to capital is reasonable compared to the money that goes to labor (you can buy all future profits for one year's labor).
GDP is dominated by consumer spending. It doesn't measure profits, and has nothing to do with profits. GDP is only "on the rise" if people are buying stuff. In some hallucinatory economy where automated factories were spitting out consumer good that no one could buy, then sure, the most naÃve way GDP is measured could suggest it's healthy (but then, how do you value goods on one buys?), but most would say the GDP was collapsing if none of that production was part of the economy.
The GDP is the people's needs, to the extent those needs are fulfilled (well, including stuff the government buys, like defense spending and roads).
Sometimes people just want nicer stuff without having to deal with pesky things like use cases.
That's why Apple makes phones. If you want style, not pesky things like functionality, there's a whole, very successful, company that makes products just for you. Would be nice if one of the Android venders would make phones for the rest of us.
It would look nicer but prevent inadvertent touches.
Everything you just said is also true of a normal chemical rocket, which is why you don't measure the power of a rocket that way: a rocket's power doesn't increase just because the observer is moving fast relative to it.
There's lots of stuff you can do in a small shop that you can't control in a team of 50-100, with all the VCS stuff controlled by a totally different group providing git repos for thousands of devs. Heck, that's why you have such different perspectives and skills in startup guys vs big company guys.
Well no, so that's kind of my point. It's really tabs for everybody, because nobody has given a shit about the ASCII contents of text files for years.
Except for all the version control tools and diff viewers out there that still aren't very sophisticated. This is why we insist people normalize to spaces (and normalize line endings). You don't want that shit in your way when you've got a cryptic, urgent bug at 3 AM.
Dark matter/energy does exactly that, un-observable theoretical concepts to explain contradictions between reality and physical laws
You got that backwards. Dark matter and energy are things we observe that can't be explained by existing theory. That's why they're "dark": no accepted explanation for them.
Why can't dark energy explain emDrive then?
Dark energy has been quantified, and it's really weak. Vastly weaker than gravity, and that's saying something. It's only the dominant energy in the universe because it's present in empty space - even the very empty space between galactic clusters - which makes up most of the universe by volume.
I don't follow - are you talking about the GR red/blueshift caused by the Earth's gravity? Over the length of the box? The claimed effect is tiny, but not that tiny.
From the description it seems like a very inefficient sort of vacuum tube - not "creating" x watts/s of power, but making use of x watts out of the 1000x watts fed into the thing (with the ratio being related to the redshift). I think actual vacuum tubes also work this way if you accelerate them enough.
A working EM drive has a massive power draw. It's only a source of energy while you feed power into it. In order to make a perpetual motion machine, you'd have to arrange it so that you were generating more power than you're putting in. Given the efficiency of this drive, that seems quite the far-fetched assumption.
You seem to be confusing the conservation of energy and of momentum. This drive seems not to conserve momentum (which, if this drive is not BS, then we know that really means there's some new physics here, that when understood restores conservation of momentum).
There's nothing about a drive like this that violates conservation of energy. As long as waste heat plus kinetic energy gained adds up to input energy (and no reason to think it doesn't), energy is conserved.
If it released energy out one side, that counts as reaction mass.
Photons, BTW, explicitly do not have mass. That's kind of the defining characteristic of particles that move at the speed of light. They have momentum even so. Relativistic energy is the sum of two terms: a mass term and a momentum term. The mass terms for a photon really is 0.
"Peer review" is what happens before reproduction. [[Insert reproduction joke here.]] This is a published result seeking reproduction. It's more than nothing, but it's not much.
Our understanding of the laws of physics is imperfect. Not everything that seems impossible turns out to be so. This EM drive is a prime example. I still think it's BS for now, but if true, well, it's something that seemed impossible turning out not to be so.
technological progress is inevitable. It will never end!
This part is true, at least for the lifetime of the species. However, technological progress will be within the laws of physics, so we may not get everything we want.
This "EM drive", if real, changes nothing near-term because it's uselessly weak. However, it might relax the bounds of that "within the laws of physics" part. That's exciting, in a long term way, because it changes things from travel to nearby stars being effectively impossible, to being impractical with current technology.
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Set health care aside. Set how we come up with 50% of the budget to spend aside. Let just talk about the math, OK?
The total current federal budget is about $13000 each. For 50% of that budget we can pay a universal basic income of $6500.
$6500 is not a subsistence income. You could make that work in the 80s - I did - but that's a lot of inflation ago.
If you believe a $10/hour minimum wage is the minimum "living wage", then you want a $12000 UBI. That 's just under 100% of the federal budget. But there's a reason social security pays twice that. Most people with only social security already live with roommates, but it's expensive to be old. There's a constant stream of stuff you could do for yourself once, but now you simply can't, and have to pay someone to do - and it only gets worse over time.
The current SS benefits I baselined on about are precisely " a subsistence income and it likely means moving or finding a roommate (or several) if you want to subsist in the more expensive parts of the country", and that UBI is still over 100% of current federal spending. Medicare is nobodies "gold-plated healthcare" and it's still a huge chunk of the budget - it's not going to get cheaper if we expand it to more people. (And, BTW, Medicare is more-or-less "subsistence medicine" unless you have supplemental insurance, which isn't cheap).
If you're taxing back the UBI, it's not a UBI, it's something different. Maybe that could work, I don't know, but what percentage of people do you plan to tax this way? If you tax the upper half, you have to tax them twice the UBI, or around $50k/year in taxes. The median household income is only $60k, so obviously that wont work. The upper 10% can't pay $240K in taxes. The upper 1% can't pay $2.4 M in taxes. There's just no way I see that working.
There are other benefits: homeless people incur huge medical bills. In part because the only medical services available to them are those that are the most expensive to provide (emergency rooms). A UBI may reduce these huge bills.
Those "huge bills" are small on the scale of SS and Medi* (Medicaid covers many poor people, though the homeless often don't apply). Look, anywhere you think there will be savings you must first identify the existing government cost - where is it?
There's nothing you can cut in terms of government spending to "free up" more than 100% of the budget. Why is this so hard to understand?
As the AC said: all I'm saying is that ignorance causes poverty -- maybe there are other causes too, I'm not intending to address that in any way -- but ignorance causes poverty. And without curing that ignorance, you can't create wealth by giving people money (because by definition, wealth is investment, not money).
But we know how to fix ignorance. We have an entire government-funded school system to solve the problem of ignorance, and to help pass on culture from one generation to the next.
So, please, please explain why people resist teaching our children useful skills. I simply cannot understand the resistance here.
The GPL is about giving freedom to the USER, not the dev. And ensuring that the USER keeps that freedom.
As a developer, I'll go with BSD-style licenses, thanks. I look after my own interests, because for sure no one else does.
Doesn't matter what else you cut, you can't spend 150-200% of the budget (for long). Do you see this?
Military spending is only 18% of federal revenue, or 15% of the budget. Don't be confused by "discretionary spending" pie charts: those are pure propaganda. We spend almost twice as much on each of SS and Medi*.
Check out http://www.usdebtclock.org/
BTW, other welfare programs that a UBI might replace are only about 9% of federal revenue, or 8% of the federal budget, so we get relatively little by replacing those.
No matter how much water I pour from my bucket into your colander, you won't have water to drink. You can only fix wealth inequality by teaching people the importance of accumulating wealth, and showing them the evidence that this is possible. (If you have any doubts, look at lottery winners as a group.)
Some individual efforts have been successful here with small groups, from the Rich Dad Poor Dad followers to the Mr Mustache followers. Lots of people from all walks of life have seen both the recipe and the example, and done well for themselves (so many scams too though: the government could certainly do something there).
But why isn't this stuff taught in school? It's shameful that we ignore one of the more important life lessons, and perhaps the most important lesson not caught up in contentious religious argument. It's an utter failure of our culture that we're not passing this basic survival technique on to our youth.
But a photo can never describe what the lens cannot see.
You've never head of photoshop? Plenty of AP stringers did, when they photoshopped up pictures of the Iraq war (some of them quite blatant - dude, don't copypaste smoke FFS), and yet the AP ran them as actual news. (Or photoshopping all the black people out of pictures of Tea Party rallies, or I'm sure people can come up with similar disgraces against progressive rallies).
Textual description can also lie about the contents of photos, which makes for good propaganda if only a small fraction of the readers can spot the problem. This happens quite often.
Well, we could also spend more and tax less (as we likely will), or spend less and tax more (as if we intended to pay off our debt). But under all the various tax schemes in the past 100 years, federal revenue has never sustained itself about 20% of GDP. It's currently just under 18% of GDP, so we could maybe squeak out 10% more revenue if we really wanted to, but that's not a difference in kind.
Here's the thing though, in the context of Social Security:
* Social Security is just barely enough to live on if your medical bills are also paid for separately.
* About 20% of Americans receive SS
* SS is already 27% of federal revenue, or 24% of the federal budget
* Medi* is 32% of federal revenue, or 27% of the federal budget
We can't pay everyone at the subsistence level SS pays out, unless we take the attitude of "we'll just print al the money we need, nothing can go wrong with that plan!". If you want a basic income in the US that provides actual subsistence living in the US, that's 150% to 200% of the federal budget (depending on health care costs). And no, universal health care doesn't meaningfully change the amount health care costs the government vs what Medi* pays, so no magic bullet there.
What country do you live in? A place where government is a force "against the wealthy and powerful"? Sounds wonderful. Never happened in all of history, but wonderful.
The government represents the interests of the powerful by definition. That's just what "powerful" means.
Now, you can choose between systems where the wealthy become powerful (like capitalism), systems where the powerful become wealthy (like socialism), or systems where those with military might become both wealthy and powerful (like feudalism), but one way or another that connection between wealth and power remains.
What I'd like, here in the real world, is a system that discourages concentration of wealth and/or power across generations of the same families, without sabotaging fundamental freedoms. Outlawing of primogeniture was an amazing step towards that (and we've forgotten than lesson, BTW). We can't seem to figure out the next step.
But, keep in mind, redistribution of income is orthogonal to redistribution of wealth. The amount you prioritize savings and investment matters more than your income stream. We talk a lot about diverting income streams (which always is in tension with basic rights). Why aren't we talking more about teaching people how to become wealthy? Is it because the people benefiting from concentration of wealth want it that way? I really think it might be.
GDP doesn't exactly track "sum of all income", but it's always close, and if it wanders too far off economists will question the metric (some just use income as the measure directly - Wikipedia goes into depth on this).
By an odd coincidence, the sum of the value of all publicly traded stock also stays close to the GDP. I'm not sure why that is, or if it's temporary, but for the past few decades it's been a reliable indicator of stock market bubbles. It's also a good sign that money that goes to capital is reasonable compared to the money that goes to labor (you can buy all future profits for one year's labor).
GDP is dominated by consumer spending. It doesn't measure profits, and has nothing to do with profits. GDP is only "on the rise" if people are buying stuff. In some hallucinatory economy where automated factories were spitting out consumer good that no one could buy, then sure, the most naÃve way GDP is measured could suggest it's healthy (but then, how do you value goods on one buys?), but most would say the GDP was collapsing if none of that production was part of the economy.
The GDP is the people's needs, to the extent those needs are fulfilled (well, including stuff the government buys, like defense spending and roads).
Sometimes people just want nicer stuff without having to deal with pesky things like use cases.
That's why Apple makes phones. If you want style, not pesky things like functionality, there's a whole, very successful, company that makes products just for you. Would be nice if one of the Android venders would make phones for the rest of us.
It would look nicer but prevent inadvertent touches.
That's a "use case", BTW.
Everything you just said is also true of a normal chemical rocket, which is why you don't measure the power of a rocket that way: a rocket's power doesn't increase just because the observer is moving fast relative to it.
There's lots of stuff you can do in a small shop that you can't control in a team of 50-100, with all the VCS stuff controlled by a totally different group providing git repos for thousands of devs. Heck, that's why you have such different perspectives and skills in startup guys vs big company guys.
Well no, so that's kind of my point. It's really tabs for everybody, because nobody has given a shit about the ASCII contents of text files for years.
Except for all the version control tools and diff viewers out there that still aren't very sophisticated. This is why we insist people normalize to spaces (and normalize line endings). You don't want that shit in your way when you've got a cryptic, urgent bug at 3 AM.
No, no, don't you see? Aliens on Earth are signaling SETI. The truth is out there!
Dark matter/energy does exactly that, un-observable theoretical concepts to explain contradictions between reality and physical laws
You got that backwards. Dark matter and energy are things we observe that can't be explained by existing theory. That's why they're "dark": no accepted explanation for them.
Why can't dark energy explain emDrive then?
Dark energy has been quantified, and it's really weak. Vastly weaker than gravity, and that's saying something. It's only the dominant energy in the universe because it's present in empty space - even the very empty space between galactic clusters - which makes up most of the universe by volume.
I don't follow - are you talking about the GR red/blueshift caused by the Earth's gravity? Over the length of the box? The claimed effect is tiny, but not that tiny.
From the description it seems like a very inefficient sort of vacuum tube - not "creating" x watts/s of power, but making use of x watts out of the 1000x watts fed into the thing (with the ratio being related to the redshift). I think actual vacuum tubes also work this way if you accelerate them enough.
A working EM drive has a massive power draw. It's only a source of energy while you feed power into it. In order to make a perpetual motion machine, you'd have to arrange it so that you were generating more power than you're putting in. Given the efficiency of this drive, that seems quite the far-fetched assumption.
You seem to be confusing the conservation of energy and of momentum. This drive seems not to conserve momentum (which, if this drive is not BS, then we know that really means there's some new physics here, that when understood restores conservation of momentum).
There's nothing about a drive like this that violates conservation of energy. As long as waste heat plus kinetic energy gained adds up to input energy (and no reason to think it doesn't), energy is conserved.
If it released energy out one side, that counts as reaction mass.
Photons, BTW, explicitly do not have mass. That's kind of the defining characteristic of particles that move at the speed of light. They have momentum even so. Relativistic energy is the sum of two terms: a mass term and a momentum term. The mass terms for a photon really is 0.
This.
"Peer review" is what happens before reproduction. [[Insert reproduction joke here.]] This is a published result seeking reproduction. It's more than nothing, but it's not much.
Our understanding of the laws of physics is imperfect. Not everything that seems impossible turns out to be so. This EM drive is a prime example. I still think it's BS for now, but if true, well, it's something that seemed impossible turning out not to be so.
You seem very emotional about this.
technological progress is inevitable. It will never end!
This part is true, at least for the lifetime of the species. However, technological progress will be within the laws of physics, so we may not get everything we want.
This "EM drive", if real, changes nothing near-term because it's uselessly weak. However, it might relax the bounds of that "within the laws of physics" part. That's exciting, in a long term way, because it changes things from travel to nearby stars being effectively impossible, to being impractical with current technology.
If you say COBOL 3 times in the mirror ... Java appears!