Yes, this is true. And even though the person without the license clearly does not need a license to make a living, in some countries it is easier to get a driver's license from scratch than it is to recover it after being caught drunk driving (or biking, in the case of Austria). So the person without the license does have an unfair advantage.
I just think this is a minor problem compared to the unfairness of harshly punishing people for drunk biking.
Of course I understood this point. What I'm saying is that it is not relevant, as the points against the license is a minor punishment, and almost everyone has a license anyway. The problem that is see with fairness is
Drunk person with drivers license on a car : punishment X eur + points against license Drunk person with drivers license on a bike: punishment X eur + points against license
You're missing an important point made by the AC: the meaning of a word is not determined by its etymology. Consider atom, or catfish for example.
If you open a philosophy text, they will be keen about giving precise definitions to terms they are using; reducing the definition to what can simply be inferred from the etymology is simply unworkable.
Come on, the unfairness has nothing to do with having a driver's license or not. It is unfair because drunk drivers often kill people, whereas I never heard of a drunk biker killing someone.
This is not a good strategy. If you google "Kick Ass Torrents" the first results are impostors that will serve you malware. Google refuses to give you the correct result. Wikipedia, though, works really well for that.
Oh. I understand your pain. I used to live in a city where my only options for the daily commute were half an hour by car or one hour by bus. It was hell. Now my commute is 15 minutes by bike. My quality of life has gone of tremendously. But it is kinda of an exceptional circumstance, as it is not that easy to find a job in a city where it is affordable to live near your workplace. I'll soon have to move again, but I'll never go back to the first situation. If I cannot commute in (worst case scenario) half an hour by rail (tram or subway), I'll simply not live in that city.
I wouldn't be so obsessed about optimising traffic flow. Humans are bad at it, I've seen plenty of evidence of that. Instead of hitting your head against the wall, maybe you should consider that it's just not a good idea to transport such a massive amount of people in private cars? Trains work really well.
We do need to make a choice when we write down the laws; if driving stoned is less dangerous than driving drunk, it is unfair to have the same punishment for both cases.
A real life example: in Vienna there is no legal distinction between drunk biking and drunk driving. So if you ride a bicycle while drunk you can lose your driving license. I kid you not. Of course you can not lose your bike driving license because they haven't yet invented such a stupid thing (but who knows? maybe that's what they plan), you lose any other driving license that you may have.
A famous story here is about a French airline pilot. After flying to Vienna, he went to a bar, got wasted, got a bicycle to get home, the police caught him and bam, he lost his pilot license.
Wait, what? Trump is the evil money corrupting politics! What is the point of buying him, if he is a billionaire himself? Do you think he's going to do anything against the interest of billionaires?
My bad, I thought you were talking about manipulating the nomination process, but you were talking about manipulating the voting itself. There was clearly a big campaign for people to vote on an "Puppy-Free slate", and they were rather sucessful. I'm not sure I'd call it "organized fandom", though, as they don't seem to form a coherent political group, like the Sad Puppies or the Rabid Puppies.
You seem to assume that there is an "organized fandom" voting on an "anti-Puppy" slate. Care to provide evidence about that? Since the Puppies seem to have made a huge amount of nominations, I conclude that if there is such an anti-Puppy conspiracy it is a rather incompetent one.
Ah, indeed, of course you're right, you can always express it as a fraction of the average income. I just think it is misleading to do so, as it seems to imply that the basic income must grow when the average income grows, and this is not the case.
Also, I don't think it offers nothing significant when it is a small fraction of the average income. Real example: the program Bolsa Familia in Brazil. It pays the poorest about 20 USD per month (about 3% of the average income), and the results were revolutionary. Millions were lifted out of poverty.
Furthermore, the assumption in TFA is that with the AI revolution the GDP will grow so much that even a small fraction of the average income will be enough to cover the basic needs of someone.
Yes, we seem not to be communicating. What I'm pointing out is that the Economist assumes that basic income should be some fixed percentage of the average income, but this assumption is false: this is not the definition of basic income.
I think this is especially clear if you consider their most expensive scenario, where they set basic income at 60% of the average income to end relative poverty. This is plainly not the goal of a basic income: it is providing a military fighter where only a business jet was requested.
I'm not claiming their calculation is wrong; it is correct, and rather simple. I'm claiming that it doesn't make sense to do this calculation, because it does not respect the definition of basic income. It's like if I were to ask you how much does it cost to design a private jet, and you give me a cost estimate for a military jet instead.
Yes, you. I replied to Iorinc, which you may check is not the same poster as Daemonik, who is the one who claimed that capitalism is more corrupted and polluted and has more poverty than any other system.
Iorinc was simply providing you empirical data, as he was born in the DDR, and therefore knows it much better than you or me (I was never there, so I can hardly provide higher-quality data than him). And his assertions about it are rather measured; he is simply saying that truth is not so one-sided, as it rarely is. You simply ignored what he said and repeated some generic talking points about how "communism is bad".
Let me try, anyway, to give you some empirical data. I just ask you to look at it instead of dismissing the possibility of its existence and insulting me. This is a map of the percentage of the vote that the radical left party "The Left" got in the German parliamentary elections of 2009. One can see clearly that The Left performed much better in the former DDR than in the former West Germany, getting in some constituencies more than 30% of the vote. Now, if the truth was so one-sided as you claim, I would expect two things to happen: people from the DDR, that have first-hand experience of what communism is like, or grew up hearing about and seeing its results, would never vote for a former communist party. The second thing I would expect is that people who only dream about communism, and never actually experienced it (i.e., people from West Germany), would support it more than people who know what it is. Neither thing happened.
Of course, there is a big majority of people in the DDR voting for parties other than the radical left, and this supports the view that most people there prefer capitalism rather than communism. But we do have roughly 25% of the electorate voting for the former communist party. I don't think it is such a stretch to conclude that they think their life got worse with the transition to capitalism.
I see a single figure based on real data, that the Swiss scheme would cost 30% of the GDP. Which is a useless figure, unless I'm familiar with Swiss economics and know that the current welfare schemes cost roughly 3% of the GDP, which is the figure I provided.
The other figures they provided are simply theoretical, and with such a wildly incorrect theory that I suspect they are being intentionally misleading. They calculate that to provide a basic income of 10% of the average income would require taxes to be 35% of national income, and to provide a basic income of 60% of the average income (ending relative poverty) would require taxes to be 85% of the national income.
The problem with this is that nobody proposes the basic income to be some percentage of the average income, and to use it to end relative poverty is plainly insane. The goal of basic income is simply to provide people with the basic they need to live: food, clothing, housing. And these costs do not increase as the average income goes up, so they are not a percentage of it (I'm discounting inflation, of course).
I thought it was clear that my goal was to compare the cost of basic income with current welfare spending, in order to have a rough idea of how affordable it is. Sorry for not making that more explicit. I'm not actually proposing to take the current welfare budget and divide it by the population. That would only be realistic if you got a really high level of basic income, as you point out. Also, dividing it by the population is clearly not the way to go: the basic income would not be paid in full to children, and I'm sure it would be a polemical point whether immigrants are eligible for basic income.
Still, my figures are better than the Economist's, because unlike them I actually provided some figures. It took me about a minute of searching. Shame they weren't able to do this.
I don't think inflation is hardest on the poor, assuming of course that wages are adjusted for it. Then, if you are living paycheck to paycheck, inflation has no effect on you whatsoever. However, if you have savings, they are slowly eroded by inflation.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, this is true. And even though the person without the license clearly does not need a license to make a living, in some countries it is easier to get a driver's license from scratch than it is to recover it after being caught drunk driving (or biking, in the case of Austria). So the person without the license does have an unfair advantage.
I just think this is a minor problem compared to the unfairness of harshly punishing people for drunk biking.
Of course I understood this point. What I'm saying is that it is not relevant, as the points against the license is a minor punishment, and almost everyone has a license anyway. The problem that is see with fairness is
Drunk person with drivers license on a car : punishment X eur + points against license
Drunk person with drivers license on a bike: punishment X eur + points against license
You're missing an important point made by the AC: the meaning of a word is not determined by its etymology. Consider atom, or catfish for example.
If you open a philosophy text, they will be keen about giving precise definitions to terms they are using; reducing the definition to what can simply be inferred from the etymology is simply unworkable.
Come on, the unfairness has nothing to do with having a driver's license or not. It is unfair because drunk drivers often kill people, whereas I never heard of a drunk biker killing someone.
Wow. Indeed. You kill the wealth creators, wealth stops being created. Simple, no?
Haha, just tried to open the website, and it's blocked in the UK. Thanks for sharing, anyway.
This is not a good strategy. If you google "Kick Ass Torrents" the first results are impostors that will serve you malware. Google refuses to give you the correct result. Wikipedia, though, works really well for that.
Oh. I understand your pain. I used to live in a city where my only options for the daily commute were half an hour by car or one hour by bus. It was hell. Now my commute is 15 minutes by bike. My quality of life has gone of tremendously. But it is kinda of an exceptional circumstance, as it is not that easy to find a job in a city where it is affordable to live near your workplace. I'll soon have to move again, but I'll never go back to the first situation. If I cannot commute in (worst case scenario) half an hour by rail (tram or subway), I'll simply not live in that city.
Stoners who tend to insist on following the letter of the law...
This sentence is just awesome. Well done, sir.
I wouldn't be so obsessed about optimising traffic flow. Humans are bad at it, I've seen plenty of evidence of that. Instead of hitting your head against the wall, maybe you should consider that it's just not a good idea to transport such a massive amount of people in private cars? Trains work really well.
We do need to make a choice when we write down the laws; if driving stoned is less dangerous than driving drunk, it is unfair to have the same punishment for both cases.
A real life example: in Vienna there is no legal distinction between drunk biking and drunk driving. So if you ride a bicycle while drunk you can lose your driving license. I kid you not. Of course you can not lose your bike driving license because they haven't yet invented such a stupid thing (but who knows? maybe that's what they plan), you lose any other driving license that you may have.
A famous story here is about a French airline pilot. After flying to Vienna, he went to a bar, got wasted, got a bicycle to get home, the police caught him and bam, he lost his pilot license.
Deal with the devil? Do you mean giving money for a DRM infested product? Or do you mean breaking the law?
If the latter, I have no problem with the concept of a unjust law, and I gladly break this kind of laws.
Trump has the stronger argument by far.
Wait, what? Trump is the evil money corrupting politics! What is the point of buying him, if he is a billionaire himself? Do you think he's going to do anything against the interest of billionaires?
My bad, I thought you were talking about manipulating the nomination process, but you were talking about manipulating the voting itself. There was clearly a big campaign for people to vote on an "Puppy-Free slate", and they were rather sucessful. I'm not sure I'd call it "organized fandom", though, as they don't seem to form a coherent political group, like the Sad Puppies or the Rabid Puppies.
Unfortunately I think George Martin is right about this. They are simply trying to destroy the Hugos.
You seem to assume that there is an "organized fandom" voting on an "anti-Puppy" slate. Care to provide evidence about that? Since the Puppies seem to have made a huge amount of nominations, I conclude that if there is such an anti-Puppy conspiracy it is a rather incompetent one.
Good books? You mean "Space Raptor Butt Invasion"? Or maybe "SJWs Always Lie"?
Ah, indeed, of course you're right, you can always express it as a fraction of the average income. I just think it is misleading to do so, as it seems to imply that the basic income must grow when the average income grows, and this is not the case.
Also, I don't think it offers nothing significant when it is a small fraction of the average income. Real example: the program Bolsa Familia in Brazil. It pays the poorest about 20 USD per month (about 3% of the average income), and the results were revolutionary. Millions were lifted out of poverty.
Furthermore, the assumption in TFA is that with the AI revolution the GDP will grow so much that even a small fraction of the average income will be enough to cover the basic needs of someone.
Yes, we seem not to be communicating. What I'm pointing out is that the Economist assumes that basic income should be some fixed percentage of the average income, but this assumption is false: this is not the definition of basic income.
I think this is especially clear if you consider their most expensive scenario, where they set basic income at 60% of the average income to end relative poverty. This is plainly not the goal of a basic income: it is providing a military fighter where only a business jet was requested.
I'm not claiming their calculation is wrong; it is correct, and rather simple. I'm claiming that it doesn't make sense to do this calculation, because it does not respect the definition of basic income. It's like if I were to ask you how much does it cost to design a private jet, and you give me a cost estimate for a military jet instead.
Yes, you. I replied to Iorinc, which you may check is not the same poster as Daemonik, who is the one who claimed that capitalism is more corrupted and polluted and has more poverty than any other system.
Iorinc was simply providing you empirical data, as he was born in the DDR, and therefore knows it much better than you or me (I was never there, so I can hardly provide higher-quality data than him). And his assertions about it are rather measured; he is simply saying that truth is not so one-sided, as it rarely is. You simply ignored what he said and repeated some generic talking points about how "communism is bad".
Let me try, anyway, to give you some empirical data. I just ask you to look at it instead of dismissing the possibility of its existence and insulting me. This is a map of the percentage of the vote that the radical left party "The Left" got in the German parliamentary elections of 2009. One can see clearly that The Left performed much better in the former DDR than in the former West Germany, getting in some constituencies more than 30% of the vote. Now, if the truth was so one-sided as you claim, I would expect two things to happen: people from the DDR, that have first-hand experience of what communism is like, or grew up hearing about and seeing its results, would never vote for a former communist party. The second thing I would expect is that people who only dream about communism, and never actually experienced it (i.e., people from West Germany), would support it more than people who know what it is. Neither thing happened.
Of course, there is a big majority of people in the DDR voting for parties other than the radical left, and this supports the view that most people there prefer capitalism rather than communism. But we do have roughly 25% of the electorate voting for the former communist party. I don't think it is such a stretch to conclude that they think their life got worse with the transition to capitalism.
I see a single figure based on real data, that the Swiss scheme would cost 30% of the GDP. Which is a useless figure, unless I'm familiar with Swiss economics and know that the current welfare schemes cost roughly 3% of the GDP, which is the figure I provided.
The other figures they provided are simply theoretical, and with such a wildly incorrect theory that I suspect they are being intentionally misleading. They calculate that to provide a basic income of 10% of the average income would require taxes to be 35% of national income, and to provide a basic income of 60% of the average income (ending relative poverty) would require taxes to be 85% of the national income.
The problem with this is that nobody proposes the basic income to be some percentage of the average income, and to use it to end relative poverty is plainly insane. The goal of basic income is simply to provide people with the basic they need to live: food, clothing, housing. And these costs do not increase as the average income goes up, so they are not a percentage of it (I'm discounting inflation, of course).
I thought it was clear that my goal was to compare the cost of basic income with current welfare spending, in order to have a rough idea of how affordable it is. Sorry for not making that more explicit. I'm not actually proposing to take the current welfare budget and divide it by the population. That would only be realistic if you got a really high level of basic income, as you point out. Also, dividing it by the population is clearly not the way to go: the basic income would not be paid in full to children, and I'm sure it would be a polemical point whether immigrants are eligible for basic income.
Still, my figures are better than the Economist's, because unlike them I actually provided some figures. It took me about a minute of searching. Shame they weren't able to do this.
I don't think inflation is hardest on the poor, assuming of course that wages are adjusted for it. Then, if you are living paycheck to paycheck, inflation has no effect on you whatsoever. However, if you have savings, they are slowly eroded by inflation.
You're trying to give information to someone who is blinded by ideology. A noble attempt, but unlikely to succeed.