You seem to make numbers up... but luckily real numbers exist. The American geophysical union (which includes many of the world's foremost experts on volcanoes) actually calculated how much CO2 volcanoes produce in an average year, the answer is about 0.25% of what coal power plants put out in an average year (and that's only a fraction of industrial CO2 emissions - remember cars for example).
Volcanic CO2 emissions average a quarter of a percent of coal powerplant CO2 emissions. We outdo volcanoes all the damn time.
Yes. BI removes the problems associated with automation. It makes sense to support both.
And the majority of the long term BI experiments happened in developed countries. The three largest long term experiments were done in the USA, Canada and the Netherlands.
Now your argument is akin to those creationists who think satan planted dinosaur fossils in the earth to decieve mankind. Or the joke about the flying spaghetti monster altering the results of genetic tests to hide his existence (pesto be upon him). Either way there is no reason to assume the simulation builders would be opposed to us finding out. There is no reason to assume they would have predicted that life would arise in the simulation, let alone intelligent life. Considering 99.99% of the universe is lifeless (under a bestcase scenario) it is much more likely were an unexpected emergent phenomenon of a physics simulation. It is not at all reasonable to addume the simulation was created for us and would want to fool us or anything else inside. We've only been around for the last few instances of the run.
Nah. If the universe is a simulation then we are still an accidental consciousness. The modern version of the theory may have been inspired by MMOs like WOW but its silly to assume the purpose is the same. Its more likely to be on par with AIs spontaneously arising in an IPCC climate model. We have been in the simulation so briefly that even if whoever built it actively monitors it is unlikely they have even noticed us.
Actually, philosophy grads tend to be highly employable (contrary to popular belief) and contrary to Mike Huckabee's claims are well paid. The average starting salary for a philosophy grad is actually about twice that of a welder (Huckabee has never been one for looking things up before saying them).
>If you're inside a simulation, then you can't run any tests to find out, now can you?
Why not. There are certain characteristics a simulated universe is likely to have - you can test for their presence. And quite a few of them are present in our universe. What we haven't figured out how to do is prove that a real universe wouldn't have the same characteristics.
It's definitely a testable hypotheses. The fact that we don't know exactly HOW to do do the test yet doesn't mean it can't be tested. The mechanics of testing have nothing to do with the definition of testable. When Einstein predicted gravitational lensing we had no idea how we may test that - after all, how can you tell if the light you're looking at has been bent by gravity in the past ? Nothing on earth has enough gravity to bend light enough to measure with 1901 technology. We figured it out some ten years later - we can look at an eclipse from Jupiter which is just far enough that light is measurably delayed, and that means if there's gravitational lensing the delay should be slightly different than if the light had travelled straight. The test was done and confirmed the hypotheses* - but it was testable when first announced. Testable meant: "If you can show that light has bent in the presence of gravity, you can test the theory" it didn't have to mean "and here is how you determine that". It's perfectly fine to leave the HOW of testing to the reader, or future scientists who will have access to technology you don't have.
If anything this is more testable than a lot of theoretical physics. We still have no idea how to test any of the variants of string theory. We can show they are logically consistent and the maths work - but much of it we have no idea how to test. Dark matter when first proposed seemed to fall clearly in the "untestable" category - how do you know something is there that doesn't interact with anything, doesn't give of any energy and cannot apparently be found ? Many scientists declared it "theory saving". Eventually though, somebody realized that if dark matter exists and has mass (and it has to have mass because it was proposed as an answer for missing mass in the first place) - then it would bend light (as per the aforementioned gravitational lensing) - and we've observed that - light being bent by a gravity source where no objects can be detected.... so it must be getting bent by objects we can not detect.
*Ironically that test was terribly flawed, and later entirely discredited, but other more accurate tests subsequently done did confirm the hypotheses again. That too is part of science, sometimes the wrong tests can give the right answers. This is one reason we retest things and re-examine old data and old experiments. Because the test was flawed, it could have been that the hypotheses had been wrong all along, retesting with more advanced technology and avoiding the mistakes made last time would let us find out if that had been the case.
>My argument is "more dollars chasing the same number of goods mean that business can raise prices since consumers have more cash" a circular reasoning fallacy?
That reasoning is simply false because it hugely oversimplifies and ignores basic reality (which is why empiric data shows this hardly ever happens). The price a a business charges for something isn't inevitably the highest price that *anybody* will pay - it's the price where they get the most profit, which is a balance between price per unit and number of units sold. When you add money at the BOTTOM of income ladder businesses hardly raise prices because the ones that do are less profitable than the ones that don't. There's suddenly a whole lot of new potential customers. Keeping your prices where they are (and where you made good money) means your number of units sold can be hugely increases (depending one your economic situation before the effect it can be multiple times the possible customers you had last week). If you raise them - then the people who now had money that didn't before still can't buy - and your profits remain as they were, while all your competitors get those profits. It is even more complicated than that. Minimum wage has other impacts - it raises the cost of PRODUCING labour intensive goods -so they tend to have a degree of inflation. But this is reduced by the "want to sell stuff to everybody else's workers who no have more money" effect. Most countries have found that moderate minimum-wage increases had a nett-zero effect on inflation. But that risk does exist with minimum wage so for MW to work it's important that it is very carefully monitored and increases are moderate enough that the effect of selling to your competitors workers will outweigh the costs now imposed by your own workers for most businesses. UBI has no such impact since even though your workers earn more - they don't cost you as a businessman more. Your most profitable path now is inevitably to sell to all these new potential customers - you can't do that if you raise prices, in fact to do that you must keep prices stable because their new incomes was based on what it costs to buy your stuff before.Of course some idiots do raise prices but they promptly get sued to hell by their shareholders as their competitors outprofit them massively by having access to this new market.
You can't base policy on anybody's reasoning - you base it on empirical data. Study after study shows that in hundreds of countries moderate minimum wage increases had a nett-zero effect on inflation, and UBI has LESS risk of inflation than minimum wage has, which is why in long-term experiment after long-term experiment done it was repeatedly found that UBI had no effect whatsoever on inflation.
It does however increase employment - when you want to sell units to all these new customers, you often have to ramp up production since you can now sell 100 units a month instead of ten you may well need 10 times as many people to make them. They may cost more in TOTAL but they don't cost more per UNIT - so raising unit prices does not benefit you.
There is a little story that is apropos to this discussion: it is said that back in the 1950's Henry Ford gave a union leader a tour of a new highly automated factory that would need very few workers. Henry is said to have asked the union leader: "So, how are you planning to get these robots to pay their union dues" ? The union leader is said to have replied: "The more important question, Henry, is how are you going to get them to buy your cars".
And as a percentage was it ? What was the statistical impact of this ?
Oh yes, that's right, not enough to change the outcome of any election - ever.
About the largest election you could ever manipulate with fake votes is class president of a homeschool.
On the other hand, you can achieve near guaranteed results by "losing" ballots, or making it hard for people to vote, or gerrymandering them into a district where they will be outnumbere - and achieve them on a massive scale. That's why THIS type of election fraud is common all over the world, and actually does change election outcomes. Why fake one or two, or even one or two hundred votes - and face a massive risk with little chance of actually changing the outcome, when you can easily make 2-thousand votes dissapear ?
Check my post history - I was pointing this out 8 years ago - as was most other people. The insanity of hating the man for doing what republicans had wanted to do all along will never look any less crazy. Oh - and where did Romney get the idea from ? That's right, the fucking Heartland Institute - literally the most conservativ organisation in all of America !
Been done. UBI has been tested in long-term experiments in communities all over the world. It has more empirical data around it than any other theory in all of economics. And every single experiment had nothing but purely positive results and ended up costing far less than welfare (and even costing less than doing nothing - because the economic gains from it and the saving it produces have to be factored in. For example it made people in general significantly healthier, that's *always* an economic gain - even with a capitalist healthcare system- because money spent on doctors is not an economically beneficial expense, to argue it is, is a broken-window fallacy).
That advantage of giving money as opposed to those things is that it means people can personally prioritize. They can choose to spend some on a better education (UBI experiments consistently showed a lot of them did), some may choose to start a small business (knowing they won't be destitute if it fails) - and spend some on getting that off the ground. People, in general, have a tendency to hate boredom, which is enough to motivate them to do something. People generally want to feel like they are contributing. The fallacy is that you have to have a paying job to do that, or that only those efforts somebody will pay for contributes to society in a useful way. The market has never been anything but absolutely horrible at pricing human endeavours. How good it may be at pricing goods is debateable but people, it's fantastically horrible at.
It's an extremely good piece of evidence. Let me enlighten you. In the 19th century - the industrial revolution caused the worst poverty in the history of England. Seriously, the average English person's annual income was less than 10% of what it had been in the 14th century. People were poorer on average than the in damn middle ages. The country was richer, but all that money was concentrated in a tiny handful. The rest were starving. Children were literally digging in the banks of the Thames to look for small valuables they could sell to buy food (and the Thames as gigantic sewer - they were literally raking through shit hoping somebody had swallowed a coin to survive). A group of educated middle class people began advocating for some changes to the system to end this massive suffering. Mostly they were made up of rare individuals who had escaped poverty through luck or rare talents. Dickens was one such (his father had spent much of his life in debtors prison). Dickens has the fortune to be literate and a skilled writer - which got him a job as a journalist, he got a reputation for meticulousness and accuracy and took that into his later work in fiction. Another member of this group was the historian John Forster. Forster and Dickens collaborated to an extend on Forster's magnum opus - a research paper on the conditions of the poor in London. Dickens sat in on many of the early interviews - teaching Forster how a journalist interviews people and get them to speak honestly. Forster's "paper" ended up being a stack of books about 2m high - a massively comprehensive detailing of the lives of London's poor with some 30-thousand case studies. That paper would later be the main drive that led to England establishing labour laws (starting with the banning of child labour) and the establishment of the welfare state. It was so meticulous, so incontrovertible and so horrifying that even the parliament of wealthy aristocrats could not deny the need to change things.
And Dickens's part in the movement that ended the worst poverty in London's history was to get the upper classes on-board (since they held all the power), and get the working class to realize that their plight was a shared one. While Forster wrote the serious academic work, Dickens wrote the popular fiction - but it was two sides of the same coin, from the same movement, documenting the same reality - just written in different ways to get the message to different groups of people.
It worked too. Dickens got the poor to campaign and the aristocrats to be sympathetic (which left the wealthy industrialists powerless for the first time), while Forster gave the politicians cold hard data to force them to adapt. Thus was born the 20th century.
You can hardly find a BETTER argument than Dickens. He lived through and helped change the results of libertarian style unregulated capitalism and what it REALLY does.
It's as if none of them understand what the word "Universal" means - seriously - it means even Donald Fucking Trump will get 30K a year from the government.
Nobody does NOT get it, employed or not, rich or poor. It's UNIVERSAL.
Because if that 30K is UBI and you take the backbreaking job - you'll be making 62K a year.
That's literally how UBI works - you do NOT lose it if you gain another income - you get it AS WELL as that other income.
The claims of inflation is complete bullshit. Von Mises's argument for money supply leading to inflation (which animates the goldbugs) was based on a circular reasoning fallacy and an outright piece of deception (he defines inflation as "an increase in the money supply" as opposed to "an increase in prices" - but wants you to assume that hte latter will still automatically happen).
In fact there is zero evidence of that, and nowhere did money for the poor ever cause that. It simply does not happen - and inflation doesn't (only) depend on the money supply anyway - the goldbugs are just as full of shit, there was plenty of inflation in the gold standard, hell the Spanish empire was destroyed by HYPERINFLATION while on the gold standard ! Inequality, for example, drives inflation just as much as money supply does - and where the money supply is relatively fixed it can drive it more - even into hyperinflation (which is what happened in Spain). When you have people who can afford to pay ten times more for everything, there's more money to be made selling a few things to 1% of the people at 10 times the price than to sell to the other 99% at the original price. So now everything costs ten times more, and the other 99% of people are starving (the merchants are of course, quickly in the 1%).
And how many bullets you buy ? Because if you're an exceptionally good shot who can kill one every bullet - you will still need about three times what can fit in a typical middle class house.
And you know what, that will only buy you a year or so, when enough of them have forgotten the massacre at your front porch, and you're still living like that - the next lot will come, only in the meantime you'll have found there weren't any more stores where you could *buy* guns.
See - most people when faced with death by starvation or death by bullet with a small chance of not dying at all - will choose the bullet. It's the saner choice.
So it's still not in your advantage to limit people to where starvation is one of their only choices because it's a sufficiently horrible way to die that just about nothing you can do to them will not be BETTER than that.
Actually that's one of the fundamental differences with UBI - it's really universal, you don't stop getting it when you start earning from another source. It's the main difference between universal basic income and welfare. Welfare can be a serious disincentive to work -but UBI is not because you KEEP your UBI if you work, or start a successful business. Some people, still stuck in silly thinking, want a UBI that declines with income - but I oppose even that as it removes one of the other major advantages of it. UBI is cheaper than welfare - even though welfare pays out to fewer people. Why ? Because welfare requires a massive (and expensive) bureaucracy to administer it. Those jobs are a complete broken window-fallacy with no real contribution to society. It is also massively invasive, you have to sacrifice all privacy to the bureaucrats to prove you're one of the deserving - and you need to be constantly monitored to ensure you remain one. Florida even wants to make welfare dependent on drug tests.
With UBI you don't ask what people spend it on, you don't stop paying to anybody - so you don't need to employ anybody to ask those questions or file people in the right list or hold application interviews, you don't need any computer resources or energy holding those databases. The entire thing can be run by 2 guys in the IRS (or whatever your local tax department is called) and even then one of them exists for redundancy purposes in case the other one is sick. They already have all the paperwork you need - which literally consists of "a list of bank accounts for every citizen".
Past experiments did show a massive increase in entrepeneurship when a UBI was introduced. Maybe not among the middle class - I don't think anybody checked that in the data so I'm just guessing - but certainly among the poor. When you're poor and struggling - whats the greatest disincentive to starting a small business instead of looking for somebody else to employ you ? All businesses are an extremely high risk investment, 80% of new businesses fail - and that's now when only already rich people with access to lots of experience are trying. when you're poor and living on very little, you are NOT going to risk what little you have on such a high-risk investment, if you aren't incredibly lucky you'll be entirely destitute. What UBI does is to make it so - even if your business fails, you are not worse off than you are now, it makes it worth trying to be better off by trying to start a small business, and some of those small businesses become bigger - and you find that employment actually goes *up* under UBI because some of those small businesses end up hiring people.
Actually - this is more like in Kerbal Space Program when your carefully constructed moon base jumps 50 feet in the air when you come out of timewarp and blows itself to smithereens because when tried to put everything at the wrong ground-level and then adjusted by tossing everything up (British readers: pun was intended).
In the case of Fleischman and Pons, the technician responsible for applying the patch was in the John with a bad case of "day-old-burrito" and that's why the bugfix for cold-fusion was only applied several hours later - by which time things had already gotten out of hand.
If you can't see how suggesting that somebody's behaviour is caused by them PMS-ing is flagrantly sexist and ibsulting to all people with uterusses then you are pretty seriously misoginystic yourself and apparently blind to that fact.
It doesn't much matter whether I like what they did or not. I'm a pacifist who rejects the idea that any war can be just unless you were attacked first so much as I agree with the idea of the abolitionists I don't believe it justified a war. Had I been Lincoln I would have LET the South secede and then gave an open-border policy to any runaway slaves who wanted to come live as free men in the North. What matters is - they won. The superior tactic, by definition, is the one that wins - no matter how horrifying it may be. There aren't any un-horrifying tactics in war - so a matter of degree is not a persuasive argument to me.
Lets take another example to clarify that point. The 2nd Anglo-Boer war of 1899-1902. During the first year of the war - the Boers held their own against the British in fairly typical combat and won most battles (they had won the 1st was just a decade earlier). The British then responded with overwhelming numbers. At the start of the war their soldiers outnumbered the Boers 3-to-1. By the 1900 it was 10-to-1. The Boers switched tactics to a form of guerilla warfare that relied on their superior knowledge of the land, stealth skills honed as hunters, highly skilled sniper abilities (long before sniper rifles existed - these guys could hit a coin a 500 yards with a Mauser - a product of their environment, if you couldn't kill an antelope at 1000 yards with a single bullet you didn't get to eat) and turned the utter lack of discipline and extreme individualism into a strength rather than a weakness by keeping attack forces tiny (2 to 3 people). The guerilla phase of the war was absolutely won by the Boers.They would attack British lines, kill 5 to 10 soldiers and disappear without the British company ever knowing where the shots were coming from. At this point Britain sent a general named Kitchener. Kitchener was one of history's great bastards. He looked at what was happening and realized that the guerilla tactic only worked because those scattered, tiny companies had the support of the local population. The women and children on the farms who could supply them food. So his answer was to remove the local population. He burned the land to the ground (this was actually when the term "scorched earth" was first coined - his name for the tactic) and captured all the civilians and put them in concentration camps (history's first example of those). 27-thousand women and children died in those camps. That broke the Boer's backs. Many of them were widowers now. Many had lost their children. They all lost their farms... within a year they surrendered.
Kitchener was one of the worst bastards to ever lead an army, one of the most brutal, and if there had been a Geneva convention back then would certainly have been tried for crimes against humanity... but his tactic worked, he won. And I say that as a descendent of those Boers. I had family who died in those camps. I may despise what he did, but I can't deny it's efficacy. There is an ironic sting in the tail of that bit of history. The boers did not know this but word had gotten back to Britain about what Kitchener was doing - and the British people were absolutely furious. They deemed this scandalous. The election of 1901 was an absolute landslide against the incumbents - the public was adament that Britain must end the camps and end this war even if it meant giving up on annexing the Boer republics. If the boers had held on just a few more months - they would have won and had they known this they may have. On the other hand - it would have been a pyrrhic victory because their culture may well have been extinct in a few more months. Beating them took a tactic so brutal that the general who used it very nearly lost the war because his own government was about to end the scandal - but ultimately, it worked, and Britain won the war. They lost the peace however, the aftermath of that scandal left Britain on the backfoot in subsequent negotiations and the Boer republics were effectively self governing by 1910.
So... it gave healthcare to people who especially *needed* it ? People who, any non psychopath, would say has to be first in line in any healthcare system or it has ALREADY failed ? How is that a *bad* thing ? It may not be great for insurance company profits, but nobody (least of all the government) is obligated to protect those. It is certainly a sufficiently profitable industry that they can afford a few million losses without actually getting measurably poorer anyway.
But any hardships they may suffer is just more reason why universal healthcare would be even better than Romneycare (let's give credit where it's due - he was the first to implement Heartland's rightwing-capitalist-as-they-can-ever-be plan)
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Miami is under water right now.
They dont call it a "dead man's switch" for nothing.
You seem to make numbers up... but luckily real numbers exist. The American geophysical union (which includes many of the world's foremost experts on volcanoes) actually calculated how much CO2 volcanoes produce in an average year, the answer is about 0.25% of what coal power plants put out in an average year (and that's only a fraction of industrial CO2 emissions - remember cars for example).
Volcanic CO2 emissions average a quarter of a percent of coal powerplant CO2 emissions. We outdo volcanoes all the damn time.
Yes. BI removes the problems associated with automation. It makes sense to support both.
And the majority of the long term BI experiments happened in developed countries. The three largest long term experiments were done in the USA, Canada and the Netherlands.
Now your argument is akin to those creationists who think satan planted dinosaur fossils in the earth to decieve mankind. Or the joke about the flying spaghetti monster altering the results of genetic tests to hide his existence (pesto be upon him).
Either way there is no reason to assume the simulation builders would be opposed to us finding out. There is no reason to assume they would have predicted that life would arise in the simulation, let alone intelligent life. Considering 99.99% of the universe is lifeless (under a bestcase scenario) it is much more likely were an unexpected emergent phenomenon of a physics simulation. It is not at all reasonable to addume the simulation was created for us and would want to fool us or anything else inside. We've only been around for the last few instances of the run.
Nah. If the universe is a simulation then we are still an accidental consciousness. The modern version of the theory may have been inspired by MMOs like WOW but its silly to assume the purpose is the same. Its more likely to be on par with AIs spontaneously arising in an IPCC climate model. We have been in the simulation so briefly that even if whoever built it actively monitors it is unlikely they have even noticed us.
> I guess they do get jobs outside of McDonald's)
Actually, philosophy grads tend to be highly employable (contrary to popular belief) and contrary to Mike Huckabee's claims are well paid. The average starting salary for a philosophy grad is actually about twice that of a welder (Huckabee has never been one for looking things up before saying them).
>If you're inside a simulation, then you can't run any tests to find out, now can you?
Why not. There are certain characteristics a simulated universe is likely to have - you can test for their presence. And quite a few of them are present in our universe. What we haven't figured out how to do is prove that a real universe wouldn't have the same characteristics.
It's definitely a testable hypotheses. The fact that we don't know exactly HOW to do do the test yet doesn't mean it can't be tested. The mechanics of testing have nothing to do with the definition of testable. When Einstein predicted gravitational lensing we had no idea how we may test that - after all, how can you tell if the light you're looking at has been bent by gravity in the past ? Nothing on earth has enough gravity to bend light enough to measure with 1901 technology. We figured it out some ten years later - we can look at an eclipse from Jupiter which is just far enough that light is measurably delayed, and that means if there's gravitational lensing the delay should be slightly different than if the light had travelled straight. The test was done and confirmed the hypotheses* - but it was testable when first announced.
Testable meant: "If you can show that light has bent in the presence of gravity, you can test the theory" it didn't have to mean "and here is how you determine that". It's perfectly fine to leave the HOW of testing to the reader, or future scientists who will have access to technology you don't have.
If anything this is more testable than a lot of theoretical physics. We still have no idea how to test any of the variants of string theory. We can show they are logically consistent and the maths work - but much of it we have no idea how to test.
Dark matter when first proposed seemed to fall clearly in the "untestable" category - how do you know something is there that doesn't interact with anything, doesn't give of any energy and cannot apparently be found ? Many scientists declared it "theory saving". Eventually though, somebody realized that if dark matter exists and has mass (and it has to have mass because it was proposed as an answer for missing mass in the first place) - then it would bend light (as per the aforementioned gravitational lensing) - and we've observed that - light being bent by a gravity source where no objects can be detected.... so it must be getting bent by objects we can not detect.
*Ironically that test was terribly flawed, and later entirely discredited, but other more accurate tests subsequently done did confirm the hypotheses again. That too is part of science, sometimes the wrong tests can give the right answers. This is one reason we retest things and re-examine old data and old experiments. Because the test was flawed, it could have been that the hypotheses had been wrong all along, retesting with more advanced technology and avoiding the mistakes made last time would let us find out if that had been the case.
>My argument is "more dollars chasing the same number of goods mean that business can raise prices since consumers have more cash" a circular reasoning fallacy?
That reasoning is simply false because it hugely oversimplifies and ignores basic reality (which is why empiric data shows this hardly ever happens). The price a a business charges for something isn't inevitably the highest price that *anybody* will pay - it's the price where they get the most profit, which is a balance between price per unit and number of units sold.
When you add money at the BOTTOM of income ladder businesses hardly raise prices because the ones that do are less profitable than the ones that don't. There's suddenly a whole lot of new potential customers. Keeping your prices where they are (and where you made good money) means your number of units sold can be hugely increases (depending one your economic situation before the effect it can be multiple times the possible customers you had last week). If you raise them - then the people who now had money that didn't before still can't buy - and your profits remain as they were, while all your competitors get those profits.
It is even more complicated than that. Minimum wage has other impacts - it raises the cost of PRODUCING labour intensive goods -so they tend to have a degree of inflation. But this is reduced by the "want to sell stuff to everybody else's workers who no have more money" effect.
Most countries have found that moderate minimum-wage increases had a nett-zero effect on inflation. But that risk does exist with minimum wage so for MW to work it's important that it is very carefully monitored and increases are moderate enough that the effect of selling to your competitors workers will outweigh the costs now imposed by your own workers for most businesses.
UBI has no such impact since even though your workers earn more - they don't cost you as a businessman more. Your most profitable path now is inevitably to sell to all these new potential customers - you can't do that if you raise prices, in fact to do that you must keep prices stable because their new incomes was based on what it costs to buy your stuff before.Of course some idiots do raise prices but they promptly get sued to hell by their shareholders as their competitors outprofit them massively by having access to this new market.
You can't base policy on anybody's reasoning - you base it on empirical data. Study after study shows that in hundreds of countries moderate minimum wage increases had a nett-zero effect on inflation, and UBI has LESS risk of inflation than minimum wage has, which is why in long-term experiment after long-term experiment done it was repeatedly found that UBI had no effect whatsoever on inflation.
It does however increase employment - when you want to sell units to all these new customers, you often have to ramp up production since you can now sell 100 units a month instead of ten you may well need 10 times as many people to make them. They may cost more in TOTAL but they don't cost more per UNIT - so raising unit prices does not benefit you.
There is a little story that is apropos to this discussion: it is said that back in the 1950's Henry Ford gave a union leader a tour of a new highly automated factory that would need very few workers. Henry is said to have asked the union leader: "So, how are you planning to get these robots to pay their union dues" ?
The union leader is said to have replied: "The more important question, Henry, is how are you going to get them to buy your cars".
LOL - I live in Africa, and I've spent some time in both Uganda and Kenya. Their rivalries aside, they are both wonderful countries.
And as a percentage was it ? What was the statistical impact of this ?
Oh yes, that's right, not enough to change the outcome of any election - ever.
About the largest election you could ever manipulate with fake votes is class president of a homeschool.
On the other hand, you can achieve near guaranteed results by "losing" ballots, or making it hard for people to vote, or gerrymandering them into a district where they will be outnumbere - and achieve them on a massive scale. That's why THIS type of election fraud is common all over the world, and actually does change election outcomes.
Why fake one or two, or even one or two hundred votes - and face a massive risk with little chance of actually changing the outcome, when you can easily make 2-thousand votes dissapear ?
Check my post history - I was pointing this out 8 years ago - as was most other people. The insanity of hating the man for doing what republicans had wanted to do all along will never look any less crazy.
Oh - and where did Romney get the idea from ? That's right, the fucking Heartland Institute - literally the most conservativ organisation in all of America !
Been done. UBI has been tested in long-term experiments in communities all over the world. It has more empirical data around it than any other theory in all of economics.
And every single experiment had nothing but purely positive results and ended up costing far less than welfare (and even costing less than doing nothing - because the economic gains from it and the saving it produces have to be factored in. For example it made people in general significantly healthier, that's *always* an economic gain - even with a capitalist healthcare system- because money spent on doctors is not an economically beneficial expense, to argue it is, is a broken-window fallacy).
That advantage of giving money as opposed to those things is that it means people can personally prioritize. They can choose to spend some on a better education (UBI experiments consistently showed a lot of them did), some may choose to start a small business (knowing they won't be destitute if it fails) - and spend some on getting that off the ground.
People, in general, have a tendency to hate boredom, which is enough to motivate them to do something. People generally want to feel like they are contributing. The fallacy is that you have to have a paying job to do that, or that only those efforts somebody will pay for contributes to society in a useful way. The market has never been anything but absolutely horrible at pricing human endeavours. How good it may be at pricing goods is debateable but people, it's fantastically horrible at.
>That's who you're using to state your case?
It's an extremely good piece of evidence. Let me enlighten you. In the 19th century - the industrial revolution caused the worst poverty in the history of England. Seriously, the average English person's annual income was less than 10% of what it had been in the 14th century. People were poorer on average than the in damn middle ages. The country was richer, but all that money was concentrated in a tiny handful. The rest were starving. Children were literally digging in the banks of the Thames to look for small valuables they could sell to buy food (and the Thames as gigantic sewer - they were literally raking through shit hoping somebody had swallowed a coin to survive).
A group of educated middle class people began advocating for some changes to the system to end this massive suffering. Mostly they were made up of rare individuals who had escaped poverty through luck or rare talents. Dickens was one such (his father had spent much of his life in debtors prison). Dickens has the fortune to be literate and a skilled writer - which got him a job as a journalist, he got a reputation for meticulousness and accuracy and took that into his later work in fiction. Another member of this group was the historian John Forster. Forster and Dickens collaborated to an extend on Forster's magnum opus - a research paper on the conditions of the poor in London. Dickens sat in on many of the early interviews - teaching Forster how a journalist interviews people and get them to speak honestly.
Forster's "paper" ended up being a stack of books about 2m high - a massively comprehensive detailing of the lives of London's poor with some 30-thousand case studies. That paper would later be the main drive that led to England establishing labour laws (starting with the banning of child labour) and the establishment of the welfare state. It was so meticulous, so incontrovertible and so horrifying that even the parliament of wealthy aristocrats could not deny the need to change things.
And Dickens's part in the movement that ended the worst poverty in London's history was to get the upper classes on-board (since they held all the power), and get the working class to realize that their plight was a shared one. While Forster wrote the serious academic work, Dickens wrote the popular fiction - but it was two sides of the same coin, from the same movement, documenting the same reality - just written in different ways to get the message to different groups of people.
It worked too. Dickens got the poor to campaign and the aristocrats to be sympathetic (which left the wealthy industrialists powerless for the first time), while Forster gave the politicians cold hard data to force them to adapt. Thus was born the 20th century.
You can hardly find a BETTER argument than Dickens. He lived through and helped change the results of libertarian style unregulated capitalism and what it REALLY does.
It's as if none of them understand what the word "Universal" means - seriously - it means even Donald Fucking Trump will get 30K a year from the government.
Nobody does NOT get it, employed or not, rich or poor. It's UNIVERSAL.
Because if that 30K is UBI and you take the backbreaking job - you'll be making 62K a year.
That's literally how UBI works - you do NOT lose it if you gain another income - you get it AS WELL as that other income.
The claims of inflation is complete bullshit. Von Mises's argument for money supply leading to inflation (which animates the goldbugs) was based on a circular reasoning fallacy and an outright piece of deception (he defines inflation as "an increase in the money supply" as opposed to "an increase in prices" - but wants you to assume that hte latter will still automatically happen).
In fact there is zero evidence of that, and nowhere did money for the poor ever cause that. It simply does not happen - and inflation doesn't (only) depend on the money supply anyway - the goldbugs are just as full of shit, there was plenty of inflation in the gold standard, hell the Spanish empire was destroyed by HYPERINFLATION while on the gold standard !
Inequality, for example, drives inflation just as much as money supply does - and where the money supply is relatively fixed it can drive it more - even into hyperinflation (which is what happened in Spain). When you have people who can afford to pay ten times more for everything, there's more money to be made selling a few things to 1% of the people at 10 times the price than to sell to the other 99% at the original price. So now everything costs ten times more, and the other 99% of people are starving (the merchants are of course, quickly in the 1%).
And how many bullets you buy ? Because if you're an exceptionally good shot who can kill one every bullet - you will still need about three times what can fit in a typical middle class house.
And you know what, that will only buy you a year or so, when enough of them have forgotten the massacre at your front porch, and you're still living like that - the next lot will come, only in the meantime you'll have found there weren't any more stores where you could *buy* guns.
See - most people when faced with death by starvation or death by bullet with a small chance of not dying at all - will choose the bullet. It's the saner choice.
So it's still not in your advantage to limit people to where starvation is one of their only choices because it's a sufficiently horrible way to die that just about nothing you can do to them will not be BETTER than that.
Actually that's one of the fundamental differences with UBI - it's really universal, you don't stop getting it when you start earning from another source. It's the main difference between universal basic income and welfare. Welfare can be a serious disincentive to work -but UBI is not because you KEEP your UBI if you work, or start a successful business.
Some people, still stuck in silly thinking, want a UBI that declines with income - but I oppose even that as it removes one of the other major advantages of it. UBI is cheaper than welfare - even though welfare pays out to fewer people. Why ? Because welfare requires a massive (and expensive) bureaucracy to administer it. Those jobs are a complete broken window-fallacy with no real contribution to society. It is also massively invasive, you have to sacrifice all privacy to the bureaucrats to prove you're one of the deserving - and you need to be constantly monitored to ensure you remain one. Florida even wants to make welfare dependent on drug tests.
With UBI you don't ask what people spend it on, you don't stop paying to anybody - so you don't need to employ anybody to ask those questions or file people in the right list or hold application interviews, you don't need any computer resources or energy holding those databases. The entire thing can be run by 2 guys in the IRS (or whatever your local tax department is called) and even then one of them exists for redundancy purposes in case the other one is sick. They already have all the paperwork you need - which literally consists of "a list of bank accounts for every citizen".
Past experiments did show a massive increase in entrepeneurship when a UBI was introduced. Maybe not among the middle class - I don't think anybody checked that in the data so I'm just guessing - but certainly among the poor.
When you're poor and struggling - whats the greatest disincentive to starting a small business instead of looking for somebody else to employ you ? All businesses are an extremely high risk investment, 80% of new businesses fail - and that's now when only already rich people with access to lots of experience are trying. when you're poor and living on very little, you are NOT going to risk what little you have on such a high-risk investment, if you aren't incredibly lucky you'll be entirely destitute.
What UBI does is to make it so - even if your business fails, you are not worse off than you are now, it makes it worth trying to be better off by trying to start a small business, and some of those small businesses become bigger - and you find that employment actually goes *up* under UBI because some of those small businesses end up hiring people.
Actually - this is more like in Kerbal Space Program when your carefully constructed moon base jumps 50 feet in the air when you come out of timewarp and blows itself to smithereens because when tried to put everything at the wrong ground-level and then adjusted by tossing everything up (British readers: pun was intended).
In the case of Fleischman and Pons, the technician responsible for applying the patch was in the John with a bad case of "day-old-burrito" and that's why the bugfix for cold-fusion was only applied several hours later - by which time things had already gotten out of hand.
If you can't see how suggesting that somebody's behaviour is caused by them PMS-ing is flagrantly sexist and ibsulting to all people with uterusses then you are pretty seriously misoginystic yourself and apparently blind to that fact.
That is not how averages work.
It doesn't much matter whether I like what they did or not. I'm a pacifist who rejects the idea that any war can be just unless you were attacked first so much as I agree with the idea of the abolitionists I don't believe it justified a war. Had I been Lincoln I would have LET the South secede and then gave an open-border policy to any runaway slaves who wanted to come live as free men in the North.
What matters is - they won. The superior tactic, by definition, is the one that wins - no matter how horrifying it may be. There aren't any un-horrifying tactics in war - so a matter of degree is not a persuasive argument to me.
Lets take another example to clarify that point. The 2nd Anglo-Boer war of 1899-1902. During the first year of the war - the Boers held their own against the British in fairly typical combat and won most battles (they had won the 1st was just a decade earlier). The British then responded with overwhelming numbers. At the start of the war their soldiers outnumbered the Boers 3-to-1. By the 1900 it was 10-to-1.
The Boers switched tactics to a form of guerilla warfare that relied on their superior knowledge of the land, stealth skills honed as hunters, highly skilled sniper abilities (long before sniper rifles existed - these guys could hit a coin a 500 yards with a Mauser - a product of their environment, if you couldn't kill an antelope at 1000 yards with a single bullet you didn't get to eat) and turned the utter lack of discipline and extreme individualism into a strength rather than a weakness by keeping attack forces tiny (2 to 3 people). The guerilla phase of the war was absolutely won by the Boers.They would attack British lines, kill 5 to 10 soldiers and disappear without the British company ever knowing where the shots were coming from.
At this point Britain sent a general named Kitchener. Kitchener was one of history's great bastards. He looked at what was happening and realized that the guerilla tactic only worked because those scattered, tiny companies had the support of the local population. The women and children on the farms who could supply them food. So his answer was to remove the local population. He burned the land to the ground (this was actually when the term "scorched earth" was first coined - his name for the tactic) and captured all the civilians and put them in concentration camps (history's first example of those). 27-thousand women and children died in those camps.
That broke the Boer's backs. Many of them were widowers now. Many had lost their children. They all lost their farms... within a year they surrendered.
Kitchener was one of the worst bastards to ever lead an army, one of the most brutal, and if there had been a Geneva convention back then would certainly have been tried for crimes against humanity... but his tactic worked, he won. And I say that as a descendent of those Boers. I had family who died in those camps. I may despise what he did, but I can't deny it's efficacy.
There is an ironic sting in the tail of that bit of history. The boers did not know this but word had gotten back to Britain about what Kitchener was doing - and the British people were absolutely furious. They deemed this scandalous. The election of 1901 was an absolute landslide against the incumbents - the public was adament that Britain must end the camps and end this war even if it meant giving up on annexing the Boer republics.
If the boers had held on just a few more months - they would have won and had they known this they may have. On the other hand - it would have been a pyrrhic victory because their culture may well have been extinct in a few more months.
Beating them took a tactic so brutal that the general who used it very nearly lost the war because his own government was about to end the scandal - but ultimately, it worked, and Britain won the war. They lost the peace however, the aftermath of that scandal left Britain on the backfoot in subsequent negotiations and the Boer republics were effectively self governing by 1910.
So... it gave healthcare to people who especially *needed* it ? People who, any non psychopath, would say has to be first in line in any healthcare system or it has ALREADY failed ? How is that a *bad* thing ? It may not be great for insurance company profits, but nobody (least of all the government) is obligated to protect those. It is certainly a sufficiently profitable industry that they can afford a few million losses without actually getting measurably poorer anyway.
But any hardships they may suffer is just more reason why universal healthcare would be even better than Romneycare (let's give credit where it's due - he was the first to implement Heartland's rightwing-capitalist-as-they-can-ever-be plan)