As an introvert myself, it's the people who go stir crazy if they don't have other people around them that seem broken to me. If you're not okay being alone by yourself for a reasonable amount of time, you've got something wrong with you. Likewise, if you can't stand to be around other people for a reasonable amount of time, you've probably got a social anxiety disorder, not just introversion. A healthy person is fine with other people or by themselves.
Goddamnit people, it's SWING SHIFT specifically that you are talking about. Any scheduled period of time that you work is "shift work", even if it is always the same schedule every day; when that schedule changes radically all the time, that is specifically SWING SHIFT. Stop saying "shift work" when you mean "swing shift".
Amazon will do the same thing that they do to their own employees: work them into the ground.
From other comments in this thread, it sounds like people are expecting the opposite: they won't have to do any work at all! Because robots do that now.
Yes, I'm well aware of the etymology thank you. The sense meaning "equipped" stems from that same etymology, branching off from the more direct sense that survives to us today, by way of sense 3 here, "To adjust to a particular specification or requirement". Regulated soldiers are (were) those with the required equipment.
Compare also the term "regular army", which does not mean a common, typical, or average army, or an army obeying laws (per the etymology of "regular"), but a standing army ready to go with everything that it needs.
Also perhaps more illustratively, compare "ordnance", which explicitly means only military equipment, weapons and ammunition, and comes from the root "ordo-" which also means both pertaining to rules (as in "ordinances", laws, and "order") and "in a line" (as in the "ordinal" numbers), and is also the root of a synonym for "regular" in the most common sense today, "ordinary". It's also closely related to "ortho-", which has both normative ("orthodox" = "correct belief") and geometric ("orthogonal" = "at a right angle") senses. ("Correct" and "right" both stem from the same "reg-" root, BTW).
FWIW the root "norm-" also shares a similar pattern: normal as in at a right angle (a la surface normals), normal as in regular or ordinary (common, typical, or average), and norms as in rules (a la "normative"). I'm not aware of a sense of "norm-" that came to mean "military equipment", though.
In the language of the time, "regulated" meant "equipped".
The real thrust of the justifying clause is against a standing army, but a lot of that is implicitly imported from the general political philosophy of the founders, in which an unfree state doesn't need a well-regulated militia or any militia at all because it has a standing army on the King's payroll always ready to do whatever he says. A free state, on the other hand, would have no such thing, so in order for it to be defended, the people in general would have to be a militia, and to function as such they would need to be well-regulated, i.e. well-equipped. Thus, the people in general shall be allowed to keep bear arms, so that the militia that they form can be well-equipped, and capable of defending the state, in a free manner, without requiring a standing army.
The real affront to the second amendment isn't gun-control laws but the standing army we have today. But you'll never hear the gun nuts complaining about that...
Is this sentence badly phrased?: "My kids being all under the age of 18, they are still in public school."
How about this one?: "My kids being all under the age of 18, you shall not have sex with them."
How about this?: "My kids being necessary to the defense of a free state, their right to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed."
Or this?: "A well-regulated militia being necessary to the defense of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed?"
It's a perfectly normal way of phrasing things. A justifying clause ("such-and-such being so-and-so"), followed by the assertion it justifies (which can be any old sentence). It's the exact equivalent of reversing the two clauses, putting "because" between them, and changing "being" to "is" or the equivalent, e.g.:
"My kids are still in public school, because they are all under the age of 18."
Or: "The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed, because a well-regulated militia is necessary to the preservation of a free state."
The point is that anyone who commits a murder with a gun is already breaking the law. Further outlawing all use of guns on top of the already-illegal murdery uses therefore necessarily only accomplishes punishing the non-murdery uses.
This is the general issue with this kind of "preventative" banning of anything. Harmful use of whatever is usually already illegal (and if not, it should be). So a blanket ban on that thing then only adds punishment for the non-harmful uses.
I've made the same argument about licensure in general, with drivers licenses as a specific example. Driving recklessly is already a crime, one that you can commit with or without a driver's license. Ostensibly, requiring licensing to operate a vehicle is to prevent reckless driving by untrained drivers. But since reckless driving is already a crime, the only people additional people you punish by having a blanket licensure requirement on top of that law is unlicensed people who were nevertheless driving safely anyway.
If we'd just do the sensible thing and make all punishments proportional to the harm they cause (not saying eye-for-an-eye, but you-pay-for-any-damage-you-cause), that would automatically do away with this kind of punishment of harmless victimless actions "just in case" someone somewhere doing those actions might cause harm. Yes, there are odds at play and I understand the blanket laws are trying to discourage people from doing things likely to cause harm, but if harm translates directly to punishment then likeliness to cause harm automatically translates to likeliness to bring punishment and accomplishes the same thing already.
Note that I'm not saying everyone should be running around with guns or driving without training or anything like that. Those are bad ideas. Because they're likely to harm someone. Which means you're likely to get punished for doing them, when you likely harm someone. So you shouldn't do them. But if someone does manage to do them without harming anyone, they should not be punished for that.
New religions pronouncing old religions bullshit pop up all the time. The old religions try to stop them, sure, but so do old governments try to stop new.
To stop such splintering and revolution, some religions are even explicitly democratic about both their leadership and decisions on matters of orthodoxy, but they are still religions because they are still just pronouncing things true (at the end of that democratic process), not giving reasons why they must be true. Modern governments are also democratic for largely the same reason (promotes cohesion and stalls revolution), but in the end they're still just declaring things by fiat.
If you really dig into what makes a religion a religion or not, it's not about the content of the belief (God, etc) but about the methodology of belief, although some classes of content demand certain methodologies, namely supernatural claims by their nature depending upon appeals to faith or authority because they are necessarily beyond observation. That appeal to faith or authority is really the defining characteristic of religion, even if there is nothing supernatural about the beliefs justified by appeal to faith or authority. Broadly speaking, religion is the practice of holding opinions based not on reason but simply because someone said so.
States also generally operate on the principle of "because we said so" (even if in democratic states try to make "we" as big a group as possible) without having to offer any actual reason why you must do as they say; them simply saying it is supposed to be sufficient. So really, calling governments religions is not too far off, at least how governance is usually done. (And I believe we will not truly have just governance until governance undergoes a transformation analogous to that which education underwent with the scientific revolution.)
You've got something backward here. Inflation forces you to use it or lose it, because its value is going down. Deflation encourages you to hold on to it because you can get more use out of it later than you could now.
You're assuming I'm the one doing the arguing here. I'm just relating something I frequently see other people do.
In any case, their motives and goals are pretty clear to me, because the maximum implications are far more than "nothing whatsoever". Religious believers frequently push governmental polices and such that have real practical impact on people, which they justify on ostensibly moral grounds, based on a morality grounded in their religious beliefs, which they back up by citing the Bible. To someone opposed to those policies etc, it's thus of enormous practical use to show that the ostensibly moral grounds appealed to for support are insubstantial because the beliefs backing them are insubstantial.
In other words, when someone is telling you what you must or mustn't do and justifying that by claiming the Tooth Fairy says so and they know that because this book says she does, it helps to show the book doesn't actually say that, isn't reliable even if it did, and there is no Tooth Fairy to begin with, never mind whether it would matter what she said to do even if she did exist.
most pastors are full of shit, most Christians are not trying to find God only support for their legalistic thinking, and every single atheist I have ever met is fighting a straw man and not the Bible.
I think most atheists are not trying to fight the Bible, but rather the beliefs professed by those full-of-shit pastors and Christians you mention, who in turn hide behind the Bible to shield themselves from criticism of those beliefs. The kind of in-depth analysis of the actual text you describe is a great way to pierce that shield, and one I've frequently seen used; not quite to the impressive degree of detail you describe, but atheists knowing the Bible better than the believers that hide behind it is a common thing, at least.
I'd say if you have something, anything, with almost every meal (or an equivalent amount, 2-3 servings a day) then you have a lot of that thing.
If you drink soda with every meal, you drink a lot of soda.
If you have a beer with every meal, you drink a lot of beer.
If you skip the beer at breakfast, but still drink it with every other meal, that's still a lot of beer.
If you eat a bag of potato chips with every meal but breakfast, you eat a lot of potato chips.
If you eat Mexican food for breakfast and dinner at home, but not at lunch, that's still a lot of Mexican food.
A beer for most every meal doesn't mean you're ever "getting drunk", but your overall consumption is still high compared to other things that you consume only occasionally.
I might go so far as to say that if there's anything that you consume every day regularly, then you consume a lot of that thing, whatever it is. "Occasionally" is a little. "Daily" is a lot. "Regularly" on some schedule other than daily is moderate.
The long second part of my post was just a followup to your comments about how you'd improve upon the curriculum. I didn't think you were saying it was perfect, I was just joining your discussion on how it could have been even better.
But the main thrust of the first short point was just that, in your list of things people would study after finishing the trivium and quadrivium, you skipped the main thing people usually went on to study, which was philosophy, which is why all the different things people go on to study today are still nominally "philosophy" at the doctorate level.
Only after you'd mastered all that material were you considered prepared to go onto specialized advanced studies (sadly, your choices were limited pretty much to theology, law or medicine).
How do you overlook philosophy, the most central and general of the post-quadrivium disciplines, out of which all of the modern disciplines split, which is why terminal degrees in all the modern fields (besides those old specialties you list) are called "Doctor of Philosophy", or "PhD".
Going off on a tangent here but this is a pet interest of mine and you mentioned it: if I were to update the medieval curriculum, I would: - keep the trivium (grammar, logic, and rhetoric) - complement it with a mathematical analogue (arithmetic, algebra, and statistics) - keep the rest of the "quadrivium" not yet accounted for (geometry, "music" aka harmonics and associated trigonometric functions, "astronomy" aka dynamics and associated calculus) - complement it with artistic analogs (graphic arts to complement geometry as a spatial art, actual music to complement harmonics as a temporal art, and theater/film/animation/etc to complement dynamics as a spatiotemporal art) - cover the basics of four broad areas of natural science (physics and space sciences, chemistry and earth sciences, biology and life sciences, psychology and social sciences) - complement those with the basics of four analogous fields that basically fall into the realm of economics and political science (further details here would be a long tangent) - round it out and glue it all together with a few actual philosophy classes - and lastly give the students a broad overview of general fields of industry they all depend on and things they need to know to make wise life choices regarding them (health and medicine, food and agriculture, clothing and other soft wares, housing and other hard wares, energy and transportation technology, and information and communication technology).
Language, math, art, philosophy, positive and normative sciences, and trades. Assuming four classes per term and three terms per year, all of those things could be covered in just over two years, leaving another nearly two years to focus on whatever specialization the students want to major in.
Is that average mean, mode, or median? I could maybe see median but I expect mean for men would be dragged far above it by the handful of exorbitantly rich men that there are. (Just like the mean personal income is about twice the median personal income, for the same reason).
Pick any UBI amount less than the mean income, as luxurious as you want it to be with that one constraint.
Tax everyone at the ratio of that basic income over the mean income to fund it.
That tax is guaranteed to exactly fund it, because that's how averages work (x% of each member of a set sum up to x% of the average of the set), and there is guaranteed to be enough money to fund it, because you're only taking a fraction of anyone's income.
Now everyone who was making below the mean income will get more from their UBI than they pay in taxes to fund it (the x% tax on an income below the mean is less than the x% of the mean income paid out, duh). Currently that is about 75% of the population. (Remember, mean is not the same as median). So no matter what UBI amount you pick (so long as it's below the mean income), it is mathematically guaranteed that there is enough money to fund it while providing a net benefit to the vast majority of the population.
And that percentage of the population who see a net benefit varies only with equality of income distribution: the more wealth concentrates at the top, the higher the mean rises above the median, and the more people are guaranteed to see a net benefit; while the more equally incomes are distributed, the closer the mean and median get, and the smaller a percentage of people see a net benefit, but then a smaller percentage would need it in that circumstance too.
In that case, everybody who is not a debt-free landowner has no liberties, because everyone who rents or owes money (on necessities at least) is dependent on whoever they're having to borrow from. Someone who doesn't own their own land is not free to exist without strings anywhere; everywhere he goes, he is on someone else's land, dependent on them (or if not them, someone else, but still always someone) consenting to him existing there at all. Sure he's free to leave... and walk onto someone else's land, and be dependent on them instead. Choice of masters is not freedom.
Poverty is dependency which by your own claim is a lack of liberty, so if so many people are stuck in unfree poverty anyway, isn't it a step up for them to be still nominally unfree but at least materially safe while they're at it?
If you raise funds to pay for the UBI with a universal flat tax at the ratio of the basic income over the mean income, then (so long as the basic income is less than the mean income) there is guaranteed to be enough money to fund it, and everyone below the mean income (currently about 75% of the population) would see some net benefit after tax and UBI. No matter what amount you set the UBI to (so long as it's below the mean income, I mean).
We could give every individual a luxurious UBI of about $25,000 a year, and fund that by taxing every individual about 50% of their income, and the way the math and income curves work out, about 75% of people would see some benefit from it (that is, they would get more UBI than they pay in tax to fund it), and it's guaranteed that there's enough money in the top 25% to pay for it (because you're not taking more than 50% of anyone's income; you would have to make literally infinite income to even reach that threshold).
A quantitative point to add to your explanation: if the additional tax to fund the UBI were set at a flat rate of the basic income over mean income, then:
- that math would automatically balance out to exactly fund the UBI (because that's how averages work)
- it's guaranteed that there is enough income available to collect that tax from (since you're only collecting a fraction of anyone's income)
- and that level of income where your stop getting something in net and start paying something in net would fall at exactly the mean income threshold, which is currently around the 75th percentile.
So, no matter what amount you set the UBI to (I mean, so long as it's less than the mean income, but of course it would be), if you fund it this way, with a flat tax (that should make conservatives happy), there's guaranteed to be enough money to pay for it, and 75% of Americans are guaranteed to see a net benefit from it.
And that percent who benefit would only go down if, through other means, the distribution if incomes became more equal on their own, which would offset the loss of benefit. Conversely, if income distribution continues to grow more unequal, then automatically more people would start to see a net benefit.
An important take-away from this for free-market proponents (at least genuine ideologically principled ones and not just "keep the gubmit outta my hussle" ones): an UBI plus the elimination of minimum wage that it would allow for would make the labor market more free, both because the artificial government intervention of minimum wage is removed, but also because the inequality of negotiating partners is lessened and so the prices negotiated are closer to their true market value since nobody can bend anyone else over a barrel, both parties are free to walk away without dire consequences.
Some jobs that cannot exist right now because they're not worth the minimum wage they'd have to be paid might spring into existence when you can start paying people lower and people can actually take that lower pay if it's worth their time because their life doesn't depend on passing it up for a higher-paying job and it's not like they have anything else to do.
Conversely, some jobs that are underpaid right now because people have to accept whatever they can get or else just die in the street might start paying more as those people walk from those jobs without fear of dying as a consequence and employers have to offer more to entice people back into them.
In either case, jobs will be paid close to what they're actually worth, as the outcome of a free and fair negotiation, which is something free market advocates should want. (In fact, I've been advocating for something like a basic income, under a different name I made up, since my high school libertarian days, precisely for this reason: an otherwise free market plus what we're now calling UBI is closer to an ideal free market than what we have now, and so a step in the right direction).
this constant "where will the money come from" panic ignores WHERE THE MONEY WILL GO: right back to the same populace who are paying the taxes to fund it. For people in the middle income ranges, what it pays them and what it costs them largely cancels out, and they see neither significant cost nor benefit. the rest of the people at the bottom get a little hand up, and the people at the top have easily more than enough income to fund that. the gradual tapering of the long tail is important: you're not asking the top 1% to pay each of the 99% the full basic income, you're asking everyone to pay it, and everyone gets it, and yes the people at the top bear the bulk of the costs but the math works out very differently than you keep spewing.
the most straightforward way to design an ubi is to take whatever basic income you want to pay out, divide it by the mean income, and add a new flat tax at that ratio (basic income over mean income) to everyone's taxes. by definition, this means that people making the mean income see no cost or benefit. the net effect on everyone else is that their post-ubi-and-tax income shifts from wherever it was before toward the mean income by whatever that percent was. that means that even if we had a basic income of HALF the mean income, which is roughly the current MEDIAN income, so more than half of the people would see their incomes more than doubled, there would, necessarily, be enough money among those above the mean to pay for it, and the richest of the rich would still be making way more than the mean income.
Run some simple numbers and see. The mean personal income is presently close to $50k, and let's say we had a basic income of 25% of that, a little over $1k/mo.
$1,600,000 * 0.75 + $12,500 = $1,212,500 still left over, so millionaires are still millionaires even $800,000 * 0.75 + $12,500 = $725,000 still left over $400,000 * 0.75 + $12,500 = $312,500 still left over $200,000 * 0.75 + $12,500 = $162,500 still left over $100,000 * 0.75 + $12,500 = $87,500 still left over $50,000 * 0.75 + $12,500 = $50,000, the break-even point at the mean personal income $25,000 * 0.75 + $12,500 = $31,250, around the median personal income $12,500 * 0.75 + $12,500 = $21,875 $6,250 * 0.75 + $12,500 = $17,187.50 $3,125 * 0.75 + $12,500 = $14,843.75 $1,562.50 * 0.75 + $12,500 = $13,671.88 $0.00 * 0.75 + $12,500 = $12,500
And all of that is necessarily revenue-neutral. Then you can tax normal taxes on those post-UBI-and-UBItax incomes, except those normal taxes would be much lower because of all the programs that can be cut once the UBI replaces them.
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As an introvert myself, it's the people who go stir crazy if they don't have other people around them that seem broken to me. If you're not okay being alone by yourself for a reasonable amount of time, you've got something wrong with you. Likewise, if you can't stand to be around other people for a reasonable amount of time, you've probably got a social anxiety disorder, not just introversion. A healthy person is fine with other people or by themselves.
That is graveyard shift.
Goddamnit people, it's SWING SHIFT specifically that you are talking about. Any scheduled period of time that you work is "shift work", even if it is always the same schedule every day; when that schedule changes radically all the time, that is specifically SWING SHIFT. Stop saying "shift work" when you mean "swing shift".
Amazon will do the same thing that they do to their own employees: work them into the ground.
From other comments in this thread, it sounds like people are expecting the opposite: they won't have to do any work at all! Because robots do that now.
Yes, I'm well aware of the etymology thank you. The sense meaning "equipped" stems from that same etymology, branching off from the more direct sense that survives to us today, by way of sense 3 here, "To adjust to a particular specification or requirement". Regulated soldiers are (were) those with the required equipment.
Compare also the term "regular army", which does not mean a common, typical, or average army, or an army obeying laws (per the etymology of "regular"), but a standing army ready to go with everything that it needs.
Also perhaps more illustratively, compare "ordnance", which explicitly means only military equipment, weapons and ammunition, and comes from the root "ordo-" which also means both pertaining to rules (as in "ordinances", laws, and "order") and "in a line" (as in the "ordinal" numbers), and is also the root of a synonym for "regular" in the most common sense today, "ordinary". It's also closely related to "ortho-", which has both normative ("orthodox" = "correct belief") and geometric ("orthogonal" = "at a right angle") senses. ("Correct" and "right" both stem from the same "reg-" root, BTW).
FWIW the root "norm-" also shares a similar pattern: normal as in at a right angle (a la surface normals), normal as in regular or ordinary (common, typical, or average), and norms as in rules (a la "normative"). I'm not aware of a sense of "norm-" that came to mean "military equipment", though.
In the language of the time, "regulated" meant "equipped".
The real thrust of the justifying clause is against a standing army, but a lot of that is implicitly imported from the general political philosophy of the founders, in which an unfree state doesn't need a well-regulated militia or any militia at all because it has a standing army on the King's payroll always ready to do whatever he says. A free state, on the other hand, would have no such thing, so in order for it to be defended, the people in general would have to be a militia, and to function as such they would need to be well-regulated, i.e. well-equipped. Thus, the people in general shall be allowed to keep bear arms, so that the militia that they form can be well-equipped, and capable of defending the state, in a free manner, without requiring a standing army.
The real affront to the second amendment isn't gun-control laws but the standing army we have today. But you'll never hear the gun nuts complaining about that ...
Is this sentence badly phrased?:
"My kids being all under the age of 18, they are still in public school."
How about this one?:
"My kids being all under the age of 18, you shall not have sex with them."
How about this?:
"My kids being necessary to the defense of a free state, their right to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed."
Or this?:
"A well-regulated militia being necessary to the defense of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed?"
It's a perfectly normal way of phrasing things. A justifying clause ("such-and-such being so-and-so"), followed by the assertion it justifies (which can be any old sentence). It's the exact equivalent of reversing the two clauses, putting "because" between them, and changing "being" to "is" or the equivalent, e.g.:
"My kids are still in public school, because they are all under the age of 18."
Or:
"The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed, because a well-regulated militia is necessary to the preservation of a free state."
The point is that anyone who commits a murder with a gun is already breaking the law. Further outlawing all use of guns on top of the already-illegal murdery uses therefore necessarily only accomplishes punishing the non-murdery uses.
This is the general issue with this kind of "preventative" banning of anything. Harmful use of whatever is usually already illegal (and if not, it should be). So a blanket ban on that thing then only adds punishment for the non-harmful uses.
I've made the same argument about licensure in general, with drivers licenses as a specific example. Driving recklessly is already a crime, one that you can commit with or without a driver's license. Ostensibly, requiring licensing to operate a vehicle is to prevent reckless driving by untrained drivers. But since reckless driving is already a crime, the only people additional people you punish by having a blanket licensure requirement on top of that law is unlicensed people who were nevertheless driving safely anyway.
If we'd just do the sensible thing and make all punishments proportional to the harm they cause (not saying eye-for-an-eye, but you-pay-for-any-damage-you-cause), that would automatically do away with this kind of punishment of harmless victimless actions "just in case" someone somewhere doing those actions might cause harm. Yes, there are odds at play and I understand the blanket laws are trying to discourage people from doing things likely to cause harm, but if harm translates directly to punishment then likeliness to cause harm automatically translates to likeliness to bring punishment and accomplishes the same thing already.
Note that I'm not saying everyone should be running around with guns or driving without training or anything like that. Those are bad ideas. Because they're likely to harm someone. Which means you're likely to get punished for doing them, when you likely harm someone. So you shouldn't do them. But if someone does manage to do them without harming anyone, they should not be punished for that.
New religions pronouncing old religions bullshit pop up all the time. The old religions try to stop them, sure, but so do old governments try to stop new.
To stop such splintering and revolution, some religions are even explicitly democratic about both their leadership and decisions on matters of orthodoxy, but they are still religions because they are still just pronouncing things true (at the end of that democratic process), not giving reasons why they must be true. Modern governments are also democratic for largely the same reason (promotes cohesion and stalls revolution), but in the end they're still just declaring things by fiat.
If you really dig into what makes a religion a religion or not, it's not about the content of the belief (God, etc) but about the methodology of belief, although some classes of content demand certain methodologies, namely supernatural claims by their nature depending upon appeals to faith or authority because they are necessarily beyond observation. That appeal to faith or authority is really the defining characteristic of religion, even if there is nothing supernatural about the beliefs justified by appeal to faith or authority. Broadly speaking, religion is the practice of holding opinions based not on reason but simply because someone said so.
States also generally operate on the principle of "because we said so" (even if in democratic states try to make "we" as big a group as possible) without having to offer any actual reason why you must do as they say; them simply saying it is supposed to be sufficient. So really, calling governments religions is not too far off, at least how governance is usually done. (And I believe we will not truly have just governance until governance undergoes a transformation analogous to that which education underwent with the scientific revolution.)
You've got something backward here. Inflation forces you to use it or lose it, because its value is going down. Deflation encourages you to hold on to it because you can get more use out of it later than you could now.
You're assuming I'm the one doing the arguing here. I'm just relating something I frequently see other people do.
In any case, their motives and goals are pretty clear to me, because the maximum implications are far more than "nothing whatsoever". Religious believers frequently push governmental polices and such that have real practical impact on people, which they justify on ostensibly moral grounds, based on a morality grounded in their religious beliefs, which they back up by citing the Bible. To someone opposed to those policies etc, it's thus of enormous practical use to show that the ostensibly moral grounds appealed to for support are insubstantial because the beliefs backing them are insubstantial.
In other words, when someone is telling you what you must or mustn't do and justifying that by claiming the Tooth Fairy says so and they know that because this book says she does, it helps to show the book doesn't actually say that, isn't reliable even if it did, and there is no Tooth Fairy to begin with, never mind whether it would matter what she said to do even if she did exist.
most pastors are full of shit, most Christians are not trying to find God only support for their legalistic thinking, and every single atheist I have ever met is fighting a straw man and not the Bible.
I think most atheists are not trying to fight the Bible, but rather the beliefs professed by those full-of-shit pastors and Christians you mention, who in turn hide behind the Bible to shield themselves from criticism of those beliefs. The kind of in-depth analysis of the actual text you describe is a great way to pierce that shield, and one I've frequently seen used; not quite to the impressive degree of detail you describe, but atheists knowing the Bible better than the believers that hide behind it is a common thing, at least.
I'd say if you have something, anything, with almost every meal (or an equivalent amount, 2-3 servings a day) then you have a lot of that thing.
If you drink soda with every meal, you drink a lot of soda.
If you have a beer with every meal, you drink a lot of beer.
If you skip the beer at breakfast, but still drink it with every other meal, that's still a lot of beer.
If you eat a bag of potato chips with every meal but breakfast, you eat a lot of potato chips.
If you eat Mexican food for breakfast and dinner at home, but not at lunch, that's still a lot of Mexican food.
A beer for most every meal doesn't mean you're ever "getting drunk", but your overall consumption is still high compared to other things that you consume only occasionally.
I might go so far as to say that if there's anything that you consume every day regularly, then you consume a lot of that thing, whatever it is. "Occasionally" is a little. "Daily" is a lot. "Regularly" on some schedule other than daily is moderate.
The long second part of my post was just a followup to your comments about how you'd improve upon the curriculum. I didn't think you were saying it was perfect, I was just joining your discussion on how it could have been even better.
But the main thrust of the first short point was just that, in your list of things people would study after finishing the trivium and quadrivium, you skipped the main thing people usually went on to study, which was philosophy, which is why all the different things people go on to study today are still nominally "philosophy" at the doctorate level.
Only after you'd mastered all that material were you considered prepared to go onto specialized advanced studies (sadly, your choices were limited pretty much to theology, law or medicine).
How do you overlook philosophy, the most central and general of the post-quadrivium disciplines, out of which all of the modern disciplines split, which is why terminal degrees in all the modern fields (besides those old specialties you list) are called "Doctor of Philosophy", or "PhD".
Going off on a tangent here but this is a pet interest of mine and you mentioned it: if I were to update the medieval curriculum, I would:
- keep the trivium (grammar, logic, and rhetoric)
- complement it with a mathematical analogue (arithmetic, algebra, and statistics)
- keep the rest of the "quadrivium" not yet accounted for (geometry, "music" aka harmonics and associated trigonometric functions, "astronomy" aka dynamics and associated calculus)
- complement it with artistic analogs (graphic arts to complement geometry as a spatial art, actual music to complement harmonics as a temporal art, and theater/film/animation/etc to complement dynamics as a spatiotemporal art)
- cover the basics of four broad areas of natural science (physics and space sciences, chemistry and earth sciences, biology and life sciences, psychology and social sciences)
- complement those with the basics of four analogous fields that basically fall into the realm of economics and political science (further details here would be a long tangent)
- round it out and glue it all together with a few actual philosophy classes
- and lastly give the students a broad overview of general fields of industry they all depend on and things they need to know to make wise life choices regarding them (health and medicine, food and agriculture, clothing and other soft wares, housing and other hard wares, energy and transportation technology, and information and communication technology).
Language, math, art, philosophy, positive and normative sciences, and trades. Assuming four classes per term and three terms per year, all of those things could be covered in just over two years, leaving another nearly two years to focus on whatever specialization the students want to major in.
Is that average mean, mode, or median? I could maybe see median but I expect mean for men would be dragged far above it by the handful of exorbitantly rich men that there are. (Just like the mean personal income is about twice the median personal income, for the same reason).
FWIW the first image that comes to mind trying to picture a person named "Reality" is a black woman. No speculation on why, just that's my impression.
Then again I thought AmiMoJo here was a woman too just (I think) because "Ami" made me think of "Amy".
(x% of each member of a set sum up to x% of the average of the set)
Oops, that should be:
(x% of each member of a set sum up to x% of the sum of the set)
You're doing something wrong with your math.
Pick any UBI amount less than the mean income, as luxurious as you want it to be with that one constraint.
Tax everyone at the ratio of that basic income over the mean income to fund it.
That tax is guaranteed to exactly fund it, because that's how averages work (x% of each member of a set sum up to x% of the average of the set), and there is guaranteed to be enough money to fund it, because you're only taking a fraction of anyone's income.
Now everyone who was making below the mean income will get more from their UBI than they pay in taxes to fund it (the x% tax on an income below the mean is less than the x% of the mean income paid out, duh). Currently that is about 75% of the population. (Remember, mean is not the same as median). So no matter what UBI amount you pick (so long as it's below the mean income), it is mathematically guaranteed that there is enough money to fund it while providing a net benefit to the vast majority of the population.
And that percentage of the population who see a net benefit varies only with equality of income distribution: the more wealth concentrates at the top, the higher the mean rises above the median, and the more people are guaranteed to see a net benefit; while the more equally incomes are distributed, the closer the mean and median get, and the smaller a percentage of people see a net benefit, but then a smaller percentage would need it in that circumstance too.
In that case, everybody who is not a debt-free landowner has no liberties, because everyone who rents or owes money (on necessities at least) is dependent on whoever they're having to borrow from. Someone who doesn't own their own land is not free to exist without strings anywhere; everywhere he goes, he is on someone else's land, dependent on them (or if not them, someone else, but still always someone) consenting to him existing there at all. Sure he's free to leave... and walk onto someone else's land, and be dependent on them instead. Choice of masters is not freedom.
Poverty is dependency which by your own claim is a lack of liberty, so if so many people are stuck in unfree poverty anyway, isn't it a step up for them to be still nominally unfree but at least materially safe while they're at it?
If you raise funds to pay for the UBI with a universal flat tax at the ratio of the basic income over the mean income, then (so long as the basic income is less than the mean income) there is guaranteed to be enough money to fund it, and everyone below the mean income (currently about 75% of the population) would see some net benefit after tax and UBI. No matter what amount you set the UBI to (so long as it's below the mean income, I mean).
We could give every individual a luxurious UBI of about $25,000 a year, and fund that by taxing every individual about 50% of their income, and the way the math and income curves work out, about 75% of people would see some benefit from it (that is, they would get more UBI than they pay in tax to fund it), and it's guaranteed that there's enough money in the top 25% to pay for it (because you're not taking more than 50% of anyone's income; you would have to make literally infinite income to even reach that threshold).
A quantitative point to add to your explanation: if the additional tax to fund the UBI were set at a flat rate of the basic income over mean income, then:
- that math would automatically balance out to exactly fund the UBI (because that's how averages work)
- it's guaranteed that there is enough income available to collect that tax from (since you're only collecting a fraction of anyone's income)
- and that level of income where your stop getting something in net and start paying something in net would fall at exactly the mean income threshold, which is currently around the 75th percentile.
So, no matter what amount you set the UBI to (I mean, so long as it's less than the mean income, but of course it would be), if you fund it this way, with a flat tax (that should make conservatives happy), there's guaranteed to be enough money to pay for it, and 75% of Americans are guaranteed to see a net benefit from it.
And that percent who benefit would only go down if, through other means, the distribution if incomes became more equal on their own, which would offset the loss of benefit. Conversely, if income distribution continues to grow more unequal, then automatically more people would start to see a net benefit.
An important take-away from this for free-market proponents (at least genuine ideologically principled ones and not just "keep the gubmit outta my hussle" ones): an UBI plus the elimination of minimum wage that it would allow for would make the labor market more free, both because the artificial government intervention of minimum wage is removed, but also because the inequality of negotiating partners is lessened and so the prices negotiated are closer to their true market value since nobody can bend anyone else over a barrel, both parties are free to walk away without dire consequences.
Some jobs that cannot exist right now because they're not worth the minimum wage they'd have to be paid might spring into existence when you can start paying people lower and people can actually take that lower pay if it's worth their time because their life doesn't depend on passing it up for a higher-paying job and it's not like they have anything else to do.
Conversely, some jobs that are underpaid right now because people have to accept whatever they can get or else just die in the street might start paying more as those people walk from those jobs without fear of dying as a consequence and employers have to offer more to entice people back into them.
In either case, jobs will be paid close to what they're actually worth, as the outcome of a free and fair negotiation, which is something free market advocates should want. (In fact, I've been advocating for something like a basic income, under a different name I made up, since my high school libertarian days, precisely for this reason: an otherwise free market plus what we're now calling UBI is closer to an ideal free market than what we have now, and so a step in the right direction).
this constant "where will the money come from" panic ignores WHERE THE MONEY WILL GO: right back to the same populace who are paying the taxes to fund it. For people in the middle income ranges, what it pays them and what it costs them largely cancels out, and they see neither significant cost nor benefit. the rest of the people at the bottom get a little hand up, and the people at the top have easily more than enough income to fund that. the gradual tapering of the long tail is important: you're not asking the top 1% to pay each of the 99% the full basic income, you're asking everyone to pay it, and everyone gets it, and yes the people at the top bear the bulk of the costs but the math works out very differently than you keep spewing.
the most straightforward way to design an ubi is to take whatever basic income you want to pay out, divide it by the mean income, and add a new flat tax at that ratio (basic income over mean income) to everyone's taxes. by definition, this means that people making the mean income see no cost or benefit. the net effect on everyone else is that their post-ubi-and-tax income shifts from wherever it was before toward the mean income by whatever that percent was. that means that even if we had a basic income of HALF the mean income, which is roughly the current MEDIAN income, so more than half of the people would see their incomes more than doubled, there would, necessarily, be enough money among those above the mean to pay for it, and the richest of the rich would still be making way more than the mean income.
Run some simple numbers and see. The mean personal income is presently close to $50k, and let's say we had a basic income of 25% of that, a little over $1k/mo.
$1,600,000 * 0.75 + $12,500 = $1,212,500 still left over, so millionaires are still millionaires even
$800,000 * 0.75 + $12,500 = $725,000 still left over
$400,000 * 0.75 + $12,500 = $312,500 still left over
$200,000 * 0.75 + $12,500 = $162,500 still left over
$100,000 * 0.75 + $12,500 = $87,500 still left over
$50,000 * 0.75 + $12,500 = $50,000, the break-even point at the mean personal income
$25,000 * 0.75 + $12,500 = $31,250, around the median personal income
$12,500 * 0.75 + $12,500 = $21,875
$6,250 * 0.75 + $12,500 = $17,187.50
$3,125 * 0.75 + $12,500 = $14,843.75
$1,562.50 * 0.75 + $12,500 = $13,671.88
$0.00 * 0.75 + $12,500 = $12,500
And all of that is necessarily revenue-neutral. Then you can tax normal taxes on those post-UBI-and-UBItax incomes, except those normal taxes would be much lower because of all the programs that can be cut once the UBI replaces them.