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User: Entrope

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  1. Re: Already here - it feels unfair to some on SaxoBank Predicts Universal Basic Income For Europe · · Score: 1

    The OP was incoherent for multiple reasons: Grossly confusing the number of people who would have to be sacrificed in order to double everyone else's wealth, claiming that sacrificing them would actually double everyone's wealth, thinking that forcibly redistributing that would yield anywhere near the paper value of the underlying assets, thinking it would do much to help the people it was given to, and so on. If you say that "1%" in the context of global wealth distribution meant something very different to the OP than "$77,000 of net worth", you may be right, but that is yet another point where OP is wrong in an easy-to-discover way.

    Your silly obsession over what qualifies as a "welfare mom" misses the point. Most people would not accept confiscating a doctor's house and medical practice to pay more money to people who live off welfare, or confiscating the home and retirement assets from a couple of 60-year-old middle-class people to build a new mud hut for a subsistence farmer in Elbonia (which is about how far the money would go after all the bureaucrats along the way take their cuts), but that is what the OP was proposing to "double the world's wealth". Fussing about "welfare moms" and whose sob story justifies sucking at the public teat is a refusal to address the legitimate objections to that kind of redistribution.

  2. Re: Not that crap again on The US Government and Open Standards: a Tale of Personal Woe (thevarguy.com) · · Score: 1

    That syndrome is in no way restricted to Adobe or Acrobat. It is endemic to proprietary software, where one of the easiest forms of competitive advantage is to bundle functionality into one big lump where the features have complicated interactions -- basically the antithesis of the Unix philosophy.

  3. Re: Already here - it feels unfair to some on SaxoBank Predicts Universal Basic Income For Europe · · Score: 1

    You're lousy at arguing, aren't you?

  4. Re: Already here - it feels unfair to some on SaxoBank Predicts Universal Basic Income For Europe · · Score: 1

    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wik... ... if you're willing to trust that den of right-wing fanatics known as Wikipedia.

  5. Re: Already here - it feels unfair to some on SaxoBank Predicts Universal Basic Income For Europe · · Score: 1

    The global 1% for wealth is a net worth of about $77,000. At least in the US, doctors easily cross that threshold, as do most near-retirees. It's just that near-retirees usually have that in illiquid assets like their homes or in well-regarded assets like retirement funds (even if those retirement funds are usually not at a level that retirement advisors say is wise).

    Welfare moms make excuses to turn why they don't want to work into why they can't work. Most people find a way. One woman I went to college with is now a single mom, raising an autistic kid, but she still works rather than depend on welfare.

  6. Re: Yeah, sure on SaxoBank Predicts Universal Basic Income For Europe · · Score: 1

    No, my argument against your unnamed "study" (undoubtedly made by someone who got the result they were looking for and who published their study in a journal refereed by their fellow travelers) is that they had thumbs on the scale the whole way. Social sciences are even more dismal, and less sound, than economics. It's trivial to lie with statistics in that kind of analysis, and the gatekeepers are almost all way out on one side of the policy spectrum, so they object to flaws in papers from their perceived domestic enemies but less similar flaws pass in papers from their "friends". Should I cite all the recent studies showing how academic closure and credentialism has led to near monoculture in many fields?

  7. Re: Next up: Social media "likes"? on German Court: "Sharing" Your Amazon Purchases Is Spamming (reuters.com) · · Score: 2

    That still doesn't make sense, unless you mean to say that my friends don't have permission to send me emails, which is clearly an untenable proposition. In this situation, Amazon is suggesting and facilitating the sending of an email by my friend, which is almost exactly the same as something showing up on my social event stream -- Facebook suggests and facilitates the "like" being sent, Amazon suggests and facilitates the "email" being sent.

  8. Re: Regulation; is there no harm it cannot bring? on US Regulators Find Serious Deficiencies At Theranos Lab (wsj.com) · · Score: 1

    Thousands seems high. I could see dozens, and maybe hundreds in the US's patent-happy system. I don't know how many they have, beyond one that I saw attributed to their CEO's time in grad school. They might have dozens or hundreds (especially if you include filed but not granted).

  9. Re: Regulation; is there no harm it cannot bring? on US Regulators Find Serious Deficiencies At Theranos Lab (wsj.com) · · Score: 2

    I've read that they have at least one patent. They do not seem to be doing very well on the "reduction to practice" bit that is supposed to be a prerequisite for getting a patent, though.

  10. Re: Regulation; is there no harm it cannot bring? on US Regulators Find Serious Deficiencies At Theranos Lab (wsj.com) · · Score: 3, Informative

    Why do you say they are technically savvy? Their marketing appears to be savvy, but all the impartial stories I've seen (including from Reason, which is usually against regulators and incumbents who benefit from regulations) give the impression of dodgy technology at Theranos.

  11. Re: Next up: Social media "likes"? on German Court: "Sharing" Your Amazon Purchases Is Spamming (reuters.com) · · Score: 1

    That makes no sense. If I opted in to see ads, I opted in. Whether they come direct from Amazon or via Google is immaterial.

  12. Re: They can't afford it on SaxoBank Predicts Universal Basic Income For Europe · · Score: 1

    Nobody in the history of the world has ever been "fucked" by getting a low interest rate. Where they go wrong is accumulating more debt than they can manage, and that is their own damn choice.

  13. Next up: Social media "likes"? on German Court: "Sharing" Your Amazon Purchases Is Spamming (reuters.com) · · Score: 1

    If this counts as harassment and unsolicited advertisements, why not the junk that fills up my feed when a social media contact "likes" some commercial speech, and MyLinkedFace+ copies the original to what I see? I could get behind that kind of rationale to block the stupid viral content that I often see.

  14. Re:its just more selective than allowing every LEA on Apple Court Testimony Reveals Why It Refuses To Unlock iPhones For Police (dailydot.com) · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Even if it is possible, there is the question of cost effectiveness. If it takes millions of CPU-hours to crack -- or, worse, days or weeks of some expert's time to take the cap off a chip, peer with an electron microscope, and poke with an electron beam -- then the nation-state will probably limit attacks to cases where they have exceptionally high expectations of return.

    Or the police will break out the $5 wrenches and rubber hoses, which runs into its own set of problems.

  15. Re: Benefits cliffs penalize work on SaxoBank Predicts Universal Basic Income For Europe · · Score: 1

    For how long? To how many people? With how much oversight or support?

    There have been an enormous number of pilot programs ("experiments"), covering all sorts of social programs, that have failed to reproduce and failed to scale up. There is a huge survivor bias in published results, so I am skeptical of any small-scale experiments, and doubly so if they filtered participants or involved highly motivated social workers.

  16. Re:Yeah, sure on SaxoBank Predicts Universal Basic Income For Europe · · Score: 1

    Getting $X in cash is almost always better for the recipient than getting $X of "in-kind" benefits. It is somewhat harder to ensure that they spend enough on food and shelter, but if you assume that they have enough self-interest and self-control, it gives them a lot more flexibility over how to allocate the public money, more control over their own life, and more responsibility for their welfare. If you assume they do not have the requisite level of self-interest and self-control, you still need to figure out how to keep them from pawning clothes, selling food, or whatever else in exchange for booze or drugs.

  17. Re: Yeah, sure on SaxoBank Predicts Universal Basic Income For Europe · · Score: 1

    The theory (largely based on selective statistics and dodgy definitions by people whose politics curiously align with their published findings) that immigration is a net plus to society says nothing about whether there are large numbers of immigrants who sponge off welfare. One Rupert Murdoch can balance out a lot of benefits leeches.

    But sure, pretend if you like that immigrants don't cluster together. You will be the one who appears to be arguing against reality, not me.

  18. Re:Already here - it feels unfair to some on SaxoBank Predicts Universal Basic Income For Europe · · Score: 1

    Wealth does imply resources. Money is a fungible (and thus convenient and objective) stand-in for control over resources. Social standing is derived from that, not vice versa.

  19. Re: Benefits cliffs penalize work on SaxoBank Predicts Universal Basic Income For Europe · · Score: 1

    In experiments, the only difference between experiments and reality is the setting. In reality, there are a lot more differences.

  20. Re: some kind of minimum wage like laws are needed on SaxoBank Predicts Universal Basic Income For Europe · · Score: 1

    Those situations seem like cases for laws about fraud or deceptive employment, not minimum wages.

  21. Re: Yeah, sure on SaxoBank Predicts Universal Basic Income For Europe · · Score: 1

    Your experience is probably both typical -- of a native -- and misleading. Do you spend much time in places where immigrants tend to cluster together and form fairly closed communities? Limiting your experience to immigrants who are trying to integrate is a definite filter, and you're not going to see the full spectrum. (To some extent, the fact that they immigrated in the first place filters out some of the lazy people, but you are probably still applying a filter to those who did immigrate. And, of course, your curious "from elsewhere in Europe" qualifier excludes places like Rotherham.)

  22. Re:Benefits cliffs penalize work on SaxoBank Predicts Universal Basic Income For Europe · · Score: 2

    A universal basic income also discourages marginal workers from working, though. The marginal benefit of (low) wages gets balanced against time and money spent finding a job, looking presentable, getting to work, and actually working, and often the rational choice is to do things besides work. There's also a good economic argument for scrapping minimum wage laws when UBI is implemented, because they both function to put a floor on an individual's income, but few advocates would accept that exchange.

    Perhaps a better scheme would be a progressive income tax that starts negative (e.g. government doubles your first $10,000 of annual income). Making it revenue-neutral while still clear enough for people to understand and accept is hard. ("What do you mean, I have to pay 30% income tax? That's for rich people! Oh, my effective rate is 8%? That's different...")

  23. Re: Already here - it feels unfair to some on SaxoBank Predicts Universal Basic Income For Europe · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Most gun uses in the US do not result in deaths. Why do you suggest they do? Even the lowest estimates (usually promulgated by gun-control advocates) are 50% to 100% higher than the firearm death rate, many more suggest they occur 15 times as often as firearm deaths, and some estimates put defensive gun uses at about 150 times the firearm death rate.

  24. Re:Already here - it feels unfair to some on SaxoBank Predicts Universal Basic Income For Europe · · Score: 1

    I'll believe we should "sacrifice" 100 people for the general good as soon as you sign up to be first.

    In reality, 1% of the world's population holds approximately half of the world's net wealth. But how will moving a doctor from a hospital or successful practice into the poorhouse help anyone? Are you going to tell the 60-year-old couple who spent decades paying their mortgage with paychecks from classroom and office jobs that they have to start from zero because a kid is starving in Bangalore, or because a welfare mom in the big city doesn't want to work?

  25. For that bit, I was thinking basically an administrative law judge or a panel at the FCC, where their main job is to adjudicate cases like this, and so they can have streamlined accesses to relevant databases -- for example, I say "I got unsolicited calls at 9:15 on day A, 10:43 on day B", and so forth, and they can confirm with my telco that those calls were made, and get details about the callers that my carrier might not give me. If those details sustain my claim of TCPA violations, this judge or panel could award damages.