You sound just like Roman Mir and the other Ayn Rand cultists who think there should be any taxes.
If that's true, then cite specific examples. Meanwhile in that post you're laying out exactly how somebody on disability should live. That's called authoritarianism, which is a major component of communism as it has existed (at least the initial stages as defined by Marx, however no communist party has ever moved beyond this stage, hence I threw the term "communist party" at you and not "communist") with the other major component being the complete de-emphasis of the needs of the individual, which you've also espoused here.
Or worse that somehow advanced nations like Denmark with high taxes on rich people are somehow "Communist". How very stupid of you.
Actually go read my post history; I'm one of the few people on slashdot who pretty clearly lay out a distinction between the concepts of socialism, communism, and welfare, namely by following the textbook definition of all three. Your whole basic income premise is very distinctly welfare, furthermore, Denmark isn't (with only a few exceptions) socialist, contrary to popular slashdot belief, rather it's capitalist with a strong welfare component. The USSR wasn't communist, rather they fit very well within the definition of socialist, even though they self identified as communist.
I've already explained in this thread that BI would not be indexed to local cost-of-living. If the BI isn't enough for you to afford to stay in Manhattan without working, then you'll have to move or get a job. This isn't hard.
So people who are currently disabled will have to move away from the life they currently know, and away from potential family members who provide them assistance (i.e. carrying their groceries) after your plan goes into effect. And then you wonder why I say you behave like a member of typical communist parties.
So far as the importance of living where you've always lived, that's some kind of imaginary right that people delude themselves into thinking exists
I've been saying that for a long time, yet I get modded as troll here when I do so. It's also one of the founding principles behind occupy wall street, and if you look at any of the slashdot discussions about San Franciscans protesting Google over making their cost of living go up, you'll see a lot of commenters defending the protesters (nevermind that Google started there, or that Google by far isn't the only company causing this.)
The number of locations in the country where you can't find a very cheap place to live within a 2 hour drive of a very affluent location is vanishingly small.
No, not really. Every time some place becomes gentrified, you can find another place that has only begun gentrification. Right now that's Austin, Texas.
yet obviously that's not true at all because we're seeing people live there for very long periods without a job, relying solely on free money to get by.
That's because they're getting *too much* free money right now, because it's indexed to location, and it treats people unequally. People on Section 8 can get a really ridiculous amount of money to go rent a house (not an apartment, a nice-sized house). The system is entirely unfair: some people are able to get a lot of largesse (like women with kids), while others can't get squat (like a 30yo guy with no kids).
Furthermore, if everybody is going to make as much as everybody who is retired or disabled
Which isn't very much; how many times do I have to point out that this is a *****BASIC***** income? Disabled people can usually work too, and retirement is a choice.
You're being extremely inconsistent here. You said we're going to remove things like disability and replace it with basic income. Yet disability pays enough that most people can continue living at least in the general area where they've always lived, including in more affluent areas, which is especially important for people who are disabled or retired to live near long time friends or family members. But you're then saying that basic income shouldn't pay enough that somebody could get by in those high cost areas, so in other words those folks will now have to move away from the life that they've known once they become disabled, and have to just assume that wherever they go they'll find help and support. And that of course being up to and including being blind, quadriplegic, making work practically impossible.
And then of course, we still need to plant a dollar figure on top of it all. After all, you said that somebody should live a really crummy life on this income, but at least have a place to live. Yet the cost difference in that life from one region to another is HUGELY different. And again, when this plan takes effect, (which it won't given how really poorly thought out and blindly ideological it already is) you're also ignoring the upward pressure it will place on the cost of property ownership and/or rent.
Oh please. This isn't creating an "abundant supply" of new money, it's just moving around, largely by eliminating existing social programs and letting people manage their money themselves instead of being chased around to see if they're "cheating", and the balance being made up with progressive taxation. For people in the middle, it'll be a wash: they'll be taxed more than now, but then the BI will make up for it so the net will be the same. For people making a lot, boo hoo, they'll have to cut back and not buy a new Rolls every year.
I like how you decided by yourself what quality of life others should have, like you've got it all figured out and everybody should trust you because you know best, and everybody else is wrong. How very Communist Party of you.
And finally, this is a ***BASIC*** income. I don't understand why I have to keep repeating this, but apparently I do. It's enough to squeak by on with a crappy apartment with roommates and some basics from the grocery store.
Probably because this is a very vague description. Most of my life has literally been spent living a life below the poverty line, and yet I've never felt poor. I've always had food, and I've always had an abundance of luxury items (before I got serious work, I had a flagship grade smartphone, a 47" tv, a really nice computer, a laptop, and a used Lexus LS400) and I made at most about $12k a year, and I otherwise only relied upon myself for everything I had. This is quite possible to do in Phoenix, Arizona, even to this day, so long as you wisely spend your money. Things like hitting bars on weekends isn't cheap and thus isn't wise.
Yet you can't do that everywhere, so you're going to need to be far more specific.
Now, knowing the politics of people of your persuasion, they typically define the concept of a living wage (which is silly for reasons I'm not going to get into here) but in California and New York, it's currently fashionable to define that as making $15 an hour at 40 hours a week. That means $31,200 a year. But since you clearly have everything already figured out, because after all, you said under no uncertain terms that Basic Income is simple, I'll let you describe how somebody is supposed to make live like you described both in Phoenix Arizona (which happens to be only slightly below the national average cost of living) and in New York. Also keep in mind that once you do this basic income thing, you need to account for how you're going to be driving up rent costs in the more affluent areas like New York City.
Also I like how you call Basic Income "simple" yet you haven't even addressed even the most basic issues that it will cause, such as perpetual hyperinflation. And no, you don't need to print money to cause inflation, simply taking it away from some source who has a lot of it (be that a person, multiple persons, or entities) and then flooding the economy with it will do the trick. And that's exactly what this whole plan proposes doing. It all has to do with the supply of money, which if somebody is storing it or otherwise "hoarding" as the term people like you like to use, then you're keeping the money supply down, even if it's done artificially. If you create an abundant supply of anything you can think of, people invariably value it less, which is exactly what inflation is.
I don't think that's going to be the case. Americans don't particularly like manufacturing jobs because they're very tedious and repetitive. In economics there's a concept known as an opportunity cost. Suppose line work is only worth about $3 an hour (though realistically probably less.) Is it really worth it to you to spend 40 hours a week doing shit that you really don't like doing for only $6k a year above your existing $20k a year? (Or whatever this basic income amounts to.) I really doubt it, I think most people would just opt to take a permanent vacation, which is an opportunity cost decision they're making, as that extra $6k per year isn't really going to improve their quality of life much.
$6k a year goes a LOT further in China than it does here though, so it's more worthwhile for them to do that kind of work there. In addition to that, the fact that everybody would have a basic income in the US means that over time Americans will value their money even less.
The more I think about it, the more I think basic income is a horrible idea, which is mainly motivated by people thinking that just the fact that you're alive means you have the right to take anything you want without having to give anything up for it.
That doesn't make any sense. If I pay you $100 and take back $99, how much am I really giving you?
This is not how a BI system works. Everyone gets the same monthly BI stipend simply for being alive. Beyond that, each person is free to work—or not—as many jobs for whatever salary they can negotiate with their employer.
So does that mean you get more money if you have kids? I can think of a few ways that this would get abused. In fact I already know how a similar system is already abused in the US.
If you think it's "immoral" to keep people from starving in the streets, then you and I have nothing in common and nothing to talk about. And if you think BI has any resemblance to Soviet-style policies, you're just an idiot.
Actually one of the interesting things about the USSR was how they talked about how they had no poor people there. What's interesting is there are lots of stories of people who escaped the USSR who were literally in tears once they realized just how bad they had it while they lived there, and feeling equally bad about the relatives they had to leave behind to live in that shit.
One time an exchange student came to visit my uncle, and the first time he took her to a store to buy school supplies, she was awe stricken by how many choices of pens and other materials there were (there's only one model of everything in the USSR, and you're told that it's the best, such as the Trabant.) She literally thought that they had put on an elaborate show for her to impress her, something which a lot of Warsaw countries would do for foreign guests from wealthier countries to try to convince them that communist life is just awesome.
She also refused to smile most of the time, because in the USSR if you were smiling or otherwise happy, you were definitely standing out from the rest of the crowd, which was a good way to paint a KGB target on your back. For literally no reason at all, you'd just disappear and nobody would ever hear from or about you again.
You don't need unemployment with BI, just like you don't need "disability", SNAP, etc. All these social programs are band-aid attempts to fix the problems caused by poverty. Eliminate poverty with a basic income and you don't need them any more.
That's interesting because you didn't address the underlying concern, while at the same time bringing up a new one.
According to your theory, people will just leave these expensive places once they don't have a job tying them there, yet obviously that's not true at all because we're seeing people live there for very long periods without a job, relying solely on free money to get by. Furthermore, if everybody is going to make as much as everybody who is retired or disabled, then what happens when the real estate cost is driven up above what people already living there on a fixed income can afford?
This sounds nice on paper, except you still haven't dealt with the problem of those who feel they have the "right" to live there. This describes a lot of the OWS types were were unemployed at the time of those protests, even for long periods of time by their own admission, yet refused to leave New York. Remember also that New York was one of those states that wanted to justify having unemployment for longer than 99 weeks. I really think you haven't thought this through as well as you think you have. (and I'm out of time to write a full response right now)
Exactly. I'm very surprised we haven't used statistical information to cut down on rent seeking behavior. Useless middlemen must wield far more power than those that desire an efficient, equitable market.
Speak of rent, I'm wondering how advocates of basic income intend to deal with people outbidding one another for property. The reason that places like New York or San Francisco are so expensive is because lots of people are essentially outbidding one another on rent or property, putting upward pressure on the prices. Now, think about how adding that much more income to their spending power is going to impact that. What happens when the rent then exceeds what somebody on this basic income can afford?
I know what you're thinking: Price controls, or maybe even go Karl Marx and just seize their property in the name of humanity and give it away. You still haven't solved the ultimate problem that an economy ultimately sorts out: How you allocate scarce resources. Land, and by extension, real estate, is a finite resource. There's only so many people that you can squeeze into New York City. So how do you decide who gets to live there and who doesn't? Some people talk about how they have a right to live in New York City, no matter how much rent costs. That's fine, but what are you going to do when people who think they have the right to live there exceeds the population capacity of the city? Something, somewhere has to give. The problem is even worse in San Francisco, because they (through the democratic process) won't allow anybody to build any additional housing.
How would you make an urgent purchase by phone? More than once, I've purchased an airline ticket over the phone while I was literally in a cab on my way to the airport, I'd be pretty pissed if my bank would not allow that. Since I don't have a chip reader in my phone, I don't see how I'd be able to make a mobile web purchase either.
I can think of a really trivial way to do that: They could just issue you a fob (or an app) that is paired with the card and issues a one time password. Think Google Authenticator or RSA SecureID.
Or if you really want to make things interesting: Have an app send an SMS to the merchant containing the one time password it generates from a secret key and pin combo (wrong pin generates the wrong key, which can't be verified until sent to the bank, meaning bank can quickly detect hack attempt) paired with a one time account number, and the authenticating service sends to the bank those two bits of information paired with the phone number that sent it the SMS, and the bank then validates (or invalidates) all three. You obtain the secret key for generating the first two from a QR code they send in the mail, combined with another code they text to you, with the app making it easy to input both.
That would be pretty damn hard to spoof, and likely not worth the time and effort for a typical petty crackhead thief just looking for fix money. This would absolutely require malware that exploits your device, and can only be done with YOUR device itself (or rather, they MUST have your physical SIM card.) And nowadays Google (and I'm guessing Apple does as well) routinely scans all devices for new bits of malware as they are found. Given how quickly an exploit like this would be spotted, the hacker probably wouldn't make much over a long term.
I've been saying this ever since I first heard of the occupy movement. Why the fuck are we demonizing anybody who makes a lot of money? That reminds me of black neighborhoods that demonize success as "acting white". It's stupid and oversimplifies the shit out of the situation.
Besides, half of the so called 1% label themselves as liberal progressives.
By the way, using a label like "1%" or in the derogatory "a 1%er" is so fucking arbitrary it's beyond stupid. 1% of what? Recent circumstances have dramatically increased my income to ~80k USD per year, which according to globalrichlist.com puts me in the top 0.1% of income earners. Oh but wait, we're talking just the 1% of US income earners? Then why the fuck have I seen Europeans and Asians mention the 1%? And why is it the top 1% and not the top 2%?
It really truly is as arbitrary as labeling somebody based on the color of their skin.
The occupy movement are really just a bunch of bigots by another name, only because they supposedly represent the "underdogs" somehow, and for really no logical reason at all, it justifies everything they do.
No, Cyanogen is the startup, and they partnered with Microsoft.
Offering SaaS cloud applications is not a cheap thing to do, especially on the scale that the likes of Amazon, Apple, Google, Microsoft, and to a lesser extent Yandex have pulled off. Hence it would make sense that if a startup was to do something like this, they'd partner with a bigger company.
I think one of the bigger things hurting the FBI is they are so exclusive towards otherwise talented people compared to the private sector, and so their human resource pool leaves a lot to be desired. For example, even though polygraph is nothing more than an intimidation tactic that is basically useless, (and people who know it's a load of crap aren't intimidated by it) they won't hire anybody without subjecting them to it. They also exclude anybody who has at any point in their life consumed cannabis, which is in many ways more benign than alcohol.
On top of it all, they don't pay shit compared to private sector jobs. (In only my second year after graduation, I already make more than most FBI agents at GS12 by just doing datacenter work.)
Trump is a great example of using OPM. Banks still loan him money for his businesses despite having four business bankruptcies on record.
Almost every person worth more than a few million dollars has had a business failure at some point, or even several. The thing is, most businesses fail within a few years of opening, and just because you have as much money as Trump had during his 4 big failures doesn't make you immune to it.
No, that doesn't define a schedule 1 drug. A schedule 1 drug means it has no accepted medicinal use, which is very much false; it actually has a lot of accepted medicinal uses. The DEA just labels it as schedule 1 because the DEA doesn't recognize any medicinal uses, which is absurd, but there you have it. The other requirement of a schedule 1 drug is that it has high potential for abuse, which is basically all scheduled drugs, in addition to alcohol, which is not classified in this way.
Also, oddly enough, the DEA says that schedule 1 drugs have physical and psychological tendencies, whereas cannabis has no proven dependencies. Meanwhile, alcohol can literally kill you if you are a long-term heavy abuser and quit cold turkey.
Pretty much the only thing it comes down to is the gateway drug theory, which has no merit at all other than one based on morality (i.e. people who use a schedule 1 drug have broken that moral barrier and are now more likely to use other schedule 1 drugs, effectively making it circular logic.)
You don't "contract" a willingness to blow yourself up in support of a cause. Christ, if that's how fucked US thinking is on the matter, you may as well vote Trump now and get it over with. I mean, seriously that has to the the dumbest thing I've ever heard. Ever.
Every bigot in the history of time has had a rationalization for why their bigotry is actually justified.
Try for a second to see the logical disconnect. He isn't trying to justify it, it's just stupid to apply the word "racism" to anything and everything that you don't like.
Probably, but at least aiming for that has a measurable goal instead of something vague like morality. Take cannabis for example; why is it a schedule 1 drug? It has hardly any of the characteristics of other schedule 1 drugs. Yet it's there because it bothers people on moral grounds.
I think that's a good thing. Or rather, it would be nice if policy decisions were made based on technical merit rather than passing some ideological test.
Slashdot Mirror
You sound just like Roman Mir and the other Ayn Rand cultists who think there should be any taxes.
If that's true, then cite specific examples. Meanwhile in that post you're laying out exactly how somebody on disability should live. That's called authoritarianism, which is a major component of communism as it has existed (at least the initial stages as defined by Marx, however no communist party has ever moved beyond this stage, hence I threw the term "communist party" at you and not "communist") with the other major component being the complete de-emphasis of the needs of the individual, which you've also espoused here.
Or worse that somehow advanced nations like Denmark with high taxes on rich people are somehow "Communist". How very stupid of you.
Actually go read my post history; I'm one of the few people on slashdot who pretty clearly lay out a distinction between the concepts of socialism, communism, and welfare, namely by following the textbook definition of all three. Your whole basic income premise is very distinctly welfare, furthermore, Denmark isn't (with only a few exceptions) socialist, contrary to popular slashdot belief, rather it's capitalist with a strong welfare component. The USSR wasn't communist, rather they fit very well within the definition of socialist, even though they self identified as communist.
I've already explained in this thread that BI would not be indexed to local cost-of-living. If the BI isn't enough for you to afford to stay in Manhattan without working, then you'll have to move or get a job. This isn't hard.
So people who are currently disabled will have to move away from the life they currently know, and away from potential family members who provide them assistance (i.e. carrying their groceries) after your plan goes into effect. And then you wonder why I say you behave like a member of typical communist parties.
So far as the importance of living where you've always lived, that's some kind of imaginary right that people delude themselves into thinking exists
I've been saying that for a long time, yet I get modded as troll here when I do so. It's also one of the founding principles behind occupy wall street, and if you look at any of the slashdot discussions about San Franciscans protesting Google over making their cost of living go up, you'll see a lot of commenters defending the protesters (nevermind that Google started there, or that Google by far isn't the only company causing this.)
The number of locations in the country where you can't find a very cheap place to live within a 2 hour drive of a very affluent location is vanishingly small.
No, not really. Every time some place becomes gentrified, you can find another place that has only begun gentrification. Right now that's Austin, Texas.
yet obviously that's not true at all because we're seeing people live there for very long periods without a job, relying solely on free money to get by.
That's because they're getting *too much* free money right now, because it's indexed to location, and it treats people unequally. People on Section 8 can get a really ridiculous amount of money to go rent a house (not an apartment, a nice-sized house). The system is entirely unfair: some people are able to get a lot of largesse (like women with kids), while others can't get squat (like a 30yo guy with no kids).
Furthermore, if everybody is going to make as much as everybody who is retired or disabled
Which isn't very much; how many times do I have to point out that this is a *****BASIC***** income? Disabled people can usually work too, and retirement is a choice.
You're being extremely inconsistent here. You said we're going to remove things like disability and replace it with basic income. Yet disability pays enough that most people can continue living at least in the general area where they've always lived, including in more affluent areas, which is especially important for people who are disabled or retired to live near long time friends or family members. But you're then saying that basic income shouldn't pay enough that somebody could get by in those high cost areas, so in other words those folks will now have to move away from the life that they've known once they become disabled, and have to just assume that wherever they go they'll find help and support. And that of course being up to and including being blind, quadriplegic, making work practically impossible.
And then of course, we still need to plant a dollar figure on top of it all. After all, you said that somebody should live a really crummy life on this income, but at least have a place to live. Yet the cost difference in that life from one region to another is HUGELY different. And again, when this plan takes effect, (which it won't given how really poorly thought out and blindly ideological it already is) you're also ignoring the upward pressure it will place on the cost of property ownership and/or rent.
Oh please. This isn't creating an "abundant supply" of new money, it's just moving around, largely by eliminating existing social programs and letting people manage their money themselves instead of being chased around to see if they're "cheating", and the balance being made up with progressive taxation. For people in the middle, it'll be a wash: they'll be taxed more than now, but then the BI will make up for it so the net will be the same. For people making a lot, boo hoo, they'll have to cut back and not buy a new Rolls every year.
I like how you decided by yourself what quality of life others should have, like you've got it all figured out and everybody should trust you because you know best, and everybody else is wrong. How very Communist Party of you.
And finally, this is a ***BASIC*** income. I don't understand why I have to keep repeating this, but apparently I do. It's enough to squeak by on with a crappy apartment with roommates and some basics from the grocery store.
Probably because this is a very vague description. Most of my life has literally been spent living a life below the poverty line, and yet I've never felt poor. I've always had food, and I've always had an abundance of luxury items (before I got serious work, I had a flagship grade smartphone, a 47" tv, a really nice computer, a laptop, and a used Lexus LS400) and I made at most about $12k a year, and I otherwise only relied upon myself for everything I had. This is quite possible to do in Phoenix, Arizona, even to this day, so long as you wisely spend your money. Things like hitting bars on weekends isn't cheap and thus isn't wise.
Yet you can't do that everywhere, so you're going to need to be far more specific.
Now, knowing the politics of people of your persuasion, they typically define the concept of a living wage (which is silly for reasons I'm not going to get into here) but in California and New York, it's currently fashionable to define that as making $15 an hour at 40 hours a week. That means $31,200 a year. But since you clearly have everything already figured out, because after all, you said under no uncertain terms that Basic Income is simple, I'll let you describe how somebody is supposed to make live like you described both in Phoenix Arizona (which happens to be only slightly below the national average cost of living) and in New York. Also keep in mind that once you do this basic income thing, you need to account for how you're going to be driving up rent costs in the more affluent areas like New York City.
Also I like how you call Basic Income "simple" yet you haven't even addressed even the most basic issues that it will cause, such as perpetual hyperinflation. And no, you don't need to print money to cause inflation, simply taking it away from some source who has a lot of it (be that a person, multiple persons, or entities) and then flooding the economy with it will do the trick. And that's exactly what this whole plan proposes doing. It all has to do with the supply of money, which if somebody is storing it or otherwise "hoarding" as the term people like you like to use, then you're keeping the money supply down, even if it's done artificially. If you create an abundant supply of anything you can think of, people invariably value it less, which is exactly what inflation is.
I don't think that's going to be the case. Americans don't particularly like manufacturing jobs because they're very tedious and repetitive. In economics there's a concept known as an opportunity cost. Suppose line work is only worth about $3 an hour (though realistically probably less.) Is it really worth it to you to spend 40 hours a week doing shit that you really don't like doing for only $6k a year above your existing $20k a year? (Or whatever this basic income amounts to.) I really doubt it, I think most people would just opt to take a permanent vacation, which is an opportunity cost decision they're making, as that extra $6k per year isn't really going to improve their quality of life much.
$6k a year goes a LOT further in China than it does here though, so it's more worthwhile for them to do that kind of work there. In addition to that, the fact that everybody would have a basic income in the US means that over time Americans will value their money even less.
The more I think about it, the more I think basic income is a horrible idea, which is mainly motivated by people thinking that just the fact that you're alive means you have the right to take anything you want without having to give anything up for it.
everyone pays taxes—even people who don't work,
That doesn't make any sense. If I pay you $100 and take back $99, how much am I really giving you?
This is not how a BI system works. Everyone gets the same monthly BI stipend simply for being alive. Beyond that, each person is free to work—or not—as many jobs for whatever salary they can negotiate with their employer.
So does that mean you get more money if you have kids? I can think of a few ways that this would get abused. In fact I already know how a similar system is already abused in the US.
If you think it's "immoral" to keep people from starving in the streets, then you and I have nothing in common and nothing to talk about. And if you think BI has any resemblance to Soviet-style policies, you're just an idiot.
Actually one of the interesting things about the USSR was how they talked about how they had no poor people there. What's interesting is there are lots of stories of people who escaped the USSR who were literally in tears once they realized just how bad they had it while they lived there, and feeling equally bad about the relatives they had to leave behind to live in that shit.
One time an exchange student came to visit my uncle, and the first time he took her to a store to buy school supplies, she was awe stricken by how many choices of pens and other materials there were (there's only one model of everything in the USSR, and you're told that it's the best, such as the Trabant.) She literally thought that they had put on an elaborate show for her to impress her, something which a lot of Warsaw countries would do for foreign guests from wealthier countries to try to convince them that communist life is just awesome.
She also refused to smile most of the time, because in the USSR if you were smiling or otherwise happy, you were definitely standing out from the rest of the crowd, which was a good way to paint a KGB target on your back. For literally no reason at all, you'd just disappear and nobody would ever hear from or about you again.
You don't need unemployment with BI, just like you don't need "disability", SNAP, etc. All these social programs are band-aid attempts to fix the problems caused by poverty. Eliminate poverty with a basic income and you don't need them any more.
That's interesting because you didn't address the underlying concern, while at the same time bringing up a new one.
According to your theory, people will just leave these expensive places once they don't have a job tying them there, yet obviously that's not true at all because we're seeing people live there for very long periods without a job, relying solely on free money to get by. Furthermore, if everybody is going to make as much as everybody who is retired or disabled, then what happens when the real estate cost is driven up above what people already living there on a fixed income can afford?
This sounds nice on paper, except you still haven't dealt with the problem of those who feel they have the "right" to live there. This describes a lot of the OWS types were were unemployed at the time of those protests, even for long periods of time by their own admission, yet refused to leave New York. Remember also that New York was one of those states that wanted to justify having unemployment for longer than 99 weeks. I really think you haven't thought this through as well as you think you have. (and I'm out of time to write a full response right now)
Exactly. I'm very surprised we haven't used statistical information to cut down on rent seeking behavior. Useless middlemen must wield far more power than those that desire an efficient, equitable market.
Speak of rent, I'm wondering how advocates of basic income intend to deal with people outbidding one another for property. The reason that places like New York or San Francisco are so expensive is because lots of people are essentially outbidding one another on rent or property, putting upward pressure on the prices. Now, think about how adding that much more income to their spending power is going to impact that. What happens when the rent then exceeds what somebody on this basic income can afford?
I know what you're thinking: Price controls, or maybe even go Karl Marx and just seize their property in the name of humanity and give it away. You still haven't solved the ultimate problem that an economy ultimately sorts out: How you allocate scarce resources. Land, and by extension, real estate, is a finite resource. There's only so many people that you can squeeze into New York City. So how do you decide who gets to live there and who doesn't? Some people talk about how they have a right to live in New York City, no matter how much rent costs. That's fine, but what are you going to do when people who think they have the right to live there exceeds the population capacity of the city? Something, somewhere has to give. The problem is even worse in San Francisco, because they (through the democratic process) won't allow anybody to build any additional housing.
So why not refer to their actions specifically, instead of opting to create an Emmanuel Goldstein?
How would you make an urgent purchase by phone? More than once, I've purchased an airline ticket over the phone while I was literally in a cab on my way to the airport, I'd be pretty pissed if my bank would not allow that. Since I don't have a chip reader in my phone, I don't see how I'd be able to make a mobile web purchase either.
I can think of a really trivial way to do that: They could just issue you a fob (or an app) that is paired with the card and issues a one time password. Think Google Authenticator or RSA SecureID.
Or if you really want to make things interesting: Have an app send an SMS to the merchant containing the one time password it generates from a secret key and pin combo (wrong pin generates the wrong key, which can't be verified until sent to the bank, meaning bank can quickly detect hack attempt) paired with a one time account number, and the authenticating service sends to the bank those two bits of information paired with the phone number that sent it the SMS, and the bank then validates (or invalidates) all three. You obtain the secret key for generating the first two from a QR code they send in the mail, combined with another code they text to you, with the app making it easy to input both.
That would be pretty damn hard to spoof, and likely not worth the time and effort for a typical petty crackhead thief just looking for fix money. This would absolutely require malware that exploits your device, and can only be done with YOUR device itself (or rather, they MUST have your physical SIM card.) And nowadays Google (and I'm guessing Apple does as well) routinely scans all devices for new bits of malware as they are found. Given how quickly an exploit like this would be spotted, the hacker probably wouldn't make much over a long term.
I've been saying this ever since I first heard of the occupy movement. Why the fuck are we demonizing anybody who makes a lot of money? That reminds me of black neighborhoods that demonize success as "acting white". It's stupid and oversimplifies the shit out of the situation.
Besides, half of the so called 1% label themselves as liberal progressives.
By the way, using a label like "1%" or in the derogatory "a 1%er" is so fucking arbitrary it's beyond stupid. 1% of what? Recent circumstances have dramatically increased my income to ~80k USD per year, which according to globalrichlist.com puts me in the top 0.1% of income earners. Oh but wait, we're talking just the 1% of US income earners? Then why the fuck have I seen Europeans and Asians mention the 1%? And why is it the top 1% and not the top 2%?
It really truly is as arbitrary as labeling somebody based on the color of their skin.
The occupy movement are really just a bunch of bigots by another name, only because they supposedly represent the "underdogs" somehow, and for really no logical reason at all, it justifies everything they do.
Just think about all of the ass gas you inhale every day.
NT
No, Cyanogen is the startup, and they partnered with Microsoft.
Offering SaaS cloud applications is not a cheap thing to do, especially on the scale that the likes of Amazon, Apple, Google, Microsoft, and to a lesser extent Yandex have pulled off. Hence it would make sense that if a startup was to do something like this, they'd partner with a bigger company.
I think one of the bigger things hurting the FBI is they are so exclusive towards otherwise talented people compared to the private sector, and so their human resource pool leaves a lot to be desired. For example, even though polygraph is nothing more than an intimidation tactic that is basically useless, (and people who know it's a load of crap aren't intimidated by it) they won't hire anybody without subjecting them to it. They also exclude anybody who has at any point in their life consumed cannabis, which is in many ways more benign than alcohol.
On top of it all, they don't pay shit compared to private sector jobs. (In only my second year after graduation, I already make more than most FBI agents at GS12 by just doing datacenter work.)
Who do you think you are, Trump?!
Trump is a great example of using OPM. Banks still loan him money for his businesses despite having four business bankruptcies on record.
Almost every person worth more than a few million dollars has had a business failure at some point, or even several. The thing is, most businesses fail within a few years of opening, and just because you have as much money as Trump had during his 4 big failures doesn't make you immune to it.
No, that doesn't define a schedule 1 drug. A schedule 1 drug means it has no accepted medicinal use, which is very much false; it actually has a lot of accepted medicinal uses. The DEA just labels it as schedule 1 because the DEA doesn't recognize any medicinal uses, which is absurd, but there you have it. The other requirement of a schedule 1 drug is that it has high potential for abuse, which is basically all scheduled drugs, in addition to alcohol, which is not classified in this way.
Also, oddly enough, the DEA says that schedule 1 drugs have physical and psychological tendencies, whereas cannabis has no proven dependencies. Meanwhile, alcohol can literally kill you if you are a long-term heavy abuser and quit cold turkey.
Pretty much the only thing it comes down to is the gateway drug theory, which has no merit at all other than one based on morality (i.e. people who use a schedule 1 drug have broken that moral barrier and are now more likely to use other schedule 1 drugs, effectively making it circular logic.)
You don't "contract" a willingness to blow yourself up in support of a cause. Christ, if that's how fucked US thinking is on the matter, you may as well vote Trump now and get it over with. I mean, seriously that has to the the dumbest thing I've ever heard. Ever.
/facepalm
That's not what he said.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Every bigot in the history of time has had a rationalization for why their bigotry is actually justified.
Try for a second to see the logical disconnect. He isn't trying to justify it, it's just stupid to apply the word "racism" to anything and everything that you don't like.
Probably, but at least aiming for that has a measurable goal instead of something vague like morality. Take cannabis for example; why is it a schedule 1 drug? It has hardly any of the characteristics of other schedule 1 drugs. Yet it's there because it bothers people on moral grounds.
...where nobody seems to know how they continue to get elected.
without any ideological consistency.
I think that's a good thing. Or rather, it would be nice if policy decisions were made based on technical merit rather than passing some ideological test.