I haven't seen anyone come up with a good reason people wouldn't use basic income to work less and be lazy.
Because many millionaires and CEOs continue to work when their financial security is completely assured? Because many people hold jobs in retirement just to keep themselves busy and buy stuff for the grandkids? Because volunteer-based organizations continue to exist all over the world?
From what I can tell, the idea that people only work for money and will become totally unproductive on UBI is an unsubstantiated myth - we've got lots of evidence to the contrary.
People on Welfare of all types are dependent on the Government for sustenance, and will continue to vote for people who give them stuff.
Citation needed. There's considerable evidence that people don't reliably vote in their economic best interests - there are wealthy people who vote for higher marginal tax rates, and people living on food stamps and welfare who vote for candidates that want to abolish said programs.
Try crunching the numbers yourself sometime before you make such declarations. A new tax policy is inherently part of implementing UBI. A lot of conservatives and libertarians are proponents of a flat tax, because they believe a progressive tax is unfair. So let's assume a flat tax of 25%, and only income beyond your $12k basic income is taxed.
Based on 2015 numbers from the IRS, that would constitute a tax decrease for some, and a tax increase for others. People below $70k a year would end up with more takehome pay (obviously, the difference will be most dramatic for those with 0 earnings, who now have $12k). People with incomes above $70k a year will end up paying more, because as a group, their real tax rates today end up being somewhat less than 25%.
This also has the virtue of being a progressive tax and flat tax at the same time - since someone making $48k a year from a job ends up paying $12k of that into taxes, so they end up paying every dollar of the UBI back but have an effective tax rate of 0%. People below that level have a negative tax rate, because they are getting more from UBI than they put in. People above have a tax rate that climbs gradually, asymptotically approaching 25% (and is basically there at about $3M in annual earnings).
Finally, assume that this gets rid of entitlement spending. If I assume $500B in entitlement spending (some would say it is far more - depends on what programs you include) then this program actually ends up saving money versus our current budget.
UBI is affordable, unless you make gross simplifications that misrepresent how it would work. The information is freely available from the IRS to do the math for yourself.
You're setting up a strawman: specifically, conflating UBI with an economy in which no human ever does labor, and then you are arguing against such a system. The thing is, though, there is still plenty of incentive to work under UBI - the idea of the policy is that it will provide just enough money to prevent dire poverty, but not enough to have much disposable income. So, while some people will be content to live only on the basic income, many people will continue to work, either for status, disposable income, personal fulfillment, or any of the other non-monetary reasons that people work.
Based on the numbers, the "skills gap" that exists is about highly specialized skills that are industry-specific (or even facility-specific) and advanced mathematics - neither is going to be solved by a vocational program, which you seem to think is the answer. The way you solve that is with better internal training to teach the specialized skills, and with more money to attract people with math skills (STEM degree holders, in other words). Look at engineering positions, which require advanced math and technical skills, and you'll find that they pay a lot better than the $16-$18/hr that the manufacturing sector is offering. The manufacturing sector is trying to fill an engineering-level position with assembly line pay.
OK, you're too lazy to even do some simple googling.
False. Simple googling shows you're wrong. It's on you to prove the contrary.
Oh, certainly, but my point with the libertarians is that UBI isn't some commie scheme from the radical left - it's got support from fiscal conservatives as well.
If companies needed these positions filled so badly, they would be doing two things: raising wages, and creating their own training programs. Supply is apparently low, but since prices aren't going up then apparently demand is also low. Or if you believe this is such a dire problem, surely there's money to be made in creating a training program? That's the free market for you.
Since you have failed to support your claim in the face of contradictory evidence, your numbers look suspect. I'm not going to go hunting to support a random assertion you made to support your increasingly weak argument. If you expect to be taken seriously, you need to provide sources to show that your argument is based in reality. Nobody else is going to do that for you.
UBI isn't supposed to replace a well-paying job - it's supposed to keep people off the street. It's supposed to function as a basic safety net that meets basic needs, yet incentivizes people to work if they want any kind of disposable income to play with.
A fair number of libertarians actually support the UBI idea, because if it exists, all sorts of other nice things fall into play and render regulations unnecessary - with a UBI in place, most arguments for a minimum wage disappear, for instance.
Still not a citation - if you're making the claim, burden of proof lies on you to back it up. Fivethirtyeight, which is a highly credible source in my experience, lists it at 379,000, less than half of your number: https://fivethirtyeight.com/fe...
That same site disagrees with your reasoning as well - is the problem a skills gap, or is it that companies aren't really willing to pay to get the right people hired? Generally, a worker shortage doesn't mean that there aren't any qualified applicants - it means that there aren't qualified applicants turning up at the price you're willing to pay.
As well, all the trendlines for manufacturing job growth are pointing in the wrong direction right now - the manufacturing sector is always doing everything it can to minimize labor costs, and there are a lot of technologies on the horizon that promise to continue that trend. The major sectors for job growth involve services.
Has he done the math as to how much that would cost?
Have you? I crunched the numbers based on the public tax info from the IRS, and when you consider the ~$1T of welfare and social security that would be saved (and the fact that many agencies worth of paper-shuffling bureaucrats would no longer be needed to administer social aid programs) you only have to increase marginal tax rates by a few percent to break even with a UBI of $12k-$18k. Seriously, any slashdotting nerd should be able to put together a spreadsheet and see for themselves.
Frik: Oh, but companies have a sovereign right to layoff employees at will and w/o advanced notice.
Frak: Yeah, well the Chief Executive (a.k.a. President) also has the right to limit entry into the U.S. at will and w/o notice.
Point one: Yes, companies do have that right, because of At Will employment laws. You don't like it, then support unions and similar worker-protection political groups.
Point two: No, the president does not have that right, because his rights are very clearly delineated based on the founding documents of the country and the body of law surrounding said documents, and his rights do not include arbitrary bans on entry into the country to huge swaths of people, some of whom are essentially citizens. In fact, some would argue that his ban is outright prohibited by the bill of rights, since this ban has an implicit religious component.
The Neural Lace is yet another concept from the Iain M. Banks Culture novels. So I guess it's clear at this point that Elon's a sci fi fan, and a fan of Banks in particular. If the names of the drone ships USS Just Read the Instructions and USS Of Course I Still Love You weren't evidence enough, this seals the deal.
Interestingly, in his book Excession, it's mentioned that along with being a direct mental interface to computers, the Neural Lace is the most effective means of human torture ever devised...
The biggest thing that makes Brave New World more descriptive of U.S. culture than 1984 is that 1984 focuses on "hard" control of the population - opressive totalitarian rule, constant monitoring, brutal policing, etc, while in BNW "soft" control is used to keep people complacent with very little force required. Huxley's biggest insight IMO was that hard control is completely unnecessary if the people are constantly focused on entertainment and consumption - just keep the population preoccupied with sex, distracted by an unending flow of vapid media, and locked onto a treadmill of materialistic, hedonistic pleasure-seeking, and you've quelled dissent much more permanently than you ever could by brute force.
Landing two boosters on drone ships could be desirable for a payload that's close to the performance limit of the Falcon Heavy, such that the center core uses all of its fuel and is expended. In such a mission, it's very possible that the side cores wouldn't have the fuel margin to boost all the way back to the launch site. So that launch profile would be close to the maximum performance of Falcon Heavy. Maximum would be expending all three cores and retaining no fuel to recover any of them. There could also be a hypothetical scenario where the center core completes one or more orbits and then returns to the landing site, while the two boosters land downrange on the drone ships.
It's not as though there is a single test article being operated on by each group though, or a single measurement technique. Each group is building their own drive, presumably with different efficiency, power, mass, etc. So if you are measuring the power output of a Honda 4-cylinder engine and a Dodge V-12, you are going to get very different number and error bars. It doesn't mean that the effect isn't there, and you wouldn't expect the error bars on the machines to overlap.
It's certainly possible that all of these experimenters are fooling themselves and EM Drive will turn out to be this generation's cold fusion, but there's no expectation at this point that differing experiments will have agreement with one another in the specific values of raw thrust, or thrust/W.
It sounds to me like you haven't really gotten very familiar with the available literature on drug treatment, but this site will give you all the references you'd ever want: http://www.drugwarfacts.org/cm... The U.S., being one of the most conservative countries, looks down on methadone treatment because it goes against the puritanical ethic of abstinence in all things. That's purely based on dogma though, and we continue to employ ineffective, outdated, unscientific treatment methods because of that dogma. In reality, methadone has such a high efficacy that in any other context (imagine a drug that cured >90% of cancer, or heart disease, or depression) it would be considered a miracle treatment.
Let me quote you from earlier:
What mostly matters, to them, is what they're *feeling*. It doesn't matter much whether it works or not, it's mostly about the emotions, the math is beside the point.
That sounds a lot to me like you're disparaging liberals for relying on feelings. Which is why I pointed out the illogical, feeling-based positions that conservatives like yourself hold. You're living in the metaphorical glass house of emotionally-driven ideology, and throwing stones at liberals in the sense that you are criticizing them for using emotions to drive their policy positions.
I don't think it's wrong to care. But I think it's wrong to put ideology before factual evidence. And especially wrong to criticize others for doing it while you yourself are just as bad or worse. No matter how much you care, no matter how much you believe you are right, if the evidence shows that you're wrong you need to revise your position, or at the very least admit that your position is irrational.
If you decided that once a meth-head, always a meth-head, that's fine, think what you want.
I haven't decided anything like that - I've looked at the medical literature, which clearly establishes that methadone and similar medications are far and away the most effective treatment for addicts.
If you have any interest in actually finding out what works, I can start you with a few pointers, based on not only reading the studies, but working directly with hundreds of alcoholics and drug addicts, many of whom have now been sober for years.
The drug court option sounds like an improvement over criminal court, but it still sounds inferior to readily available medications, going by your own numbers. It sounds like you believe that your personal observations are more trustworthy than the medical literature. But, the thing is, no number of first-hand anecdotes will tell us anything quantifiable about actual program efficacy - have you examined selection bias? Have you shown statistical significance on how well this works? Have you performed randomized trials, or controlled for any kind of confounding factors? How do you know that your experience is at all representative of addiction experiences in other regions, or with other programs, demographics, etc?
Experience is not scientific data. That isn't to say that first-hand experience is valueless (far from it), but it is not sufficient, or a replacement for studies that quantify program success in an objective way. And this is fundamentally where I see many conservatives (but liberals as well) get sloppy in their thinking: they substitute dogma and "common sense" for evidence.
Really, at the end of the day, if you're going to throw stones at liberals for using "feelings" to influence their policy positions, you're setting a very high bar for yourself, where all of your positions must be rational and justified by evidence. I think conservatives generally do even worse at that game than liberals do, and so far I haven't seen you using evidence to justify your claims, but anecdotal impressions.
We need evidence to drive our policy, otherwise we're just stumbling in the dark. Dogma, rhetoric, and personal experience are not sufficient evidence. Feynman said it best:
It doesn't matter how beautiful your theory is, it doesn't matter how smart you are. If it doesn't agree with experiment, it's wrong.
Better, in my experience, is to put some of that money in a drug court program, where people who get busted by police are strongly encouraged to participate in a program that can lead to drastically improving their lives in a permanent way.
Where's the evidence? The studies that exist show that on the whole, rehab, Narc Anon, Al Anon, interventions, and the like have extremely low success rates, and in many cases are outright dangerous, leading to death via withdrawal symptoms or suicide. There is little or no evidence to support the efficacy of abstinence programs, whether it's with teen sex or drug use. However, prescription drugs like methadone do work, with greater than 90% efficacy. And freely available contraception (along with sex ed) is one of the few policies that has been shown to effectively reduce rates of teen pregnancy (and abortion).
When you say "in my experience", it looks like you're using fuzzy, anecdotal thinking to support your policy positions. What we need are pilot programs and objective evaluation of evidence to drive our policy, rather than people picking a side a priori and then trying to shoehorn evidence into their ideology. For what it's worth, I started out conservative, but overall the conspicuous lack of evidence for many conservative positions has driven me farther and farther to the left.
They're *caring*, not thinking. What mostly matters, to them, is what they're *feeling*. It doesn't matter much whether it works or not, it's mostly about the emotions, the math is beside the point.
You know, that's really interesting, because as a fairly liberal person, I find the exact opposite to be the case: there are a lot of instances of conservative policy that doesn't make fiscal sense but *feels* conservative. Look at drug tests for welfare recipients - they cost far more than they save, so on the whole the country spends more on welfare if drug tests are made into a prerequisite. There are lots of similar situations, giving homeless people apartments has been a huge success in Utah, it ends up being cheaper to pay $10k/yr for a basic apartment than $15k-$20k/yr for emergency room visits, police calls, jail time, etc. So, it's a better fiscal solution, but it feels unfair, so conservatives generally don't like it.
The real answer, in my mind: partisan dogma is irrational on both sides. Policy is not, generally speaking, driven by data or evidence. No party has a monopoly on stupidity, although some groups capitalize on it to greater effect.
You also notice in this post there is no difference made between the right wing (most people in America) and the alt.right (a few thousand people). They are put together in the same bucket so that the odious beliefs of the alt.right may contaminate the entire right. The principle is: add a thimble of wine to a gallon of sewage and you've got a gallon of sewage, but add a thimble of sewage to a gallon of wine and you've got a gallon of sewage. This is just plain ignorant, but it's the new philosophy of the ctrl.left and sadly it has a good chance of working.
Not sure if your metaphor lands - I don't care if that wine is only 1% sewage, I'm still not drinking it. Same thing with a political movement that is aligned with Neo-nazis. Even dabbling in white supremacy compromises the entire party.
if eggs are fertilized at the wrong time of the month then the zygote still gets aborted just as part of the normal menstrual cycle.
Yes, but that is God's work, not human's. You didn't take an overt action to cause it.
In other words, people die all the time, sometimes for good reasons, sometimes for no reason at all. That doesn't make them bad, it is just life. You go when it is your time to go.
There is a difference between billions of fertile eggs dying every year due to nature and millions killed on purpose.
That is why the law, for example, splits out homicide between intentional and unintentional, and sometimes you can kill someone and not go to jail because it was an honest accident due to events beyond your control.
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Note: I fully get that not everyone agrees with me, thus the willingness to compromise. I give my point of view and set my position, then figure out what I can actually get, because I don't live in a world that has to do what I say. I honestly wish BOTH sides would remember that, because I hear it too often from both extremes that they don't wish to be reasonable.
Good job on the birth control thing - if you legitimately believe that way and are willing to forgo all contraceptive pills in your family based on your beliefs, that puts you a good step above most pro-lifers.
That said, I don't think the distinction on how a fetus gets aborted matters. The "rhythm method" of contraception has been around for a long, long time, and it plain and simple doesn't prevent eggs from being fertilized. Are these people committing continual manslaughter? Honestly, if you really go that far, then I think it might become immoral to have kids at all, or ever risk activity that would allow a fertilized egg to be aborted by natural causes or otherwise.
Think about it like this: if you want to save a kid's life, is it worth risking another kid's life for every chance at it? Obviously the answer is no. Every time you attempt to conceive, you run a serious risk of aborting a fertilized egg. By your definition, there's no moral way to conceive a child unless you can do it in such a way that you guarantee that no zygote can be aborted - and there is no way to get that guarantee.
The whole "natural" vs. "unnatural" thing is nonsense. Rape is natural, considering that it happens in the animal kingdom everywhere. Malaria is natural, so clearly there's no moral problem with allowing a child to die from malaria, right? Whether you make a choice that has a large chance of killing a child, or you outright choose to kill a child, you have done something horrific. I have found no logical argument that allowing a zygote to abort from natural causes is manslaughter, ergo early term abortion is not murder.
Far better and cheaper to let them kill themselves than waste money on people who are smarter than all the experts and ignore the Mt. Everest-sized evidence about the dangers of drug use.
No, it isn't. Junkies, homeless people, desperate people all have create a very real burden to society in terms of higher police costs, emergency room costs, and lost property values because of crime. In many cases, it's cheaper to fix the problem than it is to let it continue.
In any case, it was the 1970s, that was another time (quite common back then, he wasn't unique there), or would YOU like to be judged on what you did 40 years ago?
I know, just like we should have excused anything that Hillary did in the 80's, or 90's, or 2000's - those were different times as well. If people show you what they are like, believe them. Stop excusing Trump just because he's your guy.
Side note: abortion rights should go away, but gay rights should stay, for whatever that is worth. I still can't understand how anyone is for child murder, but there are funny people in this world.
So, I'm guessing you're one of those who believes that human life begins at "conception"? Could you specify whether conception is when the sperm fertilizes the egg, or when the egg implants in the uterine lining, or when the zygote begins dividing, or perhaps reaches some arbitrary number of cells? Because if you draw that line at fertilization, most birth control pills are equivalent to constant indiscriminate murder. And it becomes immoral to have sex any time except at the peak likelihood of successful implant, because if eggs are fertilized at the wrong time of the month then the zygote still gets aborted just as part of the normal menstrual cycle.
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I haven't seen anyone come up with a good reason people wouldn't use basic income to work less and be lazy.
Because many millionaires and CEOs continue to work when their financial security is completely assured? Because many people hold jobs in retirement just to keep themselves busy and buy stuff for the grandkids? Because volunteer-based organizations continue to exist all over the world?
From what I can tell, the idea that people only work for money and will become totally unproductive on UBI is an unsubstantiated myth - we've got lots of evidence to the contrary.
People on Welfare of all types are dependent on the Government for sustenance, and will continue to vote for people who give them stuff.
Citation needed. There's considerable evidence that people don't reliably vote in their economic best interests - there are wealthy people who vote for higher marginal tax rates, and people living on food stamps and welfare who vote for candidates that want to abolish said programs.
Try crunching the numbers yourself sometime before you make such declarations. A new tax policy is inherently part of implementing UBI. A lot of conservatives and libertarians are proponents of a flat tax, because they believe a progressive tax is unfair. So let's assume a flat tax of 25%, and only income beyond your $12k basic income is taxed.
Based on 2015 numbers from the IRS, that would constitute a tax decrease for some, and a tax increase for others. People below $70k a year would end up with more takehome pay (obviously, the difference will be most dramatic for those with 0 earnings, who now have $12k). People with incomes above $70k a year will end up paying more, because as a group, their real tax rates today end up being somewhat less than 25%.
This also has the virtue of being a progressive tax and flat tax at the same time - since someone making $48k a year from a job ends up paying $12k of that into taxes, so they end up paying every dollar of the UBI back but have an effective tax rate of 0%. People below that level have a negative tax rate, because they are getting more from UBI than they put in. People above have a tax rate that climbs gradually, asymptotically approaching 25% (and is basically there at about $3M in annual earnings).
Finally, assume that this gets rid of entitlement spending. If I assume $500B in entitlement spending (some would say it is far more - depends on what programs you include) then this program actually ends up saving money versus our current budget.
UBI is affordable, unless you make gross simplifications that misrepresent how it would work. The information is freely available from the IRS to do the math for yourself.
You're setting up a strawman: specifically, conflating UBI with an economy in which no human ever does labor, and then you are arguing against such a system. The thing is, though, there is still plenty of incentive to work under UBI - the idea of the policy is that it will provide just enough money to prevent dire poverty, but not enough to have much disposable income. So, while some people will be content to live only on the basic income, many people will continue to work, either for status, disposable income, personal fulfillment, or any of the other non-monetary reasons that people work.
There is no slavery inherent in UBI.
, and creating their own training programs.
Based on the numbers, the "skills gap" that exists is about highly specialized skills that are industry-specific (or even facility-specific) and advanced mathematics - neither is going to be solved by a vocational program, which you seem to think is the answer. The way you solve that is with better internal training to teach the specialized skills, and with more money to attract people with math skills (STEM degree holders, in other words). Look at engineering positions, which require advanced math and technical skills, and you'll find that they pay a lot better than the $16-$18/hr that the manufacturing sector is offering. The manufacturing sector is trying to fill an engineering-level position with assembly line pay.
OK, you're too lazy to even do some simple googling.
False. Simple googling shows you're wrong. It's on you to prove the contrary.
Oh, certainly, but my point with the libertarians is that UBI isn't some commie scheme from the radical left - it's got support from fiscal conservatives as well.
If companies needed these positions filled so badly, they would be doing two things: raising wages, and creating their own training programs. Supply is apparently low, but since prices aren't going up then apparently demand is also low. Or if you believe this is such a dire problem, surely there's money to be made in creating a training program? That's the free market for you.
Since you have failed to support your claim in the face of contradictory evidence, your numbers look suspect. I'm not going to go hunting to support a random assertion you made to support your increasingly weak argument. If you expect to be taken seriously, you need to provide sources to show that your argument is based in reality. Nobody else is going to do that for you.
UBI isn't supposed to replace a well-paying job - it's supposed to keep people off the street. It's supposed to function as a basic safety net that meets basic needs, yet incentivizes people to work if they want any kind of disposable income to play with.
A fair number of libertarians actually support the UBI idea, because if it exists, all sorts of other nice things fall into play and render regulations unnecessary - with a UBI in place, most arguments for a minimum wage disappear, for instance.
Still not a citation - if you're making the claim, burden of proof lies on you to back it up. Fivethirtyeight, which is a highly credible source in my experience, lists it at 379,000, less than half of your number: https://fivethirtyeight.com/fe...
That same site disagrees with your reasoning as well - is the problem a skills gap, or is it that companies aren't really willing to pay to get the right people hired? Generally, a worker shortage doesn't mean that there aren't any qualified applicants - it means that there aren't qualified applicants turning up at the price you're willing to pay.
As well, all the trendlines for manufacturing job growth are pointing in the wrong direction right now - the manufacturing sector is always doing everything it can to minimize labor costs, and there are a lot of technologies on the horizon that promise to continue that trend. The major sectors for job growth involve services.
Has he done the math as to how much that would cost?
Have you? I crunched the numbers based on the public tax info from the IRS, and when you consider the ~$1T of welfare and social security that would be saved (and the fact that many agencies worth of paper-shuffling bureaucrats would no longer be needed to administer social aid programs) you only have to increase marginal tax rates by a few percent to break even with a UBI of $12k-$18k. Seriously, any slashdotting nerd should be able to put together a spreadsheet and see for themselves.
America has over a million high skilled manufacturing jobs unfilled due to lack of trained workers.
Interesting datapoint - can you provide a citation?
Frik: Oh, but companies have a sovereign right to layoff employees at will and w/o advanced notice.
Frak: Yeah, well the Chief Executive (a.k.a. President) also has the right to limit entry into the U.S. at will and w/o notice.
Point one: Yes, companies do have that right, because of At Will employment laws. You don't like it, then support unions and similar worker-protection political groups.
Point two: No, the president does not have that right, because his rights are very clearly delineated based on the founding documents of the country and the body of law surrounding said documents, and his rights do not include arbitrary bans on entry into the country to huge swaths of people, some of whom are essentially citizens. In fact, some would argue that his ban is outright prohibited by the bill of rights, since this ban has an implicit religious component.
The Neural Lace is yet another concept from the Iain M. Banks Culture novels. So I guess it's clear at this point that Elon's a sci fi fan, and a fan of Banks in particular. If the names of the drone ships USS Just Read the Instructions and USS Of Course I Still Love You weren't evidence enough, this seals the deal.
Interestingly, in his book Excession, it's mentioned that along with being a direct mental interface to computers, the Neural Lace is the most effective means of human torture ever devised...
The biggest thing that makes Brave New World more descriptive of U.S. culture than 1984 is that 1984 focuses on "hard" control of the population - opressive totalitarian rule, constant monitoring, brutal policing, etc, while in BNW "soft" control is used to keep people complacent with very little force required. Huxley's biggest insight IMO was that hard control is completely unnecessary if the people are constantly focused on entertainment and consumption - just keep the population preoccupied with sex, distracted by an unending flow of vapid media, and locked onto a treadmill of materialistic, hedonistic pleasure-seeking, and you've quelled dissent much more permanently than you ever could by brute force.
Landing two boosters on drone ships could be desirable for a payload that's close to the performance limit of the Falcon Heavy, such that the center core uses all of its fuel and is expended. In such a mission, it's very possible that the side cores wouldn't have the fuel margin to boost all the way back to the launch site. So that launch profile would be close to the maximum performance of Falcon Heavy. Maximum would be expending all three cores and retaining no fuel to recover any of them. There could also be a hypothetical scenario where the center core completes one or more orbits and then returns to the landing site, while the two boosters land downrange on the drone ships.
It's not as though there is a single test article being operated on by each group though, or a single measurement technique. Each group is building their own drive, presumably with different efficiency, power, mass, etc. So if you are measuring the power output of a Honda 4-cylinder engine and a Dodge V-12, you are going to get very different number and error bars. It doesn't mean that the effect isn't there, and you wouldn't expect the error bars on the machines to overlap.
It's certainly possible that all of these experimenters are fooling themselves and EM Drive will turn out to be this generation's cold fusion, but there's no expectation at this point that differing experiments will have agreement with one another in the specific values of raw thrust, or thrust/W.
It sounds to me like you haven't really gotten very familiar with the available literature on drug treatment, but this site will give you all the references you'd ever want: http://www.drugwarfacts.org/cm...
The U.S., being one of the most conservative countries, looks down on methadone treatment because it goes against the puritanical ethic of abstinence in all things. That's purely based on dogma though, and we continue to employ ineffective, outdated, unscientific treatment methods because of that dogma. In reality, methadone has such a high efficacy that in any other context (imagine a drug that cured >90% of cancer, or heart disease, or depression) it would be considered a miracle treatment.
Let me quote you from earlier:
That sounds a lot to me like you're disparaging liberals for relying on feelings. Which is why I pointed out the illogical, feeling-based positions that conservatives like yourself hold. You're living in the metaphorical glass house of emotionally-driven ideology, and throwing stones at liberals in the sense that you are criticizing them for using emotions to drive their policy positions.
I don't think it's wrong to care. But I think it's wrong to put ideology before factual evidence. And especially wrong to criticize others for doing it while you yourself are just as bad or worse. No matter how much you care, no matter how much you believe you are right, if the evidence shows that you're wrong you need to revise your position, or at the very least admit that your position is irrational.
If you decided that once a meth-head, always a meth-head, that's fine, think what you want.
I haven't decided anything like that - I've looked at the medical literature, which clearly establishes that methadone and similar medications are far and away the most effective treatment for addicts.
If you have any interest in actually finding out what works, I can start you with a few pointers, based on not only reading the studies, but working directly with hundreds of alcoholics and drug addicts, many of whom have now been sober for years.
The drug court option sounds like an improvement over criminal court, but it still sounds inferior to readily available medications, going by your own numbers. It sounds like you believe that your personal observations are more trustworthy than the medical literature. But, the thing is, no number of first-hand anecdotes will tell us anything quantifiable about actual program efficacy - have you examined selection bias? Have you shown statistical significance on how well this works? Have you performed randomized trials, or controlled for any kind of confounding factors? How do you know that your experience is at all representative of addiction experiences in other regions, or with other programs, demographics, etc?
Experience is not scientific data. That isn't to say that first-hand experience is valueless (far from it), but it is not sufficient, or a replacement for studies that quantify program success in an objective way. And this is fundamentally where I see many conservatives (but liberals as well) get sloppy in their thinking: they substitute dogma and "common sense" for evidence.
Really, at the end of the day, if you're going to throw stones at liberals for using "feelings" to influence their policy positions, you're setting a very high bar for yourself, where all of your positions must be rational and justified by evidence. I think conservatives generally do even worse at that game than liberals do, and so far I haven't seen you using evidence to justify your claims, but anecdotal impressions.
We need evidence to drive our policy, otherwise we're just stumbling in the dark. Dogma, rhetoric, and personal experience are not sufficient evidence. Feynman said it best:
Better, in my experience, is to put some of that money in a drug court program, where people who get busted by police are strongly encouraged to participate in a program that can lead to drastically improving their lives in a permanent way.
Where's the evidence? The studies that exist show that on the whole, rehab, Narc Anon, Al Anon, interventions, and the like have extremely low success rates, and in many cases are outright dangerous, leading to death via withdrawal symptoms or suicide. There is little or no evidence to support the efficacy of abstinence programs, whether it's with teen sex or drug use. However, prescription drugs like methadone do work, with greater than 90% efficacy. And freely available contraception (along with sex ed) is one of the few policies that has been shown to effectively reduce rates of teen pregnancy (and abortion).
When you say "in my experience", it looks like you're using fuzzy, anecdotal thinking to support your policy positions. What we need are pilot programs and objective evaluation of evidence to drive our policy, rather than people picking a side a priori and then trying to shoehorn evidence into their ideology. For what it's worth, I started out conservative, but overall the conspicuous lack of evidence for many conservative positions has driven me farther and farther to the left.
They're *caring*, not thinking. What mostly matters, to them, is what they're *feeling*. It doesn't matter much whether it works or not, it's mostly about the emotions, the math is beside the point.
You know, that's really interesting, because as a fairly liberal person, I find the exact opposite to be the case: there are a lot of instances of conservative policy that doesn't make fiscal sense but *feels* conservative. Look at drug tests for welfare recipients - they cost far more than they save, so on the whole the country spends more on welfare if drug tests are made into a prerequisite. There are lots of similar situations, giving homeless people apartments has been a huge success in Utah, it ends up being cheaper to pay $10k/yr for a basic apartment than $15k-$20k/yr for emergency room visits, police calls, jail time, etc. So, it's a better fiscal solution, but it feels unfair, so conservatives generally don't like it.
The real answer, in my mind: partisan dogma is irrational on both sides. Policy is not, generally speaking, driven by data or evidence. No party has a monopoly on stupidity, although some groups capitalize on it to greater effect.
You also notice in this post there is no difference made between the right wing (most people in America) and the alt.right (a few thousand people). They are put together in the same bucket so that the odious beliefs of the alt.right may contaminate the entire right. The principle is: add a thimble of wine to a gallon of sewage and you've got a gallon of sewage, but add a thimble of sewage to a gallon of wine and you've got a gallon of sewage. This is just plain ignorant, but it's the new philosophy of the ctrl.left and sadly it has a good chance of working.
Not sure if your metaphor lands - I don't care if that wine is only 1% sewage, I'm still not drinking it. Same thing with a political movement that is aligned with Neo-nazis. Even dabbling in white supremacy compromises the entire party.
if eggs are fertilized at the wrong time of the month then the zygote still gets aborted just as part of the normal menstrual cycle.
Yes, but that is God's work, not human's. You didn't take an overt action to cause it.
In other words, people die all the time, sometimes for good reasons, sometimes for no reason at all. That doesn't make them bad, it is just life. You go when it is your time to go.
There is a difference between billions of fertile eggs dying every year due to nature and millions killed on purpose.
That is why the law, for example, splits out homicide between intentional and unintentional, and sometimes you can kill someone and not go to jail because it was an honest accident due to events beyond your control.
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Note: I fully get that not everyone agrees with me, thus the willingness to compromise. I give my point of view and set my position, then figure out what I can actually get, because I don't live in a world that has to do what I say. I honestly wish BOTH sides would remember that, because I hear it too often from both extremes that they don't wish to be reasonable.
Good job on the birth control thing - if you legitimately believe that way and are willing to forgo all contraceptive pills in your family based on your beliefs, that puts you a good step above most pro-lifers.
That said, I don't think the distinction on how a fetus gets aborted matters. The "rhythm method" of contraception has been around for a long, long time, and it plain and simple doesn't prevent eggs from being fertilized. Are these people committing continual manslaughter? Honestly, if you really go that far, then I think it might become immoral to have kids at all, or ever risk activity that would allow a fertilized egg to be aborted by natural causes or otherwise.
Think about it like this: if you want to save a kid's life, is it worth risking another kid's life for every chance at it? Obviously the answer is no. Every time you attempt to conceive, you run a serious risk of aborting a fertilized egg. By your definition, there's no moral way to conceive a child unless you can do it in such a way that you guarantee that no zygote can be aborted - and there is no way to get that guarantee.
The whole "natural" vs. "unnatural" thing is nonsense. Rape is natural, considering that it happens in the animal kingdom everywhere. Malaria is natural, so clearly there's no moral problem with allowing a child to die from malaria, right? Whether you make a choice that has a large chance of killing a child, or you outright choose to kill a child, you have done something horrific. I have found no logical argument that allowing a zygote to abort from natural causes is manslaughter, ergo early term abortion is not murder.
Far better and cheaper to let them kill themselves than waste money on people who are smarter than all the experts and ignore the Mt. Everest-sized evidence about the dangers of drug use.
No, it isn't. Junkies, homeless people, desperate people all have create a very real burden to society in terms of higher police costs, emergency room costs, and lost property values because of crime. In many cases, it's cheaper to fix the problem than it is to let it continue.
In any case, it was the 1970s, that was another time (quite common back then, he wasn't unique there), or would YOU like to be judged on what you did 40 years ago?
I know, just like we should have excused anything that Hillary did in the 80's, or 90's, or 2000's - those were different times as well. If people show you what they are like, believe them. Stop excusing Trump just because he's your guy.
Side note: abortion rights should go away, but gay rights should stay, for whatever that is worth. I still can't understand how anyone is for child murder, but there are funny people in this world.
So, I'm guessing you're one of those who believes that human life begins at "conception"? Could you specify whether conception is when the sperm fertilizes the egg, or when the egg implants in the uterine lining, or when the zygote begins dividing, or perhaps reaches some arbitrary number of cells? Because if you draw that line at fertilization, most birth control pills are equivalent to constant indiscriminate murder. And it becomes immoral to have sex any time except at the peak likelihood of successful implant, because if eggs are fertilized at the wrong time of the month then the zygote still gets aborted just as part of the normal menstrual cycle.