I use a VPN sometimes, and I've moved around the country several times, and I've accessed my Google account from all kinds of different places and IP addresses. Never had a problem.
I'm not real sure how you got from a discussion about problems with (or complaints about) American women to ditching the UBI, but I'll explain it best I can from my perspective, with the caveat that this is a rather generalized, high-level discussion since no one has actually implemented a real UBI yet to try it out, and like any totally new system (whether it's a social services system, or an engineered technical system like a computer or a network), there's going to be kinks and failures in the initial R&D before you come up with a system that is well-designed and stable.
You mention having SNAP benefits you're grateful for. That's a government handout that many people would love to take away from you in the name of libertarianism. Under UBI, SNAP would probably disappear, since it would no longer be necessary. Along with it would go many other government welfare benefits; if you're already giving people $X every month just for being a citizen, there's no reason to means-test people and give them more. The US (which isn't really the most generous nation with social welfare benefits anyway) spends a large portion of its tax dollars on social programs like this, with only part of that going to the actual recipients, while the rest goes to a bunch of paper-pushers with cushy government jobs. All those people can be fired and all those benefits removed, and all replaced with the UBI. You don't need a big administration any more when you're not mean-testing people and looking for "cheaters".
Who's going to own the robots? Companies of course, just like it is now. (Who do you think built your smartphone? It wasn't a human, for the most part. Electronics are all made by machine now.) The problem is distribution of wealth: letting the corporations keep all their profits (and then get loans or handouts from the government when they fail) isn't sustainable when more and more labor is mechanized. The UBI should solve this. How? Taxes, obviously. Companies will simply have to pay more in taxes than they do now, to redistribute wealth down to the bottom. This will have the bonus effect of giving them more customers.
Who will do the "real work"? Employees, of course, just like now. Why would they do this? (This seems to be a big point that anti-UBI people just don't understand.) Because they make money for it, just like now. I don't know about you, but if I can sit on my ass and get $15k/year, which relegates me to a tiny apartment with roommates and eating ramen noodles, or I can go work for RobotCo as an engineer and make $150k/year (plus the $15k/year UBI, for a total of $165k), I'm going to take the latter even though it's more work. I rather like having a nice place to myself, a car, being able to afford nice stuff and eating out, etc.
How do we pay for UBI? Simple: more taxes, and eliminating redundant social programs that we're already paying for (as I mentioned above). So for instance, if I'm making $150k working at RobotCo, then obviously I don't really need that $15k UBI like some poor guy who got chronic illness and is no longer able to work at RobotCo, and whose job I took. So under the UBI scheme, my taxes at that income level will be adjusted so that I'll be paying that UBI right back. If we switch to a UBI system, someone making, say, $100k, should not see a significant change to their taxes if it's done right. Someone making $25k should get a nice boost. Someone making $500k should be seeing a bigger chunk of their pay taken. Also, corporations should be paying more, and not being able to hide profits offshore through twisted schemes (though we should also reduce the corporate tax rate to be competitive with other industrialized nations, so there's no advantage to keeping it in Europe for example). That's how you pay for it. After eliminating most of our existing handouts, it really shouldn't be that much. Note that not all social programs can be eliminated; you still need things like CPS since child abuse isn't solved by throwing money at people. Also,
Like "Applehu Akbar" said in a parallel comment here, I think you're probably incorrect about it being biological. I don't see this kind of difference, and the greater interest in religion, in women from non-Western and particularly non-American cultures. Asian, Indian, Russian etc. women just aren't like this, AFAICT, and overall seem to be far more practical and grounded in reality than American women who seem to be happy to blow all their money on bullshit (whether it's homeopathy or a wedding).
Finally, how do you tell a man "clearly has low testosterone levels" anyway? Engineering and programming jobs are chock-full of men who aren't exactly "alpha males", and they're probably the least prone to new-age beliefs of almost any profession next to scientists (who also aren't known for being a bunch of alpha jocks). Engineers do tend to be more religious than those other two groups, however, but not in a new-age way, as they also tend to be very socially conservative.
I think you're onto something there. And it's a product of Western (and esp. American) culture too, rather than being universal, IMO. I don't think Asian women, for instance, are like this, and I'm guessing eastern-bloc women probably aren't either; women in those cultures seem to be far more practical and grounded in reality. It really seems like we raise our women here to be Disneyfied idiots, who demand insanely expensive diamond rings and weddings and define their lives by these things, and who want to spend all their free time (at least while they're in their 20s-30s and childless) hanging out at bars and socializing and getting drunk.
Agreed. I made that mistake once, and I'm not making it again. You may think acceptance of some alt-med stuff like chiropractic and homeopathy is fairly innocuous, but pretty soon that person is visiting New Age "counselors" and talking about the "Ascended Masters", "St Germain and the violet flame", and all other kinds of wackiness, plus insisting on spending inordinate amounts of money on it.
What I'd really like to see is a serious survey to determine if beliefs in this quackery are more common among women than men. I'll bet it is. Women are already known to be more religious than men, and beliefs in "medicine" not backed by evidence are basically like religion.
I'm single now, but I now have a firm rule: I will not date or marry anyone who believe in alternative medicine (except possibly chiropractors for back pain). The whole thing is a giant scam, and suckers people into spending huge amounts of money on snake oil.
Maybe, but there's a big difference between restraining performance in favor of another desirable attribute (like battery life), and restraining performance for some undesirable attribute (like making more money). Binning is all about making more money: chips are artificially limited in performance (after testing to see what they really can do) so that higher-performing ones can be sold for more; it's solely to increase prices. Otherwise, they'd only sort chips by their actual performance capabilities, but then they'd end up selling higher-speed chips for the same prices, because most chips are binned not because of performance limitation but because sales/marketing decided they needed X number of each speed grade.
Why Apple is restraining performance here isn't so obvious. Is it just to make all models perform the same regardless of carrier for some "user experience" factor, or are they trying to maximize battery life (which is a laudable goal for a mobile device)? If it's the former, I don't see how that helps the user at all. Why should Verizon users care about the speed that T-Mobile users are limited to? Verizon sucks for a lot of reasons (esp. price), but coverage and performance are not among them; if I were paying through the nose for Verizon service, I'd at least want to get the performance that that network is capable of. Personally, I'm a cheap-ass so I use a Sprint phone on Ting, but for the low price I pay for service, I'm not demanding the utmost in download speeds. If I were paying Rolls-Royce prices for a phone and service, I would.
$15 milion is a lot more than $14,000. We're talking about someone who "cheated" an online game for in-game funny money and sold it for $15M here, so that certainly qualifies for the gift threshold. It would be the same for anyone else who didn't cheat in the game and made a bunch of in-game funny money, and didn't sell it. So my point is: does the IRS actually go after people who are really serious gamers and amass lots of in-game "money" (without selling it for real money) and demand tax payments? If not, then this is not real money, and these hackers didn't really commit "fraud".
Not only that, but (you might be able to answer this better than me) doesn't the IRS require you to pay taxes on any "income" you earn? The gift exclusion is for gifts only, not for payment maid in lieu of US Dollars. If you do some yard work or handyman work for someone (not a relative/friend), and he pays you in produce from his garden or eggs from his chicken coop, you're supposed to assess the fair market value of those goods, and declare them as income and pay taxes on them, both state and federal. Of course, no one does, but that's the law. There's no minimum value exclusion here I know of. It's no different with in-game "money". So logically, the IRS should be demanding that all these MMORPG companies provide detailed information to them about all their players and how much in-game money they have, so the IRS can demand payment.
This is legally wrong. According to the IRS, if you, for example, receive something as a gift, you're supposed to declare that as "income", and pay taxes on it based on its fair market value, even if you don't actually sell it.
I don't see how it's any different here.
So yes, people who win a bunch of in-game cash need to report this to the IRS and pay taxes on it.
Otherwise, these people should be cleared of the "fraud" charges.
This is why these regions need to come together and vote to kick out the South. The country as a whole would be much better off with the South evicted.
Where do you think California gets its refined gasoline, you idiot? They refine it all themselves. And oil is sold on the global market anyway, so they'll just buy the crude from somewhere else. In fact, all the states that currently get their refined gasoline from CA will be hurting, plus all the states that benefit from CA's west-coast ports.
The US Civil War was fought to decide this issue. States cannot secede from the US.
Yep, and the country has been suffering with the South dragging them down ever since. Should have just let them go (after freeing their slaves and getting them out of there).
What if AZ and NV joined CA? It would make more sense for the western states to act together, and free themselves of the east-coast states that are dragging them down (particularly the South).
Yes, there is. It's been tried many times in history, including twice in the US's history. The first time was a resounding success, the second time, not so much.... It's best avoided if possible.
What makes you think all the people who work at these places would want to pack up and move to the east coast?
And what makes you think the eastern side could even enforce it? Instead of just CA leaving, I'd like to see the entire western side of the country secede; notice that tons of military bases are located in the western states. Those people aren't going anywhere, and they're not going to let the equipment leave either. Honestly, the east coast would be screwed if the west coast quit the country. The east coast is an economic drain, esp. the South, and doesn't produce too much any more. The big question would be the heartland states in the middle (which side would they join?), as they do produce a lot of agriculture, but then again so do the west-coast states, probably far more than enough for their own needs, unlike the east. (When I refer to west-coast states, I'm really referring to everything as far east as Colorado.)
California should not secede by itself like this. However, if it could convince all the western states (up to CO, NM, MT, etc.) to join it, that new country would do quite well on its own, without being dragged down by the South and Florida.
Trump got around 60M votes. There are about 230M registered voters in the USA. That means that 26% of the eligible population actively voted for him.
Don't forget that only about 55% of the voting-eligible population even turned out to vote, significantly less (about 4M) than in 2008 even though the number of eligible voters is a little higher now.
It's pretty obvious that a bunch of people really didn't want to vote for either one, but held their nose and did so, and a bunch just didn't bother showing up because they didn't like the choices. That latter number probably had an effect on the down-ticket votes too, leading to a Republican sweep. You did a heckuva job, DNC.
Honestly, the idea would work out a lot better if it weren't just California, but instead a bunch of the neighboring western states all joined in. If CA, AZ, NV, OR, WA, ID etc. all decided to secede together, they *really* don't need the rest of the country.
The whole field is a fraud, since it all depends on the idea of "subluxations" which are mystical BS. But apparently people like you are too stupid to understand basic science.
It doesn't help that most chiropractors buy into lots of other BS quack stuff like applied kinesiology, homeopathy, etc. But I guess morons like you believe in that stuff too, right?
There's good women everywhere, they're just a lot harder to find in some places than others. A small midwest city (~50k) just isn't going to have many unless you happen to like conservative religious women. Of course, the "midwest" is a rather large and diverse place anyway; Chicago is part of it and certainly has plenty of non-conservative, non-religious women. There's also smaller cities with universities that are a better bet with women like that. However, in all those places, the tech job factor will still be a problem; there just isn't that much of a concentration of tech jobs in those places, even in the larger cities.
Citation needed. Chiropractic is not physical therapy, it's an entirely different thing with different schools, and is not actual evidence-based medicine.
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I use a VPN sometimes, and I've moved around the country several times, and I've accessed my Google account from all kinds of different places and IP addresses. Never had a problem.
I'm not real sure how you got from a discussion about problems with (or complaints about) American women to ditching the UBI, but I'll explain it best I can from my perspective, with the caveat that this is a rather generalized, high-level discussion since no one has actually implemented a real UBI yet to try it out, and like any totally new system (whether it's a social services system, or an engineered technical system like a computer or a network), there's going to be kinks and failures in the initial R&D before you come up with a system that is well-designed and stable.
You mention having SNAP benefits you're grateful for. That's a government handout that many people would love to take away from you in the name of libertarianism. Under UBI, SNAP would probably disappear, since it would no longer be necessary. Along with it would go many other government welfare benefits; if you're already giving people $X every month just for being a citizen, there's no reason to means-test people and give them more. The US (which isn't really the most generous nation with social welfare benefits anyway) spends a large portion of its tax dollars on social programs like this, with only part of that going to the actual recipients, while the rest goes to a bunch of paper-pushers with cushy government jobs. All those people can be fired and all those benefits removed, and all replaced with the UBI. You don't need a big administration any more when you're not mean-testing people and looking for "cheaters".
Who's going to own the robots? Companies of course, just like it is now. (Who do you think built your smartphone? It wasn't a human, for the most part. Electronics are all made by machine now.) The problem is distribution of wealth: letting the corporations keep all their profits (and then get loans or handouts from the government when they fail) isn't sustainable when more and more labor is mechanized. The UBI should solve this. How? Taxes, obviously. Companies will simply have to pay more in taxes than they do now, to redistribute wealth down to the bottom. This will have the bonus effect of giving them more customers.
Who will do the "real work"? Employees, of course, just like now. Why would they do this? (This seems to be a big point that anti-UBI people just don't understand.) Because they make money for it, just like now. I don't know about you, but if I can sit on my ass and get $15k/year, which relegates me to a tiny apartment with roommates and eating ramen noodles, or I can go work for RobotCo as an engineer and make $150k/year (plus the $15k/year UBI, for a total of $165k), I'm going to take the latter even though it's more work. I rather like having a nice place to myself, a car, being able to afford nice stuff and eating out, etc.
How do we pay for UBI? Simple: more taxes, and eliminating redundant social programs that we're already paying for (as I mentioned above). So for instance, if I'm making $150k working at RobotCo, then obviously I don't really need that $15k UBI like some poor guy who got chronic illness and is no longer able to work at RobotCo, and whose job I took. So under the UBI scheme, my taxes at that income level will be adjusted so that I'll be paying that UBI right back. If we switch to a UBI system, someone making, say, $100k, should not see a significant change to their taxes if it's done right. Someone making $25k should get a nice boost. Someone making $500k should be seeing a bigger chunk of their pay taken. Also, corporations should be paying more, and not being able to hide profits offshore through twisted schemes (though we should also reduce the corporate tax rate to be competitive with other industrialized nations, so there's no advantage to keeping it in Europe for example). That's how you pay for it. After eliminating most of our existing handouts, it really shouldn't be that much. Note that not all social programs can be eliminated; you still need things like CPS since child abuse isn't solved by throwing money at people. Also,
Like "Applehu Akbar" said in a parallel comment here, I think you're probably incorrect about it being biological. I don't see this kind of difference, and the greater interest in religion, in women from non-Western and particularly non-American cultures. Asian, Indian, Russian etc. women just aren't like this, AFAICT, and overall seem to be far more practical and grounded in reality than American women who seem to be happy to blow all their money on bullshit (whether it's homeopathy or a wedding).
Finally, how do you tell a man "clearly has low testosterone levels" anyway? Engineering and programming jobs are chock-full of men who aren't exactly "alpha males", and they're probably the least prone to new-age beliefs of almost any profession next to scientists (who also aren't known for being a bunch of alpha jocks). Engineers do tend to be more religious than those other two groups, however, but not in a new-age way, as they also tend to be very socially conservative.
I think you're onto something there. And it's a product of Western (and esp. American) culture too, rather than being universal, IMO. I don't think Asian women, for instance, are like this, and I'm guessing eastern-bloc women probably aren't either; women in those cultures seem to be far more practical and grounded in reality. It really seems like we raise our women here to be Disneyfied idiots, who demand insanely expensive diamond rings and weddings and define their lives by these things, and who want to spend all their free time (at least while they're in their 20s-30s and childless) hanging out at bars and socializing and getting drunk.
Agreed. I made that mistake once, and I'm not making it again. You may think acceptance of some alt-med stuff like chiropractic and homeopathy is fairly innocuous, but pretty soon that person is visiting New Age "counselors" and talking about the "Ascended Masters", "St Germain and the violet flame", and all other kinds of wackiness, plus insisting on spending inordinate amounts of money on it.
What I'd really like to see is a serious survey to determine if beliefs in this quackery are more common among women than men. I'll bet it is. Women are already known to be more religious than men, and beliefs in "medicine" not backed by evidence are basically like religion.
My last wife bought into that crap, and more.
I'm single now, but I now have a firm rule: I will not date or marry anyone who believe in alternative medicine (except possibly chiropractors for back pain). The whole thing is a giant scam, and suckers people into spending huge amounts of money on snake oil.
Maybe, but there's a big difference between restraining performance in favor of another desirable attribute (like battery life), and restraining performance for some undesirable attribute (like making more money). Binning is all about making more money: chips are artificially limited in performance (after testing to see what they really can do) so that higher-performing ones can be sold for more; it's solely to increase prices. Otherwise, they'd only sort chips by their actual performance capabilities, but then they'd end up selling higher-speed chips for the same prices, because most chips are binned not because of performance limitation but because sales/marketing decided they needed X number of each speed grade.
Why Apple is restraining performance here isn't so obvious. Is it just to make all models perform the same regardless of carrier for some "user experience" factor, or are they trying to maximize battery life (which is a laudable goal for a mobile device)? If it's the former, I don't see how that helps the user at all. Why should Verizon users care about the speed that T-Mobile users are limited to? Verizon sucks for a lot of reasons (esp. price), but coverage and performance are not among them; if I were paying through the nose for Verizon service, I'd at least want to get the performance that that network is capable of. Personally, I'm a cheap-ass so I use a Sprint phone on Ting, but for the low price I pay for service, I'm not demanding the utmost in download speeds. If I were paying Rolls-Royce prices for a phone and service, I would.
$15 milion is a lot more than $14,000. We're talking about someone who "cheated" an online game for in-game funny money and sold it for $15M here, so that certainly qualifies for the gift threshold. It would be the same for anyone else who didn't cheat in the game and made a bunch of in-game funny money, and didn't sell it. So my point is: does the IRS actually go after people who are really serious gamers and amass lots of in-game "money" (without selling it for real money) and demand tax payments? If not, then this is not real money, and these hackers didn't really commit "fraud".
Not only that, but (you might be able to answer this better than me) doesn't the IRS require you to pay taxes on any "income" you earn? The gift exclusion is for gifts only, not for payment maid in lieu of US Dollars. If you do some yard work or handyman work for someone (not a relative/friend), and he pays you in produce from his garden or eggs from his chicken coop, you're supposed to assess the fair market value of those goods, and declare them as income and pay taxes on them, both state and federal. Of course, no one does, but that's the law. There's no minimum value exclusion here I know of. It's no different with in-game "money". So logically, the IRS should be demanding that all these MMORPG companies provide detailed information to them about all their players and how much in-game money they have, so the IRS can demand payment.
Maybe pedestrians should try looking before they cross the street...
This is legally wrong. According to the IRS, if you, for example, receive something as a gift, you're supposed to declare that as "income", and pay taxes on it based on its fair market value, even if you don't actually sell it.
I don't see how it's any different here.
So yes, people who win a bunch of in-game cash need to report this to the IRS and pay taxes on it.
Otherwise, these people should be cleared of the "fraud" charges.
You can't have it both ways.
Wow, what a fucking moron you are. You call a well-researched Wikipedia article on the profession "religious zealotry"? Who's the religious one?
This is why these regions need to come together and vote to kick out the South. The country as a whole would be much better off with the South evicted.
and gasoline will cost $25/gallon from now on
Where do you think California gets its refined gasoline, you idiot? They refine it all themselves. And oil is sold on the global market anyway, so they'll just buy the crude from somewhere else. In fact, all the states that currently get their refined gasoline from CA will be hurting, plus all the states that benefit from CA's west-coast ports.
The US Civil War was fought to decide this issue. States cannot secede from the US.
Yep, and the country has been suffering with the South dragging them down ever since. Should have just let them go (after freeing their slaves and getting them out of there).
What if AZ and NV joined CA? It would make more sense for the western states to act together, and free themselves of the east-coast states that are dragging them down (particularly the South).
Yes, there is. It's been tried many times in history, including twice in the US's history. The first time was a resounding success, the second time, not so much.... It's best avoided if possible.
What makes you think all the people who work at these places would want to pack up and move to the east coast?
And what makes you think the eastern side could even enforce it? Instead of just CA leaving, I'd like to see the entire western side of the country secede; notice that tons of military bases are located in the western states. Those people aren't going anywhere, and they're not going to let the equipment leave either. Honestly, the east coast would be screwed if the west coast quit the country. The east coast is an economic drain, esp. the South, and doesn't produce too much any more. The big question would be the heartland states in the middle (which side would they join?), as they do produce a lot of agriculture, but then again so do the west-coast states, probably far more than enough for their own needs, unlike the east. (When I refer to west-coast states, I'm really referring to everything as far east as Colorado.)
California should not secede by itself like this. However, if it could convince all the western states (up to CO, NM, MT, etc.) to join it, that new country would do quite well on its own, without being dragged down by the South and Florida.
Trump got around 60M votes. There are about 230M registered voters in the USA. That means that 26% of the eligible population actively voted for him.
Don't forget that only about 55% of the voting-eligible population even turned out to vote, significantly less (about 4M) than in 2008 even though the number of eligible voters is a little higher now.
It's pretty obvious that a bunch of people really didn't want to vote for either one, but held their nose and did so, and a bunch just didn't bother showing up because they didn't like the choices. That latter number probably had an effect on the down-ticket votes too, leading to a Republican sweep. You did a heckuva job, DNC.
Honestly, the idea would work out a lot better if it weren't just California, but instead a bunch of the neighboring western states all joined in. If CA, AZ, NV, OR, WA, ID etc. all decided to secede together, they *really* don't need the rest of the country.
You're completely clueless about the "science" behind the profession you promote. Try reading and getting educated:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
The whole field is a fraud, since it all depends on the idea of "subluxations" which are mystical BS. But apparently people like you are too stupid to understand basic science.
It doesn't help that most chiropractors buy into lots of other BS quack stuff like applied kinesiology, homeopathy, etc. But I guess morons like you believe in that stuff too, right?
There's good women everywhere, they're just a lot harder to find in some places than others. A small midwest city (~50k) just isn't going to have many unless you happen to like conservative religious women. Of course, the "midwest" is a rather large and diverse place anyway; Chicago is part of it and certainly has plenty of non-conservative, non-religious women. There's also smaller cities with universities that are a better bet with women like that. However, in all those places, the tech job factor will still be a problem; there just isn't that much of a concentration of tech jobs in those places, even in the larger cities.
Citation needed. Chiropractic is not physical therapy, it's an entirely different thing with different schools, and is not actual evidence-based medicine.
Wow, this is a really informative post you have here...