> But no, fuck the working poor, let’s fund artists.
What if they built those 66 houses? Is the complaint then, "what about the other working poor, why didn't they get houses"? Is there ever a point where it's like, ok to help some people given that some is more than none? Or is this all zero sum bullshit where if we can't help everyone we should help no one and just give Google back it's tax dollars?
> You know you CAN donate money to the government any time you want, right? Do you do that? Practice what you preach, don't hide behind "oh if only the government made me do it."
You know we can also advocate for higher taxes, given that it's astronomically more meaningful for everyone to give ten cents than for me to give a few dollars, right? Or did you think this was an insightful, valuable addition to the discussion that no one has ever suggested before? Is this the comment section of a local newspaper? Good god.
> there's loads of people who will take the government up on the offer.
Prove it. How many are loads? What, specifically, do you think UBI actually amounts to?
> You know we can also advocate for higher taxes, given that it's astronomically more meaningful for everyone to give ten cents than for me to give a few dollars, right?
And you can ALSO voluntarily pay more in taxes while doing so. It's called leading by example. Warren Buffet and Bill Gates get called out on this and they do the same thing; "oh I'm just one person, my extra tax money is but a drop in the ocean, so why bother." If you and everyone else saying "tax me harder" actually put up, it might amount to something! And at least it would make people respect your position a bit more.
> Prove it. How many are loads?
Well let's see, anyone who's lived their entire life on welfare (we have families of multiple generations who have done so at this point) would qualify. So would all the homeless people more content to live on the street and do drugs than go to rehab.
> What, specifically, do you think UBI actually amounts to?
Enough for people with low ambition to live on! And their vote counts just as much as the productive members of society paying for them.
Because we use taxes as a process to crowdsource funding more effectively. That's literally the entire basis for it. Might as well ask why "only the taxpayers who care about a new highway can raise funds to buy it" and then we're back in some weird, system of no central government because someone can always claim "why not just like, let people donate money" because it's a simplistic cliche that appeals deeply to people who aren't quite clever enough to work out just how much they've benefitted from the system as it's been constructed.
> Is this passive aggressive insult really necessary?
I think simplistic cliche's deserve derision - if you don't like that, perhaps don't use them? It's hardly a shot at the writer to suggest that what he wrote is mediocre.
> I’m sure you will agree that not everything that everybody wants can get funded. The debate here is how to draw the line.
No, your argument was that I should fund things myself directly. I pointed out that that's an inane and boring argument. If you want to debate other things, then do that in the first place.
> so I’m struggling to follow your argument.
It might help if you re-read your own arguments first, instead of trying to make them into new ones. Things people want funded by the government get funded when they vote for them to get funded either directly or via representatives - if you don't like those things, there is a clear way to change the algebra. In no case is suggesting people just like, "pay some extra taxes, man" a useful are additive observation.
> Is my friend who plays the didgeridoo in his free time now an artist if he declares it's suddenly his full-time occupation?
Is this really a risk, given UBI is generally minimal? Anyone who wants to live on it full-time to support their art, whatever it may be, is welcome to it. It's not like they're sitting back and getting rich, here.
> One example, why exclude people like Geo-scientists who sometimes dont even get any money (except they work for big-oil or the state).
Because "UBI for everyone who deserves it" is a much harder, bigger step, and fighting against small wins because they don't include literally every single outlier case you can think of is absurdly non-productive, not to mention that it's a vacuous counter-argument.
It's wild that this nonsense is still floating around by people pushing "credentialed doctors", whatever the fuck they think that means. No one with any vague degree of credibility would now or ever has supported "very large number" and all of the "externalities" (are you sure you're using the right words) have been vastly outweighed by the things the vaccine provably did.
What is a "credentialed doctor"? What are your qualifications for having an opinion in the first place? Why do you think a minority org full of quacks with little relevant background has any standing at all? Aside, of course, from the fact that it confirmed your priors (that became your priors after, presumably, some intense research on Facebook and OAN). Perhaps we should let Dr. Oz chime in, too, on things he's not qualified in.
Pretending that's what the anti-social media stance is, is hilariously dishonest.
Anyone pretending there is any anonymity and privacy to protect on the internet, right now, has their head in the sand, especially if they use social media.
I don't spend anything close to "all my day" in a car - I'm not sure what the absolutely over-the-top and completely-detached-from-reality, snide hyperbole adds, here.
Well that is certainly how it feels when I am in a city in north america.
A small errand that takes me 5 to 10min in my hometown takes me 45min to 2h in suburbialand. Worse, mutualizing errands do not even reduce the overhead of a single trip because infrastructure is usually made in such a car centric way that it makes it super inconvenient if not downright dangerous to walk from one huge parking lot to another one a couple of blocks away so you are kind of pushed to move your car, sometimes navigate a stupidly long loop to simply turn around and go on the other side of a stroad.
By the end of the day you realize you have barely done anything.
Funnily it makes it worse for both drivers and non drivers.
At home I usually opt to not take the car, not because it would be slow but because in many cases it is silly. It would be too short for the engine to even warmup and I would not have the chance to enjoy some time outside and/or exercise at the same time.
I totally see the impact spending so much time in the car and traffic has on my in law family's stress level and they do complain a lot about it while being seemingly unable to envision a better way of living and push for it at political level. It is also super bad on the security side of things because they often opt to take/make calls while driving for it to not make it time totally lost and aren't just as focused as they should be on the road.
Most of this is either a function of you not knowing what you're talking about, or hyperbolizing things. I live in the far suburbs of a mid-major city and am within 2 miles of 3 grocery stores, multiple shops and parks. That you can Google Map some specific hellscape in Dallas or Houston hardly makes either of those situations the norm, and even where they are, suggesting a normal, daily errand takes 2 hours is absolute nonsense.
At some point, it's time to leave the memes on Reddit and just not having Big Opinions about things you know you don't know anything about.
> The difference is that people shouldn't be forced to commute across the entire city to get to work because you decided to cram all of the commercial zoning into one downtown core.
Isn't the point that they should be, if that's how I choose to build a city, and they don't have to be, if you choose to build it otherwise? The entire point of a sandbox city-builder is, I assume, that it's a sandbox, and not a dogmatic interpretation of a childish Reddit meme.
It was pointed out elsewhere in this thread that SimCity already distorts reality in an ideological way: it lets you have tons of traffic without worrying about parking. It just gives you magical free underground parking everywhere that you never have to think about, in order to avoid the usual suburban parking sprawl hellscape.
The point is to illustrate that SimCity isn't a blank-slate, value-free sandbox city-builder. It has rules and those rules have been made deliberately unrealistic in ways that favour North American style cities.
It's like a fluid dynamics sandbox that causes water to flow uphill rather than settling into the valleys.
> Demonizing people because they don't agree with you is detrimental to society and it is not sustainable.
Fascinating how this is only ever used as bludgeon in one direction. Never used when people talk about immigrants eating pets or being “vermin”, or when someone asks that you call them she/her or they/them. I wonder why that is. Surely not an abject lack of moral consistency.
> What he does with his own money is none of anyone's business.
Nah, if I don’t like where my money flows after I spend it, I am perfectly free to spend it in other ways. I’m sorry people like you dislike my freedom of association.
What if they built those 66 houses? Is the complaint then, "what about the other working poor, why didn't they get houses"? Is there ever a point where it's like, ok to help some people given that some is more than none? Or is this all zero sum bullshit where if we can't help everyone we should help no one and just give Google back it's tax dollars?
Speaking of "myopic".
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