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This is a teenager
271–280 of 868 posts
Re: This is a teenager
#272One thing that jumps out is that being held back in school is one of the "adverse experiences" that will cause poor performance later. But of course being held back in school is what happens when your school performance is poor, so this seems backward. All of these things just seem to be proxies for "your parents are rich".
> being held back in school is what happens when your school performance is poor, so this seems backward
Why is that backward? Couldn't they be mutually affecting factors a la the failures of "No Child Left Behind"'s penalty system (as in: ACEs damage school performance, leading to risk of being held back a year, which risks additional ACEs)?
> All of these things just seem to be proxies for "your parents are rich".
If that is indeed a strong correlation, then that would be valuable insight gained from this study, I think.
Re: This is a teenager
#273The conclusion of this data presentation is that so of these people are our collective responsibility, and I just wasn't convinced. I wish they had shown percentages with the visualization. They choose not to. I was underwhelmed by some points that seemed like they should have been more shocking. Look at the huge number of people in the many adverse experiences category who made it to college, and make a high salary.…
I'm really surprised that you consider it a "sacrifice" to help others. Because when "others" are doing well, I'm doing better too. Give a job or a good life to anybody and you'll see, they'll just be better. Most of the poor/unemployed people are not like that because they choose to but because they had more hurdles to pass and ultimately were more at risk to fail. And it's not because some made it that it proves th…
You're just being obtuse. The topic is about spending resources in an attempt to achieve a goal. You can't just say "whatever we spend just makes people's lives better so it's worth it". There's a very real cost involved, and a very real effectiveness of spending that cost.
To put it to extremes as an example, if we're spending $1 per person to give them a 99% chance of living a better life, that's a much different situation than if we're spending $1 million per person to give them a 1% chance of living a better life. That million dollars per person could have otherwise funded countless other programs which may have had a better positive affect on the population. You can't just say "well others are doing better when we spend that money so it's worth it" with no other thought given.
Re: This is a teenager
#274Earlier quoted context omitted.
My personal position is to abolish the minimum wage and update the tax scale with negative tax rates that support a reasonable quality of life at all income levels. The market will find its own balance for what a true minimum wage is in that environment (and not have weird perverse incentives like you state). Yes, this is UBI. But phrased as a tax cut makes it politically viable (at least in the US).
I would be interested to see this modeled. One of the classic unintended consequences of social welfare is making someone at the bottom unwilling to work. We saw this during the pandemic when people in formerly low-wage jobs got a lot of cash assistance and stopped being interested in low-wage jobs. (Remember all the "help wanted" signs and early closing hours at local restaurants?) I'm curious to see an example scal…
Very much agreed that there should be no cliffs. Every dollar earned should at minimum increase your usable cash flow by at least X amount no matter where you are in the income distribution and other tax incentive phase space
Re: This is a teenager
#275Earlier quoted context omitted.
You have to disbelieve anyone who says they aren't a derivation of their previous person states. That's just physics.
This is too simplified. What is the state of a person? It's an object of infinite information, the question what aspect you focus on is very non-trivial. You don't have to disbelieve anyone who says a certain aspect of a persons life typically has little influence on their later life. Another issue is that for some a particular event might be life changing and for some the same event might be a nothing burger, for no…
I agree with you that like the post I responded to that my response is too simplified. I also agree with the post I first responded to that we are, physically or mentally and emotionally, in at least some regards never in the same exact state twice.
To clarify my comment, I was attenuating to the causal progression of identity and referencing the physical dimension of that as it is less likely to dissolve into wasteful argument. Once we exist past a day boundary we don't get to be us today without an us yesterday. I admit that the lines of existence and self can be plausibly taken as very fuzzy and I don't want to debate any of that minutiae.
My point is that we are the intersection of what we are across all the domains of our being to whatever extent we exist at the times that we do. Confusing ourselves about what we mean by a person doesn't help.
Re: This is a teenager
#276Earlier quoted context omitted.
My personal position is to abolish the minimum wage and update the tax scale with negative tax rates that support a reasonable quality of life at all income levels. The market will find its own balance for what a true minimum wage is in that environment (and not have weird perverse incentives like you state). Yes, this is UBI. But phrased as a tax cut makes it politically viable (at least in the US).
I would be interested to see this modeled. One of the classic unintended consequences of social welfare is making someone at the bottom unwilling to work. We saw this during the pandemic when people in formerly low-wage jobs got a lot of cash assistance and stopped being interested in low-wage jobs. (Remember all the "help wanted" signs and early closing hours at local restaurants?) I'm curious to see an example scal…
> One of the classic unintended consequences of social welfare is making someone at the bottom unwilling to work. We saw this during the pandemic when people in formerly low-wage jobs got a lot of cash assistance and stopped being interested in low-wage jobs. (Remember all the "help wanted" signs and early closing hours at local restaurants?)
I remember this, the cash assistance gave people back their time to focus on starting their own businesses, pursuing self-education, taking care of their kids, etc. It was fully apparent to me that these low-wage jobs effectively trapped people by sucking up all the time they had for self-improvement.
Re: This is a teenager
#277> College isn't just a place that teaches you how to do a job; it's also a safe, structured, and productive environment for people to continue growing up – and to fend off adulthood for a bit. This is actually a problem. > in developed countries, there is an era between ages 18 and 25 when we collectively agree to let people explore the world and figure out what role they want to have in it. He calls it "emerging adu…
it was my experience of college. many I know would agree, and few would agree with you. I'm sure there are some that didn't feel this way, but strange sweeping statement to make.
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Re: This is a teenager
#278Earlier quoted context omitted.
My personal position is to abolish the minimum wage and update the tax scale with negative tax rates that support a reasonable quality of life at all income levels. The market will find its own balance for what a true minimum wage is in that environment (and not have weird perverse incentives like you state). Yes, this is UBI. But phrased as a tax cut makes it politically viable (at least in the US).
It is important that this is based on all income levels equally. Yes, some will pay back that money in taxes, but the important part is keeping the amount equal. It would be even more effective if you gave them a monthly check (even if you would eventually take it all back via a consumption tax on people earning more). A ~25% national sales tax should be sufficient to cover a UBI program. (We should still have an inc…
If UBI is encoded as a negative tax rate at low income levels, it no longer really makes sense to talk about it as applying to all income levels equally. It naturally gets distributed as
1) A check (issued by Social Security service?) if income is less than X
2) Less of your paycheck being withheld if your income is greater than X (or more if you're significantly above X, depending on how this gets funded)
Re: This is a teenager
#279Earlier quoted context omitted.
(as others have said countless times) Poverty fucks people up like no other thing, sometimes for life.
FWIW, and as someone who's been through it, that's a really disempowering belief for people who have already experienced it or who are currently living through it. Life involves many profound challenges, most of which are unfairly distributed. Learning to overcome the challenges that one faces and turn them into novel opportunities and perspectives is the constructive way of looking at it. There are enough of these c…
I've been through it as well, not as in severe poverty, but definitely to the degree where what you can do in life is very limited and ...
>that's a really disempowering belief
... for me at least, it had the complete opposite effect. When you're young and particularly a teenager, you want to do as much cool things as possible (not just fun, but also things like profiling yourself to end up in a good career, make money, etc), plenty of times this does not happen if you're not privileged enough, and then most of the time people blame this on themselves, maybe I wasn't that smart, maybe I wasn't that disciplined, blah blah.
Sometimes "you just didn't have enough money" is an acceptable answer, it takes the blame out of yourself and it gives you an objective to pursue. Note: this last phrase could definitely be misinterpreted and strawman-ed to death, so I'll clarify on both points:
* It takes the blame out of yourself ... in a healthy way; most likely you are just good enough or are as good as all the other people that are already doing what you want to do. Money could well be the only limiting factor and, if this happens to be the case, you're actually lucky in the sense that is much easier to "just get some money" than to actually nurture and develop an ability that you don't have.
* It gives you a (clear and focused) objective to pursue. Money is not everything but once you identify this as the limiting factor in your life, you can become laser-focused on acquiring said wealth and things just get easier down the road. Anecdote from me: I was once a plane trip short (out of money) from enrolling on a nice PhD in a different country than mine; that, of course, got me very frustrated and sad, but after that my only purpose for a short while was to make money, I went on to work and live frugally (by choice!) and after a year I had saved up a significant wad of cash, this put me in a position where I could not only afford the plane ticket towards any PhD program I wanted, but also afford at least 6-8 months of life anywhere I wanted in the world, so I could just go to places and explore and make a decision about that when I was comfortable about it. Also that small cycle of "set up goal", "work towards it", "execute", gave a lot of meaning to my life at the time and it's a framework that is very useful to master going forward in life.
Re: This is a teenager
#280On the section for gun violence, it says "And these are the kids who witnessed gun violence", but the title says "See someone shot with gun". I'm curious which it is since gun violence encompasses things other than seeing someone shot.