I'm just trying to point out that it;s a pipe dream to think that all welfare programs can be made unnecessary by simply cutting every citizen a UBI check.
You are pointing it out using a rather contrived example (the neglected children). I have never seen anyone suggesting that childrens' social services be replaced with UBI. I think that is a rather wide definition of "welfare". I mean are services for the mentally ill (including insane asylums/long-term care mental hospitals) also a "welfare program"? By your definition, I would say yes. However I have yet to hear someone saying the the mentally ill should be released from government funded institutions and be cut a UBI cheque instead.
Similarly, your example included someone blowing "their spouse's UBI" on gambling. That would seem grounds for divorce and a lawsuit in most jurisdictions, wouldn't it? Is the justice system now also a "welfare program"? Is the police? Again, you are casting too wide a net.
The vast majority of UBI advocates want to replace government cash payments (and their cash-like equivalents, think food stamps, or special discounts and tax credits for the poor) with a UBI. I haven't seen anyone advocating the replacement of all government social services (which are not the same as welfare programs in the narrow sense) with a UBI. The calculations are not based on eliminating childrens' social services. In countries with government-funded medicare, UBI advocates typically leave that out as well - from the proposal and from the calculations.
I'm not convinced such a short and limited test would prove anything about UBI. Personally I oppose it on principle and am glad they cancelled it. I don't believe in giving people something for nothing. And it's not the cost of social programs which will bury this society, it's our massive healthcare system that will do it.
So yeah..nobody wants to discuss the huge elephant in the room. They wanna throw free money at people who don't wanna put in anything but the absolute minimum effort in life. I don't think this results in a positive outcome for our society.
"Something for nothing" is a very malleable term. I'm sure we can find lots of cases where you, for example, received something for nothing. Ever got a birthday gift from someone? Isn't that something for nothing (why is the date of your birth special and deserving of gifts?)? OK, you can easily rationalize saying that people who give you birthday presents expect something in return (even if they are not consciously aware of it, or deny it). Is giving to charity "something for nothing"? Or maybe the charity-giver gets something out of it (feeling better about himself, or morally superior to others)? Similarly however we can come with rationalizations why giving people a UBI is not "something for nothing". So this is a slippery slope which philosophically and empirically, is not very well defined.
Furthermore, in any society which has decided that letting people starve on the street is not acceptable (and this is the case with basically all Western countries), you will have some amount of people leeching off of others, either via government assistance or voluntary charity. Some will do this legitimately (as they are objectively unable to work, e.g. they have a disability) while others will be lazy bums of the type you despise. However, history shows that they will always be there (no amount of government bureaucraucy, incentives etc. will eliminate them), but also, that they are generally a tiny minority. Since society has generally decided that it's more humane to bear these people rather than to execute them (according to legend, this is how Vlad Dracula solved the homeless and beggar problem in his time), they'll be around - in any system, UBI or not.
Finally, you seem to assume that anyone on any kind of social assistance is some kind of lazy bum. Many people at "the bottom of society" so to speak are hard-working, and ambitious, and put in a lot of effort, but just don't get the reward. Often, it's just bad luck. Luck is a lot more important than people are willing to admit (because it lessens the value of their own achievements in their eyes), but often, shit is just random or beyond a person's control. Other times, people are trying but just not good enough. So who is more "morally worthy" then, the genius making a million a year due to his natural talent, with very little effort, or the not-so-bright person struggling to make ends meet despite garguantuan efforts on his part? It's not like incomes in the economy reward only effort - far from it.
That has always been my point. I don't see how you can test a UBI on a subset of the population. Of course I may very well lack the in-depth knowledge on how this thing is supposed to work, I'll grant you that any day...
This is an important point and the reason why most UBI experiements to-date have been flawed. It's not the same when a subset of the population receives the money and when everyone receives the money. Sure, you can study individual motivations and effects, but you cannot see the potential large-scale changes in the economy (or lack thereof...). Maybe, it could work if you picked a fairly remote region with a stable population (little migration in and out). Some remote part of Scandinavia or Canada, or some Pacific island nation or territory. Perhaps an inward-looking and small third-world country.
I think to really know whether the UBI does what the proponents says it would, you have to have it for everyone that shares the same borders and general tax code.
You might get away with switching a whole state in a federation like the US or Switzerland. However, a very real concern is the influx of people from outside who want nothing but free money. So we're back at controllable borders. Which, come to think of it, makes Switzerland unviable what with free migration in the EU and all that.
To me at first, immigration was also the biggest problem with UBI: won't people just arrive en masse to get free money? Even if every place on Earth had a UBI, it would be different in different places, so won't people "shop around" to get the best UBI/cost of living ratio?
However, when I thought more about it, I concluded this is not a difficult thing to solve: just like with other government services, you would have to qualify via a citizenship and residence requirement. For example, Ontario gives you "free" health care, but not everyone that happens to be in Ontario at a given time gets it: you have to live in the province legally (as a citizen or non-citizen permanent resident) for a certain time (I think it's 6 months). If you're away for more than that time, you lose access to the health system (for "free"). UBI could work in a similar manner: for example, it would be available only to citizens. This doesn't even require controllable borders, just controlling who you make a citizen. How quickly an immigrant would be able to collect UBI would depend on how quickly he can become a citizen (in Switzerland, for example, it takes about 10 years).
Or a 3rd possibility: Ms. MacLeod realized that there simply is not enough tax revenue to provide a UBI, without dramatically increasing taxes to a point that is unsustainable.
I highly doubt it.
This was a time-limited, area-limited test program: it started in 2017 and was supposed to last three years. It was not permanent. It was fully budgeted and the costs were known up-front, and they are and were small in comparison to the Ontario budget.
If Ms. MacLeod was so sure the that the program was not scalable, she could have let it run to the end (to 2020) and just expire without renewing it; and then, use the data obtained to clearly show that it's not the right way forward. She could say, OK, for X people this cost Y money, if we scale it up for everyone it clearly doesn't work.
No, this smells of just ideological preference: the project was cut short just a bit over a year in (out of three), so there could be no risk of the program actually giving a positive result. If you read TFA, you would see that the minister provided no data or reasons, just general qualifications ("not sustainable", "clearly not the answer"). If there is no meaningful data from the program, people who dislike the idea of the UBI can keep on arguing about how it's bad and how it will be the end of productive society safely, based on abstract reasoning and FUD. Governments (left and right) do this all the time, they cut short test programs (for whatever) they don't like, since their ideological preferences are more important to them that practical results.
2 possibilities: Conservatives are afraid social programs will let the poor improve their lot so they structure them for failure or Conservatives fear someone will cheat the system better than they do
Doug Ford, leader of the Progressive Conservative Party of Ontario and the new premier of the province, is, like his late brother Rob Ford, the antic-ridden former mayor of Toronto, convinced that "government waste" is the source of all problems and that everything can be fine, i.e. that you could increase spending and reduce taxes and borrowing just if you could eliminate the waste and "find efficincies".
Now, of course there is government waste, of course there is corruption and embezzlement, and of course there could be some "efficiencies": but the reality is, the scale of the money that can be saved in this manner is nowhere near what is needed to put finances in order (not to mention funding all the nice things you promised in the campaign) without making hard choices. However it's a great pitch to voters: we can give you everything you want (more goodies from the government AND tax cuts) if we just end the corrupt "gravy train" of the current administration.
Once reality hits you, you start looking for ways to look tough on "government waste" and the "gravy train" to at least justify the fact that you won't be able to deliver the goodies and the tax cuts simultaneously (or neither, perhaps). The easy way out is that, beyond the mundane (e.g. whether a government department should order expensive designer office chairs or get cheap ones from IKEA), "government waste" is usually a very subjective, ideological thing. A UBI test program, which is percieved by many as "giving free money to some lazy slobs", is not something that is ideologically dear to the Conservatives. Hence, it's very convenient to proclaim that it's "waste" and should be eliminated. Cap-and-trade (for carbon), renewable energy subsidies, windmill projects for example all fit the same bill. We don't like it ideologically hence spending money on it is waste, look at us, we're ending the gravy train.
That brings me to my next concern about the practicality of relying on UBI. What happens when someone takes their UBI, their spouse's UBI, and their kids' UBI and blows it at the casino (or on your vice of choice)? What does society do in that scenario to prevent the kids from ending up on the street? Do we create a whole new system of safety nets and monitoring systems to make sure we don't have people falling through the cracks of the UBI system? Or, do we simply accept that individuals have a right to spend their UBI as they see fit, damn the consequences?
I know that this is the minority case. I believe that most recipients of UBI would use it to take care of themselves and their families. Some tiny minority would not, and a society that wants to implement UBI either needs to implement additional safety nets for when UBI fails, or live with the consequences of not doing so. For moral and ethical reasons, I don't think the altter is tenable.
I fail to see how this is a "new" problem that arises specifically from having some form of UBI.
Most western countries already have some sort of welfare/social assistance program that involves giving the recepients a sum of money. The government doesn't go out and do these people's shopping; it writes them cheques and lets them do it themselves. Therefore it is already possible (and the case in, as you say, with a minority) that people take money they've recieved as assistance from the government and blow it on drugs or gambling or whatever, instead of feeding themselves and their families. The difference between conventional welfare and the UBI is not that the government is giving people money; that happens in both cases. The difference is that with the UBI, the government gives everyone the welfare check, without first going through complicated procedures to see if they qualify, as is the case with conventional welfare systems.
Furthermore, what is the difference between blowing money from welfare/UBI on gambling instead of feeding your kids and blowing money earned at a job on gambling instead of feeding your kids? In both cases we have neglected, unfed kids and bad parenting. The source of the money does not change the effect, and people with a job can be bad parents just as the people without a job can be.
So, the problem of neglected children exists already, regardless of a UBI, and most countries already have this "safety net" you speak of to take care of the children neglected by their parents (employed or unemployed). It's called Children Services, Family Social Services, and such, varying from place to place, but all doing basically the same thing.
So, the point you raise is irrelevant to the discussion of whether UBI should or could be implemented or not.
The Constitution is ultimately a piece of paper the people, by and large, like with any law, respect voluntarily.
It was very much against the law for commoners to execute the King in France in the 1780s, yet it happened.
The US Constitution itself is a product of a revolution - from the British point of view, it was unconstitutional - but the people did not like the previous constitutional arrangement they were in, so they fought to achieve a new one. When the mob decides to tear down the system, the courts aren't going to save it anymore.
You are assuming the human genome will stay the same. We can already precisely edit DNA,
Just because we can precisely edit DNA doesn't mean we know what exactly we are doing. We don't understand completely how DNA works and how changing bits of the genome affects everything.
and it shouldn't be too difficult to fix the genes associated with bone calcium and other low gravity issues.
That's a huge leap you are making there. Sure, we'll undo billions of years of evolution by messing around with a few genes, and at the same time not producing terrible side-effects. This is at least one level of complexity up from GMO food and whatever. I have not seen these X-Men-like genetically modified humans walking about.
By the time SpaceX is ready to start shuttling people to Mars, we can already have a modified sub-population ready to go.
Extremely unlikely.
Not only is the genetic modification required science fiction, but you wouldn't really know all the things you would need to do until you had 2-3 generations of people living on Mars. There is just too much we don't know.
Just because they own 70% of the total wealth doesnâ(TM)t mean you are entitled to any of it. What, you think the world just owes you a living?
Nobody "owes" the rich their property rights either, nor does anyone "owe" them the chance to avoid a revolution in which their heads will be guillotined.
If we assume that no one "owes" anyone anything (which, in a Hobbesian way, is a fair assumption for some uncivilized state), then everyone is just looking out for their own survival. So the poor, when they are hungry, robbing the rich, is completely fair game.
You see, the modern welfare state is a social contract between rich and poor: the rich get to keep being rich, their property rights protected vigorously by the state, and in exchange they pay a disproportional amount of the taxes which are redistributed to the poor so that they have a decent life - like, you know, welfare payments if they lose their job, access to a hospital if they are sick without this bankrupting them, and a decent education for their children that will allow them too to make a decent living.
It's funny, in many European countries which are more stratified (i.e. there is less social mobility, those born rich tend to stay rich and those born poor tend to stay poor), there is more of a realization of this by the rich. Intergenerational experience, I guess. In the US, which is a lot more socially - upward and downward - mobile, because every third billionaire had humble or middle class beginnings and has a (great)-grandfather who was a dirt poor nobody, the rich feel more entitled to their wealth, thinking it was purely on their own brilliance, talent and hard work that they earned it, and that those who are poor deserve to be so because they just aren't good enough or didn't work hard enough, so they should just shut up. They miss out on the fact that none this would matter in a revolution were the poor go after their heads (yelling "but it's not fair, I worked hard!" on your way to the guillotine will not help). They also miss out on the fact that, having themselves gone from a modest background to being rich, that they actually do indeed owe something to other people like their former selves: it was the system that gave them a chance, and now they have to fund it so it can others a chance too.
That, and most of the services the government provides is not of service to these guys. Police? Many have and pay for private security anyway. Education? They send their kids to private schools. Direct entitlements like food stamps, welfare, low cost housing, free cell phones (in California at least), Medicare/medicade, all are lost to these guys because we stop them from having access to these entitlements.
Wow, that's so ridiculously wrong that it's bordering on the absurd.
The richer you are, the more in need you are of property protection, meaning police and courts. Private security cannot replace the police. In developed countries, private security are glorified doormen (they, by law, usually have no ability to actually do anything of any consequence). Even if the private security guys can shoot, they cannot investigate crimes and arrest people. You need the police for that. There is no private service you can pay for that will prosecute, try, convict, and lock away criminals - you need the public prosecutors and the government-funded court system.
As for education, in developed countries private schools are mostly about creating an exclusive social circle (kids with rich parents hanging out exclusively with other kids with rich parents), not about a higher quality education. Usually, the private schools have to follow whatever the national approved curriculum is (or at least some core elements of it), which means they lean heavily on the public education system (who develops that curriculum? not the private schools). The price of the private school is there to keep poor people out, not to pay for some above-and-beyond education.
Btw, who do the rich employ to work for them, and therefore, earn their money for them? Legions upon legions of people schooled in the public education system. Whether its basic literacy or numeracy, or people with advanced university degrees, the rich's ability to become rich and keep being rich is heavily dependent on millions of people educated using government money.
As for the "entitlements" of the poor - they are there to stop the poor from creating a revolution and stripping their rich of their wealth (and their heads, literally). The rich are the top of the pyramid, but for there to be a top, there has to be a pyramid, a base - and the foundations have to be solid. Do you really think all of the elements of the welfare state that developed over the past 200 years were just pressure from the poor and the lower classes and not a great chunk of the elite realizing that all shit breaks loose when you let people become hungry and desperate (a la France 1789, Russia 1917, and many other examples)?
So yes, the rich benefit from food stamps, welfare, and low-cost housing for the poor. In a very clear way.
That's the practicalities of the prototype systems.
The answer is immediate. O(1). Not O(n) or worse as in any classical system.
Sounds like someone who never built anything practical of scale (and also, as other/.ers have pointed out, doesn't know what O(1) means*).
"The practicalities" of real systems are often the things that matter most. An algorithm that solves a problem in O(n^2) will finish faster on a modern computer than an algorithm that solves the same problem in O(nlogn) running on a computer from 1975. Big-O notation was invented essentially as a way to "neutrally" evaluate algorithms without taking into account the actual speed of the machine - to able to conclude, given two algorithms that run on the same machine, which one would be faster. In the real world, the speed of the machine matters. A lot.
*As other have pointed out: O(1) means that the algorithm runs in *constant time*, i.e. the running time of the algorithm does *not* depend on the *size of the input* (that would be the "n" in logn, n^2, and the like). This time however could be of varying lengths: 1 second, 1 hour, 1 year. Depends on your machine, i.e. the "practicalities".
"Classical" is the term use by physicists to refer to pre-GR and pre-QM physical theories.
Which is exactly why we shouldn't call modern digital computers "classical", since without an understanding of quantum mechanics, we would not be able to make the chips that they are built out of.
"Classical computers" may be then abacuses, Babbage's difference engine, and early electronic computers (e.g. those built out of vacuum tubes), but certainly not anyithing built with integrated circuits since the 1960s.
Alright, I should've read TFA first...but hey, this is Slashdot. Nuro is the company developing the driverless, passengerless, never-intended-for-a-human delivery cars I was thinking about. Which makes it even stranger why they are doing a different class of self-driving vehicle with a safety driver first.
but it seems weird to be ready to go ahead and start sending driverless cars (with safety riders, I know) all around at people's orders.
It's even stranger that a driverless vehicle that is transporting only *things* would be tested with a safety driver...I think I've seen companies developing, from scratch, driverless delivery vehicles that are never intended to carry a human inside. This makes sense for a lot of reasons.
Autonomous cars that transport people must satisfy two major safety requirements: 1) not kill or injure the people they are transporting and 2) not kill or injure other people on the road.
With delivery vehicles, you only really have to worry about number 2). That should make the job significantly easier. You don't have to have some sort of AI "ethics" that has to judge whether to protect the people in the car or the people outside the car, it can always just "sacrifice itself". Drive over a bridge to avoid hitting a pedestrian? OK.
Furthermore, cars that don't have to carry people are simpler to design structurally...they don't have to protect the passengers in case of a crash for example. These things can also be slower. Limit them to say 30 km/h, just schedule the deliveries properly, and you reduce a lot of potential for accidents. Etc.
So testing things first with a safety driver seems pointless, i.e. it's basically development of the wrong type of vehicle.
Democratic Socialism would be something like having all employees have equal voting share holding in all businesses, whereas private ownership requires you to buy shares.
Classical socialism, of course, involves the state owning everything.
You've jumbled things up a bit. Yes, classical socialism involves social/common - in practice, by the state - ownership of the means of production. It also however involves a "dictatorship of the proleteriat", i.e. one-party rule by a vanguard party of the ruling class which will establish first socialism, and then, via socialism, slowly transition to a classless society, thus achieving communism.
"Democratic socialism" means social i.e. state ownership of the means of production, but a political democracy - so no one-party, dictatorship of the proleteriat stuff, we have a real democracy where people meaningfully vote and get to decide what the state does with those means of production it controls. It's still a planned economy but people get to vote on the plan, basically. Note that this is different from "social democracy", which what you described in your first paragraph (Norway etc.), which means a mixed (state and private ownership) market economy that is extensively regulated and where there is a large state-funded social safety net. To play around with the words of Dubek, social democracy is "capitalism with a human face" whereas democratic socialism is "socialism with a human face".
What you have described as democratic socialism is in fact called worker's self-management and was the official ideology of communist Yugoslavia from about the late 1950s/early 1960s (with major reforms resulting in the 1970s) to its demise in the 1990s. Under this ideology, previously state-owned and controlled socialist enterprises where restructured as "Organizations of United Labour" (OUR in Serbo-Croatian) run by workers' councils and not by the state/Communist Party (though the two retained a large influence, especially in large and important companies). Even some public institutions (hospitals, universities, etc.) were reorganized into OURs. Btw, the system still wasn't democratic - political power was still monopolized by the Communist Party (officially no longer a political "party" but instead a "union" or "league"), so it definitely wasn't democratic socialism. Interestingly, OURization brought in a large degree of market competition and quasi-competition into the system, as, theoretically, these were all companies set up independently by workers and were not co-ordinated by the state/party. In practice, it was a heavily-regulated quasi-market economy with a huge dose of government intervention, and OURs essentially could not go bankrupt. In the end, both an actual capitalist market economy, as well as a classical planned socialist economy, were more efficient.
OK, I realize that may be we are not talking about the same thing, as prices for these things vary from place to place.
You are probably referring to the slightly thicker and bigger plastic bags you would get for free when you buy something at a clothing or shoe store, but for which they charge you some small amount at supermarkets. I was mainly thinking of the much thicker, sturdier plastic bags/sacs. I agree that the former will usually not last for years, while the latter easily will (those are the ones that I have which are ~10 years old in some cases). However, even the former should last you 6-12 months easily.
Heck, my grandmother used to wash (yes, wash! and put out on the clothes line to dry) the regular, thin grocery plastic bags and reuse them. So she got a few weeks or months out of each on average before they would tear or become too dirty to clean.
Of course, bags (of any thickness) can break, so you have to be careful about how much you load them. Yes, people shop opportunistically - so they should always keep a few reusable bags/sacs in their car, just for that purpose. You see, that's partly the point - if you want to reduce waste, you have to actively THINK about it and modify your behaviour from the "everything is disposable" mindset. This is not something new actually, it was the default mode of human thinking until about the 1960s/70s.
People's shopping habits differ btw. I go to the grocery store almost every day. A reusable bag (even one which lasts only a couple of months) saves a lot of waste on what would otherwise be single-use (if they tear by the time I get home, which happens to like 50% of them) or dual-use (if they get reused as garbage bags) thin grocery bags. This is typical of where I live. If that doesn't make sense for you, well, don't use the 0.15$ bags, buy the string sacks instead, or whatever.
Finally, it's a bit cheap to come back always with some "yeah that's fine but what about the pollution you make from... X?" - yeah, what about it? (Most of my clothes are 100% cotton btw. I'm not a fan of polyester and the like - not an environmental thing, but a preference.) It's like saying "why bother locking up the thieves if we can't catch all the rapists?" Less pollution and less waste is always good. Especially when you can do it with things that are totally non-essential, like single-use plastic grocery bags. If those became unavailable tomorrow, the world would go on just as well.
I'd suggest that's unlikely verging on the ridiculous.
Errm...why is that ridiculous?
I have plenty of those thicker ~$0.15 which are several years old...some are 10 years old. They have been used hundreds of times. Each such bag can be used for a year at least (and in reality, for many years), if you go grocery shopping at least twice a week (lowball estimate, most people visit the supermarket more often), and take the bag with you, that's 104 uses per year. Far from unlikely, and certainly not ridiculous.
Btw, reusing the thin plastic bags in whatever capacity (as garbage bags etc.) is good, but whether it's single or dual use, they still end up at the landfill where they take literally ages to decompose. I've started buying biodegradable garbage bin liners (since after I reduced by thin plastic bag use, I started running out of bags to throw out my garbage in).
- Netscape and Firefox have never been 'The Internet'. Microsoft did its damndest to make sure that Windows users all directly equated that blue 'e' icon with 'The Internet'. Google is its own damn verb. Both companies' marketing divisions have made very good pushes to make themselves synonymous with 'The Internet'.
What I used to do back in the day when installing and configuring computers for my non-tech-savvy relatives was to place a shortcut for Netscape/Firefox on their desktop, but with the blue "e" icon and just labeled "Internet". I would also configure the browser appropriately, and delete any easy way for them to find/launch Internet Explorer.
I stopped doing that after Internet Explorer acquired is terrible reputation...
Paper? Forget it. Should be burned or dumped into pits for methane gas retrieval, and used for power. Cheaper and more environmentally friendly to plant more trees. Then breaking it down, de-inking, re-bleaching, and reprocessing it.
Where, exactly?
Maybe in North America it's cheaper with its vast empty (of people and farms) landscapes with endless forests. In places like Europe...I don't think so. I mean, the industry lobbying body says itself that "we want every fiber back...it’s our precious raw material". Furthermore they say 88% of corrugated boxes are made from recycled material...so why would they be doing this if it were cheaper to just cut down fresh trees? Well, because it isn't cheaper to cut down fresh trees.
Fun Fact: I heard pizza boxes are not recyclable because of all the oil from the pizza soaking into the cardboard!
Fun fact: outside of North America, we don't usually soak our pizzas in oil (and assorted fats).
Seriously, the pizza box has a separate cardboard "tray" inside that soaks up anything that leaks (fat, sauce, wayward toppings). Since the pizza is not leaking like crazy (as with would be the case with the Pizza Pizzas and Dominos of this world), you can usually just throw away that tray, and the rest of the box is dry and can be recycled.
Jesus tits. They've been sending lots of recycling to landfills, forever.
This is correct. A lot of "recycling" isn't actually made of recyclables - people throw in stuff (mostly various types of plastic) that they assume is recyclable, but actually isn't. So at the waste processing plant these things get removed and thrown in with the rest of the (non-recyclable) garbage. Other things are theoretically recyclable (and have the recycling sign on it) but very few places have the capabilitiy to recycle them, or there just isn't a market demand for these materials. It's fairly easy to obtain statistics - both of the "contamination rate" (things found in recycling bins that shouldn't be there) and the % of actual recyclables that get sold to someone for reuse instead of just landfilled or burned. There is also the "diversion rate", the % of recyclable materials that make it into the recycling bins (instead of being thrown in with the "regular" garbage and ending up in the landfill by definition).
Paper and colored glass recycling is just a show. Getting you to sort your trash is just conditioning you to do what your told.
Now, this is the type of sweeping general statement that just doesn't make any sense. At all. It shows that you are reading in your ideological positions into this issue instead of looking at the facts.
Sure, there may be places where "recycling" is just a scam for show - the local government wants to appear to be tackling the garbage problem, while really not doing so. This may be the case where you live. I don't know. However I do know this is NOT the general case.
Example: In the city where I currently live, municipally-organized recycling is very poorly organized, and, up until a few years ago, did not actually exist. Yet, the poorest of urban residents, primarily from the Roma (Gypsy) community, have for decades made a living by recycling. It is a common sight to see them wheeling carts on the street, scowering the dumpsters for recyclable material. Mostly, they collect cardboard and paper. The second most common is metal (from the dumpsters, I mean - metal recycling is of course the most lucrative recycling business but scrap metal is not found on a large scale in household dumpsters, but elsewhere) - you see people picking cans out of the trash, flattening them, and packing them. I have also seen them collect glass and PET bottles. They sell this to someone...and not to the city or some other government entity. Someone is using these raw materials. So clearly, if one is able to make (an admittedly meagre) living out of picking recyclables out of dumpsters, large-scale, organized recycling in advanced countries is not "just for show".
On the point of sorting: actually, in many places you DON'T have to sort the different types of recyclables any more. You have to just sort the recyclables from the non-recyclables (2 bins). There are machines that can now sort the recyclables automatically. A lot cities have gone from multiple recycling bins to one. This has its problems, but generally encourages people to recycle more.
I find most of the criticism of TLJ misplaced. Your criticism is typical, unfortunately: it feels like people wanted to hate it, and so spent a lot of time redefining scenes to imply things that weren't really there.
Well I didn't. I thought TFA was an amusing remake of the original SW movie and that the story had potential. On first viewing I even thought TLJ was OK (I was swayed by all the effects and stuff). However, about 30 mins. out of the theatre it dawned on me how terrible it was. The more I thought about it, the more it pissed me off, really. So no, I didn't want to hate it...I wanted it to be a good movie. It wasn't.
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I'm just trying to point out that it;s a pipe dream to think that all welfare programs can be made unnecessary by simply cutting every citizen a UBI check.
You are pointing it out using a rather contrived example (the neglected children). I have never seen anyone suggesting that childrens' social services be replaced with UBI. I think that is a rather wide definition of "welfare". I mean are services for the mentally ill (including insane asylums/long-term care mental hospitals) also a "welfare program"? By your definition, I would say yes. However I have yet to hear someone saying the the mentally ill should be released from government funded institutions and be cut a UBI cheque instead.
Similarly, your example included someone blowing "their spouse's UBI" on gambling. That would seem grounds for divorce and a lawsuit in most jurisdictions, wouldn't it? Is the justice system now also a "welfare program"? Is the police? Again, you are casting too wide a net.
The vast majority of UBI advocates want to replace government cash payments (and their cash-like equivalents, think food stamps, or special discounts and tax credits for the poor) with a UBI. I haven't seen anyone advocating the replacement of all government social services (which are not the same as welfare programs in the narrow sense) with a UBI. The calculations are not based on eliminating childrens' social services. In countries with government-funded medicare, UBI advocates typically leave that out as well - from the proposal and from the calculations.
I'm not convinced such a short and limited test would prove anything about UBI. Personally I oppose it on principle and am glad they cancelled it. I don't believe in giving people something for nothing. And it's not the cost of social programs which will bury this society, it's our massive healthcare system that will do it. So yeah..nobody wants to discuss the huge elephant in the room. They wanna throw free money at people who don't wanna put in anything but the absolute minimum effort in life. I don't think this results in a positive outcome for our society.
"Something for nothing" is a very malleable term. I'm sure we can find lots of cases where you, for example, received something for nothing. Ever got a birthday gift from someone? Isn't that something for nothing (why is the date of your birth special and deserving of gifts?)? OK, you can easily rationalize saying that people who give you birthday presents expect something in return (even if they are not consciously aware of it, or deny it). Is giving to charity "something for nothing"? Or maybe the charity-giver gets something out of it (feeling better about himself, or morally superior to others)? Similarly however we can come with rationalizations why giving people a UBI is not "something for nothing". So this is a slippery slope which philosophically and empirically, is not very well defined.
Furthermore, in any society which has decided that letting people starve on the street is not acceptable (and this is the case with basically all Western countries), you will have some amount of people leeching off of others, either via government assistance or voluntary charity. Some will do this legitimately (as they are objectively unable to work, e.g. they have a disability) while others will be lazy bums of the type you despise. However, history shows that they will always be there (no amount of government bureaucraucy, incentives etc. will eliminate them), but also, that they are generally a tiny minority. Since society has generally decided that it's more humane to bear these people rather than to execute them (according to legend, this is how Vlad Dracula solved the homeless and beggar problem in his time), they'll be around - in any system, UBI or not.
Finally, you seem to assume that anyone on any kind of social assistance is some kind of lazy bum. Many people at "the bottom of society" so to speak are hard-working, and ambitious, and put in a lot of effort, but just don't get the reward. Often, it's just bad luck. Luck is a lot more important than people are willing to admit (because it lessens the value of their own achievements in their eyes), but often, shit is just random or beyond a person's control. Other times, people are trying but just not good enough. So who is more "morally worthy" then, the genius making a million a year due to his natural talent, with very little effort, or the not-so-bright person struggling to make ends meet despite garguantuan efforts on his part? It's not like incomes in the economy reward only effort - far from it.
That has always been my point. I don't see how you can test a UBI on a subset of the population. Of course I may very well lack the in-depth knowledge on how this thing is supposed to work, I'll grant you that any day...
This is an important point and the reason why most UBI experiements to-date have been flawed. It's not the same when a subset of the population receives the money and when everyone receives the money. Sure, you can study individual motivations and effects, but you cannot see the potential large-scale changes in the economy (or lack thereof...). Maybe, it could work if you picked a fairly remote region with a stable population (little migration in and out). Some remote part of Scandinavia or Canada, or some Pacific island nation or territory. Perhaps an inward-looking and small third-world country.
I think to really know whether the UBI does what the proponents says it would, you have to have it for everyone that shares the same borders and general tax code.
You might get away with switching a whole state in a federation like the US or Switzerland. However, a very real concern is the influx of people from outside who want nothing but free money. So we're back at controllable borders. Which, come to think of it, makes Switzerland unviable what with free migration in the EU and all that.
To me at first, immigration was also the biggest problem with UBI: won't people just arrive en masse to get free money? Even if every place on Earth had a UBI, it would be different in different places, so won't people "shop around" to get the best UBI/cost of living ratio?
However, when I thought more about it, I concluded this is not a difficult thing to solve: just like with other government services, you would have to qualify via a citizenship and residence requirement. For example, Ontario gives you "free" health care, but not everyone that happens to be in Ontario at a given time gets it: you have to live in the province legally (as a citizen or non-citizen permanent resident) for a certain time (I think it's 6 months). If you're away for more than that time, you lose access to the health system (for "free"). UBI could work in a similar manner: for example, it would be available only to citizens. This doesn't even require controllable borders, just controlling who you make a citizen. How quickly an immigrant would be able to collect UBI would depend on how quickly he can become a citizen (in Switzerland, for example, it takes about 10 years).
Or a 3rd possibility: Ms. MacLeod realized that there simply is not enough tax revenue to provide a UBI, without dramatically increasing taxes to a point that is unsustainable.
I highly doubt it.
This was a time-limited, area-limited test program: it started in 2017 and was supposed to last three years. It was not permanent. It was fully budgeted and the costs were known up-front, and they are and were small in comparison to the Ontario budget.
If Ms. MacLeod was so sure the that the program was not scalable, she could have let it run to the end (to 2020) and just expire without renewing it; and then, use the data obtained to clearly show that it's not the right way forward. She could say, OK, for X people this cost Y money, if we scale it up for everyone it clearly doesn't work.
No, this smells of just ideological preference: the project was cut short just a bit over a year in (out of three), so there could be no risk of the program actually giving a positive result. If you read TFA, you would see that the minister provided no data or reasons, just general qualifications ("not sustainable", "clearly not the answer"). If there is no meaningful data from the program, people who dislike the idea of the UBI can keep on arguing about how it's bad and how it will be the end of productive society safely, based on abstract reasoning and FUD. Governments (left and right) do this all the time, they cut short test programs (for whatever) they don't like, since their ideological preferences are more important to them that practical results.
2 possibilities: Conservatives are afraid social programs will let the poor improve their lot so they structure them for failure or Conservatives fear someone will cheat the system better than they do
Doug Ford, leader of the Progressive Conservative Party of Ontario and the new premier of the province, is, like his late brother Rob Ford, the antic-ridden former mayor of Toronto, convinced that "government waste" is the source of all problems and that everything can be fine, i.e. that you could increase spending and reduce taxes and borrowing just if you could eliminate the waste and "find efficincies".
Now, of course there is government waste, of course there is corruption and embezzlement, and of course there could be some "efficiencies": but the reality is, the scale of the money that can be saved in this manner is nowhere near what is needed to put finances in order (not to mention funding all the nice things you promised in the campaign) without making hard choices. However it's a great pitch to voters: we can give you everything you want (more goodies from the government AND tax cuts) if we just end the corrupt "gravy train" of the current administration.
Once reality hits you, you start looking for ways to look tough on "government waste" and the "gravy train" to at least justify the fact that you won't be able to deliver the goodies and the tax cuts simultaneously (or neither, perhaps). The easy way out is that, beyond the mundane (e.g. whether a government department should order expensive designer office chairs or get cheap ones from IKEA), "government waste" is usually a very subjective, ideological thing. A UBI test program, which is percieved by many as "giving free money to some lazy slobs", is not something that is ideologically dear to the Conservatives. Hence, it's very convenient to proclaim that it's "waste" and should be eliminated. Cap-and-trade (for carbon), renewable energy subsidies, windmill projects for example all fit the same bill. We don't like it ideologically hence spending money on it is waste, look at us, we're ending the gravy train.
That brings me to my next concern about the practicality of relying on UBI. What happens when someone takes their UBI, their spouse's UBI, and their kids' UBI and blows it at the casino (or on your vice of choice)? What does society do in that scenario to prevent the kids from ending up on the street? Do we create a whole new system of safety nets and monitoring systems to make sure we don't have people falling through the cracks of the UBI system? Or, do we simply accept that individuals have a right to spend their UBI as they see fit, damn the consequences?
I know that this is the minority case. I believe that most recipients of UBI would use it to take care of themselves and their families. Some tiny minority would not, and a society that wants to implement UBI either needs to implement additional safety nets for when UBI fails, or live with the consequences of not doing so. For moral and ethical reasons, I don't think the altter is tenable.
I fail to see how this is a "new" problem that arises specifically from having some form of UBI.
Most western countries already have some sort of welfare/social assistance program that involves giving the recepients a sum of money. The government doesn't go out and do these people's shopping; it writes them cheques and lets them do it themselves. Therefore it is already possible (and the case in, as you say, with a minority) that people take money they've recieved as assistance from the government and blow it on drugs or gambling or whatever, instead of feeding themselves and their families. The difference between conventional welfare and the UBI is not that the government is giving people money; that happens in both cases. The difference is that with the UBI, the government gives everyone the welfare check, without first going through complicated procedures to see if they qualify, as is the case with conventional welfare systems.
Furthermore, what is the difference between blowing money from welfare/UBI on gambling instead of feeding your kids and blowing money earned at a job on gambling instead of feeding your kids? In both cases we have neglected, unfed kids and bad parenting. The source of the money does not change the effect, and people with a job can be bad parents just as the people without a job can be.
So, the problem of neglected children exists already, regardless of a UBI, and most countries already have this "safety net" you speak of to take care of the children neglected by their parents (employed or unemployed). It's called Children Services, Family Social Services, and such, varying from place to place, but all doing basically the same thing.
So, the point you raise is irrelevant to the discussion of whether UBI should or could be implemented or not.
The Constitution is ultimately a piece of paper the people, by and large, like with any law, respect voluntarily.
It was very much against the law for commoners to execute the King in France in the 1780s, yet it happened.
The US Constitution itself is a product of a revolution - from the British point of view, it was unconstitutional - but the people did not like the previous constitutional arrangement they were in, so they fought to achieve a new one. When the mob decides to tear down the system, the courts aren't going to save it anymore.
You are assuming the human genome will stay the same. We can already precisely edit DNA,
Just because we can precisely edit DNA doesn't mean we know what exactly we are doing. We don't understand completely how DNA works and how changing bits of the genome affects everything.
and it shouldn't be too difficult to fix the genes associated with bone calcium and other low gravity issues.
That's a huge leap you are making there. Sure, we'll undo billions of years of evolution by messing around with a few genes, and at the same time not producing terrible side-effects. This is at least one level of complexity up from GMO food and whatever. I have not seen these X-Men-like genetically modified humans walking about.
By the time SpaceX is ready to start shuttling people to Mars, we can already have a modified sub-population ready to go.
Extremely unlikely.
Not only is the genetic modification required science fiction, but you wouldn't really know all the things you would need to do until you had 2-3 generations of people living on Mars. There is just too much we don't know.
Just because they own 70% of the total wealth doesnâ(TM)t mean you are entitled to any of it. What, you think the world just owes you a living?
Nobody "owes" the rich their property rights either, nor does anyone "owe" them the chance to avoid a revolution in which their heads will be guillotined.
If we assume that no one "owes" anyone anything (which, in a Hobbesian way, is a fair assumption for some uncivilized state), then everyone is just looking out for their own survival. So the poor, when they are hungry, robbing the rich, is completely fair game.
You see, the modern welfare state is a social contract between rich and poor: the rich get to keep being rich, their property rights protected vigorously by the state, and in exchange they pay a disproportional amount of the taxes which are redistributed to the poor so that they have a decent life - like, you know, welfare payments if they lose their job, access to a hospital if they are sick without this bankrupting them, and a decent education for their children that will allow them too to make a decent living.
It's funny, in many European countries which are more stratified (i.e. there is less social mobility, those born rich tend to stay rich and those born poor tend to stay poor), there is more of a realization of this by the rich. Intergenerational experience, I guess. In the US, which is a lot more socially - upward and downward - mobile, because every third billionaire had humble or middle class beginnings and has a (great)-grandfather who was a dirt poor nobody, the rich feel more entitled to their wealth, thinking it was purely on their own brilliance, talent and hard work that they earned it, and that those who are poor deserve to be so because they just aren't good enough or didn't work hard enough, so they should just shut up. They miss out on the fact that none this would matter in a revolution were the poor go after their heads (yelling "but it's not fair, I worked hard!" on your way to the guillotine will not help). They also miss out on the fact that, having themselves gone from a modest background to being rich, that they actually do indeed owe something to other people like their former selves: it was the system that gave them a chance, and now they have to fund it so it can others a chance too.
That, and most of the services the government provides is not of service to these guys. Police? Many have and pay for private security anyway. Education? They send their kids to private schools. Direct entitlements like food stamps, welfare, low cost housing, free cell phones (in California at least), Medicare/medicade, all are lost to these guys because we stop them from having access to these entitlements.
Wow, that's so ridiculously wrong that it's bordering on the absurd.
The richer you are, the more in need you are of property protection, meaning police and courts. Private security cannot replace the police. In developed countries, private security are glorified doormen (they, by law, usually have no ability to actually do anything of any consequence). Even if the private security guys can shoot, they cannot investigate crimes and arrest people. You need the police for that. There is no private service you can pay for that will prosecute, try, convict, and lock away criminals - you need the public prosecutors and the government-funded court system.
As for education, in developed countries private schools are mostly about creating an exclusive social circle (kids with rich parents hanging out exclusively with other kids with rich parents), not about a higher quality education. Usually, the private schools have to follow whatever the national approved curriculum is (or at least some core elements of it), which means they lean heavily on the public education system (who develops that curriculum? not the private schools). The price of the private school is there to keep poor people out, not to pay for some above-and-beyond education.
Btw, who do the rich employ to work for them, and therefore, earn their money for them? Legions upon legions of people schooled in the public education system. Whether its basic literacy or numeracy, or people with advanced university degrees, the rich's ability to become rich and keep being rich is heavily dependent on millions of people educated using government money.
As for the "entitlements" of the poor - they are there to stop the poor from creating a revolution and stripping their rich of their wealth (and their heads, literally). The rich are the top of the pyramid, but for there to be a top, there has to be a pyramid, a base - and the foundations have to be solid. Do you really think all of the elements of the welfare state that developed over the past 200 years were just pressure from the poor and the lower classes and not a great chunk of the elite realizing that all shit breaks loose when you let people become hungry and desperate (a la France 1789, Russia 1917, and many other examples)?
So yes, the rich benefit from food stamps, welfare, and low-cost housing for the poor. In a very clear way.
Sigh.
That's the practicalities of the prototype systems.
The answer is immediate. O(1). Not O(n) or worse as in any classical system.
Sounds like someone who never built anything practical of scale (and also, as other /.ers have pointed out, doesn't know what O(1) means*).
"The practicalities" of real systems are often the things that matter most. An algorithm that solves a problem in O(n^2) will finish faster on a modern computer than an algorithm that solves the same problem in O(nlogn) running on a computer from 1975. Big-O notation was invented essentially as a way to "neutrally" evaluate algorithms without taking into account the actual speed of the machine - to able to conclude, given two algorithms that run on the same machine, which one would be faster. In the real world, the speed of the machine matters. A lot.
*As other have pointed out: O(1) means that the algorithm runs in *constant time*, i.e. the running time of the algorithm does *not* depend on the *size of the input* (that would be the "n" in logn, n^2, and the like). This time however could be of varying lengths: 1 second, 1 hour, 1 year. Depends on your machine, i.e. the "practicalities".
"Classical" is the term use by physicists to refer to pre-GR and pre-QM physical theories.
Which is exactly why we shouldn't call modern digital computers "classical", since without an understanding of quantum mechanics, we would not be able to make the chips that they are built out of.
"Classical computers" may be then abacuses, Babbage's difference engine, and early electronic computers (e.g. those built out of vacuum tubes), but certainly not anyithing built with integrated circuits since the 1960s.
Parent AC said "$600 for the motherboard and processor". Not $600 just for the motherboard.
Except that Musk (or any of his companies) had nothing to do with designing this AI...or the robot at all.
Alright, I should've read TFA first...but hey, this is Slashdot. Nuro is the company developing the driverless, passengerless, never-intended-for-a-human delivery cars I was thinking about. Which makes it even stranger why they are doing a different class of self-driving vehicle with a safety driver first.
but it seems weird to be ready to go ahead and start sending driverless cars (with safety riders, I know) all around at people's orders.
It's even stranger that a driverless vehicle that is transporting only *things* would be tested with a safety driver...I think I've seen companies developing, from scratch, driverless delivery vehicles that are never intended to carry a human inside. This makes sense for a lot of reasons.
Autonomous cars that transport people must satisfy two major safety requirements: 1) not kill or injure the people they are transporting and 2) not kill or injure other people on the road.
With delivery vehicles, you only really have to worry about number 2). That should make the job significantly easier. You don't have to have some sort of AI "ethics" that has to judge whether to protect the people in the car or the people outside the car, it can always just "sacrifice itself". Drive over a bridge to avoid hitting a pedestrian? OK.
Furthermore, cars that don't have to carry people are simpler to design structurally...they don't have to protect the passengers in case of a crash for example. These things can also be slower. Limit them to say 30 km/h, just schedule the deliveries properly, and you reduce a lot of potential for accidents. Etc.
So testing things first with a safety driver seems pointless, i.e. it's basically development of the wrong type of vehicle.
Democratic Socialism would be something like having all employees have equal voting share holding in all businesses, whereas private ownership requires you to buy shares.
Classical socialism, of course, involves the state owning everything.
You've jumbled things up a bit. Yes, classical socialism involves social/common - in practice, by the state - ownership of the means of production. It also however involves a "dictatorship of the proleteriat", i.e. one-party rule by a vanguard party of the ruling class which will establish first socialism, and then, via socialism, slowly transition to a classless society, thus achieving communism.
"Democratic socialism" means social i.e. state ownership of the means of production, but a political democracy - so no one-party, dictatorship of the proleteriat stuff, we have a real democracy where people meaningfully vote and get to decide what the state does with those means of production it controls. It's still a planned economy but people get to vote on the plan, basically. Note that this is different from "social democracy", which what you described in your first paragraph (Norway etc.), which means a mixed (state and private ownership) market economy that is extensively regulated and where there is a large state-funded social safety net. To play around with the words of Dubek, social democracy is "capitalism with a human face" whereas democratic socialism is "socialism with a human face".
What you have described as democratic socialism is in fact called worker's self-management and was the official ideology of communist Yugoslavia from about the late 1950s/early 1960s (with major reforms resulting in the 1970s) to its demise in the 1990s. Under this ideology, previously state-owned and controlled socialist enterprises where restructured as "Organizations of United Labour" (OUR in Serbo-Croatian) run by workers' councils and not by the state/Communist Party (though the two retained a large influence, especially in large and important companies). Even some public institutions (hospitals, universities, etc.) were reorganized into OURs. Btw, the system still wasn't democratic - political power was still monopolized by the Communist Party (officially no longer a political "party" but instead a "union" or "league"), so it definitely wasn't democratic socialism. Interestingly, OURization brought in a large degree of market competition and quasi-competition into the system, as, theoretically, these were all companies set up independently by workers and were not co-ordinated by the state/party. In practice, it was a heavily-regulated quasi-market economy with a huge dose of government intervention, and OURs essentially could not go bankrupt. In the end, both an actual capitalist market economy, as well as a classical planned socialist economy, were more efficient.
OK, I realize that may be we are not talking about the same thing, as prices for these things vary from place to place.
You are probably referring to the slightly thicker and bigger plastic bags you would get for free when you buy something at a clothing or shoe store, but for which they charge you some small amount at supermarkets. I was mainly thinking of the much thicker, sturdier plastic bags/sacs. I agree that the former will usually not last for years, while the latter easily will (those are the ones that I have which are ~10 years old in some cases). However, even the former should last you 6-12 months easily.
Heck, my grandmother used to wash (yes, wash! and put out on the clothes line to dry) the regular, thin grocery plastic bags and reuse them. So she got a few weeks or months out of each on average before they would tear or become too dirty to clean.
Of course, bags (of any thickness) can break, so you have to be careful about how much you load them. Yes, people shop opportunistically - so they should always keep a few reusable bags/sacs in their car, just for that purpose. You see, that's partly the point - if you want to reduce waste, you have to actively THINK about it and modify your behaviour from the "everything is disposable" mindset. This is not something new actually, it was the default mode of human thinking until about the 1960s/70s.
People's shopping habits differ btw. I go to the grocery store almost every day. A reusable bag (even one which lasts only a couple of months) saves a lot of waste on what would otherwise be single-use (if they tear by the time I get home, which happens to like 50% of them) or dual-use (if they get reused as garbage bags) thin grocery bags. This is typical of where I live. If that doesn't make sense for you, well, don't use the 0.15$ bags, buy the string sacks instead, or whatever.
Finally, it's a bit cheap to come back always with some "yeah that's fine but what about the pollution you make from ... X?" - yeah, what about it? (Most of my clothes are 100% cotton btw. I'm not a fan of polyester and the like - not an environmental thing, but a preference.) It's like saying "why bother locking up the thieves if we can't catch all the rapists?" Less pollution and less waste is always good. Especially when you can do it with things that are totally non-essential, like single-use plastic grocery bags. If those became unavailable tomorrow, the world would go on just as well.
I'd suggest that's unlikely verging on the ridiculous.
Errm...why is that ridiculous?
I have plenty of those thicker ~$0.15 which are several years old...some are 10 years old. They have been used hundreds of times. Each such bag can be used for a year at least (and in reality, for many years), if you go grocery shopping at least twice a week (lowball estimate, most people visit the supermarket more often), and take the bag with you, that's 104 uses per year. Far from unlikely, and certainly not ridiculous.
Btw, reusing the thin plastic bags in whatever capacity (as garbage bags etc.) is good, but whether it's single or dual use, they still end up at the landfill where they take literally ages to decompose. I've started buying biodegradable garbage bin liners (since after I reduced by thin plastic bag use, I started running out of bags to throw out my garbage in).
- Netscape and Firefox have never been 'The Internet'. Microsoft did its damndest to make sure that Windows users all directly equated that blue 'e' icon with 'The Internet'. Google is its own damn verb. Both companies' marketing divisions have made very good pushes to make themselves synonymous with 'The Internet'.
What I used to do back in the day when installing and configuring computers for my non-tech-savvy relatives was to place a shortcut for Netscape/Firefox on their desktop, but with the blue "e" icon and just labeled "Internet". I would also configure the browser appropriately, and delete any easy way for them to find/launch Internet Explorer.
I stopped doing that after Internet Explorer acquired is terrible reputation...
The whole point of science fiction is you can do anything you want.
Not really, as was already explained in another reply. Also, Star Wars is not science fiction.
Paper? Forget it. Should be burned or dumped into pits for methane gas retrieval, and used for power. Cheaper and more environmentally friendly to plant more trees. Then breaking it down, de-inking, re-bleaching, and reprocessing it.
Where, exactly?
Maybe in North America it's cheaper with its vast empty (of people and farms) landscapes with endless forests. In places like Europe...I don't think so. I mean, the industry lobbying body says itself that "we want every fiber back...it’s our precious raw material". Furthermore they say 88% of corrugated boxes are made from recycled material...so why would they be doing this if it were cheaper to just cut down fresh trees? Well, because it isn't cheaper to cut down fresh trees.
Fun Fact: I heard pizza boxes are not recyclable because of all the oil from the pizza soaking into the cardboard!
Fun fact: outside of North America, we don't usually soak our pizzas in oil (and assorted fats).
Seriously, the pizza box has a separate cardboard "tray" inside that soaks up anything that leaks (fat, sauce, wayward toppings). Since the pizza is not leaking like crazy (as with would be the case with the Pizza Pizzas and Dominos of this world), you can usually just throw away that tray, and the rest of the box is dry and can be recycled.
Jesus tits. They've been sending lots of recycling to landfills, forever.
This is correct. A lot of "recycling" isn't actually made of recyclables - people throw in stuff (mostly various types of plastic) that they assume is recyclable, but actually isn't. So at the waste processing plant these things get removed and thrown in with the rest of the (non-recyclable) garbage. Other things are theoretically recyclable (and have the recycling sign on it) but very few places have the capabilitiy to recycle them, or there just isn't a market demand for these materials. It's fairly easy to obtain statistics - both of the "contamination rate" (things found in recycling bins that shouldn't be there) and the % of actual recyclables that get sold to someone for reuse instead of just landfilled or burned. There is also the "diversion rate", the % of recyclable materials that make it into the recycling bins (instead of being thrown in with the "regular" garbage and ending up in the landfill by definition).
Paper and colored glass recycling is just a show. Getting you to sort your trash is just conditioning you to do what your told.
Now, this is the type of sweeping general statement that just doesn't make any sense. At all. It shows that you are reading in your ideological positions into this issue instead of looking at the facts.
Sure, there may be places where "recycling" is just a scam for show - the local government wants to appear to be tackling the garbage problem, while really not doing so. This may be the case where you live. I don't know. However I do know this is NOT the general case.
Example: In the city where I currently live, municipally-organized recycling is very poorly organized, and, up until a few years ago, did not actually exist. Yet, the poorest of urban residents, primarily from the Roma (Gypsy) community, have for decades made a living by recycling. It is a common sight to see them wheeling carts on the street, scowering the dumpsters for recyclable material. Mostly, they collect cardboard and paper. The second most common is metal (from the dumpsters, I mean - metal recycling is of course the most lucrative recycling business but scrap metal is not found on a large scale in household dumpsters, but elsewhere) - you see people picking cans out of the trash, flattening them, and packing them. I have also seen them collect glass and PET bottles. They sell this to someone...and not to the city or some other government entity. Someone is using these raw materials. So clearly, if one is able to make (an admittedly meagre) living out of picking recyclables out of dumpsters, large-scale, organized recycling in advanced countries is not "just for show".
On the point of sorting: actually, in many places you DON'T have to sort the different types of recyclables any more. You have to just sort the recyclables from the non-recyclables (2 bins). There are machines that can now sort the recyclables automatically. A lot cities have gone from multiple recycling bins to one. This has its problems, but generally encourages people to recycle more.
I find most of the criticism of TLJ misplaced. Your criticism is typical, unfortunately: it feels like people wanted to hate it, and so spent a lot of time redefining scenes to imply things that weren't really there.
Well I didn't. I thought TFA was an amusing remake of the original SW movie and that the story had potential. On first viewing I even thought TLJ was OK (I was swayed by all the effects and stuff). However, about 30 mins. out of the theatre it dawned on me how terrible it was. The more I thought about it, the more it pissed me off, really. So no, I didn't want to hate it...I wanted it to be a good movie. It wasn't.