Can we come up with a solution that doesn't strong-arm workers into keeping society's dead weight around? Why make sure that every non-worker in society has enough money to eat McDonalds and watch cable TV at the cost of the freedom of everyone to make and spend money as they please?
thank you for this. I'm an empathetic person, but every morning I drive out of my driveway to work and look at the house across the street from me with three people who stay home all day in their house watching TV.
When I get home, their TV is still on and the other people in my building and I are exhausted from working and finally get some time for recreation, usually in the dark. The other neighbors say the across-the-street people are selling opiates. They should be made to do something in return for their government money: anything useful around town like cleaning up, repainting signs, babysitting- not just getting free government money to capitalize their opiate sales.
I love my job, but not enough that I would come here everyday first thing in the morning if I weren't being paid. That's why the Wikipedia example mentioned in the article is a _terrible_ counterexample for OP's point. First, Wikipedia is a _clone_, not an original work. Second, it's billions of micro-contributions, not people working 40-45 hours per week like the others in my building and myself. No one is that motivated. As posted yesterday, the theory of the Tyranny of Structurelessness is real. Only a small portion of society functions without leaders. And I admit that I am not one of its leaders (yet!), but I am comfortable for the most getting led toward productive efforts.
That's why I believe poverty is a failure of leadership. It's the inability or disinclination of leaders to herd those people into something useful. It's cheaper to pay them to stay home. It's got nothing to do with them being lazy, as someone else wrote. MOST of us are lazy, not merely the unemployed.
Have you considered the fact that you don't know anything about the lives of the people who live across the street from you and maybe you should refrain from judging them so harshly?
> Why make sure that every non-worker in society has enough money to eat McDonalds and watch cable TV at the cost of the freedom of everyone to make and spend money as they please?
To turn this question around, why do we want only slaves to live comfortably, while denying this right to people who are free?
Yes, slaves. Our culture, out of necessity, managed to successfully hide this fact from most of the people, that we are all slaves. We need to work, or else we starve. Some of us are lucky and do the things they would have done anyway living free, but for most of us, it's just global slavery we're in denial with.
Automation may finally free us all, and this is the point most people (suprisingly, even here on HN) seem to fail to understand.
The problem is that many Americans don't see anything wrong with their government depriving people of their human rights. And if you are an American that doesn't agree with this, you might just be detained or killed. And, of course, the first group sees nothing wrong with this.
> Your only recourse is voting (as it should be in a democratic society)
If I believe that every man is free to do what they please as long as it doesn't have a direct negative effect on someone else's right to be free, how can I vote for someone and give them the implicit power to restrict the freedom of myself and others?
Take the third option. Invalidate your vote. Invalid votes are a recognized form of civil disobedience. If enough people aren't pleased by choices given, it will reduce credibility of any government significantly.
Give me a public transportation system that runs on time, doesn't spread disease, doesn't have punk kids who confront you for no reason, is safe, and has sane time schedules and I'll be happy.
Until then, I'll always prefer driving/walking/biking/anything. Unfortunately, I'm in a situation where I can't drive now, and I have to deal with an awful San Francisco public transit system that does 0 of the things I listed.
> "Give me a public transportation system that runs on time, doesn't spread disease, doesn't have punk kids who confront you for no reason, is safe, and has sane time schedules and I'll be happy."
The problem is that you live in San Francisco.
The biggest problem in that list (safety/perceived safety) has more to do with the city than the transit system itself. It's not a brokenness in the transportation system (though more can be done to curb it, certainly), it's a brokenness in the society it serves.
It's always a little depressing to think about how so many other cities - both bigger and smaller - on this continent put the transit of San Francisco utter, complete shame.
It's the same in Europe. As a visiting American, I'm in awe of the infrastructure they've built -- beautiful, clean, fast, charming -- but these were built with European society in mind, which generally raises kids to be respectful, clean, and polite.
But now there are a ton of pretty awful immigrants from the Middle East who harass women, destroy property, and threaten anyone they dislike... which is quickly making European cities very unpleasant places to live. I wouldn't be surprised if Europeans start their own version of white flight away from their cities.
I don't know about other European cities, but immigrants are priced out of the central areas of Stockholm, just like poor black people are priced out of Manhattan. I wouldn't be surprised if the same effect is true in other cities as well, due to the fact that most have been a lot more restrictive than USA when it comes to erecting high rises.
In San Francisco? Probably yeah. Some of the routes are extremely rough, especially at night.
On many bus routes the conditions can be positively third world. Graffiti everywhere - seats, floors, windows. Human excrement. Urine. Addicts. Homeless. MUNI buses are one of the less fortunate places you can find yourself anywhere.
Having lived there in the past, I can sympathize with residents who want to drive, or take Ubers everywhere. The public transit in the city can be a very foul experience - though this is largely a reflection of the city rather than the system itself.
Actually, the number of people physically killed by a Muni bus annually is significant: IIRC, there's a small but non-negligible (single digits) number of people who are run over and killed by Muni every year.
We focus on crime, because it's easy to lash out at order breaking down and can relate to being harassed by the small percentage of Muni riders who can genuinely be considered subhuman refuse. In reality, though, SF has several times as many annual traffic casualties (around 3000, from some rudimentary Googling) as crimes reported on Muni (around 1000).
That latter figure has some factors that may suggest undercounting (it's reported crimes, and I can see how people might have so little faith in Muni that they don't bother reporting it) but also some that suggest overcounting (it includes fare violations and eating on the bus).
Muni certainly needs to be cleaned up, but let's not get ahead of ourselves: you're much more likely to die via automobile in SF than being shot or stabbed on the Muni. I wouldn't be surprised if you're more likely to be killed being hit by a Muni than murdered on the Muni.
