No, Musk doesn't have a better grasp at the issue than me.
The entire fabrication of strong AI is so far beyond anything we can currently produce as to be a non-issue. One might think the solution is Freudian psychology: a controlling, cold machine at the core to use the AI's intelligence to analyze and make decisions about how X is related to Y, and program that to manipulate the AI's thoughts to behave a certain way (don't self-reproduce, don't take over other systems, don't defeat its own internal controls, don't become hostile to humanity). The problem with such thinking is that programming a machine to think in such a way would be ridiculously difficult and farfetched.
It's like saying our biggest threat is Russia opening an Einstein-Rosen bridge to the Sun to let its plasma out within the Earth's atmosphere: cute, but won't happen. By the time it's actually likely to happen, we'll be well aware of it.
And, as you note, Japanese is incredibly more context-dependent than English. Oftentimes, anything that can be omitted from a sentence will be omitted, particularly anything that is clear from context, that has been previously established in the text or conversation or what-have-you.
I have noticed much in English that I must remind my conversation partners of the sentence, or explicitly hint the conversation. Even extremely intelligent people will, after several turns of sentence, ask me what I'm talking about when I continue to comment on the same subject we hold dialogue on; and, often, the subject flows out and, after a single exchange on this, they immediately assume I am talking about the *original* subject rather than the *new* subject.
For example:
Me: "Dogs wag their tails when they're happy."
Him: "Bears don't wag though, they just kill things."
Me: "Black bears actually hardly ever attack humans. They're also too noisy to sneak up on you."
Him: "What? My dog doesn't sneak up on me."
Me: "I was talking about black bears."
Him: "We were talking about dogs!"
Discussions of the form above happen often to me. English speakers--at least Americans--apparently need repeated cues to remember about what they were discussing.
Anglo-Saxon refers to the blending of Germanic and French roots. English is an Anglo-Saxon language because it is a mixture of Germanic- and Latin-root languages.
Japanese is Subject-(wa)-object-(predicate), with verb terminator. You have wo and ga following direct and indirect objects; vocalized punctuation from ka and ne; and context-implied elements ("Run!" instead of "You run!" because no shit I mean you).
German is S-V-O until you get to questions, then it's V-S-DO-V instead of S-V-DO-V.
The Japanese don't have an R or L sound. There's a sound which is inflective on the hard palate, which is commonly thought of as an R or L or a combination. Most English speakers even hear it as a distorted R, because their brain wants familiarity. It is, in fact, a distinct sound.
Mandarin is not hard to learn though. That's a dumb statement.
Most people want to learn a language by learning vocabulary. That's why we mock Asians for their stupid accents, and why everyone in Europe mocks the American tourist for talking like a retarded kid with a hatchet stuck in his skull: people just learn words, and try to force them into grammar structures that are familiar to them, and just remember sentences.
Languages are about sounds. I find all languages equally easy to learn--the more different, like Japanese and Mandarin, arguably easier--because there is just so much interesting to do. Learning to a high degree of skill requires focus on technique, recognized goals, and constant and immediate feedback; I am listening to the tonal inflections in a language, trying to determine if there are sounds my brain hasn't figured out yet (your brain will hear recognizable sounds and thus misinterpret them as other sounds), and trying to mimic them, and so I am applying this type of deliberate practice whenever I mimic any word in any language. As a result, I quickly learn to pronounce any language fluently--before I have a vocabulary much over 50 words or so.
Anyone else can do this. The first few times, you'll screw it up. It'll be hard to roll Rs, it'll be hard to follow Chinese tonal dialect, and you'll even completely fail to hear sounds in Russian that simply don't exist in English. After 20 or 30 hours, with no more than attentive listening to both a speaker and your own recital, you'll have adjusted a near-perfect diction. It's pretty much that easy, but it does require intentional focus.
This is why I always start with Pimsleur. There may be more effective ways to learn a language, but there are scant few ways to immerse yourself in the simple toil of speaking fluidly. Even the $10 sets with a few hours--some 5 CDs and 10 hours of lessons--is enough to set good pronunciation for most European languages, definitely for Japanese, and perhaps not for Mandarin or English. Japanese requires 108 sounds to produce properly; English requires over 8000, and it's not exactly known how many.
After a short while, Pimsleur becomes tedious. I like it, and continue to use it, but other methods of loading raw vocabulary and grammar are faster once you've grasped the language. I find I learn to speak a language *quickly*, because conversational grammar is small and attainable in a scant few hundred words; expanding that to 2000 words can be done readily by loading new vocabulary into your well-learned language.
Self-driving electric lorries would sharply reduce the cost of shipping by reducing fuel cost (my 12 gallon, 300-mile tank would cost $1.92 to fill if it were a Tesla electric Model S) and eliminating the wages of the truck driver for the 5000-mile, multi-day, cross-country journey.
Self-driving electric cars would eliminate ZipCar and Taxis. Like ZipCar, you could charter a vehicle for personal use, for $6/hr, insurance and fuel included; like taxis, the car is immediately returned to the service operator when you exit the vehicle. Drivers won't pay 8 hours to have the car parked 8 hours outside their job, and there won't be cabbies to demand any sort of salary at $7.25/hr (already more than the ZipCar costs in fuel, insurance, maintenance, etc.).
There would be no need for buses for mass transit, as private cars are always instantly available. Only shuttle bus, such as for mass transportation of school children, would remain.
Logically, we understand the cost of anything is the cost of labor. There is little gold, and it requires many men working many hours to fetch a small amount of gold from the earth. The same can be said for oil, and for copper, and iron. Many men work to refine steel, to transport refined girders to building sites, to rivet building frames and attach concrete forms to support structures. Labor is the cost of everything.
On this logic, automation systems must require less labor to build, transport, and upkeep than the persons they replace. A self-driving car must cost roughly as much in labor to build and maintain as any other car, with any additional costs for sensors or software being altogether less across the life of the car than the labor cost of the operator driving a modern vehicle. That is to say: one cabbie driving over the useful life of a taxi fleet vehicle must cost more at his wages than the increase in cost and maintenance for a self-driving car.
Imagine a wage worker making $20/hr produces the factory sensor part, at a rate of 100 per hour through the operation of a machine. Each part thus costs 20 cents, plus the cost of the raw materials, plus maintenance cost of the machine to build them, plus the cost of a part divided by the average number of correct parts produced per one defective part. This may all come out to under a dollar, or reach as high as a thousand dollars; but, even then, a cab service running 16 hours per day would, between two drivers, spend more than that on wages in ten days. If the part does not break within ten days, and it is the only increase in cost, then this cab is cheaper to own and operate than a cab with a salaried driver.
Automation is the art of replacing the labor of 100 low-paid workers with the labor of 10 workers each making three times as much.
The car needs to also recognize hazards including pedestrians, animals, and drivers violating traffic law; if the car decides the intersection is safe to cross, and crosses illegal, it shouldn't hit anything anyway. Conversely, if the intersection is marked clear, and a driver crosses illegally, the car should recognize this. Humans often heuristically identify drivers not exhibiting a stopping behavior when approaching an intersection, projecting the driver will violate a stop sign or traffic signal; the car must do this as well.
The DEA assert that we live in a lawless land where they can do what they please, as long as it seems easy enough. Can log onto facebook, create a profile or steal someone else's, impersonate people, create fake people? The terms of use contracted to the Facebook business entity says you won't do that, but breach of contract is such an outdated ideal...
I was more interested in the wide and volatile range chosen. $100k is considered a big line to cross; to cross it twice is an immense step. It is as if we compared people making $20,000-$60,000 and found that more McDonalds workers are in that range than small business accountants--with McDonalds workers making $22k on average, and accountants making $58k.
I find more amusing that some software developers are making $104,000, and there are more of them than managers making $200,000, therefor there are more software developers in the $103,000-$203,000 range than there are managers in said range.
You are free to work in the salt mines of Arizona for the next 40 years...? Seems just compensation for a 23-year-old caught by a 17-year-old girl behind a tree; she did see his penis, after all.
I was trying to figure out why Eric Holder is mentioned. I assume because it's true; but I must question, because Eric Holder promised to resign so that he may be remembered as an AG who championed rights and undid Government corruption, which drew a raucous of laughter from the crowd as they cried out in exuberant hysteria that he will be remembered as the most racist, corrupt, party-line-pandering Attorney General in America's documented history. I am, understandably, on the lookout for propaganda, especially the propaganda of truth to distract from other, more damning truth.
I have some misgivings with a flat tax as a matter of mechanism, rather than fairness.
I advantage myself with a flat tax set specifically for the Citizen's Dividend for which I champion, of 14.5%, to replace all direct basic welfare including Social Security, EBT, housing assistance, and the like. Such a tax, being flat, takes a measure of the entire economy: it is not impacted by the shifting sands of income inequality, while yet following inflation automatically to the great benefit of never having a need for adjustment. This mechanism is of tremendous import for a Dividend off the economy.
A standard flat income tax, on the other hand, diminishes the wages of the lower workers. By diminishing the wage of the worker--of the poor and of the middle class--such a tax encourages businesses to put forth additional effort to eliminate the need for the worker. I do not propose that a business should run inefficiently to preserve the working class; but the working class, paid an income below the cost of automation or of any other new process which reduces the need for the working class, are the more efficient option until such time as such new processes become less costly to implement. It is therefore apparent that raising the necessary wages to entice the working class to employment would also hasten the transition to such new processes, while the economy suffers less from slow transitions so that it may heal from its minor scrapes and scratches rather than suffer from more major wounds in their stead.
Because there is so little gain from taxing the working class, it seems sensible that the lower income workers may experience lower taxes. To flatten our tax system, the 39.6% which the high-income earners pay would become 39.56%, while the 10% which the lowest wage workers pay would also become 39.56%; this seems nonsense to me when considering the required salary increases to retain the standard of living of the working class, and the encouragement of businesses to eliminate some set of such jobs at earliest convenience.
I have no moral issues with everyone paying their fair share; indeed, I dislike the concept of overtaxing the rich simply because the poor have a poor lot and we wish to take from those who have more than us without calling it property and theft. I simply recognize the mechanism of economy, and seek to strike a fair balance to support that mechanism.
Social Security is originally a welfare system designed such as to ensure that retirees will have some money when they retire. It is a countermeasure to economic collapse in such a way that banks are raided by depositors and forced to fold due to insolvency, and a counterpart to the FDIC which insures deposit accounts against insolvency.
I am quite aware of the economics of welfare programs, and the political methods of controlling public opinion. The terms "Social Services", "Social Security", and "Social Welfare" are used interchangeably in some contexts, particularly in America where "welfare" carries automatic negative connotations and so a number of programs have been termed "Social Services".
It is also interesting that the opposite happens in common conversation: unemployment is technically a form of insurance, although also a form of welfare; it is, thus, described as such depending on the speaker's motive. When a person becomes unemployed, he is often told, as I have been, that unemployment is "his money", because "he paid it in taxes" (this is strictly untrue: it's paid by a business based on how many of its former employees have collected unemployment historically, and thus less is paid if fewer employees go on unemployment). When unemployment is discussed publicly in an economic downturn, such as the Great Recession of 2007, it is termed as a form of welfare--going so far as to mandate an expansion of unemployment insurance as a welfare service at the Federal level, paying for it in taxpayer dollars to extend terms from 6 months to 12.
Regardless, social security is Government retirement aid in cash dollars. Social Security also provides Hospital Insurance, ostensibly, as medicare and medicaid; interestingly, if you have assets, they won't give you a fucking nickel unless you spend your own money first and firmly run out: it's means-tested insurance, which screams "welfare" so hard in your face that you must have gone deaf at your age not to hear it. By this mechanism, high-income earners--who are mandated to pay a much higher premium than low-income workers, almost twice as high--are entirely unable to collect on this "insurance" in any way.
Of course I did not count healthcare or education services in my calculations, as they aren't relevant to my larger argument. We could probably classify healthcare as welfare, at least medicaid and medicare, but that is an issue of current debate and is sensible to land on either side of that argument; education is more the shape of a social service, and is neither a necessity for life nor a thing which must be provided at any particular time to provide for life, as would be surgery or food or shelter.
And besides - its just liquor and smokes money anyway! No matter how poor they are I know they still have too much because (I imagine) they are boozing and guzzling up a storm! Bad poor person for having vices in my imagination!
On the one hand, we have people calling for taxes on liquor and cigarettes to be banned because they just, mostly, hit the poor, who smoke too much and drink too much.
On the other, we have these same people claiming that's not a thing.
Meanwhile, my city has taken a disliking to its image, and so has rescinded thousands of liquor licenses in areas it wants to "clean up", so as to encourage the poor to move somewhere else. It works.
You also seem to have a fetish for attacking a rational thought because it is distasteful, rather than accept that it is reasonable and useful.
You have no reading comprehension ability. Go back to either third grade or to whatever treatment center corrects mental retardation--it can be done, retards can be made functional on a normal human being level.
Slashdot Mirror
Alcohol isn't a plant.
No, Musk doesn't have a better grasp at the issue than me.
The entire fabrication of strong AI is so far beyond anything we can currently produce as to be a non-issue. One might think the solution is Freudian psychology: a controlling, cold machine at the core to use the AI's intelligence to analyze and make decisions about how X is related to Y, and program that to manipulate the AI's thoughts to behave a certain way (don't self-reproduce, don't take over other systems, don't defeat its own internal controls, don't become hostile to humanity). The problem with such thinking is that programming a machine to think in such a way would be ridiculously difficult and farfetched.
It's like saying our biggest threat is Russia opening an Einstein-Rosen bridge to the Sun to let its plasma out within the Earth's atmosphere: cute, but won't happen. By the time it's actually likely to happen, we'll be well aware of it.
And, as you note, Japanese is incredibly more context-dependent than English. Oftentimes, anything that can be omitted from a sentence will be omitted, particularly anything that is clear from context, that has been previously established in the text or conversation or what-have-you.
I have noticed much in English that I must remind my conversation partners of the sentence, or explicitly hint the conversation. Even extremely intelligent people will, after several turns of sentence, ask me what I'm talking about when I continue to comment on the same subject we hold dialogue on; and, often, the subject flows out and, after a single exchange on this, they immediately assume I am talking about the *original* subject rather than the *new* subject.
For example:
Me: "Dogs wag their tails when they're happy."
Him: "Bears don't wag though, they just kill things."
Me: "Black bears actually hardly ever attack humans. They're also too noisy to sneak up on you."
Him: "What? My dog doesn't sneak up on me."
Me: "I was talking about black bears."
Him: "We were talking about dogs!"
Discussions of the form above happen often to me. English speakers--at least Americans--apparently need repeated cues to remember about what they were discussing.
It's just grammar.
Anglo-Saxon refers to the blending of Germanic and French roots. English is an Anglo-Saxon language because it is a mixture of Germanic- and Latin-root languages.
What?
Japanese is Subject-(wa)-object-(predicate), with verb terminator. You have wo and ga following direct and indirect objects; vocalized punctuation from ka and ne; and context-implied elements ("Run!" instead of "You run!" because no shit I mean you).
German is S-V-O until you get to questions, then it's V-S-DO-V instead of S-V-DO-V.
The Japanese don't have an R or L sound. There's a sound which is inflective on the hard palate, which is commonly thought of as an R or L or a combination. Most English speakers even hear it as a distorted R, because their brain wants familiarity. It is, in fact, a distinct sound.
It is Anglo-Saxon. Every school child knows this.
Mandarin is not hard to learn though. That's a dumb statement.
Most people want to learn a language by learning vocabulary. That's why we mock Asians for their stupid accents, and why everyone in Europe mocks the American tourist for talking like a retarded kid with a hatchet stuck in his skull: people just learn words, and try to force them into grammar structures that are familiar to them, and just remember sentences.
Languages are about sounds. I find all languages equally easy to learn--the more different, like Japanese and Mandarin, arguably easier--because there is just so much interesting to do. Learning to a high degree of skill requires focus on technique, recognized goals, and constant and immediate feedback; I am listening to the tonal inflections in a language, trying to determine if there are sounds my brain hasn't figured out yet (your brain will hear recognizable sounds and thus misinterpret them as other sounds), and trying to mimic them, and so I am applying this type of deliberate practice whenever I mimic any word in any language. As a result, I quickly learn to pronounce any language fluently--before I have a vocabulary much over 50 words or so.
Anyone else can do this. The first few times, you'll screw it up. It'll be hard to roll Rs, it'll be hard to follow Chinese tonal dialect, and you'll even completely fail to hear sounds in Russian that simply don't exist in English. After 20 or 30 hours, with no more than attentive listening to both a speaker and your own recital, you'll have adjusted a near-perfect diction. It's pretty much that easy, but it does require intentional focus.
This is why I always start with Pimsleur. There may be more effective ways to learn a language, but there are scant few ways to immerse yourself in the simple toil of speaking fluidly. Even the $10 sets with a few hours--some 5 CDs and 10 hours of lessons--is enough to set good pronunciation for most European languages, definitely for Japanese, and perhaps not for Mandarin or English. Japanese requires 108 sounds to produce properly; English requires over 8000, and it's not exactly known how many.
After a short while, Pimsleur becomes tedious. I like it, and continue to use it, but other methods of loading raw vocabulary and grammar are faster once you've grasped the language. I find I learn to speak a language *quickly*, because conversational grammar is small and attainable in a scant few hundred words; expanding that to 2000 words can be done readily by loading new vocabulary into your well-learned language.
With high automation, shipping fuel costs become way more expensive than labor.
Self-driving electric lorries would sharply reduce the cost of shipping by reducing fuel cost (my 12 gallon, 300-mile tank would cost $1.92 to fill if it were a Tesla electric Model S) and eliminating the wages of the truck driver for the 5000-mile, multi-day, cross-country journey.
Self-driving electric cars would eliminate ZipCar and Taxis. Like ZipCar, you could charter a vehicle for personal use, for $6/hr, insurance and fuel included; like taxis, the car is immediately returned to the service operator when you exit the vehicle. Drivers won't pay 8 hours to have the car parked 8 hours outside their job, and there won't be cabbies to demand any sort of salary at $7.25/hr (already more than the ZipCar costs in fuel, insurance, maintenance, etc.).
There would be no need for buses for mass transit, as private cars are always instantly available. Only shuttle bus, such as for mass transportation of school children, would remain.
Logically, we understand the cost of anything is the cost of labor. There is little gold, and it requires many men working many hours to fetch a small amount of gold from the earth. The same can be said for oil, and for copper, and iron. Many men work to refine steel, to transport refined girders to building sites, to rivet building frames and attach concrete forms to support structures. Labor is the cost of everything.
On this logic, automation systems must require less labor to build, transport, and upkeep than the persons they replace. A self-driving car must cost roughly as much in labor to build and maintain as any other car, with any additional costs for sensors or software being altogether less across the life of the car than the labor cost of the operator driving a modern vehicle. That is to say: one cabbie driving over the useful life of a taxi fleet vehicle must cost more at his wages than the increase in cost and maintenance for a self-driving car.
Imagine a wage worker making $20/hr produces the factory sensor part, at a rate of 100 per hour through the operation of a machine. Each part thus costs 20 cents, plus the cost of the raw materials, plus maintenance cost of the machine to build them, plus the cost of a part divided by the average number of correct parts produced per one defective part. This may all come out to under a dollar, or reach as high as a thousand dollars; but, even then, a cab service running 16 hours per day would, between two drivers, spend more than that on wages in ten days. If the part does not break within ten days, and it is the only increase in cost, then this cab is cheaper to own and operate than a cab with a salaried driver.
Automation is the art of replacing the labor of 100 low-paid workers with the labor of 10 workers each making three times as much.
It's a legitimate point, but a poor example.
The car needs to also recognize hazards including pedestrians, animals, and drivers violating traffic law; if the car decides the intersection is safe to cross, and crosses illegal, it shouldn't hit anything anyway. Conversely, if the intersection is marked clear, and a driver crosses illegally, the car should recognize this. Humans often heuristically identify drivers not exhibiting a stopping behavior when approaching an intersection, projecting the driver will violate a stop sign or traffic signal; the car must do this as well.
"We're selling part of our supply chain"? Who is "we"? Is the Government owning IBM now?
Get ready for the Space Jam
The DEA assert that we live in a lawless land where they can do what they please, as long as it seems easy enough. Can log onto facebook, create a profile or steal someone else's, impersonate people, create fake people? The terms of use contracted to the Facebook business entity says you won't do that, but breach of contract is such an outdated ideal...
I was more interested in the wide and volatile range chosen. $100k is considered a big line to cross; to cross it twice is an immense step. It is as if we compared people making $20,000-$60,000 and found that more McDonalds workers are in that range than small business accountants--with McDonalds workers making $22k on average, and accountants making $58k.
I find more amusing that some software developers are making $104,000, and there are more of them than managers making $200,000, therefor there are more software developers in the $103,000-$203,000 range than there are managers in said range.
Pretty much. "Mouthpiece for Canonical: Canonical-made System Better than Stupid Other System."
From blowjobs.gov?
You are free to work in the salt mines of Arizona for the next 40 years...? Seems just compensation for a 23-year-old caught by a 17-year-old girl behind a tree; she did see his penis, after all.
I was trying to figure out why Eric Holder is mentioned. I assume because it's true; but I must question, because Eric Holder promised to resign so that he may be remembered as an AG who championed rights and undid Government corruption, which drew a raucous of laughter from the crowd as they cried out in exuberant hysteria that he will be remembered as the most racist, corrupt, party-line-pandering Attorney General in America's documented history. I am, understandably, on the lookout for propaganda, especially the propaganda of truth to distract from other, more damning truth.
I have some misgivings with a flat tax as a matter of mechanism, rather than fairness.
I advantage myself with a flat tax set specifically for the Citizen's Dividend for which I champion, of 14.5%, to replace all direct basic welfare including Social Security, EBT, housing assistance, and the like. Such a tax, being flat, takes a measure of the entire economy: it is not impacted by the shifting sands of income inequality, while yet following inflation automatically to the great benefit of never having a need for adjustment. This mechanism is of tremendous import for a Dividend off the economy.
A standard flat income tax, on the other hand, diminishes the wages of the lower workers. By diminishing the wage of the worker--of the poor and of the middle class--such a tax encourages businesses to put forth additional effort to eliminate the need for the worker. I do not propose that a business should run inefficiently to preserve the working class; but the working class, paid an income below the cost of automation or of any other new process which reduces the need for the working class, are the more efficient option until such time as such new processes become less costly to implement. It is therefore apparent that raising the necessary wages to entice the working class to employment would also hasten the transition to such new processes, while the economy suffers less from slow transitions so that it may heal from its minor scrapes and scratches rather than suffer from more major wounds in their stead.
Because there is so little gain from taxing the working class, it seems sensible that the lower income workers may experience lower taxes. To flatten our tax system, the 39.6% which the high-income earners pay would become 39.56%, while the 10% which the lowest wage workers pay would also become 39.56%; this seems nonsense to me when considering the required salary increases to retain the standard of living of the working class, and the encouragement of businesses to eliminate some set of such jobs at earliest convenience.
I have no moral issues with everyone paying their fair share; indeed, I dislike the concept of overtaxing the rich simply because the poor have a poor lot and we wish to take from those who have more than us without calling it property and theft. I simply recognize the mechanism of economy, and seek to strike a fair balance to support that mechanism.
Social Security is originally a welfare system designed such as to ensure that retirees will have some money when they retire. It is a countermeasure to economic collapse in such a way that banks are raided by depositors and forced to fold due to insolvency, and a counterpart to the FDIC which insures deposit accounts against insolvency.
I am quite aware of the economics of welfare programs, and the political methods of controlling public opinion. The terms "Social Services", "Social Security", and "Social Welfare" are used interchangeably in some contexts, particularly in America where "welfare" carries automatic negative connotations and so a number of programs have been termed "Social Services".
It is also interesting that the opposite happens in common conversation: unemployment is technically a form of insurance, although also a form of welfare; it is, thus, described as such depending on the speaker's motive. When a person becomes unemployed, he is often told, as I have been, that unemployment is "his money", because "he paid it in taxes" (this is strictly untrue: it's paid by a business based on how many of its former employees have collected unemployment historically, and thus less is paid if fewer employees go on unemployment). When unemployment is discussed publicly in an economic downturn, such as the Great Recession of 2007, it is termed as a form of welfare--going so far as to mandate an expansion of unemployment insurance as a welfare service at the Federal level, paying for it in taxpayer dollars to extend terms from 6 months to 12.
Regardless, social security is Government retirement aid in cash dollars. Social Security also provides Hospital Insurance, ostensibly, as medicare and medicaid; interestingly, if you have assets, they won't give you a fucking nickel unless you spend your own money first and firmly run out: it's means-tested insurance, which screams "welfare" so hard in your face that you must have gone deaf at your age not to hear it. By this mechanism, high-income earners--who are mandated to pay a much higher premium than low-income workers, almost twice as high--are entirely unable to collect on this "insurance" in any way.
Of course I did not count healthcare or education services in my calculations, as they aren't relevant to my larger argument. We could probably classify healthcare as welfare, at least medicaid and medicare, but that is an issue of current debate and is sensible to land on either side of that argument; education is more the shape of a social service, and is neither a necessity for life nor a thing which must be provided at any particular time to provide for life, as would be surgery or food or shelter.
And besides - its just liquor and smokes money anyway! No matter how poor they are I know they still have too much because (I imagine) they are boozing and guzzling up a storm! Bad poor person for having vices in my imagination!
On the one hand, we have people calling for taxes on liquor and cigarettes to be banned because they just, mostly, hit the poor, who smoke too much and drink too much.
On the other, we have these same people claiming that's not a thing.
Meanwhile, my city has taken a disliking to its image, and so has rescinded thousands of liquor licenses in areas it wants to "clean up", so as to encourage the poor to move somewhere else. It works.
You also seem to have a fetish for attacking a rational thought because it is distasteful, rather than accept that it is reasonable and useful.
You have no reading comprehension ability. Go back to either third grade or to whatever treatment center corrects mental retardation--it can be done, retards can be made functional on a normal human being level.