Free Obamacare? The unemployed get free health insurance? Since when?
Since the ACA was enacted, the income threshold to qualify for medicaid was raised (meaning more and more moderately-poor people qualify for it). If you have no income (for sufficiently long) you will (eventually) qualify for it. So those who are unemployed (for long enough), or even just sufficiently underemployed, or just underpaid, get free health insurance now. One of the only good things about the ACA, really.
That said, this guy having been a CEO, he probably still has (investment) income despite not having a job, hasn't been unemployed long enough for his last tax return that medicaid will ask for for income verification to reflect that status (of course), and that's not even counting the golden parachute he's undoubtedly received, since they "accepted his resignation" rather than "terminated him with cause".
We're yet to see how many of its victims the MemePlague kills. Like I said about my mom, who voted Trump: she survives entirely off social programs likely to be cut as a consequence of Trump's tax plan, and may die as a consequence because nobody else with the means to help her will. We'll see how many people suffer or die from the consequences of Brexit. And we can only hope that the consequences of a Trump presidency don't plunge the whole US into (further) poverty (with lots of consequent death), or worse yet, lead to a war that threatens the existence of humanity in general.
A difference still remaining, though, is that the potential lethal effects of memetic disease can kill even people who are immune to the disease per se. It's more like if there were a plague that caused people to explode in a giant fireball; just because you're immune to the plague per se, doesn't make you immune to explosions, so if someone next to you catches it, you might still die from it. That makes it significantly harder for selection processes to generate herd immunity.
I think you're onto something with the generational shift, but alot of the worst deplorables online (like 4chan) are young people, so I'm not so sure this will get better over time.
I wasn't suggesting it was getting better with younger generations (though I did express a hope that someday a generation not yet born would en masse develop an immunity to such bullshit), but rather suggesting that the older generation of netizens (meaning those who were early adopters of the internet, not people who happen to be old and on the internet today) experienced conditions that let us (I'm one of them, barely) collectively develop a herd immunity to this kind of stuff, and pass it down year after year to the newcomers. That is until Eternal September happened (and never ended and just got so bad to the point that now nobody even knows what that term means) and so many new people were thrown into communication with each other so quickly that on the whole herd immunity was lost, and those who have immunity are now so few and far between that viral ideas can ravage the population at a whim, and the handful not affected are left lost and alone in a sea of infected zombies.
I had a thought earlier today: The internet is the primary vector for the worst epidemic of mental disease ever to strike humanity, on par with the Old World plagues that wiped out New World peoples upon first contact. Here's what I wrote about it elsewhere:
Fuck 4chan. They're responsible for this Trump victory. Actually, fuck the internet in general as it is today, but 4chan is where that shit first gained a foothold.
Trump winning this election happened because of the continuous shitfest of frothing-at-the-mouth rabid drivel that now circulates around 24/7 nonstop. The internet is what lead my dad to turn into a crazy conspiracy theorist who thinks that 9/11 was a coverup for the then-recently-revealed existence of extraterrestrial life awaiting our spiritual awakening ever since the fall of Atlantis at the end of the Pleistocene. It's also what's convinced my original-generation-hippy, lifelong-Democrat, now-disabled mom, who survives entirely off of social programs likely to be cut under Trump, that Obama is a Muslim building a Mosque at Ground Zero, and that Hillary is part of the Illuminati who apparently worship Satan on some hill in Oregon (according to the obviously doctored photos someone posted online), and made her vote Trump for her first Republican president ever.
Once upon a time I was under this blissful delusion that instant worldwide communication would lead to a new enlightenment for the populace in general, but it's become abundantly clear that the only thing keeping an echochamber of the worst, craziest, lowest-common-denominator "truthy" bullshit from drowning what few braincells most people have to rub together was the physical difficulty in that kind of craziness spreading.
I think there's an analogue to be made with biological disease here. Back in the days before modern medicine, cities were about the least healthy places you could live, because being in close physical proximity to so many other people (and animals) made it so much easier for disease to spread; you weren't air-gapped from most people like you would be in the country. I think the same is true of what I guess we'd call "memetic" diseases of the mind: nasty, destructive, viral ideas spread and mutate far more quickly now that everyone is plugged into the internet 24/7, than they could back in the day when they would be contained to whoever Joe McNutbar was ranting to at the local pub.
A further hypothesis: When the Old World first met the New World, the New World people died of Old World plagues but not vice-versa because the Old World had lots of previous exposure to plagues, having had lots of big dense cities for a long time and developing strong immune systems piecemeal over time enough that those plagues could just be everywhere in the Old World and most people were unaffected by them, while New World peoples with their sparser populations had no history of plagues (none that had any survivors to adapt to them at least) and so had both no resistance to the European ones and none to offer in return. I wonder if the earliest netizens, those of us who remember when UseNet was the happening place, are like the Europeans in that analogy. Those of us who grew up with trolls and flamewars and the kinds of crazy that the internet could breed... we got inoculated to it. That crazy was always still around but you know, don't feed the trolls and you'll be fine. We grew up knowing not to believe everything you read because the internet is full of lies.
But now the whole goddamn world is very suddenly connected to that cesspool of lies and madness, and they have no defense against it, so it's spreading like wildfire, mutating into ever-more virulent strains, and wiping out (the minds of) the population at large.
I just hope there are survivors enough to adapt a herd immunity to it some day.
Thank you, I get so tired of that canard myself and would have posted the same clarification myself if you hadn't first.
I have a strong suspicion that the people repeating it are Republicans who are hung up on the mostly-meaningless names of their party and the Democratic party, and want to emphasize Republic > Democracy because therefore (in their minds) Republican > Democrat.
how you'd go about find[ing] another seller/buyer" on demand and at minimal cost
The whole point of my post was that, in absence of the ability to rent, there would be demand for on-demand buyer/sellers of property... and that that would come at a cost, equivalent to the convenience afforded by them, which should be similar to the cost of renting if what you're really paying for there is the same convenience. For those not willing to pay that cost, the effort of finding a buyer or seller to save that money may be more worth it.
I spent the first decade of my adult life renting a bedroom in a house full of ever-shifting strangers where we all shared a lease and technically rented the whole house and had to find replacement housemates when others moved out or else be stuck with the cost of their rent ourselves -- basically doing the work of the landlord in finding and vetting tenants, except without any of the powers of the landlord to get rid of them if we didn't like them, leaving me stuck for years in a house full of shitheads I could do nothing about -- because that was the only kind of housing that left me any room to save to eventually escape to something better (which I eventually did). I could have just moved somewhere else every time a new asshat moved in to where I was already, but that would have cost me a lot of money. I stayed and put up with their shit and fought to find better people so as to save money.
Let transient passers-through pay for the convenience if it's worth it to them. Those of us just looking to live somewhere long term can take the time to see to it that that doesn't cost us an arm and a leg.
the magic of loans
Which come at interest, which is just rent on money and so has the exact same problems, except that the interest alone on the smallest possible home loan can easily exceed the lowest alternative rent, and leave someone trying to eventually just own something even further from that goal.
renters with sufficient financial leverage
That is the entire purpose of my objection to rent. Huge swathes of people are perpetually unable to escape from renting. I myself, making twice what the median person makes, face a lifelong uphill battle to be able to stop renting either property directly or the money with which to buy it some day before I die, and I don't know if that's something I will ever achieve. Neither of my parents could, and most of my peers in my generation seem to be making less progress than even I. Almost nobody has "sufficient financial leverage" and that creates a perpetual underclass of propertyless serfs working mostly just to find the money with which to pay rent to the lords on whose land they live and not for their own benefit.
the scheme you propose is workable, then why isn't someone doing it?
If running a plantation with paid labor is workable, why would anyone use slaves? Because slave labor is more beneficial... to the slaveholder. And renting is more beneficial to the landowner. The point is merely that in absence of legal protection of such unjust practices, alternatives would be forced into existence, and such alternatives are possible; it wouldn't be the end of the world, just the end of an unjust advantage some people hold over others.
It's a way of capturing inefficiencies from property that no one actor wants to use all the time. When I travel, I want to be able to rent a room and a car; I don't want to have to purchase them and then sell them again when I leave.
I hear this argument all the time, but aside from artificially imposed hoops in the process buying and selling real estate (vs anything else), why would that be so awful? You would need sufficient liquidity in the market of course, for it to not be terribly inconvenient, and someone willing to sell to you on long terms (many small payments over time, so you can start right away) and buy on short terms (cash you out all at once, so you can leave right away), but there's a business opportunity for someone in providing that, at a cost to you (the difference between their sale price and purchase price), without it technically being rent, and in that process circumventing the possible abuses of rent. If the convenience isn't worth the cost, if you're not someone moving quickly from place to place but just someone trying to live somewhere for a good long while and unable to buy in the kind of markets we have today, you could find another seller/buyer and save yourself some money. A lot of money, for the long-term renter. The less temporary your use of the property, the more worthwhile it becomes, and the less the cost to you per time in occupancy, and so the less "rent-like" the arrangement becomes, to the point that people who currently spend their entire lives (or families who spend generations) renting could actually end that cycle of poverty and end up owning something to their name for all the money they've spent on housing. Without inconveniencing travelers at all, who are happy to pay for the convenience.
There is evidence that rents went up because of AirBnB-style practices. This law discourages AirBnB-style practices. Ergo this law counteracts those rising rents, i.e. lowering them again. QED.
Use your property however you damn well please, but expecting government to enforce contracts forcing someone else to pay you a permanent fee for the temporary use of your property is not "using your property".
If a market is capitalistic -- shaped by the prior distribution of capital, rather than solely the present value contributed by its participants -- then it's not free.
Rent-seeking is a lot broader than using the power of government to attack other businesses. It's any economic practice that seeks to use some kind of privileged access to something, being the gatekeeper of something, to leverage an unearned income.
I know most people would say otherwise but I strongly contend that rent in the ordinary sense of the word is exactly that. The housekeeping that a hotel/BnB/etc provide is certainly a real service that they could charge for as such, but the model of "I have a thing I'm not using, you need to use a thing you don't have, give me money I can keep forever and I'll let you borrow it for a while" is exactly the kind of gatekeeper behavior that defines rent-seeking.
If you want to profit off of something you own and aren't using yourself, sell it.
If downloading copyrighted material is infringement, then
This antecedent is the matter in question here. Of course it's common sense that the consequent follows from it, but asserting this antecedent is the new thing here. Previously it was held (rightly) that being the recipient of someone else's illegal distribution of an illegal copy was not illegal copying and distribution on your part, but on theirs.
To continue the analogy, it's like a library places a book on a public shelf. You are the one choosing to take it off that shelf, walk over to the copy machine, push the button, and then take the photocopy home with you.
That's not analogous. A closer analogy would be if I could walk into the library, browse the book titles on the shelf without being able to touch them, and then ask the librarian to photocopy one of them for me to take home. When you download something from a remote server, you're sending it a request to transmit a copy to you. It's up to the other party (and how they've configured their server) whether to comply with that request or not. You're not even in possession of any media to copy until they've already copied it and distributed it to you.
It's not about possession, it's about who's in control of the "make a copy" process.
So if I first ask my girlfriend to make me a mix CD, then I become party to her copyright infringement, but if she just does it of her own accord I'm fine?
If asking for a mix CD still leaves me innocent, what if instead I email her asking her to email me a ripped copy back?
What if she has a script in her email that will read properly-phrased incoming emails and email ripped MP3s back?
I ask because I'm not in control of the "make a copy" process when downloading either. I'm asking someone else in possession of the media to send me a copy of it. They're doing the copying and distributing of it. Does it make a legal difference that I asked them to? Does it make a legal difference if the asking is via electronic communication instead of verbal, or if their response is automated instead of manual?
Is the recipient of a mix CD a copyright infringer? If not, it doesn't make any sense that a downloader would be either.
The one who started out in possession of the media, made and distributed a copy of it, is violating the right to control copying and distribution, i.e. copyright.
Someone who started out with nothing, copied nothing, distributed nothing, but ends up in possession of something that someone else illegally copied and distributed, has done what exactly that violates what law?
The entirety of your post is rather selfish. You admit that the average person is marching almost futilely into destitution at the end of their life. But no, let's not do anything about that, that would "ruin the progress of society". The progress enjoyed by only the tiniest sliver of society, riding on the backs of everyone else, for all of history. Who's really selfish here?
I make almost exactly the mean personal income / median household income. I still live virtually the same way I did as a poor college student, saving as much as possible as quickly as possible so that someday I will have a chance of securing the most basic bit of security: having a place I'm allowed to sit and (at least) starve to death in peace, without having to bribe someone else every month for the privilege of doing so in their space. That is to say, to own a home (outright) and stop renting. As things are currently trending (including the long-term growth trends in my income, inflating cost of living over time, etc), if I can keep up the breakneck speed I'm saving at right now, I might be able to accomplish that by my 70s, giving me a mere handful of years before I will probably die in which to "save up for retirement" (i.e. food money, etc).
Cutting full time down to 30 hours will merely reduce my income to 75%, which will reduce my rate of progress toward that goal to 25%, which will extend the date that I am free from rent and able to start saving for other retirement expenses to some time near my 200th birthday.
Merely cutting everyone's hours is only going to help those who are unemployed (and not even all of them), at the expense of those who are employed (and a proportionally greater expense for the lower-paid), at not cost to the richest of the rich who are currently siphoning up all the wealth of society. A real solution to poverty has to be at the expense of those who can afford it, not merely dragging the rest of society with barely any hope already down into the same depths of hopelessness as the worst-off of us.
The ISP level is where the no-platforming line should be drawn, so long as ISPs are government-granted monopolies. There is no barrier to choice in social media platforms or web hosts, but most people in most municipalities have one or at most two choices of ISP, so they must be required to be common carriers and not discriminate based on content.
If there comes a day when anyone can connect to any... I dunno, wireless patch network or something like that... and there's no barrier to choice in ISPs either, then the ISPs are free to no-platform you too.
I did bother reading the rest of this thread, and all you gave was further "how". How did it come to be that living things that are around today behave in ways that tend to increase the propagation of their genes? Those that didn't died out, leaving only these ones behind. That's a "how". And to be fair, "why" is an overloaded term, and one sense of it does mean "how", so you've technically answered one sense of the question, but clearly people are asking for an answer to the other sense of it, which you might put as "how come?" In other words, for what purpose?
Purposes are not causes. They don't explain why things are, and no amount of explaining why things are will tell you its purpose. A purpose is why something ought to be, what it's good for. To answer that, you first need to answer what is good, what ought to be, in the general (which no amount of discussion about what is or is not will accomplish, as it's a completely separate, orthogonal question); and then answer how the something in particular furthers that end (probably quite indirectly).
You could actually be interpreted as having given an answer to that question, if "My biological function..." is meant not to merely describe what you do do, but to prescribe what you ought to do. If you're saying "the good that my existence serves is propagating the existence of organisms like me", then that's an answer. One that implies that the existence of organisms like you is good (either intrinsically or at least instrumentally), and that your existence tends to propagate their existence (which is only the case if you're actually likely to procreate).
I'd argue that it's possibly not the best answer (if you mean that the existence, or propagation thereof, of organisms like you is an intrinsic good, rather than merely an instrumental one), and it's possibly a rather sad one (if the only thing you're good for is giving someone else a chance to try again next generation), but it could still technically be an answer, if you meant it in that sense.
Your doubling down on the "how is all the why there is", though, makes me doubt you did mean it in that sense.
People stupidly vote for who they think is going to win, rather than who they actually want, like it's some kind of goddamn horse race and all that matters is "picking a winner", rather than making the winner. If it weren't for the superdelegates predetermining that Clinton was going to win, chances are Bernie would've seen a much better popular vote too.
Unless you live in a swing state, "protest votes" are the only way to effect any change. Voting for either major party in a non-swing state neither changes who wins the election nor sends any kind of feedback inducing any party to change. You're just voting for business as usual, whatever that should happen to be.
Voting for a third party doesn't influence who wins the election either, but it influences the statistics that the major parties use to target their platforms to capture those lost votes.
The cancer went malignant years ago and has already infested most of the rest of the internet.
Online used to be my respite from the idiocy of the real world, back in the days when it was mostly college professors or at least students, and nerdy little kids like I was, on the nascent public ISPs, were the worst of the noobs. Now, most of the idiots (and definitely the worst of them) that I encounter seem to be on the internet, and more and more, the things they have in common all seem to stem from 4chan "culture" and its derivatives.
It's really all just an extension of Eternal September, plus Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory. More and more, the internet is populated by the same morons who make the real world a shithole, their swarm overwhelming whatever moderating influence the indigenous population may have once had on such newcomers; and the anonymity and large audience the internet provides to them just brings out the worst in all of them.
Thing is though, we're not going to work out how to build a sustainable colony on Mars on paper, then send people (or robots) there to build it sight-unseen. We'd build prototypes here on Earth first, like how we tested out the Mars rovers in Earth's deserts first. The propulsion technology to get stuff to Mars is largely a solved problem by now. What we need to solve is what to build when we get there, and how to get it built, which means developing robots to build sealed "biodomes" or whatnot in inhospitable places here on Earth first -- to test the technology to make sure it will work when we strap it to a rocket and send it to Mars -- and then, by the time we're ready to strap it to a rocket, there's not a whole lot of need to actually do that anymore, besides just "because it's there".
Which is still a perfectly fine reason in the long term, and if romanticism about people on Mars gets the technology funded and developed that's great, but one way or another we're going to be building Earth-bound versions of it first, and those "prototypes" themselves will then have already solved any practical problems that might have motivated the Mars mission.
The same technology it would take to build self-sustaining colonies on Mars could much more easily build self-sustaining colonies on Earth. Mars is already a desolate wasteland; if we could work out how to survive there, then we could, much more easily, work out how to survive Earth becoming a desolate wasteland, even if we couldn't stop other people from making that happen.
Until we can have self-sustaining cities at the poles, in the middle of the world's deserts, on the seafloor, etc -- all much more hospitable places than Mars -- then talking about building one on Mars is a pipe dream. And once we can do that on Earth, that's much of the existential risk mitigated right there; nuclear winter, climate change, meteor impact, meh, doesn't really make anything worse than they already are underwater/on Antarctica/in the Sahara.
Slashdot Mirror
Free Obamacare? The unemployed get free health insurance? Since when?
Since the ACA was enacted, the income threshold to qualify for medicaid was raised (meaning more and more moderately-poor people qualify for it). If you have no income (for sufficiently long) you will (eventually) qualify for it. So those who are unemployed (for long enough), or even just sufficiently underemployed, or just underpaid, get free health insurance now. One of the only good things about the ACA, really.
That said, this guy having been a CEO, he probably still has (investment) income despite not having a job, hasn't been unemployed long enough for his last tax return that medicaid will ask for for income verification to reflect that status (of course), and that's not even counting the golden parachute he's undoubtedly received, since they "accepted his resignation" rather than "terminated him with cause".
We're yet to see how many of its victims the MemePlague kills. Like I said about my mom, who voted Trump: she survives entirely off social programs likely to be cut as a consequence of Trump's tax plan, and may die as a consequence because nobody else with the means to help her will. We'll see how many people suffer or die from the consequences of Brexit. And we can only hope that the consequences of a Trump presidency don't plunge the whole US into (further) poverty (with lots of consequent death), or worse yet, lead to a war that threatens the existence of humanity in general.
A difference still remaining, though, is that the potential lethal effects of memetic disease can kill even people who are immune to the disease per se. It's more like if there were a plague that caused people to explode in a giant fireball; just because you're immune to the plague per se, doesn't make you immune to explosions, so if someone next to you catches it, you might still die from it. That makes it significantly harder for selection processes to generate herd immunity.
I think you're onto something with the generational shift, but alot of the worst deplorables online (like 4chan) are young people, so I'm not so sure this will get better over time.
I wasn't suggesting it was getting better with younger generations (though I did express a hope that someday a generation not yet born would en masse develop an immunity to such bullshit), but rather suggesting that the older generation of netizens (meaning those who were early adopters of the internet, not people who happen to be old and on the internet today) experienced conditions that let us (I'm one of them, barely) collectively develop a herd immunity to this kind of stuff, and pass it down year after year to the newcomers. That is until Eternal September happened (and never ended and just got so bad to the point that now nobody even knows what that term means) and so many new people were thrown into communication with each other so quickly that on the whole herd immunity was lost, and those who have immunity are now so few and far between that viral ideas can ravage the population at a whim, and the handful not affected are left lost and alone in a sea of infected zombies.
I had a thought earlier today: The internet is the primary vector for the worst epidemic of mental disease ever to strike humanity, on par with the Old World plagues that wiped out New World peoples upon first contact. Here's what I wrote about it elsewhere:
Fuck 4chan. They're responsible for this Trump victory. Actually, fuck the internet in general as it is today, but 4chan is where that shit first gained a foothold.
Trump winning this election happened because of the continuous shitfest of frothing-at-the-mouth rabid drivel that now circulates around 24/7 nonstop. The internet is what lead my dad to turn into a crazy conspiracy theorist who thinks that 9/11 was a coverup for the then-recently-revealed existence of extraterrestrial life awaiting our spiritual awakening ever since the fall of Atlantis at the end of the Pleistocene. It's also what's convinced my original-generation-hippy, lifelong-Democrat, now-disabled mom, who survives entirely off of social programs likely to be cut under Trump, that Obama is a Muslim building a Mosque at Ground Zero, and that Hillary is part of the Illuminati who apparently worship Satan on some hill in Oregon (according to the obviously doctored photos someone posted online), and made her vote Trump for her first Republican president ever.
Once upon a time I was under this blissful delusion that instant worldwide communication would lead to a new enlightenment for the populace in general, but it's become abundantly clear that the only thing keeping an echochamber of the worst, craziest, lowest-common-denominator "truthy" bullshit from drowning what few braincells most people have to rub together was the physical difficulty in that kind of craziness spreading.
I think there's an analogue to be made with biological disease here. Back in the days before modern medicine, cities were about the least healthy places you could live, because being in close physical proximity to so many other people (and animals) made it so much easier for disease to spread; you weren't air-gapped from most people like you would be in the country. I think the same is true of what I guess we'd call "memetic" diseases of the mind: nasty, destructive, viral ideas spread and mutate far more quickly now that everyone is plugged into the internet 24/7, than they could back in the day when they would be contained to whoever Joe McNutbar was ranting to at the local pub.
A further hypothesis: When the Old World first met the New World, the New World people died of Old World plagues but not vice-versa because the Old World had lots of previous exposure to plagues, having had lots of big dense cities for a long time and developing strong immune systems piecemeal over time enough that those plagues could just be everywhere in the Old World and most people were unaffected by them, while New World peoples with their sparser populations had no history of plagues (none that had any survivors to adapt to them at least) and so had both no resistance to the European ones and none to offer in return. I wonder if the earliest netizens, those of us who remember when UseNet was the happening place, are like the Europeans in that analogy. Those of us who grew up with trolls and flamewars and the kinds of crazy that the internet could breed... we got inoculated to it. That crazy was always still around but you know, don't feed the trolls and you'll be fine. We grew up knowing not to believe everything you read because the internet is full of lies.
But now the whole goddamn world is very suddenly connected to that cesspool of lies and madness, and they have no defense against it, so it's spreading like wildfire, mutating into ever-more virulent strains, and wiping out (the minds of) the population at large.
I just hope there are survivors enough to adapt a herd immunity to it some day.
Thank you, I get so tired of that canard myself and would have posted the same clarification myself if you hadn't first.
I have a strong suspicion that the people repeating it are Republicans who are hung up on the mostly-meaningless names of their party and the Democratic party, and want to emphasize Republic > Democracy because therefore (in their minds) Republican > Democrat.
how you'd go about find[ing] another seller/buyer" on demand and at minimal cost
The whole point of my post was that, in absence of the ability to rent, there would be demand for on-demand buyer/sellers of property... and that that would come at a cost, equivalent to the convenience afforded by them, which should be similar to the cost of renting if what you're really paying for there is the same convenience. For those not willing to pay that cost, the effort of finding a buyer or seller to save that money may be more worth it.
I spent the first decade of my adult life renting a bedroom in a house full of ever-shifting strangers where we all shared a lease and technically rented the whole house and had to find replacement housemates when others moved out or else be stuck with the cost of their rent ourselves -- basically doing the work of the landlord in finding and vetting tenants, except without any of the powers of the landlord to get rid of them if we didn't like them, leaving me stuck for years in a house full of shitheads I could do nothing about -- because that was the only kind of housing that left me any room to save to eventually escape to something better (which I eventually did). I could have just moved somewhere else every time a new asshat moved in to where I was already, but that would have cost me a lot of money. I stayed and put up with their shit and fought to find better people so as to save money.
Let transient passers-through pay for the convenience if it's worth it to them. Those of us just looking to live somewhere long term can take the time to see to it that that doesn't cost us an arm and a leg.
the magic of loans
Which come at interest, which is just rent on money and so has the exact same problems, except that the interest alone on the smallest possible home loan can easily exceed the lowest alternative rent, and leave someone trying to eventually just own something even further from that goal.
renters with sufficient financial leverage
That is the entire purpose of my objection to rent. Huge swathes of people are perpetually unable to escape from renting. I myself, making twice what the median person makes, face a lifelong uphill battle to be able to stop renting either property directly or the money with which to buy it some day before I die, and I don't know if that's something I will ever achieve. Neither of my parents could, and most of my peers in my generation seem to be making less progress than even I. Almost nobody has "sufficient financial leverage" and that creates a perpetual underclass of propertyless serfs working mostly just to find the money with which to pay rent to the lords on whose land they live and not for their own benefit.
the scheme you propose is workable, then why isn't someone doing it?
If running a plantation with paid labor is workable, why would anyone use slaves? Because slave labor is more beneficial... to the slaveholder. And renting is more beneficial to the landowner. The point is merely that in absence of legal protection of such unjust practices, alternatives would be forced into existence, and such alternatives are possible; it wouldn't be the end of the world, just the end of an unjust advantage some people hold over others.
It's a way of capturing inefficiencies from property that no one actor wants to use all the time. When I travel, I want to be able to rent a room and a car; I don't want to have to purchase them and then sell them again when I leave.
I hear this argument all the time, but aside from artificially imposed hoops in the process buying and selling real estate (vs anything else), why would that be so awful? You would need sufficient liquidity in the market of course, for it to not be terribly inconvenient, and someone willing to sell to you on long terms (many small payments over time, so you can start right away) and buy on short terms (cash you out all at once, so you can leave right away), but there's a business opportunity for someone in providing that, at a cost to you (the difference between their sale price and purchase price), without it technically being rent, and in that process circumventing the possible abuses of rent. If the convenience isn't worth the cost, if you're not someone moving quickly from place to place but just someone trying to live somewhere for a good long while and unable to buy in the kind of markets we have today, you could find another seller/buyer and save yourself some money. A lot of money, for the long-term renter. The less temporary your use of the property, the more worthwhile it becomes, and the less the cost to you per time in occupancy, and so the less "rent-like" the arrangement becomes, to the point that people who currently spend their entire lives (or families who spend generations) renting could actually end that cycle of poverty and end up owning something to their name for all the money they've spent on housing. Without inconveniencing travelers at all, who are happy to pay for the convenience.
There is evidence that rents went up because of AirBnB-style practices. This law discourages AirBnB-style practices. Ergo this law counteracts those rising rents, i.e. lowering them again. QED.
Use your property however you damn well please, but expecting government to enforce contracts forcing someone else to pay you a permanent fee for the temporary use of your property is not "using your property".
free market capitalism
There's no such thing.
If a market is capitalistic -- shaped by the prior distribution of capital, rather than solely the present value contributed by its participants -- then it's not free.
Rent-seeking is a lot broader than using the power of government to attack other businesses. It's any economic practice that seeks to use some kind of privileged access to something, being the gatekeeper of something, to leverage an unearned income.
I know most people would say otherwise but I strongly contend that rent in the ordinary sense of the word is exactly that. The housekeeping that a hotel/BnB/etc provide is certainly a real service that they could charge for as such, but the model of "I have a thing I'm not using, you need to use a thing you don't have, give me money I can keep forever and I'll let you borrow it for a while" is exactly the kind of gatekeeper behavior that defines rent-seeking.
If you want to profit off of something you own and aren't using yourself, sell it.
If downloading copyrighted material is infringement, then
This antecedent is the matter in question here. Of course it's common sense that the consequent follows from it, but asserting this antecedent is the new thing here. Previously it was held (rightly) that being the recipient of someone else's illegal distribution of an illegal copy was not illegal copying and distribution on your part, but on theirs.
To continue the analogy, it's like a library places a book on a public shelf. You are the one choosing to take it off that shelf, walk over to the copy machine, push the button, and then take the photocopy home with you.
That's not analogous. A closer analogy would be if I could walk into the library, browse the book titles on the shelf without being able to touch them, and then ask the librarian to photocopy one of them for me to take home. When you download something from a remote server, you're sending it a request to transmit a copy to you. It's up to the other party (and how they've configured their server) whether to comply with that request or not. You're not even in possession of any media to copy until they've already copied it and distributed it to you.
It's not about possession, it's about who's in control of the "make a copy" process.
So if I first ask my girlfriend to make me a mix CD, then I become party to her copyright infringement, but if she just does it of her own accord I'm fine?
If asking for a mix CD still leaves me innocent, what if instead I email her asking her to email me a ripped copy back?
What if she has a script in her email that will read properly-phrased incoming emails and email ripped MP3s back?
I ask because I'm not in control of the "make a copy" process when downloading either. I'm asking someone else in possession of the media to send me a copy of it. They're doing the copying and distributing of it. Does it make a legal difference that I asked them to? Does it make a legal difference if the asking is via electronic communication instead of verbal, or if their response is automated instead of manual?
Is the recipient of a mix CD a copyright infringer? If not, it doesn't make any sense that a downloader would be either.
The one who started out in possession of the media, made and distributed a copy of it, is violating the right to control copying and distribution, i.e. copyright.
Someone who started out with nothing, copied nothing, distributed nothing, but ends up in possession of something that someone else illegally copied and distributed, has done what exactly that violates what law?
The entirety of your post is rather selfish. You admit that the average person is marching almost futilely into destitution at the end of their life. But no, let's not do anything about that, that would "ruin the progress of society". The progress enjoyed by only the tiniest sliver of society, riding on the backs of everyone else, for all of history. Who's really selfish here?
I make almost exactly the mean personal income / median household income. I still live virtually the same way I did as a poor college student, saving as much as possible as quickly as possible so that someday I will have a chance of securing the most basic bit of security: having a place I'm allowed to sit and (at least) starve to death in peace, without having to bribe someone else every month for the privilege of doing so in their space. That is to say, to own a home (outright) and stop renting. As things are currently trending (including the long-term growth trends in my income, inflating cost of living over time, etc), if I can keep up the breakneck speed I'm saving at right now, I might be able to accomplish that by my 70s, giving me a mere handful of years before I will probably die in which to "save up for retirement" (i.e. food money, etc).
Cutting full time down to 30 hours will merely reduce my income to 75%, which will reduce my rate of progress toward that goal to 25%, which will extend the date that I am free from rent and able to start saving for other retirement expenses to some time near my 200th birthday.
Merely cutting everyone's hours is only going to help those who are unemployed (and not even all of them), at the expense of those who are employed (and a proportionally greater expense for the lower-paid), at not cost to the richest of the rich who are currently siphoning up all the wealth of society. A real solution to poverty has to be at the expense of those who can afford it, not merely dragging the rest of society with barely any hope already down into the same depths of hopelessness as the worst-off of us.
It's not a completely new idea: see panarchism and Functional Overlapping Competing Jurisdictions.
The ISP level is where the no-platforming line should be drawn, so long as ISPs are government-granted monopolies. There is no barrier to choice in social media platforms or web hosts, but most people in most municipalities have one or at most two choices of ISP, so they must be required to be common carriers and not discriminate based on content.
If there comes a day when anyone can connect to any... I dunno, wireless patch network or something like that... and there's no barrier to choice in ISPs either, then the ISPs are free to no-platform you too.
I did bother reading the rest of this thread, and all you gave was further "how". How did it come to be that living things that are around today behave in ways that tend to increase the propagation of their genes? Those that didn't died out, leaving only these ones behind. That's a "how". And to be fair, "why" is an overloaded term, and one sense of it does mean "how", so you've technically answered one sense of the question, but clearly people are asking for an answer to the other sense of it, which you might put as "how come?" In other words, for what purpose?
Purposes are not causes. They don't explain why things are, and no amount of explaining why things are will tell you its purpose. A purpose is why something ought to be, what it's good for. To answer that, you first need to answer what is good, what ought to be, in the general (which no amount of discussion about what is or is not will accomplish, as it's a completely separate, orthogonal question); and then answer how the something in particular furthers that end (probably quite indirectly).
You could actually be interpreted as having given an answer to that question, if "My biological function..." is meant not to merely describe what you do do, but to prescribe what you ought to do. If you're saying "the good that my existence serves is propagating the existence of organisms like me", then that's an answer. One that implies that the existence of organisms like you is good (either intrinsically or at least instrumentally), and that your existence tends to propagate their existence (which is only the case if you're actually likely to procreate).
I'd argue that it's possibly not the best answer (if you mean that the existence, or propagation thereof, of organisms like you is an intrinsic good, rather than merely an instrumental one), and it's possibly a rather sad one (if the only thing you're good for is giving someone else a chance to try again next generation), but it could still technically be an answer, if you meant it in that sense.
Your doubling down on the "how is all the why there is", though, makes me doubt you did mean it in that sense.
People stupidly vote for who they think is going to win, rather than who they actually want, like it's some kind of goddamn horse race and all that matters is "picking a winner", rather than making the winner. If it weren't for the superdelegates predetermining that Clinton was going to win, chances are Bernie would've seen a much better popular vote too.
Unless you live in a swing state, "protest votes" are the only way to effect any change. Voting for either major party in a non-swing state neither changes who wins the election nor sends any kind of feedback inducing any party to change. You're just voting for business as usual, whatever that should happen to be.
Voting for a third party doesn't influence who wins the election either, but it influences the statistics that the major parties use to target their platforms to capture those lost votes.
The cancer went malignant years ago and has already infested most of the rest of the internet.
Online used to be my respite from the idiocy of the real world, back in the days when it was mostly college professors or at least students, and nerdy little kids like I was, on the nascent public ISPs, were the worst of the noobs. Now, most of the idiots (and definitely the worst of them) that I encounter seem to be on the internet, and more and more, the things they have in common all seem to stem from 4chan "culture" and its derivatives.
It's really all just an extension of Eternal September, plus Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory. More and more, the internet is populated by the same morons who make the real world a shithole, their swarm overwhelming whatever moderating influence the indigenous population may have once had on such newcomers; and the anonymity and large audience the internet provides to them just brings out the worst in all of them.
Thing is though, we're not going to work out how to build a sustainable colony on Mars on paper, then send people (or robots) there to build it sight-unseen. We'd build prototypes here on Earth first, like how we tested out the Mars rovers in Earth's deserts first. The propulsion technology to get stuff to Mars is largely a solved problem by now. What we need to solve is what to build when we get there, and how to get it built, which means developing robots to build sealed "biodomes" or whatnot in inhospitable places here on Earth first -- to test the technology to make sure it will work when we strap it to a rocket and send it to Mars -- and then, by the time we're ready to strap it to a rocket, there's not a whole lot of need to actually do that anymore, besides just "because it's there".
Which is still a perfectly fine reason in the long term, and if romanticism about people on Mars gets the technology funded and developed that's great, but one way or another we're going to be building Earth-bound versions of it first, and those "prototypes" themselves will then have already solved any practical problems that might have motivated the Mars mission.
The same technology it would take to build self-sustaining colonies on Mars could much more easily build self-sustaining colonies on Earth. Mars is already a desolate wasteland; if we could work out how to survive there, then we could, much more easily, work out how to survive Earth becoming a desolate wasteland, even if we couldn't stop other people from making that happen.
Until we can have self-sustaining cities at the poles, in the middle of the world's deserts, on the seafloor, etc -- all much more hospitable places than Mars -- then talking about building one on Mars is a pipe dream. And once we can do that on Earth, that's much of the existential risk mitigated right there; nuclear winter, climate change, meteor impact, meh, doesn't really make anything worse than they already are underwater/on Antarctica/in the Sahara.