Here's another interesting possibility that the original false dichotomy excluded: What if only some of us had free will? In Quantum Night, author Robert J. Sawyer explored that idea. One of the premises is that around 58% of people actually have no free will at all, and the rest (42%) are divided into psychopaths and fully conscious people with free will.
I don't know, does encouraging your listeners to kill a government official who actively conducting an investigating foreign election tampering count as "not really hurting anybody"? Personally, I think when Alex Jones crossed over into overt threats, in this case specifically claiming that the would kill Robert Mueller or die trying, he crossed a line and responsible people have to yank their support for him.
I'm of the opinion that Alex Jones may not not "off his nut", as you put it. It's quite possible that he's a thoroughly rotten person who pretends to be crazy because his audience loves the crazy conspiracy stuff. Several people who have worked with him have said that Jones doesn't actually believe in anything that he's peddling and he lies constantly during his shows. He's claimed in the past that the federal government was coming to take his house because he's put every last penny he has into his show, when in he's taking a seven-figure salary, and has multiple houses.
It's entirely possible that Alex Jones is a phony who's taking advantage of the people stupid enough to believe in him, which, I suppose is why he supports Trump so ardently, that would make them kindred spirits.
No, everything you wrote is bullshit. Ajit Pai wants to eliminate net neutrality because it's an impediment to the predatory profit-seeking plans of the corporate monopolies that own him, body and soul.
I don't think I'm following your reasoning here. It looks like you're referring to Energy Return on Energy Investment (EROEI) graph in section 12, however, the graph for Nuclear EROEI seems is based on the assumption that high quality uranium to fuel nuclear power plants will run out in the year 2070. That makes the EROEI for the plants go to 0 at that point (which is worst than break even, because it represents a 100% loss of the invested energy). I looked for a better source that would give me some comparison values and I found this meta-analysis. In it, the authors conclude that the average nuclear plant has a 14:1 EROEI (look for figure 3 for the comparison graph), you source has a EROIE of about 2.5 for current plants, which is much lower. It's slightly lower than wind and coal and slightly higher than solar PV. As an aside, I found an article on Forbes that claimed nuclear had an EROEI of 75, but I think it's an editorial from a nuclear industry advocate...
It's important to note that the EROEI for coal, natural gas, and oil are all declining as it becomes more expensive (and energy-intensive) to access new deposits. The EROEI for nuclear may also decline, I can't be sure if the original analysis included the energy cost to store nuclear waste (What energy for storage? Well, you probably need to employ guards at the storage site for at least 60 years, for example, and they probably like heating, air conditioning, lights and maybe a fridge to keep their lunch in). The Solar PV and the wind values should increase as better construction techniques and materials decrease the energy investment cost of materials.
So can you provide a clear explaination why you think nuclear has an EROIE of 1?
If you get people off welfare and they become self sufficient, those programs go away. You have no heart. Think of the bureaucrats and their empires?
That's another reason why some people favour a UBI. Everybody gets it, so it never has to grow or try to shrink. Mind you, quite a few bureaucrats will lose their empires when it's introduced, but I think that's a sacrifice we would all gladly make for our country...
Isn't that like saying that if you got pregnant, you didn't use contraception? Or is the more like a "No true Scotsman" fallacy where everyone who decides to abstain but ends up having sex wasn't really trying to be abstinent? The point is that there are all kinds of abstinence programs and they are just about as effective as fad diets. People can stay on the wagon for a short time, but eventually virtually everyone falls off. For diets, the failure rate is 95%, I'd be surprised if the abstinence rate failure rate is much lower.
In truth, all non-permanent contraceptives fail at least some of the time.
Yes they do, but let's look at the failure rate of abstinence pledges, for example. Religious teenagers who make abstinence pledges have sex at rates that are exactly the same as religious teenagers who didn't make abstinence pledges. However, the teenagers who made the pledges are less likely to use other contraception when they have sex and thus have higher pregnancy rates and STD rates. Abstinence pledges not only don't reduce the rate of sexual activity, they are actually counter-productive and aggravate the harm from sexual activity. They are actually worse than useless.
That's our morals; others have their own morals. C'est la vie.
That's ok. I don't agree with those morals, but you should live your life the way that you want to. I'm not trying to tell you that you are living your life the wrong way. I'm pointing out that saying "don't have sex" isn't in any way a useful contribution to the discussion on population control or contraception.
The most efficient contraceptive is abstinence! No sex means sperm doesn't meet egg which means no birth (* Christians believe that Jesus was NOT the product of sex). Every other method will fail at least some of the time.
Actually, the abstinence method of contraception fails every time someone has sex. It's literally the least reliable method of contraception. It's kind of like trying to commit suicide by holding your breath. There may be some people who can do it, but the vast majority of people just wouldn't be able to. Especially if they have a enthusiastic breathing partner...
I think central idea of a "Techno Salvation" proposition is that technology will save us without our having to do anything to actually address the problem. That's what makes it "faith-based". It's the belief that we can do whatever we want, and eventually someone will invent something that will fix everything for us.
Apparently, NASA scientist, Lori Fenton looked at two different images of Mars taken 22 years apart (1977 and 1999), and determined that there appears to have been a temperature change of 0.65 degrees in between the two images. That appears to be the source of the global warming on Mars myth.
That mechanism exists. It is called consumer choice. It can roughly be stated as, "don't by stuff you don't need."
So what you're saying is all we need is for everyone to exhibit perfect behaviour at all times? I mean, if only people stopped acting like people and did what our model of what people should do says they should do, then everything would work, right? Frankly, I'm not sure a system the depends on people not acting like people is actually a good system.
In 2012, total estimated retirement plan assets in the US were $23.7 trillion.
In 2012, the top 1% of American controlled 43% of total wealth of American and the top 5% of Americans controlled ~72% of that wealth. If current trends hold, then by 2030, the top 1% will control ~64% of the total wealth of America, and top 5% will control ~95% of the total wealth of America.
Except in this case, this is the first generation, where it seems a majority of them are wanting to fundamentally change the society and system that have grown this country to the great level it has reached.
There's always an excuse for why this time it's different, and yet it always seems to be the same complaint (the new generation isn't exactly like me) and the same result (a generation that is nearly identical to the one that preceded it).
Funny, I'm not sure I care that much about whether the free market kills, socialism kills me, or a despot kills me. In all three cases I'm dead and my preferences don't much matter.
However, I would prefer to live in a liberal democracy with free markets than have to take up arms against a despot and live in a war zone. Somewhere in between those extremes is the point where I start killing people who won't let me live the way I want to.
This is a reasonable discussion to have. I tend to favor market forces wherever possible, and I think the concept of a welfare state is a flawed one. I do support using the government as a safety net, but I believe the goal of the safety net should be to get people back on their own two feet if at all possible. I think this can be achieved by rejiggering incentives for the people running and participating in the programs.
One problem is that it kind of looks like every time someone tries to rejigger the incentives, politics gets involved and the result ends up being even less effective at encouraging results, often because too much effort is put into designing the sticks and virtually none into designing the carrots.
I'll have to look them up tonight. I've never heard of them, but from what you describe it sounds like complete heresy. Nothing in Revelations indicated that the end times can be or will be brought about by man. In fact, it says "no man knows the hour or the day" indicating it will be on God's time table. I often wonder how these groups call themselves Christians when there is nothing in scripture to substantiate what they believe.
Just wait until you get to the Prosperity Christians. They believe that God loves rich people, otherwise he wouldn't allow them to be rich. Consequently, it follows that poor people deserve to be poor, and they must have done something to make God angry at them. As a corollary, they also preach that you can be come a better, and therefore richer, person by giving money to their churches.
EVEN WORSE: It all took place on OUR watch. ALL of them. All of US. T / O / B / C / B / etc. Our leaders do represent The People, but exactly which ones are yet to be determined.
You are completely missing what I am trying to say. Let us pretend we are attending a conference on qualfonic energy, which is completely made up. Let us suppose that someone has just given an address with a serious criticism of this form of energy. Would you be more likely to trust this criticism if it came from someone who has had nothing good to say about it or from someone who was a major proponent of it? Hopefully you can understand why people might take the comments from the latter person more seriously given no other information.
Neither. They both have motivations to lie. I'd want to fact check the claims of either person because the first one might be inventing a criticism and the second one may be omitting other major problems. You're a fool if you think either of them is more trustworthy than the other. Furthermore, a proponent admitting a minor flaw, is a classic hustle technique to get you to buy into the product that they're pitching.
If this were not the case you would understand why a source pointing out all of the things that Trump has lied about or misrepresented is not sufficient proof of your claim. You need to compare it to other politicians and I am not convinced that Trump is significantly worse. He certainly is not a truthful politician, but few are and we tend to forget the myriad lies and cover-ups of controversies that surround past politicians. I suspect that if we were discussing some subject where you were not in agreement with the conclusion, you would be quick to employ the same arguments I have used here, but you dislike Trump so much that your emotions blind you to reason.
That is not to say you are a bad person, because everyone is that way about something that they take personally. My point is that in this particular area, you are not a good source absent significant and quality evidence.
How much evidence do you need? If you're really interested, there's a lot more stuff on Trump's lack of honesty and his place in the world of American politics in respect to that, but I think it's telling that presidential historians (who ought to know quite a bit about past presidents) have (spoilers) ranked him last place out of all of America's presidents. That's pretty unusual, most politicians get ranked in the middle somewhere during their terms, neither best nor worst.
I read through some of the linked paper because I was wondering the same thing, they mention in Clinical Implications section that they don't think the results are likely to be an exercise correlation because most of the studies they used in their analysis were supposed to have controlled for exercise levels, and they found that the combination of exercise and sauna usage had a larger beneficial health effect that either exercise or sauna use by itself. Furthermore, the pathways section suggests that the evidence indicates that 30 minutes in a sauna has a cardiovascular effect similar to medium to high intensity walking for a similar duration, so they have an identified mechanism for why sauna bathing causes the published results.
These are mildly interesting results, but I think the biggest danger, as they acknowledge in the Clinical Implications section, is that most of the studies they examined had small sample sizes, so the results may be tainted by publishing bias (i.e. only the studies that found positive results were published). I'm sceptical of the results, but it seems worthy of devoting some resources to conduct a larger study of the benefits of sauna usage on patients with high blood pressure conditions to see if the results hold up in well-designed and correctly sized study.
I don't see your point because the founding fathers also enshrined in law that only male, white, landowners were be allowed to vote. Also, they waged an armed rebellion against a government that didn't represent the will of the majority of Americans, so I'm seeing some mixed messages here. Also, I seriously doubt that the electoral college is actually working the way that they expected it to work.
The problem with most UBI programs is that they don't require it's recipients to look for work and thus encourage people to be passive and not bother looking for work. Previous programs are the way they are exactly because they're supposed to prevent abuse, i.e people getting benefits they're not entitled to like unemployment for people who have no intention of being employed. Reductions in overhead costs mostly stem from the removal of systems intended to prevent abuse and when added to an UBI pram, the program will be just as inefficient and complex as the programs it's supposed to replace.
The key words are "supposed to prevent abuse", the problem is that often in trying to prevent abuse, the systems actually mandate abuse. I was on unemployment once. I lost my benefits for 3 weeks because I worked for 3 days and earned too much money on my (very) short term contract. By doing actual work, I ended up with less money than I would have had if I hadn't done any work at all. I also had to be careful about accepting a job because if the job didn't pay enough and it didn't work out, my benefits could be lowered permanently or gone entirely. Never mind that I had been paying into unemployment insurance for years, already.
UBI basically just throws all of these safeguards to the side and assumes people won't abuse the program when the safeguards were originally put into place exactly because people were abusing the old systems.
The UBI throws away all of those safeguards because it assumes that the things that people thought were "abuses" no longer matter if everyone is getting the same amount of money. You no longer care if people are working or not because benefits don't end when someone starts working. You no longer care if someone is sick or not, because benefits don't end when someone is no longer too sick to work. You no longer care if someone is hiding their income because you don't reduce their welfare benefits when they start making too much money. The biggest abuse in a UBI program is, I think, collecting someone else's benefits (either by fraud, or by coercion). The rest of it doesn't matter as long as the basic income is actually universal. When you start trying to tailor benefits or claw them back, it becomes just another of the programs that it was supposed to replace.
The key thing here is that you have to trust that left to their own devices, people will generally choose to be good rather than bad. If you can't believe that, then you will never be able to support a UBI. If you do believe that, then everything else is implementation details.
Slashdot Mirror
Here's another interesting possibility that the original false dichotomy excluded: What if only some of us had free will? In Quantum Night, author Robert J. Sawyer explored that idea. One of the premises is that around 58% of people actually have no free will at all, and the rest (42%) are divided into psychopaths and fully conscious people with free will.
Alex Jones Threatens to Shoot Robert Mueller
Alex Jones threatens to shoot "Pedophile" Robert Mueller
Youtube takes down 4 Jones videos because of violent or graphic content and issues a warning to Jones.
I don't know, does encouraging your listeners to kill a government official who actively conducting an investigating foreign election tampering count as "not really hurting anybody"? Personally, I think when Alex Jones crossed over into overt threats, in this case specifically claiming that the would kill Robert Mueller or die trying, he crossed a line and responsible people have to yank their support for him.
If he actually had posts deleted, the chances are that his friends reported him because they were actually offended by what he wrote.
Specifically, what got him kicked off several of the sites this time, was his on-air threat to kill Robert Mueller or die trying.
I'm of the opinion that Alex Jones may not not "off his nut", as you put it. It's quite possible that he's a thoroughly rotten person who pretends to be crazy because his audience loves the crazy conspiracy stuff. Several people who have worked with him have said that Jones doesn't actually believe in anything that he's peddling and he lies constantly during his shows. He's claimed in the past that the federal government was coming to take his house because he's put every last penny he has into his show, when in he's taking a seven-figure salary, and has multiple houses.
It's entirely possible that Alex Jones is a phony who's taking advantage of the people stupid enough to believe in him, which, I suppose is why he supports Trump so ardently, that would make them kindred spirits.
No, everything you wrote is bullshit. Ajit Pai wants to eliminate net neutrality because it's an impediment to the predatory profit-seeking plans of the corporate monopolies that own him, body and soul.
No. The peer reviewed science from over 10 universities around the world beg to differ in a study that uses established methods for industrial energetic input. Nuclear power provides no energetic return on energy invested.
I don't think I'm following your reasoning here. It looks like you're referring to Energy Return on Energy Investment (EROEI) graph in section 12, however, the graph for Nuclear EROEI seems is based on the assumption that high quality uranium to fuel nuclear power plants will run out in the year 2070. That makes the EROEI for the plants go to 0 at that point (which is worst than break even, because it represents a 100% loss of the invested energy). I looked for a better source that would give me some comparison values and I found this meta-analysis. In it, the authors conclude that the average nuclear plant has a 14:1 EROEI (look for figure 3 for the comparison graph), you source has a EROIE of about 2.5 for current plants, which is much lower. It's slightly lower than wind and coal and slightly higher than solar PV. As an aside, I found an article on Forbes that claimed nuclear had an EROEI of 75, but I think it's an editorial from a nuclear industry advocate...
It's important to note that the EROEI for coal, natural gas, and oil are all declining as it becomes more expensive (and energy-intensive) to access new deposits. The EROEI for nuclear may also decline, I can't be sure if the original analysis included the energy cost to store nuclear waste (What energy for storage? Well, you probably need to employ guards at the storage site for at least 60 years, for example, and they probably like heating, air conditioning, lights and maybe a fridge to keep their lunch in). The Solar PV and the wind values should increase as better construction techniques and materials decrease the energy investment cost of materials.
So can you provide a clear explaination why you think nuclear has an EROIE of 1?
If you get people off welfare and they become self sufficient, those programs go away. You have no heart. Think of the bureaucrats and their empires?
That's another reason why some people favour a UBI. Everybody gets it, so it never has to grow or try to shrink. Mind you, quite a few bureaucrats will lose their empires when it's introduced, but I think that's a sacrifice we would all gladly make for our country...
If you have sex, you don't practice abstinence.
Isn't that like saying that if you got pregnant, you didn't use contraception? Or is the more like a "No true Scotsman" fallacy where everyone who decides to abstain but ends up having sex wasn't really trying to be abstinent? The point is that there are all kinds of abstinence programs and they are just about as effective as fad diets. People can stay on the wagon for a short time, but eventually virtually everyone falls off. For diets, the failure rate is 95%, I'd be surprised if the abstinence rate failure rate is much lower.
In truth, all non-permanent contraceptives fail at least some of the time.
Yes they do, but let's look at the failure rate of abstinence pledges, for example. Religious teenagers who make abstinence pledges have sex at rates that are exactly the same as religious teenagers who didn't make abstinence pledges. However, the teenagers who made the pledges are less likely to use other contraception when they have sex and thus have higher pregnancy rates and STD rates. Abstinence pledges not only don't reduce the rate of sexual activity, they are actually counter-productive and aggravate the harm from sexual activity. They are actually worse than useless.
That's our morals; others have their own morals. C'est la vie.
That's ok. I don't agree with those morals, but you should live your life the way that you want to. I'm not trying to tell you that you are living your life the wrong way. I'm pointing out that saying "don't have sex" isn't in any way a useful contribution to the discussion on population control or contraception.
The most efficient contraceptive is abstinence! No sex means sperm doesn't meet egg which means no birth (* Christians believe that Jesus was NOT the product of sex). Every other method will fail at least some of the time.
Actually, the abstinence method of contraception fails every time someone has sex. It's literally the least reliable method of contraception. It's kind of like trying to commit suicide by holding your breath. There may be some people who can do it, but the vast majority of people just wouldn't be able to. Especially if they have a enthusiastic breathing partner...
Where do you propose we build our new Mount Everest, every other year? I suppose we could work on building a real Atlantis....
I think central idea of a "Techno Salvation" proposition is that technology will save us without our having to do anything to actually address the problem. That's what makes it "faith-based". It's the belief that we can do whatever we want, and eventually someone will invent something that will fix everything for us.
Apparently, NASA scientist, Lori Fenton looked at two different images of Mars taken 22 years apart (1977 and 1999), and determined that there appears to have been a temperature change of 0.65 degrees in between the two images. That appears to be the source of the global warming on Mars myth.
That mechanism exists. It is called consumer choice. It can roughly be stated as, "don't by stuff you don't need."
So what you're saying is all we need is for everyone to exhibit perfect behaviour at all times? I mean, if only people stopped acting like people and did what our model of what people should do says they should do, then everything would work, right? Frankly, I'm not sure a system the depends on people not acting like people is actually a good system.
In 2012, total estimated retirement plan assets in the US were $23.7 trillion.
In 2012, the top 1% of American controlled 43% of total wealth of American and the top 5% of Americans controlled ~72% of that wealth. If current trends hold, then by 2030, the top 1% will control ~64% of the total wealth of America, and top 5% will control ~95% of the total wealth of America.
Jesus had nothing against capitalism.
I'm not sure the money lenders in the temple would agree with that statement...
Except in this case, this is the first generation, where it seems a majority of them are wanting to fundamentally change the society and system that have grown this country to the great level it has reached.
There's always an excuse for why this time it's different, and yet it always seems to be the same complaint (the new generation isn't exactly like me) and the same result (a generation that is nearly identical to the one that preceded it).
Funny, I'm not sure I care that much about whether the free market kills, socialism kills me, or a despot kills me. In all three cases I'm dead and my preferences don't much matter.
However, I would prefer to live in a liberal democracy with free markets than have to take up arms against a despot and live in a war zone. Somewhere in between those extremes is the point where I start killing people who won't let me live the way I want to.
This is a reasonable discussion to have. I tend to favor market forces wherever possible, and I think the concept of a welfare state is a flawed one. I do support using the government as a safety net, but I believe the goal of the safety net should be to get people back on their own two feet if at all possible. I think this can be achieved by rejiggering incentives for the people running and participating in the programs.
One problem is that it kind of looks like every time someone tries to rejigger the incentives, politics gets involved and the result ends up being even less effective at encouraging results, often because too much effort is put into designing the sticks and virtually none into designing the carrots.
I'll have to look them up tonight. I've never heard of them, but from what you describe it sounds like complete heresy. Nothing in Revelations indicated that the end times can be or will be brought about by man. In fact, it says "no man knows the hour or the day" indicating it will be on God's time table. I often wonder how these groups call themselves Christians when there is nothing in scripture to substantiate what they believe.
Just wait until you get to the Prosperity Christians. They believe that God loves rich people, otherwise he wouldn't allow them to be rich. Consequently, it follows that poor people deserve to be poor, and they must have done something to make God angry at them. As a corollary, they also preach that you can be come a better, and therefore richer, person by giving money to their churches.
EVEN WORSE: It all took place on OUR watch. ALL of them. All of US. T / O / B / C / B / etc. Our leaders do represent The People, but exactly which ones are yet to be determined.
Apparently the Russian people?
I don't know what to say about people who prefer treason to honest elections...
You are completely missing what I am trying to say. Let us pretend we are attending a conference on qualfonic energy, which is completely made up. Let us suppose that someone has just given an address with a serious criticism of this form of energy. Would you be more likely to trust this criticism if it came from someone who has had nothing good to say about it or from someone who was a major proponent of it? Hopefully you can understand why people might take the comments from the latter person more seriously given no other information.
Neither. They both have motivations to lie. I'd want to fact check the claims of either person because the first one might be inventing a criticism and the second one may be omitting other major problems. You're a fool if you think either of them is more trustworthy than the other. Furthermore, a proponent admitting a minor flaw, is a classic hustle technique to get you to buy into the product that they're pitching.
If this were not the case you would understand why a source pointing out all of the things that Trump has lied about or misrepresented is not sufficient proof of your claim. You need to compare it to other politicians and I am not convinced that Trump is significantly worse. He certainly is not a truthful politician, but few are and we tend to forget the myriad lies and cover-ups of controversies that surround past politicians. I suspect that if we were discussing some subject where you were not in agreement with the conclusion, you would be quick to employ the same arguments I have used here, but you dislike Trump so much that your emotions blind you to reason.
Trump's lies corrode democracy.
There's a long history of presidential untruths. Here's why Donald Trump is 'in a class by himself.
How Does Trump Stack Up Against the Best — and Worst — Presidents?
Trump’s Lies vs. Obama’s
Donald Trump running the most dishonest White House ever, says historian
Comparing Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump on the Truth-O-Meter
Are Clinton and Trump the Biggest Liars Ever to Run for President?
That is not to say you are a bad person, because everyone is that way about something that they take personally. My point is that in this particular area, you are not a good source absent significant and quality evidence.
How much evidence do you need? If you're really interested, there's a lot more stuff on Trump's lack of honesty and his place in the world of American politics in respect to that, but I think it's telling that presidential historians (who ought to know quite a bit about past presidents) have (spoilers) ranked him last place out of all of America's presidents. That's pretty unusual, most politicians get ranked in the middle somewhere during their terms, neither best nor worst.
I read through some of the linked paper because I was wondering the same thing, they mention in Clinical Implications section that they don't think the results are likely to be an exercise correlation because most of the studies they used in their analysis were supposed to have controlled for exercise levels, and they found that the combination of exercise and sauna usage had a larger beneficial health effect that either exercise or sauna use by itself. Furthermore, the pathways section suggests that the evidence indicates that 30 minutes in a sauna has a cardiovascular effect similar to medium to high intensity walking for a similar duration, so they have an identified mechanism for why sauna bathing causes the published results.
These are mildly interesting results, but I think the biggest danger, as they acknowledge in the Clinical Implications section, is that most of the studies they examined had small sample sizes, so the results may be tainted by publishing bias (i.e. only the studies that found positive results were published). I'm sceptical of the results, but it seems worthy of devoting some resources to conduct a larger study of the benefits of sauna usage on patients with high blood pressure conditions to see if the results hold up in well-designed and correctly sized study.
I don't see your point because the founding fathers also enshrined in law that only male, white, landowners were be allowed to vote. Also, they waged an armed rebellion against a government that didn't represent the will of the majority of Americans, so I'm seeing some mixed messages here. Also, I seriously doubt that the electoral college is actually working the way that they expected it to work.
The problem with most UBI programs is that they don't require it's recipients to look for work and thus encourage people to be passive and not bother looking for work. Previous programs are the way they are exactly because they're supposed to prevent abuse, i.e people getting benefits they're not entitled to like unemployment for people who have no intention of being employed. Reductions in overhead costs mostly stem from the removal of systems intended to prevent abuse and when added to an UBI pram, the program will be just as inefficient and complex as the programs it's supposed to replace.
The key words are "supposed to prevent abuse", the problem is that often in trying to prevent abuse, the systems actually mandate abuse. I was on unemployment once. I lost my benefits for 3 weeks because I worked for 3 days and earned too much money on my (very) short term contract. By doing actual work, I ended up with less money than I would have had if I hadn't done any work at all. I also had to be careful about accepting a job because if the job didn't pay enough and it didn't work out, my benefits could be lowered permanently or gone entirely. Never mind that I had been paying into unemployment insurance for years, already.
UBI basically just throws all of these safeguards to the side and assumes people won't abuse the program when the safeguards were originally put into place exactly because people were abusing the old systems.
The UBI throws away all of those safeguards because it assumes that the things that people thought were "abuses" no longer matter if everyone is getting the same amount of money. You no longer care if people are working or not because benefits don't end when someone starts working. You no longer care if someone is sick or not, because benefits don't end when someone is no longer too sick to work. You no longer care if someone is hiding their income because you don't reduce their welfare benefits when they start making too much money. The biggest abuse in a UBI program is, I think, collecting someone else's benefits (either by fraud, or by coercion). The rest of it doesn't matter as long as the basic income is actually universal. When you start trying to tailor benefits or claw them back, it becomes just another of the programs that it was supposed to replace.
The key thing here is that you have to trust that left to their own devices, people will generally choose to be good rather than bad. If you can't believe that, then you will never be able to support a UBI. If you do believe that, then everything else is implementation details.