"Averages about $1200", and "You could get"? Every single machine I see over $1200 is an old Mac Pro; current models are over $3000 as they use server-type processors and ECC memory. And you "could get" a five year old 2.66Ghz quad core Mac Pro from that link at $739, which is...less than two thirds of $1200. Or a three year old 2.5Ghz quad core iMac at $799.
If the price still puts you off, you don't have to buy into that market. But don't complain that these things keep their value; in most products (like cars), that means it was a solid, reliable product, unlike certain computers I've bought that died after only a year. I dare you to find non-Macs from 5 years ago that sell anywhere near $799 now.
The Mac chiclet keyboard is vastly superior (in my opinion) to most other laptop or OEM-supplied keyboards. There are many better keyboards, but not that the computer manufacturer will give you with the machine. The trackpad on laptops used to be several orders of magnitude better than anything available on a laptop, but Windows laptops (especially those certified for Windows 8) have been copying it for a while now so the difference is probably negligible. As for a mouse, you can buy a three button wired mouse for $5 if you really don't like the option of a touch-enabled "Magic Mouse", a trackpad, or the "Apple Mouse" that I think has middle button support (but maybe only if you use a third party configuration tool?) for its 360-degree scroll ball.
I don't blame you for having higher standards, but unless you're buying a gaming computer anything else you could buy comes with cheaper, crappier stuff than Apple's "style over usability" keyboard and mouse. The way I see it you'd be spending extra money either way unless you just use your existing keyboard and mouse, which you'd have to do anyway for the Mac Mini (which is your only Mac option under $899).
First let's say that the explanation in the article makes some pretty weird alterations to the trolley problem to come to its conclusion. So first we have the problem that the trolley problem is not an adequate measure of whether a robot can "correctly decide to kill humans". From there it goes through some weird permutations until there is a decidedly "correct" solution to the trolley problem: a computer program designed by a known villain is about to be installed on a switch that could make a decision to injure maintenance workers. And since another computer program cannot determine whether the first program will ever halt, it cannot always make the right decision.
The flaw is right there in the summary:
One curious corollary is that if the human brain is a Turing machine, then humans can never decide this issue either, a point that the authors deliberately steer well clear of.
In what way could anybody always prove that a piece of computer software is safe and correct? Let's assume that the hardware is safe and an expert in machine code is available to make the determination. Could that expert ever make the right choice? Of course. But could the expert always make the right choice? The Halting Problem doesn't state that a program can never determine if a program will halt. It only states that a program cannot always determine if any program will halt. A machine could use exactly the same methods available to us humans (recognizing certain design patterns, certain known logical structures with known outcomes) to usually make the right choice, but could not always know what the right choice is. The disconnect that might make one think a computer is somehow less capable of making this decision is in believing that a human being can make a better determination. A human can't. If the program is written in a strange or obscure manner, the human can't know what will happen either. And that's where we encounter the halting problem: you can't always know for sure without running the program, and if the program never halts (or never makes a bad judgement), that's not proof positive that it doesn't halt (or is safe).
Ultimately the real "flaw" is the way this result has been picked up. The headline "Halting Problem Proves That Lethal Robots Cannot Correctly Decide To Kill Humans" is a lot more sensational than the title of the paper, "Logical Limitations to Machine Ethics / with Consequences to Lethal Autonomous Weapons". The Medium headline and article claim that this paper "proves" something about the capabilities of "lethal robots", when all it really does is prove limitations of machine ethics. It isn't really about lethal weapons; based on this result, an algorithm cannot always make the morally correct choice, regardless of whether or not that choice involve killing. And the reason? Because sometimes, making the morally correct choice requires information that is provably impossible to always obtain.
ISIS hates everyone and is a threat to everyone. Why should America have to lead the charge? Because we're the only ones willing to? ISIS is a graver threat to European countries who are content to keep their hands clean. ISIS is an even graver threat to other Middle Eastern countries like Turkey and Iran, whose agendas are different from our own and whose actions may provoke us against them so they aren't going to want to make themselves a target. You see? America being the first to act in every military situation makes everyone else back off. And before you say "America, fuck yeah!" remember who is leading our country. Do you want Obama to be the only person in the world capable of waging war on every single threat that comes along? What about the next president? And the one after that? Even if you like every single president this country is ever going to have, that is simply too much responsibility to weigh on one person's shoulders. Our Congress won't even exercise its Constitutional mandate to decide when our country goes to war.
If we are ever going to advance as a society, we need to get past this "world superpower" phase. America must not be in the business of policing the entire world. It is extremely costly and it makes us a target. Why do you think ISIS is beheading Americans? They desperately want us to lead a unilateral attack, because they know that if they can goad us to strike alone then no one else will join us. They will be able to recruit even more people to fight demon America, the nation that fancies itself a greater power than God. And don't make the mistake of thinking that this is a purely military conflict. This is ideological. This is cultural. This will not end until those that would aid ISIS know that it isn't just their greatest nemesis American that is fighting them. The whole world must be arrayed against them. They must fear that the forces against them are assembled not by their enemies, but by God himself.
If the entire government became Libertarian today, it would take less than 10 years for corporations to take total control of governance and we'd have just as much (or probably more) squashing of individual liberties, but no longer any accountability to voters. There are many powerful players in society and I'm not one of them. Does it make me a crony capitalist or a welfare queen when I decide I'd rather the power go to those I can vote out of office than those I can't?
Hey, don't accuse me of hijacking the discussion. I wasn't the one who asked if an SD card bought from unreliable sources could install malware without autorun:
Does anybody know if there are any known firmware issues with SD or other non-USB flash cards that could effectively allow a foreign seller/distributor to place malicious software on my Android phone or laptop simply on insertion of the device with autoplay turned off?
That was the OP, not me. I just wanted to praise queazocotal for actually answering the OP's question.
I'm not asserting anything about SD cards. I don't myself know how dangerous a maliciously crafted one could be. That's why I thought I'd wade into the comment section and see who does. Apparently more people are interested in answering a different question.
There's a big difference between "it will lose the data you put on it" and "it will infect your computer and destroy the data you put everywhere". If I wanted to conduct secure transactions with my bank over the internet, it doesn't really matter (much) if my computer is running off of an unreliable hard drive. It might crash in the middle, but I probably won't lose money over it. But if the hard drive infected the operating system, the infection could undermine the security of my transactions and drain my bank account. When we apply that logic to a piece of removable storage instead of the main system drive, an unreliable flash drive or SD card won't crash your computer (unless you're using it for memory paging), but an insecure one could still drain my bank account.
I won't say that everyone knows the risks of faulty storage coming from east Asia. But the OP has chimed in in reply saying that he understands the risks and bought it anyway. So would everyone please stop saying the same damn thing over and over again and take a look at what is really the much more interesting question of whether SD cards are a meaningful attack vector with autorun disabled?
Mod parent up! This is the only informative on-topic comment I've seen on the entire page so far! Why is that if someone asks "is it safe", everyone wants to chime in and instead "it isn't real"? That is an answer to a different question than the question that was asked.
Execution-time knowledge of the generic type used in the collection is good enough reason to use C#. If you really want the features from Java, you can always port them as anything that might be superior is user-space code, even if it's part of the standard library.
Once software is open source, the open source version can never be closed again. If Microsoft made.Net 4.5 open source and closed the source again in.Net 5, 4.5 would still be completely open because open source licenses would permit existing licensees to redistribute the software under their own license terms. That's assuming they use a real open source license, of course, but if they try to manufacture a revokable open source license then the EFF's lawyers will know, it will be another story on Slashdot, and they will gain absolutely nothing.
But then I suppose that "supported" is different from "legally available". But any open source project can pull support, and most don't have great support to begin with, so it's a moot point.
[T]here is a fine line between collaboration and cheating in computer science
No Mercy
All introductory CS students are born with an intuitive and always-correct understanding of when they cross the "fine line"! They have all been subject to rigorous academic standards for plagiarism, right? So they all know exactly what is expected of them on day 1 of their life in college!
You're free to wonder as long as you try to come up with something that works better. And just cheaper isn't better; if all you can do is spend less everyone will be justified in expecting it to do worse. Figure out how to make society better, regardless of whether you think the recipients of the help really need it.
I find your boogeyman treatment of art and artists to be highly distasteful. Whatever caricature you've dreamt up is not representative of the majority of people receiving food stamps. Furthermore, funding those truly in need while preventing the kind of excess you're afraid of would take more government bureaucracy, resulting in more wasted taxpayer money. The beauty of the food stamps program is that it is cheap to administer while still mostly affecting only the people that really need it.
We as one of the greatest civilizations to ever exist have more than enough food to feed everyone. Do you have a problem with people studying the arts? Do you think it's wasteful to learn how to design pleasant visuals and work/living spaces? Is it wrong for people to want to learn how to make a difference to socially disadvantaged people? Are the arts not our only lasting message as a culture, our greatest means to reveal the realities of our own humanity and our generation in a way that informs the future and hopefully allows them to build on our successes and failures?
But even more than the fact that we can and should support those people who want to spend their lives carrying on our culture for the future is the fact that food stamps don't just benefit the people who receive them. When the government buys somebody food, that person gets food, and the food seller/maker gets paid. Agriculture is the foundation of every society and it becomes more and more difficult for our farmers to maintain their lifestyle with every passing year. Food stamps are one way that the government supports farmers by making sure that when tough times come, they don't lose huge parts of their market. It's not just about the starving children that we hope to feed (and the other hungry mouths we feed along the way). It's about the food in our markets that would otherwise waste away and be thrown away. It's about the hard working farmers and ranchers and even factory workers who depend on that food being sold. It's about the truckers and the retailers. It's about the small town communities that depend on farmers to bring capital out of the city so that they can run schools, court houses, cafes, small stores, and churches.
What I'm saying is that every government handout affects a multitude of people. The money that pays for poor people to have opportunity is the money that keeps the wide foundations of our entire economy stable. No matter how much you personally feel the beneficiaries didn't deserve it, if you take away that money, you are taking away our foundation.
Maybe you don't want welfare to be part of the foundations of our society. I don't particularly like it either. It hasn't always been this way. But the foundations we had have disappeared due to wage stagnation and the unequal distribution of the benefits of technology and automation. A lot of that foundation has also been shipped abroad, where it is slowly building the societies of places like China and Bangladesh. We've been left with no advantage but our own prosperity, and if that prosperity should falter - if our poorest people were forced to drop out of the consumer market completely - the bottom will drop out of our society and everyone will suffer. Especially the hard-working middle class, when our employers faced with dwindling markets and therefore shrinking revenues.
Let's advance the conversation beyond the righteous anger many people feel about government handouts. Clearly there are outliers to be angry about, whether or not they are representative of beneficiaries or would be worth throwing out of the programs. But what is our solution? How do we build a society where our poorest people can still find a job that keeps them from needing government handouts? We have to look into our past. We have to look at what brought our poverty down from 30% to 15%, as you said. What happened in that time? A number of things: we had a high minimum wage (relative to now); we funded millions of WWII vet
Ooh, the food stamp boogeyman is going to steal all our money. How much does it really cost to eat roasted rabbit with butter tarragon, and sweet potatoes? Well...I don't know, because I've never seen rabbit for sale and have always assumed it's the sort of meat that you have to hunt (or breed) yourself if you really want it. Which most people wouldn't from what I've heard. Eating good food is a function of how well you can cook more than how much money you can spend on it, unless you're eating out which food stamps does not cover.
Also, it shouldn't be too incredible for a college graduate with a practical degree to feel entitled to a $80k job. Such people work hard for several years, taking on enormous debt, with the promise that they'll never be able to get a high paying job without doing so. But the entitlement is a problem, because the job market doesn't reward people for their skills and hard work. It mostly rewards them for the connections, and after that their good fortune.
You say 50 years and $22T+. It's true we've wasted a lot of money and failed to find the best solution. But every attempted solution we've had was a compromise. Social reform is big and complicated and takes a grand vision, and when you take a grand vision and cut little bits and pieces out of it so that Congress will pass it, that compromise may just completely break what would have made the vision work. So what's the solution? We take our best ideas and try them out in controlled environments. Do science with regional policy changes. Then take what we've learned and apply it at the national level. No more of this ideological horse shit.
Poverty is not exclusively a minority problem, yet that perception heavily colors any discussion of the issue.
This much is unfortunately very true. Ever since the civil rights movement it has become politically incorrect to talk about keeping the n*****s down, but that won't keep some people from trying anyway. So the racists have just gotten used to saying "poor people" to actually mean "black people", which is why unfortunately the more cynical and fraud-fearing political element in our society (the Republicans, based a lot on southern and rural communities with histories of racial bigotry) tends to ideologically oppose the entire concept of welfare instead of trying to figure out how to make it work. Democrats might be too trusting (and also too ideological) to make it work right, but they're usually the only ones trying.
It's one thing to make observations like you have. It's another thing completely to solve problems based on those observations. How do you expect to get people to stop having children they can't afford? Somebody who can barely afford to keep themselves in a home and not hungry usually doesn't "choose" to have a child. It happens by accident. What are you going to do about it? Go hand out free condoms?
Further, an "unquenchable drive to improve oneself" is a great character trait that most people don't have. What is going to give somebody that kind of drive? The belief that you can lift yourself out of poverty is actually statistically very unlikely, and human beings are surprisingly good at perceiving obvious trends like that. The people with that kind of drive are actually ignoring the reality of their situation and believing something that hasn't been true for anyone around them - that they can actually climb the social ladder and make a better life for their future. And just think about the logical leaps one has to make from "work really hard to improve my situation" to "send out hundreds of job applications and hope that one of these benevolent corporate overlords will by some mistake share their wealth with me for anything, anything at all that I am willing to do at this point". Dealing with the job market in this country is so far removed from anything that our animal instincts can recognize as contributing to our survival that it just beats most of us down into depressed wage slaves.
around here "public housing" means you go rent a normal apartment, and the gov't pays for the rent (a gov't agency sends a check every month to your landlord)
That sounds like a great way to waste taxpayer money for the benefit of the few people with enough capital to live off their investments (in this case real estate) and exert their influence on local politics. Building and maintaining an apartment complex, especially one with no need to collect rent, would be a lot cheaper than paying for the rent and multiple landlord overhead of the multitude of apartment complexes around. Most cities need more low income housing too, because low- to middle-income renters are being priced out of the market all over the country (although in San Francisco they have it pretty bad and they have a scapegoat).
Where's the will for our government to do its job the best way possible? Is it just a cynical given now that the only way we can do good anymore is if a special interest gets their cut?
Does not affect Drupal 6. Not sure about Drupal 8, but if you're concerned about the security of your website run on beta releases you're doing it wrong.
Tip to moderators: There is no mod category "Sad". The best response is to ignore it, because then those who can recognize a completely unmoderated post will appreciate the metahumor.
It's not racist to observe that African Americans are much more likely to be impoverished than whites. That's a fact. What is racist is to suggest they somehow deserve it.
Or is the dirty little secret that some groups truly are incapable of taking care of themselves?
Well, my 2-year-old certainly can't take care of himself. If I were unemployed and homeless, I definitely could not provide him with the same quality of education or prepare him to afford to take care of himself any better than I could. And then he would grow up without learning how not to be unemployed and homeless and have his own 2-year-old he couldn't prepare for society. Your college degrees may not give you the income you deserve for them, but you underestimate yourself. You can read and write, you can probably do basic arithmetic and algebra, and you probably believe you are at least capable of making a middle class income and contributing to society. Ask an inner city high school teacher sometime how many of their students are at least that capable, and what is life like at home for those who are not.
You can pay taxes to give the poor public housing and opportunities to train for work (like having access to Wikipedia et al). Or you can pay taxes to arrest the poor when they start stealing the things they can't afford (like food), pay taxes to clean up the dead bodies from drug overdose and gang violence, and pay taxes for the grand public housing scheme known as our overcrowded prison system. Or you can pay taxes and your immortal soul to round them all up and kill them every few generations (and hope you don't get rounded up when this happens). You may think for some idiotic reason that being nice is morally the wrong thing to do, but being an asshole may just cost you more in taxes than it does to give the poor the same entitlements you got from your parents.
Slashdot Mirror
"Averages about $1200", and "You could get"? Every single machine I see over $1200 is an old Mac Pro; current models are over $3000 as they use server-type processors and ECC memory. And you "could get" a five year old 2.66Ghz quad core Mac Pro from that link at $739, which is...less than two thirds of $1200. Or a three year old 2.5Ghz quad core iMac at $799.
If the price still puts you off, you don't have to buy into that market. But don't complain that these things keep their value; in most products (like cars), that means it was a solid, reliable product, unlike certain computers I've bought that died after only a year. I dare you to find non-Macs from 5 years ago that sell anywhere near $799 now.
The Mac chiclet keyboard is vastly superior (in my opinion) to most other laptop or OEM-supplied keyboards. There are many better keyboards, but not that the computer manufacturer will give you with the machine. The trackpad on laptops used to be several orders of magnitude better than anything available on a laptop, but Windows laptops (especially those certified for Windows 8) have been copying it for a while now so the difference is probably negligible. As for a mouse, you can buy a three button wired mouse for $5 if you really don't like the option of a touch-enabled "Magic Mouse", a trackpad, or the "Apple Mouse" that I think has middle button support (but maybe only if you use a third party configuration tool?) for its 360-degree scroll ball.
I don't blame you for having higher standards, but unless you're buying a gaming computer anything else you could buy comes with cheaper, crappier stuff than Apple's "style over usability" keyboard and mouse. The way I see it you'd be spending extra money either way unless you just use your existing keyboard and mouse, which you'd have to do anyway for the Mac Mini (which is your only Mac option under $899).
First let's say that the explanation in the article makes some pretty weird alterations to the trolley problem to come to its conclusion. So first we have the problem that the trolley problem is not an adequate measure of whether a robot can "correctly decide to kill humans". From there it goes through some weird permutations until there is a decidedly "correct" solution to the trolley problem: a computer program designed by a known villain is about to be installed on a switch that could make a decision to injure maintenance workers. And since another computer program cannot determine whether the first program will ever halt, it cannot always make the right decision.
The flaw is right there in the summary:
One curious corollary is that if the human brain is a Turing machine, then humans can never decide this issue either, a point that the authors deliberately steer well clear of.
In what way could anybody always prove that a piece of computer software is safe and correct? Let's assume that the hardware is safe and an expert in machine code is available to make the determination. Could that expert ever make the right choice? Of course. But could the expert always make the right choice? The Halting Problem doesn't state that a program can never determine if a program will halt. It only states that a program cannot always determine if any program will halt. A machine could use exactly the same methods available to us humans (recognizing certain design patterns, certain known logical structures with known outcomes) to usually make the right choice, but could not always know what the right choice is. The disconnect that might make one think a computer is somehow less capable of making this decision is in believing that a human being can make a better determination. A human can't. If the program is written in a strange or obscure manner, the human can't know what will happen either. And that's where we encounter the halting problem: you can't always know for sure without running the program, and if the program never halts (or never makes a bad judgement), that's not proof positive that it doesn't halt (or is safe).
Ultimately the real "flaw" is the way this result has been picked up. The headline "Halting Problem Proves That Lethal Robots Cannot Correctly Decide To Kill Humans" is a lot more sensational than the title of the paper, "Logical Limitations to Machine Ethics / with Consequences to Lethal Autonomous Weapons". The Medium headline and article claim that this paper "proves" something about the capabilities of "lethal robots", when all it really does is prove limitations of machine ethics. It isn't really about lethal weapons; based on this result, an algorithm cannot always make the morally correct choice, regardless of whether or not that choice involve killing. And the reason? Because sometimes, making the morally correct choice requires information that is provably impossible to always obtain.
ISIS hates everyone and is a threat to everyone. Why should America have to lead the charge? Because we're the only ones willing to? ISIS is a graver threat to European countries who are content to keep their hands clean. ISIS is an even graver threat to other Middle Eastern countries like Turkey and Iran, whose agendas are different from our own and whose actions may provoke us against them so they aren't going to want to make themselves a target. You see? America being the first to act in every military situation makes everyone else back off. And before you say "America, fuck yeah!" remember who is leading our country. Do you want Obama to be the only person in the world capable of waging war on every single threat that comes along? What about the next president? And the one after that? Even if you like every single president this country is ever going to have, that is simply too much responsibility to weigh on one person's shoulders. Our Congress won't even exercise its Constitutional mandate to decide when our country goes to war.
If we are ever going to advance as a society, we need to get past this "world superpower" phase. America must not be in the business of policing the entire world. It is extremely costly and it makes us a target. Why do you think ISIS is beheading Americans? They desperately want us to lead a unilateral attack, because they know that if they can goad us to strike alone then no one else will join us. They will be able to recruit even more people to fight demon America, the nation that fancies itself a greater power than God. And don't make the mistake of thinking that this is a purely military conflict. This is ideological. This is cultural. This will not end until those that would aid ISIS know that it isn't just their greatest nemesis American that is fighting them. The whole world must be arrayed against them. They must fear that the forces against them are assembled not by their enemies, but by God himself.
If the entire government became Libertarian today, it would take less than 10 years for corporations to take total control of governance and we'd have just as much (or probably more) squashing of individual liberties, but no longer any accountability to voters. There are many powerful players in society and I'm not one of them. Does it make me a crony capitalist or a welfare queen when I decide I'd rather the power go to those I can vote out of office than those I can't?
Hey, don't accuse me of hijacking the discussion. I wasn't the one who asked if an SD card bought from unreliable sources could install malware without autorun:
Does anybody know if there are any known firmware issues with SD or other non-USB flash cards that could effectively allow a foreign seller/distributor to place malicious software on my Android phone or laptop simply on insertion of the device with autoplay turned off?
That was the OP, not me. I just wanted to praise queazocotal for actually answering the OP's question.
I'm not asserting anything about SD cards. I don't myself know how dangerous a maliciously crafted one could be. That's why I thought I'd wade into the comment section and see who does. Apparently more people are interested in answering a different question.
There's a big difference between "it will lose the data you put on it" and "it will infect your computer and destroy the data you put everywhere". If I wanted to conduct secure transactions with my bank over the internet, it doesn't really matter (much) if my computer is running off of an unreliable hard drive. It might crash in the middle, but I probably won't lose money over it. But if the hard drive infected the operating system, the infection could undermine the security of my transactions and drain my bank account. When we apply that logic to a piece of removable storage instead of the main system drive, an unreliable flash drive or SD card won't crash your computer (unless you're using it for memory paging), but an insecure one could still drain my bank account.
I won't say that everyone knows the risks of faulty storage coming from east Asia. But the OP has chimed in in reply saying that he understands the risks and bought it anyway. So would everyone please stop saying the same damn thing over and over again and take a look at what is really the much more interesting question of whether SD cards are a meaningful attack vector with autorun disabled?
Mod parent up! This is the only informative on-topic comment I've seen on the entire page so far! Why is that if someone asks "is it safe", everyone wants to chime in and instead "it isn't real"? That is an answer to a different question than the question that was asked.
Execution-time knowledge of the generic type used in the collection is good enough reason to use C#. If you really want the features from Java, you can always port them as anything that might be superior is user-space code, even if it's part of the standard library.
Once software is open source, the open source version can never be closed again. If Microsoft made .Net 4.5 open source and closed the source again in .Net 5, 4.5 would still be completely open because open source licenses would permit existing licensees to redistribute the software under their own license terms. That's assuming they use a real open source license, of course, but if they try to manufacture a revokable open source license then the EFF's lawyers will know, it will be another story on Slashdot, and they will gain absolutely nothing.
But then I suppose that "supported" is different from "legally available". But any open source project can pull support, and most don't have great support to begin with, so it's a moot point.
[T]here is a fine line between collaboration and cheating in computer science
No Mercy
All introductory CS students are born with an intuitive and always-correct understanding of when they cross the "fine line"! They have all been subject to rigorous academic standards for plagiarism, right? So they all know exactly what is expected of them on day 1 of their life in college!
You're free to wonder as long as you try to come up with something that works better. And just cheaper isn't better; if all you can do is spend less everyone will be justified in expecting it to do worse. Figure out how to make society better, regardless of whether you think the recipients of the help really need it.
I find your boogeyman treatment of art and artists to be highly distasteful. Whatever caricature you've dreamt up is not representative of the majority of people receiving food stamps. Furthermore, funding those truly in need while preventing the kind of excess you're afraid of would take more government bureaucracy, resulting in more wasted taxpayer money. The beauty of the food stamps program is that it is cheap to administer while still mostly affecting only the people that really need it.
We as one of the greatest civilizations to ever exist have more than enough food to feed everyone. Do you have a problem with people studying the arts? Do you think it's wasteful to learn how to design pleasant visuals and work/living spaces? Is it wrong for people to want to learn how to make a difference to socially disadvantaged people? Are the arts not our only lasting message as a culture, our greatest means to reveal the realities of our own humanity and our generation in a way that informs the future and hopefully allows them to build on our successes and failures?
But even more than the fact that we can and should support those people who want to spend their lives carrying on our culture for the future is the fact that food stamps don't just benefit the people who receive them. When the government buys somebody food, that person gets food, and the food seller/maker gets paid. Agriculture is the foundation of every society and it becomes more and more difficult for our farmers to maintain their lifestyle with every passing year. Food stamps are one way that the government supports farmers by making sure that when tough times come, they don't lose huge parts of their market. It's not just about the starving children that we hope to feed (and the other hungry mouths we feed along the way). It's about the food in our markets that would otherwise waste away and be thrown away. It's about the hard working farmers and ranchers and even factory workers who depend on that food being sold. It's about the truckers and the retailers. It's about the small town communities that depend on farmers to bring capital out of the city so that they can run schools, court houses, cafes, small stores, and churches.
What I'm saying is that every government handout affects a multitude of people. The money that pays for poor people to have opportunity is the money that keeps the wide foundations of our entire economy stable. No matter how much you personally feel the beneficiaries didn't deserve it, if you take away that money, you are taking away our foundation.
Maybe you don't want welfare to be part of the foundations of our society. I don't particularly like it either. It hasn't always been this way. But the foundations we had have disappeared due to wage stagnation and the unequal distribution of the benefits of technology and automation. A lot of that foundation has also been shipped abroad, where it is slowly building the societies of places like China and Bangladesh. We've been left with no advantage but our own prosperity, and if that prosperity should falter - if our poorest people were forced to drop out of the consumer market completely - the bottom will drop out of our society and everyone will suffer. Especially the hard-working middle class, when our employers faced with dwindling markets and therefore shrinking revenues.
Let's advance the conversation beyond the righteous anger many people feel about government handouts. Clearly there are outliers to be angry about, whether or not they are representative of beneficiaries or would be worth throwing out of the programs. But what is our solution? How do we build a society where our poorest people can still find a job that keeps them from needing government handouts? We have to look into our past. We have to look at what brought our poverty down from 30% to 15%, as you said. What happened in that time? A number of things: we had a high minimum wage (relative to now); we funded millions of WWII vet
Ooh, the food stamp boogeyman is going to steal all our money. How much does it really cost to eat roasted rabbit with butter tarragon, and sweet potatoes? Well...I don't know, because I've never seen rabbit for sale and have always assumed it's the sort of meat that you have to hunt (or breed) yourself if you really want it. Which most people wouldn't from what I've heard. Eating good food is a function of how well you can cook more than how much money you can spend on it, unless you're eating out which food stamps does not cover.
Also, it shouldn't be too incredible for a college graduate with a practical degree to feel entitled to a $80k job. Such people work hard for several years, taking on enormous debt, with the promise that they'll never be able to get a high paying job without doing so. But the entitlement is a problem, because the job market doesn't reward people for their skills and hard work. It mostly rewards them for the connections, and after that their good fortune.
You say 50 years and $22T+. It's true we've wasted a lot of money and failed to find the best solution. But every attempted solution we've had was a compromise. Social reform is big and complicated and takes a grand vision, and when you take a grand vision and cut little bits and pieces out of it so that Congress will pass it, that compromise may just completely break what would have made the vision work. So what's the solution? We take our best ideas and try them out in controlled environments. Do science with regional policy changes. Then take what we've learned and apply it at the national level. No more of this ideological horse shit.
Poverty is not exclusively a minority problem, yet that perception heavily colors any discussion of the issue.
This much is unfortunately very true. Ever since the civil rights movement it has become politically incorrect to talk about keeping the n*****s down, but that won't keep some people from trying anyway. So the racists have just gotten used to saying "poor people" to actually mean "black people", which is why unfortunately the more cynical and fraud-fearing political element in our society (the Republicans, based a lot on southern and rural communities with histories of racial bigotry) tends to ideologically oppose the entire concept of welfare instead of trying to figure out how to make it work. Democrats might be too trusting (and also too ideological) to make it work right, but they're usually the only ones trying.
It's one thing to make observations like you have. It's another thing completely to solve problems based on those observations. How do you expect to get people to stop having children they can't afford? Somebody who can barely afford to keep themselves in a home and not hungry usually doesn't "choose" to have a child. It happens by accident. What are you going to do about it? Go hand out free condoms?
Further, an "unquenchable drive to improve oneself" is a great character trait that most people don't have. What is going to give somebody that kind of drive? The belief that you can lift yourself out of poverty is actually statistically very unlikely, and human beings are surprisingly good at perceiving obvious trends like that. The people with that kind of drive are actually ignoring the reality of their situation and believing something that hasn't been true for anyone around them - that they can actually climb the social ladder and make a better life for their future. And just think about the logical leaps one has to make from "work really hard to improve my situation" to "send out hundreds of job applications and hope that one of these benevolent corporate overlords will by some mistake share their wealth with me for anything, anything at all that I am willing to do at this point". Dealing with the job market in this country is so far removed from anything that our animal instincts can recognize as contributing to our survival that it just beats most of us down into depressed wage slaves.
around here "public housing" means you go rent a normal apartment, and the gov't pays for the rent (a gov't agency sends a check every month to your landlord)
That sounds like a great way to waste taxpayer money for the benefit of the few people with enough capital to live off their investments (in this case real estate) and exert their influence on local politics. Building and maintaining an apartment complex, especially one with no need to collect rent, would be a lot cheaper than paying for the rent and multiple landlord overhead of the multitude of apartment complexes around. Most cities need more low income housing too, because low- to middle-income renters are being priced out of the market all over the country (although in San Francisco they have it pretty bad and they have a scapegoat).
Where's the will for our government to do its job the best way possible? Is it just a cynical given now that the only way we can do good anymore is if a special interest gets their cut?
Does not affect Drupal 6. Not sure about Drupal 8, but if you're concerned about the security of your website run on beta releases you're doing it wrong.
Tip to moderators: There is no mod category "Sad". The best response is to ignore it, because then those who can recognize a completely unmoderated post will appreciate the metahumor.
Be smart, look at your income, calculate if you can afford to have children or not.
Do they know how?
Or even worse decide to have multiple children without a two-parent home with stable income.
How many teenagers (or emotionally immature adults) do you know that would decline sex if there wasn't a condom handy?
Having children is not a right but an earned responsibility.
Tell that to your penis or uterus. I'm sure it will stop trying once it realizes you haven't earned it yet.
subsidizing the millions in this country that have excess children
Isn't that the same thing as subsidizing the millions of excess children who have bum parents?
If I'm paying for their housing, clothes, food, and now internet, I want a complete say in how those kids are raised.
Then become a foster parent. Or were you kidding when you volunteered to take on all that responsibility?
It's not racist to observe that African Americans are much more likely to be impoverished than whites. That's a fact. What is racist is to suggest they somehow deserve it.
Or is the dirty little secret that some groups truly are incapable of taking care of themselves?
Well, my 2-year-old certainly can't take care of himself. If I were unemployed and homeless, I definitely could not provide him with the same quality of education or prepare him to afford to take care of himself any better than I could. And then he would grow up without learning how not to be unemployed and homeless and have his own 2-year-old he couldn't prepare for society. Your college degrees may not give you the income you deserve for them, but you underestimate yourself. You can read and write, you can probably do basic arithmetic and algebra, and you probably believe you are at least capable of making a middle class income and contributing to society. Ask an inner city high school teacher sometime how many of their students are at least that capable, and what is life like at home for those who are not.
If other posts here on Slashdot are any indication, "Mr. Councilman" is just as likely to lose political points by supporting the poor.
You can pay taxes to give the poor public housing and opportunities to train for work (like having access to Wikipedia et al). Or you can pay taxes to arrest the poor when they start stealing the things they can't afford (like food), pay taxes to clean up the dead bodies from drug overdose and gang violence, and pay taxes for the grand public housing scheme known as our overcrowded prison system. Or you can pay taxes and your immortal soul to round them all up and kill them every few generations (and hope you don't get rounded up when this happens). You may think for some idiotic reason that being nice is morally the wrong thing to do, but being an asshole may just cost you more in taxes than it does to give the poor the same entitlements you got from your parents.