This is the exploration process: questions are paths, you keep going down them until you reach a clearing - some light! Then you look around and find another path/question. Repeat. Hope for partial illumination (a clearing!). Yeah, some people think they can achieve total illumination: out of the woods at last! I'm skeptical about the 'total' part, yet ever hopeful another clearing is just down the road. All the while aware that some problems require decisive and timely action, even though the light could be better.
"...estimates a seasonal decline of 76%, and mid-summer decline of 82% in flying insect biomass over the 27 years of study."
Even when we think we're doing the right thing as an "end-in-itself", there is an implicit assumption that the world will turn out better (at least in the "long term") if we simply focused on the action itself, consequences be damned. Basically, it's a heuristic that resolves a lot of ethical dilemmas. We need heuristics because life is complicated; we can't think through everything.
Is it any wonder that a lot of Republicans soured on the environmental movement or came to doubt the "consensus" on climate change? Sure, as members of a pro-business/limited government party, it's not surprising that Republicans would be a bit less gung-ho about environmental regulation than Democrats. But that doesn't explain the change in Republican opinion over the last decade or so.
Some government programs have already been shown to reduce chronic and transient poverty. One multi-year study found that the following government benefits combined reduced the chronic US poverty rate from 10.8% to 2.1%...What more can be done? Lots! Just a few ideas...
At the debate, UBI advocates dismissed these predictions as overly speculative, maintaining that possible risks could be managed. Their main argument was that a generous UBI was called for because Americans are suffering and their situation will keep getting worse without a major overhaul of the social contract. More specifically: poverty, income volatility, job instability and stalled social mobility are a plague upon the country and the only cure is a universal basic income. ...So let's look at these Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse:
According to every recent survey I've read, Trump supporters are well aware of the President's character defects and many don't agree with all his policies, yet they continue to support this vile man because they trust his overall policy instincts, don't mind or even enjoy the show he puts on, and/or really, really hate the Democrats.
But wait! Won’t robots and AI free us from the need for labor? So can't we just ignore all the evidence re work disincentives and labor market participation?
On second thought, all research is desire-driven. Because behavior is necessarily goal-driven and you don't have goals without wanting something to happen and wanting is desire and doing science is a behavior. But some desires are more conducive to scientific progress than others. Like the desire for reality not to make fools of us.
Suppression of alternative points of view is immoral, because it prevents movement towards a better understanding of the truth. Species evolve through competing variations within changing environments. Nothing works for long (except for crocodiles).
Today's topic is: Why Many People don’t Return to Work after Not Working for a Period of Time
In Europe, high unemployment has been associated with the following: “generous unemployment benefits that are allowed to run on indefinitely, combined with little or no pressure on the unemployed to obtain work and low levels of active intervention to increase the ability and willingness of the unemployed to work" …What is it about work, and looking for work, that so many people would prefer not to?
UBI advocates often argue that government benefits only disincentivize work when they’re means-tested or stopped if the recipient gets a job. They argue that if you eliminated this “work-penalty”, there’d be no work disincentive. For proof, they point to Alaska...
With the proposed UBI, how many US citizens and residents would be tempted to stop working, reduce their work hours, take longer job breaks, or plan gap years from work? Consider, for instance, the results of a recent survey of older workers...
A whopping 57% of households in the bottom income quintile are single individuals. This is not so surprising, given that 44% of bottom quintile households are headed by individuals younger than 25 or older than 64. We're talking young people and seniors.
Per previous posts, this UBI scheme would cost about $4.1 trillion a year in new taxes. Let’s have the business community pay $500 billion of that. That leaves a $3.6 trillion tax tab for US households.
...to fund this UBI proposal with a stable source of tax revenue, we will need a broad-based tax base, like that of the Scandinavian Counties. For instance, like in Denmark, where “plumbers pay the same 50 percent income tax as hedge fund managers.”
Motion Summary: Basic income recipients would include children and adults; the employed and unemployed; and citizens, permanent residents, and all other residents who could prove a residency duration of at least three years. The amount given would start at $1,000 per person per month and be pegged to GDP growth going forward. No programs in the existing social safety would be replaced by this policy...This begins a series of posts laying out my case against the above UBI proposal.
A moral emotion wants something to happen. What if the things it wants to happen are in a zero-sum relationship with each other? More of this means less of that and both this and that are Moral Goods. But you can’t have the optimal amount of both. You gotta choose! (And keep choosing, because time doesn't stop and stuff keeps happening).
...you insist on seeing things as binaries rather than continua. Either this or that, e.g., save the environment or help business; serve the rich or help the poor.