Earlier quoted context omitted.
Speaking of children, that’s who’s gonna starve if you decide to let them suffer the consequences of their parents’ poor choices. I would have personally starved to death dozens of times over if not for food stamps.
Food stamps don't prevent children from suffering the consequences of their parents poor choices; people can and do trade those benefits for other things. Children also get to suffer for policymakers poor choices of what the stamps should be spent on, and taxpayers get to suffer the cost of every benefit program duplicating income verification functions and other eligibility functions rather than having universal pro…
Suspicious Discontinuities
271–280 of 307 posts
Re: Suspicious Discontinuities
#272Earlier quoted context omitted.
A man can't go in space, can't fly, can't trick rocks into thinking, and can't do many things. But we do anways. Your understanding of reality is flawed. XY chromosomes provide the instructions for the human organism to construct a male body -- they do nothing to prevent the altering of it later on. Also, is this not 'hacker' news? Chromosomes are just the source code -- eventually we we will hack the souce or the bi…
Right, just remind me when we're able to change the physical construct after it has already been constructing. It's literally impossible. Might as well change a banana into a fly by "changing the source code".
Re: Suspicious Discontinuities
#273Earlier quoted context omitted.
If the system incentivizes capable people not to work and just live off taxes, that should be corrected.
That's a bit shortsighted. There are many valuable types of "work" in society that are not rewarded monetarily. Take for example, child rearing, community building, or caring for elderly/disabled/homeless people. Should "the system" really push capable people into valueless jobs at the cost of meaningful jobs that have no monetary value?
But I don't think the UK's or US's systems are like that; they just got hobbled together by being pushed in different directions by various groups with conflicting desiderata that combined to produce ridiculous incentives, and those incentives should be corrected.
Moreover, to the extent that valueless jobs and valuable non-monetary jobs exist and can be identified, the proper response is to explicitly target them (either with penalties or subsidies), not just allow anti-market-labor incentives to exist because "hey, not every job is worth doing, you know?"
Re: Suspicious Discontinuities
#274I have firsthand experience of the frustration that these sort of discontinuities can cause. I lost all financial aid and nearly all "scholarship" money my senior year of undergrad after my 6 month coop at Intel put me over some income limits (probably around $33k per year). All told, I was probably ~$5k ahead compared to where I would have been with the scholarships and without the income. Still, it would have been…
Presumably the experience itself helped you get other jobs that would’ve been unattainable had you not had a prestigious internship at intel.
Re: Suspicious Discontinuities
#275Earlier quoted context omitted.
Speaking of children, that’s who’s gonna starve if you decide to let them suffer the consequences of their parents’ poor choices. I would have personally starved to death dozens of times over if not for food stamps.
You might have been more hungry, but death by starvation in the USA is nearly unheard of. I personally have never heard of anyone - homeless or otherwise - dying of starvation in the USA. The only people I've heard of dying of starvation were stranded on a mountain or on the ocean or something.
Re: Suspicious Discontinuities
#276Earlier quoted context omitted.
Right, just remind me when we're able to change the physical construct after it has already been constructing. It's literally impossible. Might as well change a banana into a fly by "changing the source code".
People also thought flight was impossible. In this case, the 'construct' is the morphological traits that distinguish men from women. That's what our brains use to differentiate men from women -- chromosomes are irrelevant here. We don't need to replicate sex at a molecular level -- if someone is indiscernible from a women without inspecting their molecular structure they are for all practical purposes a woman. A far…
How are you going to take a grown man, whose physical traits are obviously different from a woman (broader shoulders, taller, more muscle mass, deep voice, not to mention his reproductive system, and other documented differences in other organs), and turn him into a woman? This is physically impossible and is akin to changing a banana into a fly.
> if someone is indiscernible from a women without inspecting their molecular structure they are for all practical purposes a woman
And physics and biology would still disagree with you. This warping of reality to fit some unscientific narrative is getting out of hand.
Re: Suspicious Discontinuities
#277Earlier quoted context omitted.
This was in the context of a political discussion about what the tax bands should be, not about paying the current taxes in reality. Some people want higher taxes and some want lower; what I’m saying is, 50% stood out as an arbitrary threshold that many people seemed possibly willing to agree on. Some complained that rich people shouldn’t be expected to prop up the rest of society, but conceded that progressive tax b…
Tax rates dont pay for services, they pay for preventing inflation. The government printing money pays for services.
Re: Suspicious Discontinuities
#278Earlier quoted context omitted.
People also thought flight was impossible. In this case, the 'construct' is the morphological traits that distinguish men from women. That's what our brains use to differentiate men from women -- chromosomes are irrelevant here. We don't need to replicate sex at a molecular level -- if someone is indiscernible from a women without inspecting their molecular structure they are for all practical purposes a woman. A far…
They're two very different things. Flight is obviously possible because the inherent laws of physics allow it, and we observed other creatures do it. How are you going to take a grown man, whose physical traits are obviously different from a woman (broader shoulders, taller, more muscle mass, deep voice, not to mention his reproductive system, and other documented differences in other organs), and turn him into a wom…
Well, the spectrum of bone sizes / muscle mass do have crossovers between the sexes. Obviously you're not going to turn a 6'5'' 300lb man into a believable woman but if that same man starts to transition at 16? Who knows. And there are plenty of people who are well within the size parameters of the opposing sex even in adulthood.
> And physics and biology would still disagree with you. This warping of reality to fit some unscientific narrative is getting out of hand.
Disagree with what? I said for all practical purposes. Sure, you could in theory make a biological and physical distinction -- it just won't be relevant to 99% of people if the difference is not available to them. Does a multi-platform software user care if he's running the ARM or x86 binary? They are two vastly different beasts but if the compilers work the user has no distinction.
> They're two very different things. Flight is obviously possible because the inherent laws of physics allow it, and we observed other creatures do it.
You are missing the big picture. What we view as physically possible now will change, as it always has throughout history. Space travel used to be 'physically impossible', heck so did circumnavigating the world. We will eventually reverse engineer our brain structure -- downloading our consciousness might be feasible one day. Do you think people will care about XY chromosomes when they can swap bodies? Or in a world that heavily uses VR?
Re: Suspicious Discontinuities
#279Earlier quoted context omitted.
People also thought flight was impossible. In this case, the 'construct' is the morphological traits that distinguish men from women. That's what our brains use to differentiate men from women -- chromosomes are irrelevant here. We don't need to replicate sex at a molecular level -- if someone is indiscernible from a women without inspecting their molecular structure they are for all practical purposes a woman. A far…
They're two very different things. Flight is obviously possible because the inherent laws of physics allow it, and we observed other creatures do it. How are you going to take a grown man, whose physical traits are obviously different from a woman (broader shoulders, taller, more muscle mass, deep voice, not to mention his reproductive system, and other documented differences in other organs), and turn him into a wom…
You seem to be completely ignoring the generally agreed-upon scientific consensus that gender and sex are not equivalent; sex is biology, and gender is mostly performance. A transwoman is a woman (gender) even though they're biologically male (sex).
Re: Suspicious Discontinuities
#280Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The perverse incentives around these discontinuities is one of the worst misfeatures of programs intended to help people. This is a key motivation for replacing many of those programs with UBI funded by progressive taxes.
A Negative Income Tax which phases out would work too (though I think a UBI would be more popular and thus resilient to budget cuts, as Alaska has shown). The wonderful thing about cash (UBI, NIT, EITC) is that it's easy to divide up and low-cost to distribute.