2019-04-20 03:00:16

Yeah Jayde I can't take you seriously when your studying oh lets see "gender theory" Witch is a program invented by the radicals and postmodernists. So yeah like Iron said your smug attitude knows no bounds son. Try living in reality for a change it is pretty fun. Oh and just because I'm not studying social work like every boring blind person doesn't mean I don't know nothing.

Bitcoin Address:
1MeNca7h6m8du4TV3psN4m4X666p6Y36u5m

2019-04-20 03:29:00 (edited by JessicaGG 2019-04-20 03:31:39)

Hi @Jayde
even though, some os us aren't studying the same as you do, doesn't mean we aren't allowed to disagree with you.
btw: I find it funny that you in post 17 (in your moderation) moderates against borderline personal attacks:
> Where, exactly, is your similar accreditation, the one that entitles you to invalidate my experience in the manner that you have? I mean, disagree with me if you want to, but it ought to stop there. You'll note that I'm not saying anything like, "You're just an x. What could you possibly know"; that would be extremely rude, and plenty of people know a lot of things.
And then in post 25 you practiced the same behavior you moderated against, towards Ironcross
> If you are not a member of my program, then you do not have the knowledge I have. You do not know what we're doing. As such, any condemnation of my actions, my state of mind or the impact I am likely to have is sheer ignorance on your part.
And just a side note: We, constituted by our basic democratic rights, are well within bounds to both condemn your actions and disagree with you as much as we like.

If you like what I do, Feel free to check me out on GitHub, or follow me on Twitter

2019-04-20 03:31:37

Again, I never said you didn't know things. I note that I am not attempting to invalidate your experience.
You, on the other hand, keep trying to dismiss the basis for my study. Why do you feel the need to do this? Does it please you? Does it validate you to try and knock someone else down? If so, you're failing miserably at least with half of it, because I am, in fact, rather bolstered by your continued attacks. Every word you say on the subject just convinces me that I'm right all over again.
You are using buzzwords without apparent thought. Why are socialism, post-modern and radical dirty words on your tongue? What precisely makes gender theory a made-up construct?
Funny fact though: gender, in and of itself, is kind of made-up, in the sense that it is a social construct, which means that yes, it was created. It was not intrinsic...so congratulations for validating gender studies. Gender studies, in essence, suggests that gender is a social construct, rather than just biological male/female sex. There are literally thousands of scientists, sociologists, psychologists, doctors, clinicians of various stripes, psychiatrists and other experts who agree with me. These people, if called upon to do so, can cite thousands of studies, essays, anecdotes, case studies, people (living and dead), scientific findings, progress milestones, psychological trials and heaven knows what else to back up the science, to reinforce the point that the sex you're born with does not have to coincide with the gender you are assigned. And on the other side, we have you...well, no, that's not entirely fair. We have you, alongside a shrill minority who has less science, less findings and less facts by the hour. A shrill minority whose platform looks a great deal like an ice cube in a pot of boiling water. If I were an outsider, I know who I'd trust.

Check out my Manamon text walkthrough at the following link:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/z8ls3rc3f4mkb … n.txt?dl=1

2019-04-20 03:35:40

Now, Nicklas, I'll deal with you:

I am dismissing Ironcross's opinion. I am telling him that if he thinks social workers just destroy families, he's entitled to believe that, but he's flying in the face of what I do. If I were to say all forum users named Ironcross are jerks and all forum users named Nicklas are foolish, you'd probably say I'm not being fair...and of course, I'm not, and thus would never say and mean such a thing. If Ironcross wants to say that his experience of social workers is that they're destructive, well and good. I'm sorry as hell that's been the case. If he wants to basically say that he thinks all social workers do this? He's starting to really stretch, so I'm absolutely going to step in and say "Actually, no, that's not how that's going to work in this case". At that point, at least where I am concerned, I have removed Ironcross's rational reason to dismiss what I say based on those specific grounds only. If he does it, he does it irrespective of logic and due consideration. I am not moderating him or telling him that he's going to be punished if he doesn't stop; I'm telling him that his willingness to put his own experience above the stated aim and intent of someone else means I'm not going to take him seriously (again, on those very specific grounds) if he wants to persist in that delusion.

Check out my Manamon text walkthrough at the following link:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/z8ls3rc3f4mkb … n.txt?dl=1

2019-04-20 04:59:53

@Jayde, well man, all your arguments are predicated on the fact that the other person is wrong, ignorant, or simply haven't studied as much as you have, so forgive me if I can't take you seriously, especially with your condescending attitude I've seen you put on display towards multiple people. Also, while you may be well versed in the world of academia, it doesn't sound like you have a lot of real life experience. I wish you would see the damage your party is doing. I wish that you would see the dichotomy that exists between their public image and what actually goes on. It's funny how the two biggest insults that get thrown at conservatives are homo/transphobic and biggot/racist. That used to bother me, because I don't consider myself either, but it doesn't anymore, because it's just the left coming in like a wrecking ball trying to smash our house down, which our collective indomitable spirit will not allow to happen. And yes I do disbelieve entirely in gender theory and gender studies. To me, there are two genders. That doesn't mean that I've ever gone up to a trans person and said hey, you suck, you're broken and despicable. I don't judge people on how they choose to live their life, but I am tired of this pc culture and seeing people put they/them, she/her and he/him or whatever else after their names. If you want to know something about someone, ask it of them. But still, that's my personal opinion, I don't go to them and say hey, quit that, it's annoying. The left though, they're the real racists, and the way they go about it is sneaky as hell. They will literally try to covertly undermine any work that would bring people closer together, and when they use labels, and make racism such a hot button issue, what's that supposed to do. I have African American, Asian, and Latino friends. I don't go around talking about them putting that info first. That's racist, that's seeing the color of their skin, or some elements of their culture as something to identify them by. It would be like sighted people who see us as nothing but the blind X, where X is something you do, like a career or hobby. Your race shouldn't entirely define you, and it shouldn't be used as a way to undermine your freedom. But hey, I guess I've really just wasted a bunch of time. What I really want you to do is quit tromping all over this forum acting like the school yard bully, which is what you've been doing for quite some time.

Facts with Tom MacDonald, Adam Calhoun, and Dax
End racism
End division
Become united

2019-04-20 05:16:58

ironcross32 wrote:

@Jayde, well man, all your arguments are predicated on the fact that the other person is wrong, ignorant, or simply haven't studied as much as you have, so forgive me if I can't take you seriously, especially with your condescending attitude I've seen you put on display towards multiple people. Also, while you may be well versed in the world of academia, it doesn't sound like you have a lot of real life experience. I wish you would see the damage your party is doing. I wish that you would see the dichotomy that exists between their public image and what actually goes on. It's funny how the two biggest insults that get thrown at conservatives are homo/transphobic and biggot/racist. That used to bother me, because I don't consider myself either, but it doesn't anymore, because it's just the left coming in like a wrecking ball trying to smash our house down, which our collective indomitable spirit will not allow to happen. And yes I do disbelieve entirely in gender theory and gender studies. To me, there are two genders. That doesn't mean that I've ever gone up to a trans person and said hey, you suck, you're broken and despicable. I don't judge people on how they choose to live their life, but I am tired of this pc culture and seeing people put they/them, she/her and he/him or whatever else after their names. If you want to know something about someone, ask it of them. But still, that's my personal opinion, I don't go to them and say hey, quit that, it's annoying. The left though, they're the real racists, and the way they go about it is sneaky as hell. They will literally try to covertly undermine any work that would bring people closer together, and when they use labels, and make racism such a hot button issue, what's that supposed to do. I have African American, Asian, and Latino friends. I don't go around talking about them putting that info first. That's racist, that's seeing the color of their skin, or some elements of their culture as something to identify them by. It would be like sighted people who see us as nothing but the blind X, where X is something you do, like a career or hobby. Your race shouldn't entirely define you, and it shouldn't be used as a way to undermine your freedom. But hey, I guess I've really just wasted a bunch of time. What I really want you to do is quit tromping all over this forum acting like the school yard bully, which is what you've been doing for quite some time.

Unfortunately, that side of the isle all too often doesn't see past their own assumptions. I've said this before, but they seem to think they have the moral high ground and believe themselves to be saints who should impose their values upon the rest of us. I'm not saying that all of the left thinks this way, but this sort of puritanism seems to be the dominant trend, so much so that they often end up attacking dissidents within their own ranks for heresy; and let's not even start on who they consider to be "far-right" or "alt-right". That tent seems to be expanding every day.

I attack with the savagery of a thousand piranhas.

2019-04-20 05:19:48

I'm sorry you feel that stating opinions is tromping all over the schoolyard like a bully, so to speak. I'd just like to point out, however, that I'm not the one with a previous ban for doubling down on such behaviour, so I believe this counts as the pot calling the kettle black.

I, too, have friends from many different backgrounds and who cover most forms of adversity and privilege. I, too, recognize them as individuals, and rather than try to pretend we're all the same - we aren't - I face the facts. Our lived experiences differ, so the single best thing anyone can do is listen. And that includes them, since sometimes I have good things to say too. When you can spare a moment to think instead of acting with your gut reaction and spewing party rhetoric, give a thought to the concepts of blindness and consciousness where they apply to race, gender and orientation, just for starters. There's a world of difference between those two concepts.

As far as the contention that I'm waving my academic credentials in your face, please consider this. As far as I know, the rest of you do not have any such accreditation. This means that, in these very specific grounds, I have the advantage of study and perhaps experience as well. When you try to argue with me about this, it's a little bit like arguing law with someone in law school. It doesn't mean you're wrong by default, but it does mean the burden of proof is on you to disprove what I say. I, on the other hand, take that up a notch. I see ignorance, I challenge ignorance, because it's a very powerful tool. Make people think.
You can say whatever you want. You're never going to be punished or threatened for expressing a right-ish agenda. I don't like it, but that's the glory of freedom of speech. I'll call it out as a user when I think it might hurt people - and that's why I do, by the way, but I do my best to stay polite - but if you expect to say what you want without being challenged, that's another thing. This means we obviously have every right to challenge or disprove or call one another out. I'm good with that if you are. But when we start arguing point for point, I daresay my background should give me something to go on. To put a shoe on the other foot, I am willing to hear you out, but why should I, or anyone else for that matter, take your word over the word of someone who's living it?

We're not talking about straight-up racism or bigotry in this topic, so that particular "wrecking-ball" simply doesn't apply here. I tend to agree that some on the left can be very shrill about such labels, using them as a blanket to protect themselves from active discussion. They do this because frankly, trotting out the same old arguments to deaf ears is really, really frustrating, but that doesn't make it right. I am not such a person, by the way, so please operate in accordance.

Check out my Manamon text walkthrough at the following link:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/z8ls3rc3f4mkb … n.txt?dl=1

2019-04-20 05:39:00

It isn't because you state your opinion that I say you're tromping around like a school yard bully, it's literally how you handle each and every single person who has a differing viewpoint than you do. You attack them with the same old rhetoric each time of being ignorant, not having any academic credentials, and a condescending attitude. Which, to me sounds more like an echo chamber, and don't you want to try to avoid echo chambers? I actually think you're not a bad person, you just have this thing going on where you crank everything to 50. It's like you're a mixer and someone's passing audio through you where they crank the preamps, put the faders all the way up, and now the mic is feeding back into the system because the monitors are picking it up clear as day. That's you right now, or at least, how I perceive you. Also, don't you just love to keep bringing up my ban, is this what, the fourth or fifth time so far? I mean, you can keep doing it if you want to, I'm not especially bothered, but it does seem as though you are a little fixated on it.

Facts with Tom MacDonald, Adam Calhoun, and Dax
End racism
End division
Become united

2019-04-20 06:29:09

The only reason I'm bringing it up is because I find that it's relevant in this case. I'd like to know the other times I've pointed out that ban. I believe the only times I've ever mentioned it before are when someone else has tried suggesting it wasn't merited. I believe it was. That's as far as it goes. I don't have a problem with it. It happened and it's done, and it's not a black mark. It just means when you start talking about how I'm tromping around and amping up things and whatnot, I find it rather ironic. The most charitable thing I can say is that you might have been trying to say "don't do what I've done before you", but that doesn't appear to be the issue.

The issue, as I see it, is double standards.

You bring up the "same old rhetoric"? Well okay, here's some samey rhetoric for you. It's called tone policing.
When people on the right get tired of science, logical discourse and reason, they usually resort to telling those of us on the left that we're being too loud, too pushy. Some of us really are, and I hear that, and I'm right with you. Your threshold is obviously different from mine, and I can respect that, but please understand that I have heard this argument levelled at the left so many times that it's lost nearly all of its meaning. My default position on it now is to dismiss it as tone policing, rather than to honour it as a valid viewpoint. It is a tactic often used by any group, or individual within a group, in order to try and rob their opposition's words of their impact.
Imagine how it would feel if on many occasions, you felt like you were making great points, yet all anyone ever seemed to focus on is "you're too angry", or "you're too loud", or "You're too righteous". And maybe on occasion you were one or even all of those things. Sure, it happens. But if you keep getting that flag thrown, it usually -doesn't mean you're responsible. It usually means your opponent would rather attack you and force you to defend yourself on contestable grounds than interact with the meaningful things you said.

I'll be direct. Consider this my last defense of the tone-policing argument, until or unless I really and truly go off the high side. I'm not perfect, and I know I have overstepped before, so this is by no means a blanket protection against any future wrongdoing. It simply means that this argument, in specific, the tone argument, is something I will not honour without a very, very good reason from here on out. If you want to argue other points of rhetoric with respect, I can do that. If you want to ignore them, I can do that too. I won't chase you. I won't try and force you into anything. But what I also won't do is continue to fight your fight. If this must be a contest, then I get to choose the terms of gngagement, at least on my side, just as you do on yours.

From now on, I'm going to kindly ask all and sundry to remember that, while my accreditation does not by any means make me infallible, it does mean I have some ground to stand on here. If you wouldn't argue law with a lawyer, or you wouldn't argue arrest procedure with a cop, then don't argue social policy with a social worker. Or, if you must do these things, remember to attempt to do it with respect for the individual against whom you have chosen to pit yourself. I promise to do likewise.

Check out my Manamon text walkthrough at the following link:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/z8ls3rc3f4mkb … n.txt?dl=1

2019-04-20 06:58:55

I don't have much to say on this topic specificly but

jade wrote:

so I believe this counts as the pot calling the kettle black

Exactly what I was going to say, @ironcross but lmao jade did it before I could so all I can do is do what I am doing right now. wink
I find it very funny and ironic that you call Jade a bully and

ironcross wrote:

it's literally how you handle each and every single
person who has a differing viewpoint than you do

Might want to go back and read all your posts in almost all the topics that you reply to.
I have said this before, and I will say it again, you are outright insulting and rude against people who don't go, quack quack nod head yes yes along with you or with what you say, mostly anyway.
Just as an example just from this topic alone, I find this really offencive even though it wasn't directed at me, but if it were I am sure I would be quite well... offended tongue pissed off, or what you will.

rude insulting post wrote:

Yeah yeah bro, you have a fancy piece of paper or are on the way to getting a fancy piece of paper from a university which is your card to becoming a radical
progressive. Most of the things you state there simply don't exist. I hope you had fun wasting money on this, as now you will enter the work force and
you will destroy families,

Sheesh.
@daigonite +1, some good insites and food for thought there
@JaceK +1 I wonder the same thing.
Grryf

Of all sad words of tongue or pen, the saddest are these, ‘It might have been.
Follow me on twitter

2019-04-20 07:08:45 (edited by daigonite 2019-04-20 07:10:55)

hurstseth405 wrote:

Yeah Jayde I can't take you seriously when your studying oh lets see "gender theory" Witch is a program invented by the radicals and postmodernists. So yeah like Iron said your smug attitude knows no bounds son. Try living in reality for a change it is pretty fun. Oh and just because I'm not studying social work like every boring blind person doesn't mean I don't know nothing.

did you have fun watching the debate lol

All joking aside. Post modernism has nothing to do with socialism/communism/whatever. This video explains this well (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cU1LhcEh8Ms)

My whole opinion on the gender thing is just that gender is socially losing its meaning. Gender and sex are relative, although sex is a lot more concrete in regards to biological reproductive roles. Gender though is a complex social-cultural thing that has a lot of factors (such as expression, identity, role, sexual orientation ect.). Because of the rise of various waves of feminism, gender roles have been continually challenged. Nowadays its not uncommon for a man to be a stay-at-home dad, even though 100 years ago this was unheard of. Because of this, the idea of what roles are male-female are dissolving. Homosexuals challenge the role that marriage plays in reproduction. Trans people challenge the idea that we have to have an assigned gender identity. The nonbinary movement challenges the structure of gender and there are even people who believe that gender isn't even real, and only treat it as real for others. You could argue that LGBT activism and feminism in the 20th century are connected by the fact that the construct of gender is being challenged from so many angles.

A way to think of it in the context of evolution is that not only has our biology evolved, but our social behaviour has evolved as well. We experience gender as real as a result of these socialized behaviours, but because of certain challenges to that structure caused by the rise of human rights, these socialized behaviours are being challenged. That's why its so difficult to understand.

Also, it is possible in the distant future that we will be able to reproduce without pregnancy. If this is the case, then biological sex will also face the same fate. Nothing is permanent.

There will always be fringe people out there. And honestly if you really want something "logical" you really can't get more "logical" than communism, if anything I think they're too logical...

And you know nothing because you don't educate yourself, instead you get your information from people equally misinformed. You can find a lot of books about left politics for free online all over the place.

you like those kinds of gays because they're gays made for straights

2019-04-20 17:11:31

Thank you very much, Daigonite. Your perspective is refreshing.

Check out my Manamon text walkthrough at the following link:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/z8ls3rc3f4mkb … n.txt?dl=1

2019-04-20 17:16:02

@36 I didn't really want a debate but Jayde started it so that is why we launched in to this. Jayde I will have you know that wile I'm accepting section 8 fore my apartment in witch I will be moving into on may 3 of this year. My eventual goal is to work to provide for my self. I do not like accepting social services.

Bitcoin Address:
1MeNca7h6m8du4TV3psN4m4X666p6Y36u5m

2019-04-20 18:11:18 (edited by daigonite 2019-04-20 18:14:46)

What does that have to do with anything?

Can you address the issues with capitalism I brought up with post #13 on page 1?

All I know about your argument is that it hinges on the idea that property is a right. I think that if we were technologically automated for resource production there would be no need for property to be a right because all resources necessary would be available. Therefore I think arguing that it should be a right is incomplete. Also, property doesn't even really exist, it's basically just something we accept because of laws, and laws in theory don't really exist and are really upheld by the force of the individuals who run the state, convincing others to fight with them. But I won't go into THAT haunted house in this post. I will say this though, the phantom nature of "property" is probably part of the reason why there's so many problems with people getting hacked with cryptocurrency. Does property really mean anything if its mine to steal?

you like those kinds of gays because they're gays made for straights

2019-04-20 18:23:18

I'm glad that you want to work to provide for yourself. I do too. it's why I went to school, since I can't be a social service worker without the proper accreditation. I hope one day that people will not have to slave at a job for thirty-plus hours a week just to stay alive, but we aren't there yet.

And yeah, just for future reference, I'm really, really not a fan of being called out on my apparently bullying nature by people who spit on what I do. That kind of invalidates your right to get mad when I stand my ground, you know? Chances are pretty good that if I see you saying stuff about how I know nothing, or how I'm just an (insert derogatory name for group x that you don't like), or how I'm going to probably destroy families...well, that's not really argument. That's borderline personal attack. And again, I'm not perfect here. I've said some pretty sharp stuff to people from time to time. I'm not blameless. In this case, though, you kinda can't start a fire and then point to someone else and go "See? That guy right there! He did it!"

Check out my Manamon text walkthrough at the following link:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/z8ls3rc3f4mkb … n.txt?dl=1

2019-04-20 18:39:54

I think most people want to be productive, they just have their own ideas on what it means to be productive and this can be difficult to deal with when you need to have a job in order to survive.

you like those kinds of gays because they're gays made for straights

2019-04-20 18:54:49 (edited by CAE_Jones 2019-04-20 19:10:40)

Ugh, I saw the title, decided I wanted to avoid the inevitable dumpster-fire, then the weekend hit and I had nothing better to do and I read the first 7 posts and wish I'd just read it in the first place so as not to be so late.

@ 7: No True Scotsman No True Scotsman! If every time someone has claimed to attempt something, it immediately devolved into totalitarian atrocities, that does not speak well of the ability to attempt the thing. Communism has been tried, just as theocracy and various religions have been tried. I bring up religion because, 15-ish years ago, the debates were about religion (and Dubya's foreign policy, but that's off topic), and the whole reason anyone knows about the No True Scotsman Fallacy is because those often resulted in one side claiming that such and such christians were wrong or abusive or whatever, and the other responding that those were not True Christians. And, you know what? I read the Gospels, and the latter is correct. It is also irrelevant when talking about things at the societal, cultural, or governmental levels. Scandinavian Democratic Socialism, and Soviet Socialism, both count for / against Socialism, just like witch-burnings and soup kitchens both count against / for Christianity. This is why getting attached to a group identifier is a dangerous idea: you cannot eject the baggage you don't like. If you're lucky, the baggage is outdated or defeated or far less extreme than it sounds—After all, 20th century Communism is gone, and unless you count Operation Iraqi Freedom, the Crusades are long gone, and Islamic Terrorism was always exaggerated after its one big victory against The West™. TBH, this rant is as much on Herseth for puting Socialism on the spot as it is on Jayde for the ... I did say I stopped at post 8, right? Because if there's better defenses later, I haven't reached them yet.

@Jayde: the one thing in your first two posts in this thread that really bugged me was how you linked rejection of the Capitalist work-mandate to the implementability of Socialist policies. It's almost a nonsequidor. The question isn't whether you must work for such and such benefits[1], but how such and such benefits are produced and distributed. The complete and utter failure of every Communist government to effectively produce and distribute (their whole schtick!) has done about as much to tarnish their reputations as the brutal dictators, but everyone with any knowledge of recent history has retreated to the Scandinavian style, so I'll drop the references to Communism henceforth.
Scandinavia is interesting, historically speaking. Kinda kept to themselves until the fall of Rome, then grew strong from the loot and conquests of the Vikings, then everyone converted to Christianity and Viking was no longer profitable, there was some dabbling in European warfare and imperialism, but never on the scale of the other European nations (well, the Great Northern War might sorta-kinda count?), then those who weren't neutral sorta-kinda allied with the Nazis, but in more of a "Hey, Hitler said we were cool and he won't attack us. Any idea what's going on down there?" sort of way, then we got today's Demsoc, which I hope is not an abbreviation that is being used by Alt-right jerks because I am getting tired of typing Democratic Socialism every other sentence. And there are whispers of cracks starting over how people deal with immigrants, so if The North should swing back in the other direction, well, it's a 2000-year-old tradition at this point, for what lack of good it does.
I kinda wish I heard more detailed analyses from the center and left, because the only two criticisms I hear toward Demsoc as practiced are the suicide rates, and the ethnic homogeity of the Scandinavian countries. (Racists love to bring up that last one, as though it proves anything that can't be explained by culture clash and long histories of oppression. Included here for completeness. sad ).
I will add "but they're kinda small, aren't they?" to that. Canada and the UK aren't quite there, and the UK sounds kinda distopic, leaving Germany and the Netherlands as the primary non-Scandinavian contenders. The Netherlands are also kinda small, and what little I know about Dutch politics and such makes them sound kinda borderline, so the real example that doesn't have the benefit of being small, cold, and away from everyone else is Germany.
So how's it going in Germany? I'm on my phone, so will have to add research later. Aiui, Germany doesn't actually have all of those "free food, healthcare, and UBI" features, but is moving in that direction more gracefully than anyone else south of The North Sea. We've got several German members who could comment on how that's going, and I suppose I should actually read the rest of the thread to see if any have.

But I will point out one thing: we are NOT in a post-scarcity world where the post-scarcity is being held back by evil rich people. As far as food is concerned, yes, we have enough food to feed everyone, if we'd just distribute it. Thing is, food deserts aren't actually that common in the Developed World. The distribution there needs to be from the richer countries to the poorer countries, which, umm, we've kinda been working on for a while. (North Korea relies heavily on their arch nemeses for food, because reality is kinda mean to North Korea but the Kims certainly aren't helping).
Healthcare, though, is really expensive. No, I don't mean the companies that overprice medications and treatments because they're greedy jerks—those guys are indeed problems and we need to do more to stop them from abusing that power—rather, there are three big areas of expense that keep healthcare costs high. These are fairly specific to the US: the cost of becoming a doctor (why does a doctor need a non-medical degree before they can go to med school? This puts them in so much debt that they have to keep prices high just to pay for school!), and the cost of legal protection (Americans are really sue-happy. Maybe this keeps doctors less likely to mess up, but it does mean they have to have lawyers and insurance and that stuff, and that's expensive. Bring the prices of either down, or decrease the malpractice suits (decreasing malpractice would be a good start), and that would help a ton.). The third big cost is R and D, and while a good chunk of that is to get through bureaucratic red tape, a lot of it is because medical research is just really difficult, dangerous, and resource-intensive. Some have said that American healthcare being so expensive is what enables it to be so cheap everywhere else. I expect that's partly true, but only partly.
I mentioned Canada and the UK earlier as not-quite-Socialist. Mostly, what's Socialist about them is their healthcare. Everything I've heard says that the differences between Healthcare in Canada / the UK and the US are a mixed bag, and anyone who can afford American Healthcare, when it doesn't involve a specialist who is somehow busy for the next two months in spite of having fewer patients than a GP, are generally happier with American healthcare. That is, of course, a problem: if you aren't rich enough to afford it, you're kinda in trouble. Although, it sounds like Medicaid and Medicare have some advantages over the Canadian system, while the Canadian system has advantages of its own (ever been to an American Emergency Room? Ever tried to get an unnecessarily restricted or overpriced drug in America? Canada's got you covered.). No one has any good plans for fixing any of these, but it seems extremely clear that if free, high-quality healthcare was something that could be done right now, someone would be doing it. Would "free, high-quality healthcare" describe the NHS, in the opinion of any users here who partake? I've found accounts of the NHS confusing and all over the place. Someone who's experienced the healthcare systems in multiple countries would be very welcome to share their experiences (that's where I got my Canada vs US comparisons).

And that leaves us with UBI. Let's be honest: blind people on SSI and other countries' equivalents are more or less on UBI, aren't we? I hear people trying to push for a UBI of $1000/month. I haven't heard where the money comes from, but I have heard suggestions that it might be more doable than the dozen trillion dollar pricetag makes it sound, but it's not entirely clear. And if we make it more like a progressive income tax... umm, what does that do to me? Like, me specifically. I started working last month, so got my last SSI check on the first. After taxes, this gives me about $1250/ month. The SSA will take $200, because there was some overpay while I was in college. Work actually has food (not exactly the best food, but I don't have to pay for lunch, is the important thing), and it's not in walking distance of my house and buses take literally 10× as long as a car, so in practice I get more free food when family provides transportation. So the money saved on food cancels out the SSA's 10%. If my defered college loans come due, I'm in the negatives every month. If not, I'm actually making enough money to not have to choose between food and heat/air (seriously that happened this winter). Also-also, if we went Socialist right now, that college debt is still there. And about $1000/month. So would the high-end UBI basically be the equivalent of forgiving that debt and letting me actually keep my freakin' paycheck (which, I should add, does not involve anything I learned in college in the slightest)? I can live with that. Crap, that'd basically be $600 in my pocket every month and—wait a minute...
... How does Socialism deal with rent, property, property taxes, savings, and investments? Because if my college debt were forgiven in full right now, that'd be the same as the situation above. I own my home, but so does an angry raccoon that murdered a possum in the vents Thursday night, so I don't think selling it would get me diddlysquat, certainly not enough to be worth having to move in with parents or my sister. $600/month is pretty worthless by itself—I could order pizza, get faster internet, or take an Uber to a restaurant or something, but that's kinda wasteful, ne?—so what happens to savings matters. On top of that, my current strategy would be to put a huge chunk of it into Vanguard's best Index as soon as I'd have $3k to spare (not happening soon, irl, because $3k is enough to pay off one of those loans, and free up an extra $50/month). As I understand it, this is basically the equivalent of giving a bunch of money to a pot that much better investors use to fund all the publicly traded companies, adjusting based on apparent value (whether this is a proxy for which can do the most good at any moment, or some weird capitalist witchcraft, I'm not sure anyone knows), then splitting the ensuing interest among everyone involved. This feels weird, because it sounds like hella capitalist, moneysmithing, but it is literally public ownership of the means of production, and public profiting from it directly, so isn't that, like, more toward the Socialist side? Is it Capitalist because I first need that $3k to get started, or because people with more money will make more from such a system?
I think the Index Fund bit is important. Socialism cannot be work vs post-scarcity mass charity, because we are not at post-scarcity levels of total wealth (yet! Growth Mindset!). What does workers owning the "Means of Production"™ even mean? Would it not look basically like a giant Index Fund, except without the rich-favoring barrier to access? And, while Index Funds sound like magic at present—a guaranteed 3-10% annual return on your investment, so 25× your annual expenses is infinite money—it doesn't just make money out of thin air. It allocates the money to the companies that the investment algorithms (which I assume are soulless profit-maximizing robots) think it will be converted into the most value, and the interest only materializes if the value is produced. Under the hood, this is probably some supercomputer from Hell trying to play the Stock Market literally at the speed of light, but in an ideal world that still contains Index Funds somehow, it would be because the companies leverage the money from the investments to improve their output. It would basically be a weird intersection of Capitalist-style investing in businesses with taxing and wealth redistribution.
And you are probably thinking, if you are at all like the author of Planet Seva, that the ideal world wouldn't need businesses to produce value, so that whole mess is nonsensical and pointless. This is, of course, super naive, but since Healthcare came up, I assume you know full well that Healthcare requires technology that has to come from somewhere, and we already established that the somewhere is neither easy nor cheap. (If there is a sustainably farmable Panacea somewhere in the Amazon that changes all of this, then we're good.). Then there's the climate to worry about (it's nice enough right now that I am writing this outside, but a couple months ago, the heater, oven, and three layers were necessary to manage indoors, and last May/June, I had to go elsewhere when my air conditioner broke down, because "barely habitable" is not a bad description of certain latitudes during the hot seasons, post 1998. The ideal world would be post-scarcity, and neither Healthcare nor climate would be problems of an industrial scale or higher. At present, though, they are, and the resources and innovations to deal with those problems, and lesser-but-non-negligible problems like them, must come from somewhere. Impirically, that somewhere has mostly been more Capitalist than Socialist, but Capitalist countries did kinda have a wealth-and-size advantage when Socialism came onto the scene in the first place, so it's hardly a fair comparison. Does Socialism have solutions to these problems? If the solution is something like "in order to improve healthcare, we must cure cancer", that is not a solution; that is a semi-abstract goal. We know what victory looks like, but not how to get there. Capitalism's solution is "the market will handle it". What is the Socialist solution? Where does the free healthcare come from? If you have magic healing crystals, and a fat white man in a tux is sitting atop a pile of them with a glass of Kianti in one hand, and a whip for driving off poor people in the other, then all you have to do is kick The Penguin off the pile and share it with everyone. I'm pretty sure that's not the world we live in, though.


Ugh, this post is a mess. I should read the rest of the thread. *Flicks up a couple times* ... nevermindI'mpostingnowbye!

看過來!
"If you want utopia but reality gives you Lovecraft, you don't give up, you carve your utopia out of the corpses of dead gods."
MaxAngor wrote:
    George... Don't do that.

2019-04-20 20:12:59

@Jayde: I think your best point here has been that money and resources need not be inseparably linked. I mean, I have no idea how you could separate them at this point, and trying to do so by wit and force of will has not worked out for me in all the years that I've been trying, but separating money from value is a good start.
@Dagonite: speaking of money vs value, that was an excellent point about prices and paychecks not accurately tracking the value that people and products provide. I have yet to stumble upon the sort of Capitalist who says that outlandish CEO pay is a good thing. I do feel like a lot of people grossly underestimate the work that top executives have to do—I seem to remember Bill Gates and Steve Jobs puting in 15 hour days during the heights of their executiveship—but even then, who does anything worth a billion dollars?
I've been noticing something as people try to determine how wealth redistribution will work, though. That something being that a lot of the 1% don't actually have giant swimmingpools full of money, so much as lots of high-value stock in their company/ies. Much of their fame and power comes from people knowing that they are in charge of something that does so well on the stock market. Oh, they're traditionally rich, too; they can't just walk into a restaurant or airport and get free service. But those outlandishly huge numbers that the tech and oil giants get in Forb's are "Net Worth" estimates, rather than what's in their bank accounts. How do you tax a billion dollars in stock? Require that they surrender half of it to the government, who either sells it for tax revenue, or gives them out for free to citizens? The latter would bring the prices down, which would reduce the value of doing it in the first place, but it would be increasing public ownership in the big corporations. It wouldn't do anything for Healthcare, Foodstamps, or Education, but it would be one step closer to reasonable value distribution?

Re: Gender. It is off topic and I wish it hadn't come up, but I will say that the Gender Studies noise-making annoys the hell out of me, because I find the Gender Binary annoying and archaeic and just why? (The why is presumably "division of labor based on sexual dimorphism", but this ain't the neolithic, dangit!). What does preaching about it accomplish, other than getting people who didn't care in the first place to double down on the defaults as somehow infallible and unchangeable? Have Gender Studies and Gender Theory done anything to unambiguously improve equality, make life better for those who don't fit the WASP traditional genders? Done anything useful whatsoever, other than turn would-be church-ladies into Vice Admiral Holdo? It bugs me more than gender essentialists, toxic masculinists, and gender role enforcers, because (1) I escaped those assholes when I got out of high school, and (2) it hurts so much more when the "good guys" are the ones making things worse. A lot of the anti-American stuff from The Left™? That's because it's worse when the "good guys" do wrong. We expect the "bad guys" to do "bad things". You know what to do with that: you resist, fight back if necessary. What do you do when the "good guys" are doing the "bad thing", and won't listen when you point this out?
And that's where I am with the state of Gender and Race conversations in the 2010s. The champions of Social Justice are making it worse.
I mean, the loudest are usually hypocrites overcompensating for their own failings. Gay homophobic preachers, closeted racist antiracists, the redpill types being resentful of the strongly gendered, Male Feminists™ who really just want to get laid, the list goes on. It doesn't help anyone. But even ignoring that, this is the Streisand Effect with a dash of 1980s-2000s Satanic Goths levels of not helping.

My favorite solution? Figure out how to reduce the counterproductive levels of paranoia in ... I kinda want to retire the word "modern" to refer to 1492-1991, but "Millennial" is too generation-coded... *ahem* it's more a goal than a solution, isn't it? But I'd prefer to fight paranoia, then find something we can build that will help dramatically reduce scarcity, so we can get to implementing better policies. I like the idea of using Space-based infrastructure for this (lots of solar power, Helium, and precious metals with actual industrial uses out there), but that's a really hard engineering problem, and, well, look at the feelings surrounding Elon Musk. Of course, he's trying to speed to Mars, so he can personally go there during his lifetime, instead of building the solar power and mining infrastructure in orbit and on the moon that we could use to bring energy and launch costs down enormously, but still!
But it doesn't have to be space. That would just be the super-cool option. Sure, it'd let us fight climate change without permanently wrecking the planet with aerosol particulates or whatever, would create tons of jobs even if just for robot-operators, would force us to stop neglecting our structural engineering skills (how are bridges and roads these days?), and get cheap or free internet everywhere on and near Earth, and would probably be cheaper than UBI, but it's risky and full of unknowns. And I personally wouldn't get crap out of it, unless it brings down Braille costs tremendously via one of those cheaper-to-produce-in-space materials. ... Note to self: look up if there's something that would improve Brailletech that would be more viable / cheaper in space.

[1] If you can call "food" and "healthcare" and "shelter" "benefits". Sounds kinda ... odd.

看過來!
"If you want utopia but reality gives you Lovecraft, you don't give up, you carve your utopia out of the corpses of dead gods."
MaxAngor wrote:
    George... Don't do that.

2019-04-20 20:25:44

Socialism's answer is something like this:
Nothing actually has to cost money unless you're a capitalist and/or unless you need money to survive. Money is not literally transmuted into goods or services. That's labour.
This means that if you could somehow convince people to work for free, all your costs would evaporate. You would simply need an available team with the expertise to treat the sick and injured, and to continue research and development. Right now, that simply will not fly.
So that's where technology comes in. 3d printing is, as I said before, especially lucrative. Farming strategies are growing more complex and less space-intensive (vertical farming, anyone?). Energy sources are trying to become cleaner, which is just better all around even if it takes awhile. More and more tasks are able to be automated. This will free human beings themselves up to do other things.

The fact is this. No, you can't just hand-wave the bad socialists and bad communists and bad capitalists and all the rest. But you can absolutely put them in a box and tell them to stay there. Know why? Because people try and represent the movement with them. I'm not going to point at the Crusades and say all Christians are jerks, so I'm not going to stand by and let you point at the Russians and say that communism is dirty. The Christians fucked things up with the Crusades. The Russians fucked things up with communism. They are both inarguable points of history. It's just not realistic to tar an entire movement with one brush.

Now, as to why they failed? Simple. Because technology and such simply weren't there yet. If you don't have the resources, or the ability to get those resources, the socialism is going to be tricky if you try and take it to an extreme. This is why taking it gradually is a good start. Health care is a great place to start. Public programs, UBI, that sort of thing. Fun fact: in Ontario, we have a thing called Ontario Works, which is what you can go on if you don't have a job and are looking, and don't have a disability. The maximum amount you can make on OW is something like 760 bucks a month. That is not even enough for rent alone in most cities and towns in Ontario, unless you want to live in the worst neighbourhoods. And again, that's just rent. No food, no internet, no expenses. Rent. This is not UBI. It has not responded to inflation, and that's a bad thing. For UBI to be effective, it needs to be enough that your basic needs (food and shelter, particularly) are met. Some blind people have this, some don't. I think -everyone should have it.

As far as the whole property thing? Eventually, far down the line, property stops being quite the dumpster fire it is nowadays.

Check out my Manamon text walkthrough at the following link:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/z8ls3rc3f4mkb … n.txt?dl=1

2019-04-21 00:44:52 (edited by daigonite 2019-04-21 00:47:29)

I have yet to stumble upon the sort of Capitalist who says that outlandish CEO pay is a good thing. I do feel like a lot of people grossly underestimate the work that top executives have to do—I seem to remember Bill Gates and Steve Jobs puting in 15 hour days during the heights of their executiveship—but even then, who does anything worth a billion dollars?

I think you mistaken the problems as moral ones - the problem with not having labour properly compensated means that capitalism will inevitably collapse after most capital is forced to the top. Think about the example with the CEO for a second, the CEO can often buy many times more things than the people who are actually producing things. This means over time money is moving away from the producers and more towards the people pushing money around. Actually, I'm pretty sure that its impossible to not have a net loss over time here. An analogy would be like a machine working with 100% efficiency - some heat is lost to friction and thus you can't run a machine perpetually without energy input.

AKA, these problems don't go away just because we say we disagree with them morally.

Re: Gender. It is off topic and I wish it hadn't come up, but I will say that the Gender Studies noise-making annoys the hell out of me, because I find the Gender Binary annoying and archaeic and just why? (The why is presumably "division of labor based on sexual dimorphism", but this ain't the neolithic, dangit!). What does preaching about it accomplish, other than getting people who didn't care in the first place to double down on the defaults as somehow infallible and unchangeable? Have Gender Studies and Gender Theory done anything to unambiguously improve equality, make life better for those who don't fit the WASP traditional genders? Done anything useful whatsoever, other than turn would-be church-ladies into Vice Admiral Holdo?

I think what is actually happening is that idpol academics, while having meaningful contributions within their field, are working on very specific, detailed issues that are difficult to discuss with a general audience - whether or not those issues are "worth it" or not to discuss is anyone's guess. The activist on the other hand is trying to have their individuality recognized; at its core, queer issues do actually affect everyone because they are fundamentally about freedom of bodily autonomy and expression. Should society decide for us what is and what isn't acceptable? And this is an important question for all of us - that is often lost in the fog of people trying to finding moral justice.

In my opinion I look at the situation very simply - our natural origins interferes with our freedom of autonomy and identity. We will eventually overtake our natural origins, through technology, to find that freedom. These social justice movements are less about morals and more about accessing more freedoms as individuals.

I do think that one of the biggest problems with academics is that it in of itself is a huge source of privilege - how many people get to dedicate their lives to the precise issues afflicting a specific demographic of queer black women in a suburb of Phoenix, Arizona? Most of us have to live the hard life and in a way part of your frustration is actually a form of protest against the academic elitism.

Highly disagree with space based infrastructure, huge waste of money, time and resources when we really need to organize ourselves on Earth first. Elon Musk is a good example that imho we can't really rely on billionaires to do the work for us.

you like those kinds of gays because they're gays made for straights

2019-04-21 04:17:36

OK, then the question becomes: how do we get the necessary tech advancements in a world that is still too Capitalist to ignore? I don't want to keep coming back to the USSR, since we agree they failed so hard it might literally be visible from space, but I think one of the big problems that 20th century Communists had is that they were trying to go from pre-industrial to Communist without the intervening industrial-Capitalist phase, and trying to brute-force it with a planned economy destroyed things on scales for which Biblical would undersell the body count. It's an extreme example, and you've already demonstrated that you think rushing like the Russians is a bad idea, but I'm not entirely clear on what can be done now, vs what requires more advances, and how we can avoid the eternal procrastination phenomenon ("we'll get to it eventually. Eventually.").
I like that you brought up 3d printing, mostly because of the super fiberoptics cables they made using the International Space Station's 3d printer that could not be made on Earth. But if I stay on space too long, I'll find a way to make an annoying FALGSC reference.

I do want to challenge some of the "do the work for free" type stuff. Mostly because the problems I mentioned with healthcare are not solved via volunteer medical professionals. Doctors still need expensive certifications, and research is still expensive. We can solve the first if we can get a Healthcare Czar to make the MD requirements less pointlessly expensive, but the latter is the real bottleneck. I'm sure that if I do enough research, I can find one or two aspects that would benefit from more space-stuff, but that would kinda miss the point.
One innovation that would apparently help, unless the studies have failed to replicate or something, is to get doctors to follow checklists, and to make the software that hospitals and other medical practices use better (you thought I couldn't bring it back to space but behold! The space shuttle software was actually nigh perfect when shipped!) The thing these have in common, though, is that they're more Healthcare reform than new medical tech or socialist. But nobody can lead with nuanced policy proposals that might actually be implementable with bipartisan support, because that wouldn't energize the base or something. Have I mentioned partisanship is bad? Because partisanship is bad, mkay?
(Since I keep tying space to everything... umm... we could send partisan politicians into space, and only let them come back to Earth if they ... either invent something useful, or win a Gundam fight?)

UBI kinda scares me, tbh. It's hard to explain, but it almost feels more like a prison sentence than an offer of additional freedom. I'm not sure why. I'd probably change my mind if I actually had it. Heck, the LCB stipened on top of SSI is close to $1k, and I wasn't exactly paying the same amount in utilities or internet while there, so maybe money more or less being a non-issue was a bigger deal than was obvious? ...
I think it's because personal freedom is hard, and UBI by itself reminds me too much of the abyss of awful that was college. ... and 2014. Although I did go back for a semester in 2014, so I guess that counts. Ugh. ugh Ugh ugh uGh ugH UGH.

A few years back, I wrote a dialog between a couple of characters trying to come up with a way to cut healthcare costs. It was not too detailed, but it covered the point that the problem is not people being unwilling to work for free/cheap, but all the upstream costs. Not sure if I can find it or if it's worth sharing. And it focused on doctors and hospitals more than R&D, and, again, taking the profit motive out of the picture doesn't make R&D stop being costly. I mean, if it turns out that the cure for a bunch of cancers can only be produced in masse in space, money or no, that's going to be costly. And that's apparently not as far beyond the difficulties involved in developing new treatments as you might think. You basically have to get a huge number of people who want it more than anything else, are clever enough to use all the most efficient and most effective means, and you'd also have to reform the existing systems to make the barriers more reasonable and less "to distribute this life-saving treatment, you must first burn a giant pile of money".

Re: fix Earth before going to Space, I should point out that I'm not talking about moving to Mars, so much as the stuff we can do in Space that can improve things on Earth. Ex, low gravity chemistry, things requiring a vacuum, solar power (apparently solar panels are easier to manufacture in space, never mind all the wasted solar energy up there), etc. I include the Moon mainly because it's so bloody expensive to get things into Space that using the Moon as a source of raw materials could make all of the above more viable. And I get the impression we've failed hard enough at fighting climate change that we really do need a backup strategy asap, and giant mirrors / solar collectors in orbit have the advantage of being adjustable after the fact, unlike the ground-based or air-based geo engineering ideas. Like, if we are past the point of no return, we need more than Herculean emission-reduction efforts. Not that Herculean emission-reduction efforts aren't an essential part of the process, and also the one part that the average person can conceiveably do something about.

Weirdly enough, I'm less excited about the agricultural tech advancements, because we don't need them urgently enough compared to what we already have. This is an area where removing the profit motive would help tons, because as prices come down, people stop farming, which I suppose puts a floor on the prices. Increased automation sounds like it would help, but I think one of the things making food so cheap, and wrecking the agriculture-based economies that dominated the pre-war world, is that the number of people required has already dropped dramatically. Green Revolution, better machines, etc. So, as a result, Kansas is turning into a ghost-state. If we just built giant greenhouses more often, that'd boost yields significantly, and that's something we've been capable of since before the Green Revolution, IIUC.
Of course, let's not forget food waste. The amount of food that goes down the garbage disposal every morning at work could feed a small family for at least a day. Turns out there are laws about what you can do with leftovers, and incentives toward preparing too much food outweigh the incentives toward more efficiency. I've heard that Whole Foods tried to cut back on waste by allowing shelves to go empty when stocking them would have resulted in unnecessary waste, but customers disliked the empty shelves enough that they went back.
(Do I have to bring it back to Space again, at this point? Umm... Space Plane type systems would make transporting food around the world much quicker, possibly improving the distribution networks? )

I feel like I need to say something about education and housing, since costs and quality there are a mess that keeps getting messier, but I'm not really sure what I could say besides that. I think just making college free for everyone is not going to help as much as one might think, because the costs are not the root of the problem, so much as a symptom.

看過來!
"If you want utopia but reality gives you Lovecraft, you don't give up, you carve your utopia out of the corpses of dead gods."
MaxAngor wrote:
    George... Don't do that.

2019-04-21 13:09:15 (edited by daigonite 2019-04-21 13:16:29)

OK, then the question becomes: how do we get the necessary tech advancements in a world that is still too Capitalist to ignore?

Open source projects that are funded through donations or government investment even actually offers an opportunity. Part of the problem that capitalism faces is that it conflicts directly with automation; we are reaching a point where automation is starting to take more jobs than it actually creates. IMHO this is a much bigger problem with capitalism interfering with the development of such technology rather than a problem in communism itself.

I don't want to keep coming back to the USSR, since we agree they failed so hard it might literally be visible from space, but I think one of the big problems that 20th century Communists had is that they were trying to go from pre-industrial to Communist without the intervening industrial-Capitalist phase, and trying to brute-force it with a planned economy destroyed things on scales for which Biblical would undersell the body count.

I sort of agree; I think fundamentally communism conflicts heavily with what a "state" is which is why I'm anti-state. Ideal end stage communism would have no state. The issue then becomes how that is achieved. Insofar as I know there are two main approaches, centralized (socialists) and decentralized (anarchists); the socialists believe that the state would represent a secure, safe model to ensure safe transition while anarchists believe that a transition should occur more democratically. For me, a state isn't the people, the state will always protect itself before the people, and over time it will be more inclined to protect more and more of itself; this is why you can see the emergence of things like gulags ect.

I do want to challenge some of the "do the work for free" type stuff. Mostly because the problems I mentioned with healthcare are not solved via volunteer medical professionals. Doctors still need expensive certifications, and research is still expensive.

The reason why those things are expensive is because essentially of capitalsim. Healthcare is weird because I think it's one of the much more socializable aspects of production. Let's assume that we valued doctors for their work so much that we gave them free room and board while they studied and perform their tasks - do you think that they would suddenly stop doing their jobs? Sure, some would, but it would also make being a doctor more accessible to people who actually want to be doctors. The problem with transitioning between capitalism to communism is that this doesn't occur in a vacuum and could have profound effects on the rest of the economy as well as being poorly managed while being restructured; but I think these problems should be addressed gradually instead of assuming that capitalism "works".

Personally, I believe in the idea that socialist alternatives should compete and be funded by small communities of dedicated individuals. This allows the product to compete in the capitalist space and encourage communities to eventually transition away from capitalistly sourced resources. These communities can have some advantages over a corporation, depending on how they're structured, such as having no structured hierarchy, reduced operation costs, no need for labour costs, having creative dedicated individuals instead of marketing teams behind production ect., allowing them to stay competitive. The main problem is that this requires an extremely vulnerable initial startup phase. Obviously this wouldn't start with medicine but something much more practical - most likely in computers.

UBI kinda scares me, tbh. It's hard to explain, but it almost feels more like a prison sentence than an offer of additional freedom. I'm not sure why. I'd probably change my mind if I actually had it.

Don't take this the wrong way but I really don't understand the problem with UBI. It's not like you can't have a job with UBI (unlike how with many assistance programs you have to prove you don't need assistance). I actually like the idea because it greatly reduces the amount of beuocracy surrounding public assistance and we can focus our money on things that we actually want instead of having to worry if we'll be on the street or can eat. Also, taxes can eat up any UBI given to anyone who makes above a certain income level.

I think it's because personal freedom is hard, and UBI by itself reminds me too much of the abyss of awful that was college. ... and 2014. Although I did go back for a semester in 2014, so I guess that counts. Ugh. ugh Ugh ugh uGh ugH UGH.

IDK man I just don't know why you'd want to make it harder on yourself. Sure you were dumb in college but you were also younger back then and I really don't believe that's just because you were receiving assistance from somewhere. Yeah, if I was 22 and I had UBI I would be dumb with it, but now I really wish I had UBI because then I could quit my job, dedicate myself full time to game production and push my accessible gaming shit. The fact that I have to be fully self reliant because of capitalism prevents me from finding my own personal freedom.

IMHO capitalism only offers "freedom" if your definition of freedom is freedom of consuming material experiences and things...

Regarding cutting healthcare costs. A lot of the cost is beuocratic and the fact that we have a completely privatized health system. Keep in mind that the CEO's of these health insurance companies get often 15-20 million dollar salaries for example, which in of itself is a massive waste (again, is a CEO really worth that much?). I'm just saying as someone who's been on the inside of that block that it is extremely complicated, fucked up, wrapped around all sorts of confusing regulations and is a complete fucking mess.

Weirdly enough, I'm less excited about the agricultural tech advancements, because we don't need them urgently enough compared to what we already have.

Aren't a ton of people starving and aren't we facing a topsoil crisis because of annual crops? Not to mention that current technology harms the environment and contributes towards global warming. 1 in 5 children in America are not getting enough food.

I think a lot of the problem with food supply is less agricultural and more distribution - a ton of food ends up stockpiled somewhere and not in the mouths of people who actually need it. It's weird its almost as if capitalism and 20th century style state communism doesn't work lel

Space would DEFINITELY not be cheaper than literally anything today... just... no. Stop with the space stuff it was a huge waste of money in the 60s its a huge waste of money now. I don't mind the research but trying to implement it into production is completely ridiculous, as well is offering commercial space flights

you like those kinds of gays because they're gays made for straights