If you think that excluding people based on race and gender is a good thing, you are definitely a republican.
Fixed that for you. I never said they should be picked based on these things. Just that the expectation that politicians ought to be white males is itself evidence of unequal opportunity in the political sphere, and nation as a whole. We should pick the best person for the job, and the demographic makeup of the country suggests that best person would be someone besides a white male fairly often.
I'm not a fan of either of their politics, but I do think either one would be vastly better than what we ended up with. I also think that it suggests the nation is providing more equal opportunity since you see both parties now running non-white, non-male political candidates - while the GP seems to be suggesting that this is a sign of moral failings by the political establishment.
The current US Senate, for example, is 83% male. It is 96% white.
None of that contradicts what I said, and it actually supports it. You believe that it is somehow a mark against democrats that they keep running females and nonwhites for political office. On the contrary, a party that isn't running candidates in proportions that roughly reflect its general demographic makeup is failing at representing its constituents.
My, your admiration for the infallible goodness of scientists touches my heart but you're making a claim without any substantiation.
It's amusing to me that you interpret my claim that "scientists aren't corrupt psychopaths" as a claim that scientists have infallible goodness. I LITERALLY say that scientists aren't infallible just one sentence before. You demonstrate my entire point - that the political interests either paint scientists as divine prophets of the apocalypse or as scheming Illuminati manipulating the world to their nefarious ends. In reality, they are just people trying to show up and do a job.
Something that more slashdotters can relate to: Climate scientists are like the IT department. They tell the management (us) that there is a huge, gaping security hole in our system architecture. It will take a lot of manpower and a serious commitment to fix. We have the choice to either do nothing and take our chances, or build a better system that will reduce risk. But the sign of terrible management is when, instead of taking responsibility for a decision, they claim that the IT department doesn't understand computers.
Exactly. If it was a powerful enough metaphor to aid in the discovery of the concept in the first place, it is probably going to be among the better teaching tools as well. I didn't really understand orbits until I saw Newton's diagram of the cannonballs of progressively higher velocity shooting around the earth - but that one image made the entire concept clear for me.
I think more educators should use the original diagrams and thought experiments because of the historical significance, too - it's pretty neat to look at the same exact drawings and think through the same exact patterns of thought that were used decades or centuries before, when the ideas were brand new.
No, it just means that the best representative will be one who is maybe one standard deviation above average capability, but then chooses advisors that are yet another standard deviation above that. That way, you get someone who can relate to a substantial amount of the country and articulate goals and priorities in terms that are broadly palatable. At the same time, that representative gets ideas from the top experts in respective fields.
If you think about it, that describes a good chunk of the best leaders, across business, government, military, or anything else. You want someone with broad appeal, who is smarter than the average bear, but who also has enough humility to surround himself/herself with far more intelligent people.
I doubt the Democratic party will have another all white male ticket again...
Why is it that important? Based on the demographic makeup of the U.S., you would expect a ticket of 2 white males to be fairly rare.
Whites are about 73% of the U.S., going by the 2015 census data, which means that if all things were equal, the chance of both nominees being white would only be about 54%. Then, the chance of that ticket being 2 males, rather than male/female, female/male, or female/female, is only 25%. So that means that in an equal society with the demographic makeup of ours, you would expect two white males to be on a ticket only 13.5% of the time.
Running candidates that aren't white males doesn't look very provocative to me - it looks more like what naturally happens when you stop wrongly disqualifying non-white, non-males. The republicans had Ben Carson, Sarah Palin, and Carly Fiorina as serious contenders, after all.
So the real problem right now is...there is no solution. Nothing even remotely viable. As I've said before, I'm not going to sit around in the dark to stop climate change.
Reducing uncertainty in the forecast is a meaningful step - how do you prepare for an event that might be the worst extinction event in the history of the planet, or might be nothing to worry about? That huge temperature range contributes to the lack of clarity in the discussion, so bringing it more certainly into the range of "a big problem, but not the apocalypse" is a massive and concrete step towards reasonable solutions.
And really, the rest of your argument amounts to fatalism. I reject that. While the current geopolitical situation is deeply frustrating, it ALWAYS has been. Only about 50 years ago, segregation seemed like an intractable problem. 30 years ago, the ozone hole seemed unstoppable, until everybody in the world worked together and fixed it. Things can be fixed, and it really doesn't take anything magical to do it - it just requires people to take some responsibility and stop whining.
The climate guys can only really tell us some of those consequences - the others are dependent on political, social and financial factors.
That small 'correction' aside, great post!
Fair enough, and I agree with you on that point. It's not the job of the climate scientists to fix things, just to tell us honestly how bad things seem to be, while providing all the caveats about uncertainty and probabilities and ways to be wrong. Overall, I think they are doing pretty damned well there and it's a shame that there is so much shooting of the messengers on this topic.
Some simple thought experiments, exactly the same as those that Einstein used, would be a great place to start. Specifically, using train cars, and lights, and clocks, and bombs. The most fundamental thing to understand is that WHEN something happened depends on your perspective. That's the fundamental idea, and if you can help your kid appreciate why cause and effect can appear to be different for the same event, that will get him interested.
I think it will also keep his interest to focus on the provocative aspects of that. Relativity DOESN'T behave the same way that the normal world does, and that's intriguing to people of any age that take the time to think about it.
I didn't put those words in your mouth, I'm just telling you how they come across outside of your own head.
Tell me, please, which groups are the "cultural peas" and which groups are the "cultural carrots"? Did it not occur to you how much your language mirrors principles like "separate but equal"?
You can be offended and call me names all you want, but that doesn't make you look any less wrong.
And I'd still love to hear you address my original point, which is that Trumpism is incompatible with the teachings of Christ.
Imagine that it's your job to tell the future. An amazing amount of money, and possibly lives depend on your forecast. Your tools are math and temperature measurements.
That's the situation that climate scientists find themselves in. I used to do some comparatively very simple modeling of satellite electronics to show that system data integrity and uptime would be satisfactory in the midst of cosmic radiation - and in the whole field of reliability and radiation effects, there's an absurd amount of handwaving and slop. I was regularly dealing with uncertainty on the order of 10x-100x in the error rates of some components. Thankfully, in most cases you can afford to apply tons of margin to your estimate to cover all of those unknowns.
Climate scientists have it much harder. The analysis is far more complex and much more sensitive - there's almost no room for error. The measurements are imperfect, the models are incomplete, and uncertainty abounds. However, the trend is there. What are we going to do, bury our heads in the sand and hope for the best?
Instead, it seems like we should listen to the smartest people in the world on this topic, who have devoted their lives to it. We should applaud the advances like this, which make incremental progress towards a better understanding. That same process of incremental advancement of human knowledge has given us the most advanced civilization in human history.
Most importantly, we should especially celebrate this kind of advance, which reduces uncertainty in the forecast, because that's the real key to reducing the political hysteria, and to bringing sanity into the discussion.
Climate scientists are just normal people. They aren't infallible. They also aren't corrupt psychopaths. They have an impossible job in front of them. And in the absence of a crystal ball, they are the very best resource we have available for figuring out what the hell we should do about all this.
We would all do better to listen to what they are actually saying, and stop reflexively misrepresenting them to suit our preconceptions.
1. Some cultures are better than others. Keeping the cultural peas separated from the carrots is kind of the point of having this thing called a "country" and "borders".
Careful, your white supremacy is showing. Are you intentionally trying to promote a return to segregation, or is that just a coincidence?
Illegal immigrants are [criminals/freeloaders/here against the law]. That's not fair.
I find this whiny, and it really just supports my contention - Trump's whole focus is on people "outside of one's own tribe", and how they are the problem. My central point isn't to question why Trump supporters voted for him. It's to say that they are Christians in name only.
Jesus was an ethnic minority and a refugee, born to parents fleeing regional genocide (Herod killing the Jew's male children). Even if Trump's incoherent rambling about immigrants had any validity (which it doesn't), it would still be utterly hypocritical of Christians to support him and his policies. Jesus was known for associating with the poor, the criminals, and the outcasts of society. He preached constantly about forgiving and about sacrificing your own comfort for the sake of helping people in need.
We can also look at history and see a pattern of great evil being perpetrated with these very same arguments - trying to rationalize other groups as morally deficient or culturally inferior is a tactic used by segregationists, white supremacists, Nazis, and genocidal regimes. Christians IN PARTICULAR should reject this kind of ideology in any form.
Really, though, I can argue all day that anti-immigrant, anti-refugee, anti-minority policies are not compatible with Christ's teachings, but I'll just let him speak for himself.
Matthew 25:31-46 31 “But when the Son of Man[a] comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, then he will sit upon his glorious throne. 32 All the nations[b] will be gathered in his presence, and he will separate the people as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats. 33 He will place the sheep at his right hand and the goats at his left.
34 “Then the King will say to those on his right, ‘Come, you who are blessed by my Father, inherit the Kingdom prepared for you from the creation of the world. 35 For I was hungry, and you fed me. I was thirsty, and you gave me a drink. I was a stranger, and you invited me into your home. 36 I was naked, and you gave me clothing. I was sick, and you cared for me. I was in prison, and you visited me.’
37 “Then these righteous ones will reply, ‘Lord, when did we ever see you hungry and feed you? Or thirsty and give you something to drink? 38 Or a stranger and show you hospitality? Or naked and give you clothing? 39 When did we ever see you sick or in prison and visit you?’
40 “And the King will say, ‘I tell you the truth, when you did it to one of the least of these my brothers and sisters,[c] you were doing it to me!’
41 “Then the King will turn to those on the left and say, ‘Away with you, you cursed ones, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his demons.[d] 42 For I was hungry, and you didn’t feed me. I was thirsty, and you didn’t give me a drink. 43 I was a stranger, and you didn’t invite me into your home. I was naked, and you didn’t give me clothing. I was sick and in prison, and you didn’t visit me.’
44 “Then they will reply, ‘Lord, when did we ever see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or naked or sick or in prison, and not help you?’
45 “And he will answer, ‘I tell you the truth, when you refused to help the least of these my brothers and sisters, you were refusing to help me.’
46 “And they will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous will go into eternal life.”
Sadly, empathy for tribes outside of one's own has not historically been one of humanity's bright points.
True. And that's why Jesus and Christianity have lasted for thousands of years. The irony is that those who try to teach such things are hated the most, especially by those who (again, ironically) think they are so smart.
I know of nobody who hates empathetic Christians that are living out their faith by helping the poor and needy - but I know lots of people that can't stand judgmental, anti-intellectual evangelicals. Most of the faith has been co-opted by conservative political interests at this point. A majority of U.S. Christians voted for Trump, who ran on a campaign of fearing "tribes outside of one's own". Those people don't deserve to call themselves Christians.
The problem that I see is that loyalty has swapped. Where Senators and Representatives should have their loyalty in the following order. To their State, to their Country finally to their Party. Their loyalty seems to show they are more loyal to their party, then to the country and finally to the State they represent.
I agree that loyalty isn't where it should be, but it seems to me that Senators and Representatives are often loyal in this order: Campaign donors, Noisy Extremists, Party, State, Country
Campaign donors should be nowhere on the list, especially because they can represent foreign interests or corporate interests that are in opposition to the interests of most of the population (state or country).
The CRITICAL difference there is that you and I are not having money taken from OUR earnings to support them.
Doesn't really matter. Money isn't wealth, it's a representation of wealth - taxes are not about funding govt, they are about destroying currency to keep inflation under control. This is clearly the case because the government can (and often does) create money out of nothing. Keeping government spending at parity with government revenue is mostly just a convenient way to make sure you aren't erring too far on the side of creating or destroying currency. The actual question is whether your working populace is productive enough to support your nonworking populace (including children, retirees, the disabled, and the unemployed, wealthy or no). This is also obviously true, because a society made up entirely of retirees could not function in reality, even if all of those retirees had theoretical pensions that would provide income for life.
We already have the basic answer from extant welfare programs.
We do? There's almost nothing in economics where we have "the answer". There are lots of cases where we have some evidence one way or the other, but even then it's usually fuzzy. I'd love to see any evidence you have in support of your views - and in any case, experiments are useful, and UBI is different in substantial ways from other kinds of welfare so the result may be different.
I simply resent having a portion of what I earn taken by the government and redistributed to people who have no intention of working...
Why do you resent it if it saves you money in the long run? There are studies showing it's cheaper to provide homes for the homeless than to it is to deal with the load they put on the ER, police, legal system, and jails. We should choose policies based on evidence, not feelings.
Police and fire departments are NOT the same thing as having a portion of the money taken from me to house, clothe and feed a bunch of freeloaders in idle "luxury". And you KNOW this.
You're simply being disingenuous.
No, I'm really not. We pay for firefighters because it's basically a public insurance policy in case of a house fire. It also prevents a fire in one house from spreading to others and causing more harm overall. It's in our collective best interest.
UBI and/or welfare are no different. They are collective insurance policies in the case of income failure. They prevent poverty from causing starvation, homelessness, and crimes of desperation. They, also, are in our collective best interest.
It seems to me that the only moral objection to this comes from a misrepresentation of the situation as one individual stealing from another. Taxation is NOT theft - unless you agree that taxes going to the fire department are also theft. If you are going to be an ideologue, at least make your ideology consistent.
Do you object to paying for police and fire departments? If your house has never caught fire, tax money is TAKEN FROM YOU to save a bunch of freeloaders who have house fires. Certainly that must offend you as well?
As to the 'people given the option WILL DO NOTHING' - well that's 100% provable lie. We don't need the study to know this.
If it's a "100%" provable "lie", then PROVE IT.
J.K Rowling was on welfare when she wrote her first Harry Potter book. The vast majority of the open source software ecosystem is written by volunteers. There are plenty of seniors who choose not to retire at the soonest possible moment, because they enjoy their work. Any trust fund kiddie that actually started a business or went to work doing something is evidence that people will try to do useful work even if they aren't driven by the fear of homelessness. What's more, there's actually evidence that monetary compensation can REDUCE people's productivity in highly creative / intellectual situations, and destroy their motivation entirely in others - the "carrot/stick" model of human motivation is absurdly simplistic and inapplicable in many cases.
We should be asking different questions. Will some people work even if they can survive without work? Certainly, because there are already lots of people doing that every day. Will some people lounge around? Certainly, because there are already lots of people doing that thanks to a trust fund, welfare, or enabling family members. So the real question is, will UBI cause more loafing (some people who don't want to work but do it to survive), less loafing (people who want to work but are disincentivized somehow), or will it cause no change at all?
And even more fundamental - is the real goal of society to minimize loafing? Why does it matter if there are some people who choose not to work? We're more productive as a civilization than ever. Why should we expect all people to continue to work 40 hours per week forever, when advancing technology dramatically changes the need for and value of human labor? More important to me is suffering, freedom, and prosperity - we should create policies to minimize suffering, and maximize freedom and prosperity. This experiment is an important step to determine if UBI is a better policy than alternatives - the researchers are anticipating that it increases employment AND saves money. If it does so, isn't it unequivocally better than the welfare system it proposes to replace?
Lower crime rates means less police and lawyers which means higher unemployment which means increased taxes for those who do work to support whole population getting free money.
Poe's law in a nutshell here. If I'm not mistaken, this is an argument FOR higher crime rates, because crime needs to exist in order to keep police and lawyers employed and keep the tax dollars flowing in. In other words, keep the poor down, crime of desperation is good for business!
I sincerely hope that the parent post is made in jest, but in today's political climate you never can be sure...
. What happens when the municipality gets cash strapped and decides to jack rats up by a factor of 10? At least with Comcast or AT&T, you can switch or even do without. That $50 a month is basically an added tax to a state that already has a high income cost.
Wrong on every level. The internet is just a public option - you are still welcome to choose CenturyLink or Comcast, which have suddenly and mysteriously dropped their rates. The $50 a month is a price you can choose to pay or not, but you would be stupid not to because it's 20x the speed of the competitors at a lower monthly rate.
They stayed the same, but the state income tax got a hike, and is now one of the highest in the US.
It's already been noted, but it's worth saying again that this is a complete and total lie. The state income tax did not get a hike, the state income tax is in no way related to municipal internet anyway (which is funded and operated by a CITY), and the state income tax is lower than the national average.
Thank you for pointing this out. In sports reporting and politics reporting, and apparently now bitcoin reporting, people love to make oddly specific observations to suggest some sort of pattern or narrative in the random noise of outcomes. Flipping a coin 3 times and getting a tails on the 3rd time is not notable, surprising, or meaningful. Same with this "news".
Slashdot Mirror
If you think that excluding people based on race and gender is a good thing, you are definitely a republican.
Fixed that for you. I never said they should be picked based on these things. Just that the expectation that politicians ought to be white males is itself evidence of unequal opportunity in the political sphere, and nation as a whole. We should pick the best person for the job, and the demographic makeup of the country suggests that best person would be someone besides a white male fairly often.
I'm not a fan of either of their politics, but I do think either one would be vastly better than what we ended up with. I also think that it suggests the nation is providing more equal opportunity since you see both parties now running non-white, non-male political candidates - while the GP seems to be suggesting that this is a sign of moral failings by the political establishment.
The current US Senate, for example, is 83% male. It is 96% white.
None of that contradicts what I said, and it actually supports it. You believe that it is somehow a mark against democrats that they keep running females and nonwhites for political office. On the contrary, a party that isn't running candidates in proportions that roughly reflect its general demographic makeup is failing at representing its constituents.
My, your admiration for the infallible goodness of scientists touches my heart but you're making a claim without any substantiation.
It's amusing to me that you interpret my claim that "scientists aren't corrupt psychopaths" as a claim that scientists have infallible goodness. I LITERALLY say that scientists aren't infallible just one sentence before. You demonstrate my entire point - that the political interests either paint scientists as divine prophets of the apocalypse or as scheming Illuminati manipulating the world to their nefarious ends. In reality, they are just people trying to show up and do a job.
Something that more slashdotters can relate to: Climate scientists are like the IT department. They tell the management (us) that there is a huge, gaping security hole in our system architecture. It will take a lot of manpower and a serious commitment to fix. We have the choice to either do nothing and take our chances, or build a better system that will reduce risk. But the sign of terrible management is when, instead of taking responsibility for a decision, they claim that the IT department doesn't understand computers.
Exactly. If it was a powerful enough metaphor to aid in the discovery of the concept in the first place, it is probably going to be among the better teaching tools as well. I didn't really understand orbits until I saw Newton's diagram of the cannonballs of progressively higher velocity shooting around the earth - but that one image made the entire concept clear for me.
I think more educators should use the original diagrams and thought experiments because of the historical significance, too - it's pretty neat to look at the same exact drawings and think through the same exact patterns of thought that were used decades or centuries before, when the ideas were brand new.
No, it just means that the best representative will be one who is maybe one standard deviation above average capability, but then chooses advisors that are yet another standard deviation above that. That way, you get someone who can relate to a substantial amount of the country and articulate goals and priorities in terms that are broadly palatable. At the same time, that representative gets ideas from the top experts in respective fields.
If you think about it, that describes a good chunk of the best leaders, across business, government, military, or anything else. You want someone with broad appeal, who is smarter than the average bear, but who also has enough humility to surround himself/herself with far more intelligent people.
I doubt the Democratic party will have another all white male ticket again...
Why is it that important? Based on the demographic makeup of the U.S., you would expect a ticket of 2 white males to be fairly rare.
Whites are about 73% of the U.S., going by the 2015 census data, which means that if all things were equal, the chance of both nominees being white would only be about 54%. Then, the chance of that ticket being 2 males, rather than male/female, female/male, or female/female, is only 25%. So that means that in an equal society with the demographic makeup of ours, you would expect two white males to be on a ticket only 13.5% of the time.
Running candidates that aren't white males doesn't look very provocative to me - it looks more like what naturally happens when you stop wrongly disqualifying non-white, non-males. The republicans had Ben Carson, Sarah Palin, and Carly Fiorina as serious contenders, after all.
So the real problem right now is...there is no solution. Nothing even remotely viable. As I've said before, I'm not going to sit around in the dark to stop climate change.
Reducing uncertainty in the forecast is a meaningful step - how do you prepare for an event that might be the worst extinction event in the history of the planet, or might be nothing to worry about? That huge temperature range contributes to the lack of clarity in the discussion, so bringing it more certainly into the range of "a big problem, but not the apocalypse" is a massive and concrete step towards reasonable solutions.
And really, the rest of your argument amounts to fatalism. I reject that. While the current geopolitical situation is deeply frustrating, it ALWAYS has been. Only about 50 years ago, segregation seemed like an intractable problem. 30 years ago, the ozone hole seemed unstoppable, until everybody in the world worked together and fixed it. Things can be fixed, and it really doesn't take anything magical to do it - it just requires people to take some responsibility and stop whining.
The climate guys can only really tell us some of those consequences - the others are dependent on political, social and financial factors.
That small 'correction' aside, great post!
Fair enough, and I agree with you on that point. It's not the job of the climate scientists to fix things, just to tell us honestly how bad things seem to be, while providing all the caveats about uncertainty and probabilities and ways to be wrong. Overall, I think they are doing pretty damned well there and it's a shame that there is so much shooting of the messengers on this topic.
Some simple thought experiments, exactly the same as those that Einstein used, would be a great place to start. Specifically, using train cars, and lights, and clocks, and bombs. The most fundamental thing to understand is that WHEN something happened depends on your perspective. That's the fundamental idea, and if you can help your kid appreciate why cause and effect can appear to be different for the same event, that will get him interested.
I think it will also keep his interest to focus on the provocative aspects of that. Relativity DOESN'T behave the same way that the normal world does, and that's intriguing to people of any age that take the time to think about it.
I didn't put those words in your mouth, I'm just telling you how they come across outside of your own head.
Tell me, please, which groups are the "cultural peas" and which groups are the "cultural carrots"? Did it not occur to you how much your language mirrors principles like "separate but equal"?
You can be offended and call me names all you want, but that doesn't make you look any less wrong.
And I'd still love to hear you address my original point, which is that Trumpism is incompatible with the teachings of Christ.
Thats not what I said. I merely made a note that the long-term temperature trend before human action is already upwards.
A very gradual change over thousands of years is not what the concern is - the concern is a sudden increase in the rate of warming.
It's kind of like telling someone not to worry that their house is on fire, because it's July and the weather has been getting hotter for months.
Imagine that it's your job to tell the future. An amazing amount of money, and possibly lives depend on your forecast. Your tools are math and temperature measurements.
That's the situation that climate scientists find themselves in. I used to do some comparatively very simple modeling of satellite electronics to show that system data integrity and uptime would be satisfactory in the midst of cosmic radiation - and in the whole field of reliability and radiation effects, there's an absurd amount of handwaving and slop. I was regularly dealing with uncertainty on the order of 10x-100x in the error rates of some components. Thankfully, in most cases you can afford to apply tons of margin to your estimate to cover all of those unknowns.
Climate scientists have it much harder. The analysis is far more complex and much more sensitive - there's almost no room for error. The measurements are imperfect, the models are incomplete, and uncertainty abounds. However, the trend is there. What are we going to do, bury our heads in the sand and hope for the best?
Instead, it seems like we should listen to the smartest people in the world on this topic, who have devoted their lives to it. We should applaud the advances like this, which make incremental progress towards a better understanding. That same process of incremental advancement of human knowledge has given us the most advanced civilization in human history.
Most importantly, we should especially celebrate this kind of advance, which reduces uncertainty in the forecast, because that's the real key to reducing the political hysteria, and to bringing sanity into the discussion.
Climate scientists are just normal people. They aren't infallible. They also aren't corrupt psychopaths. They have an impossible job in front of them. And in the absence of a crystal ball, they are the very best resource we have available for figuring out what the hell we should do about all this.
We would all do better to listen to what they are actually saying, and stop reflexively misrepresenting them to suit our preconceptions.
Global temperature has risen more than 12 fahrenheit since the ice age. Hunter-gatherers didn't have cars or coal power plants.
Everything was fine up till now, so everything will always be fine, forever.
1. Some cultures are better than others. Keeping the cultural peas separated from the carrots is kind of the point of having this thing called a "country" and "borders".
Careful, your white supremacy is showing. Are you intentionally trying to promote a return to segregation, or is that just a coincidence?
Illegal immigrants are [criminals/freeloaders/here against the law]. That's not fair.
I find this whiny, and it really just supports my contention - Trump's whole focus is on people "outside of one's own tribe", and how they are the problem. My central point isn't to question why Trump supporters voted for him. It's to say that they are Christians in name only.
Jesus was an ethnic minority and a refugee, born to parents fleeing regional genocide (Herod killing the Jew's male children). Even if Trump's incoherent rambling about immigrants had any validity (which it doesn't), it would still be utterly hypocritical of Christians to support him and his policies. Jesus was known for associating with the poor, the criminals, and the outcasts of society. He preached constantly about forgiving and about sacrificing your own comfort for the sake of helping people in need.
We can also look at history and see a pattern of great evil being perpetrated with these very same arguments - trying to rationalize other groups as morally deficient or culturally inferior is a tactic used by segregationists, white supremacists, Nazis, and genocidal regimes. Christians IN PARTICULAR should reject this kind of ideology in any form.
Really, though, I can argue all day that anti-immigrant, anti-refugee, anti-minority policies are not compatible with Christ's teachings, but I'll just let him speak for himself.
Matthew 25:31-46
31 “But when the Son of Man[a] comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, then he will sit upon his glorious throne. 32 All the nations[b] will be gathered in his presence, and he will separate the people as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats. 33 He will place the sheep at his right hand and the goats at his left.
34 “Then the King will say to those on his right, ‘Come, you who are blessed by my Father, inherit the Kingdom prepared for you from the creation of the world. 35 For I was hungry, and you fed me. I was thirsty, and you gave me a drink. I was a stranger, and you invited me into your home. 36 I was naked, and you gave me clothing. I was sick, and you cared for me. I was in prison, and you visited me.’
37 “Then these righteous ones will reply, ‘Lord, when did we ever see you hungry and feed you? Or thirsty and give you something to drink? 38 Or a stranger and show you hospitality? Or naked and give you clothing? 39 When did we ever see you sick or in prison and visit you?’
40 “And the King will say, ‘I tell you the truth, when you did it to one of the least of these my brothers and sisters,[c] you were doing it to me!’
41 “Then the King will turn to those on the left and say, ‘Away with you, you cursed ones, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his demons.[d] 42 For I was hungry, and you didn’t feed me. I was thirsty, and you didn’t give me a drink. 43 I was a stranger, and you didn’t invite me into your home. I was naked, and you didn’t give me clothing. I was sick and in prison, and you didn’t visit me.’
44 “Then they will reply, ‘Lord, when did we ever see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or naked or sick or in prison, and not help you?’
45 “And he will answer, ‘I tell you the truth, when you refused to help the least of these my brothers and sisters, you were refusing to help me.’
46 “And they will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous will go into eternal life.”
Sadly, empathy for tribes outside of one's own has not historically been one of humanity's bright points.
True. And that's why Jesus and Christianity have lasted for thousands of years. The irony is that those who try to teach such things are hated the most, especially by those who (again, ironically) think they are so smart.
I know of nobody who hates empathetic Christians that are living out their faith by helping the poor and needy - but I know lots of people that can't stand judgmental, anti-intellectual evangelicals. Most of the faith has been co-opted by conservative political interests at this point. A majority of U.S. Christians voted for Trump, who ran on a campaign of fearing "tribes outside of one's own". Those people don't deserve to call themselves Christians.
The problem that I see is that loyalty has swapped.
Where Senators and Representatives should have their loyalty in the following order.
To their State, to their Country finally to their Party.
Their loyalty seems to show they are more loyal to their party, then to the country and finally to the State they represent.
I agree that loyalty isn't where it should be, but it seems to me that Senators and Representatives are often loyal in this order: Campaign donors, Noisy Extremists, Party, State, Country
Campaign donors should be nowhere on the list, especially because they can represent foreign interests or corporate interests that are in opposition to the interests of most of the population (state or country).
The CRITICAL difference there is that you and I are not having money taken from OUR earnings to support them.
Doesn't really matter. Money isn't wealth, it's a representation of wealth - taxes are not about funding govt, they are about destroying currency to keep inflation under control. This is clearly the case because the government can (and often does) create money out of nothing. Keeping government spending at parity with government revenue is mostly just a convenient way to make sure you aren't erring too far on the side of creating or destroying currency. The actual question is whether your working populace is productive enough to support your nonworking populace (including children, retirees, the disabled, and the unemployed, wealthy or no). This is also obviously true, because a society made up entirely of retirees could not function in reality, even if all of those retirees had theoretical pensions that would provide income for life.
We already have the basic answer from extant welfare programs.
We do? There's almost nothing in economics where we have "the answer". There are lots of cases where we have some evidence one way or the other, but even then it's usually fuzzy. I'd love to see any evidence you have in support of your views - and in any case, experiments are useful, and UBI is different in substantial ways from other kinds of welfare so the result may be different.
I simply resent having a portion of what I earn taken by the government and redistributed to people who have no intention of working...
Why do you resent it if it saves you money in the long run? There are studies showing it's cheaper to provide homes for the homeless than to it is to deal with the load they put on the ER, police, legal system, and jails. We should choose policies based on evidence, not feelings.
Police and fire departments are NOT the same thing as having a portion of the money taken from me to house, clothe and feed a bunch of freeloaders in idle "luxury".
And you KNOW this.
You're simply being disingenuous.
No, I'm really not. We pay for firefighters because it's basically a public insurance policy in case of a house fire. It also prevents a fire in one house from spreading to others and causing more harm overall. It's in our collective best interest.
UBI and/or welfare are no different. They are collective insurance policies in the case of income failure. They prevent poverty from causing starvation, homelessness, and crimes of desperation. They, also, are in our collective best interest.
It seems to me that the only moral objection to this comes from a misrepresentation of the situation as one individual stealing from another. Taxation is NOT theft - unless you agree that taxes going to the fire department are also theft. If you are going to be an ideologue, at least make your ideology consistent.
Do you object to paying for police and fire departments? If your house has never caught fire, tax money is TAKEN FROM YOU to save a bunch of freeloaders who have house fires. Certainly that must offend you as well?
As to the 'people given the option WILL DO NOTHING' - well that's 100% provable lie. We don't need the study to know this.
If it's a "100%" provable "lie", then PROVE IT.
J.K Rowling was on welfare when she wrote her first Harry Potter book. The vast majority of the open source software ecosystem is written by volunteers. There are plenty of seniors who choose not to retire at the soonest possible moment, because they enjoy their work. Any trust fund kiddie that actually started a business or went to work doing something is evidence that people will try to do useful work even if they aren't driven by the fear of homelessness. What's more, there's actually evidence that monetary compensation can REDUCE people's productivity in highly creative / intellectual situations, and destroy their motivation entirely in others - the "carrot/stick" model of human motivation is absurdly simplistic and inapplicable in many cases.
We should be asking different questions. Will some people work even if they can survive without work? Certainly, because there are already lots of people doing that every day. Will some people lounge around? Certainly, because there are already lots of people doing that thanks to a trust fund, welfare, or enabling family members. So the real question is, will UBI cause more loafing (some people who don't want to work but do it to survive), less loafing (people who want to work but are disincentivized somehow), or will it cause no change at all?
And even more fundamental - is the real goal of society to minimize loafing? Why does it matter if there are some people who choose not to work? We're more productive as a civilization than ever. Why should we expect all people to continue to work 40 hours per week forever, when advancing technology dramatically changes the need for and value of human labor? More important to me is suffering, freedom, and prosperity - we should create policies to minimize suffering, and maximize freedom and prosperity. This experiment is an important step to determine if UBI is a better policy than alternatives - the researchers are anticipating that it increases employment AND saves money. If it does so, isn't it unequivocally better than the welfare system it proposes to replace?
Lower crime rates means less police and lawyers which means higher unemployment which means increased taxes for those who do work to support whole population getting free money.
Poe's law in a nutshell here. If I'm not mistaken, this is an argument FOR higher crime rates, because crime needs to exist in order to keep police and lawyers employed and keep the tax dollars flowing in. In other words, keep the poor down, crime of desperation is good for business!
I sincerely hope that the parent post is made in jest, but in today's political climate you never can be sure...
. What happens when the municipality gets cash strapped and decides to jack rats up by a factor of 10? At least with Comcast or AT&T, you can switch or even do without. That $50 a month is basically an added tax to a state that already has a high income cost.
Wrong on every level. The internet is just a public option - you are still welcome to choose CenturyLink or Comcast, which have suddenly and mysteriously dropped their rates. The $50 a month is a price you can choose to pay or not, but you would be stupid not to because it's 20x the speed of the competitors at a lower monthly rate.
Additionally, Colorado doesn't have a very high income tax - it's below the national average: https://taxfoundation.org/stat...
I miss the days when the telco shills and Trumpist trolls would put at least a cursory effort into believable arguments.
They stayed the same, but the state income tax got a hike, and is now one of the highest in the US.
It's already been noted, but it's worth saying again that this is a complete and total lie. The state income tax did not get a hike, the state income tax is in no way related to municipal internet anyway (which is funded and operated by a CITY), and the state income tax is lower than the national average.
How the fuck is this news?
Thank you for pointing this out. In sports reporting and politics reporting, and apparently now bitcoin reporting, people love to make oddly specific observations to suggest some sort of pattern or narrative in the random noise of outcomes. Flipping a coin 3 times and getting a tails on the 3rd time is not notable, surprising, or meaningful. Same with this "news".