Bay 12 Games Forum

Well, there's this going against you.

I'll see your journal article and raise you a researchers fail article.

Science is great, unless it isn't.

...likely to be American, and be conservative, so not be in favor of unliimited free medical treatment at need.

I think most Americans would be all for unlimited free medical care.  Trouble is, basically 100% of people are opposed to providing unlimited medical care with no compensation.

This post not sponsored by the Verizon School of Defining Unlimited and Free.

Yay for the stay, even if it is limited.  At least we still* have checks and balances. Some places don't even have that much.

*Sad that I have to asterisk that.

If you e.g. give 30,000 people $10K to live on, they have to spend it. Say 2/3rds of that goes to creating minimum-wage jobs and you set those at $20K. That just made 10,000 jobs to feed/cloth/house the other 30000....

That's the kind of stuff that unfortunately only works out that way in economics textbooks

We pay taxes. Hell, when they gave me my greencard, I even got a brochure that included my right to pay more taxes.

I guess I should have specified "they think immigrants only get paid under the table and so don't pay taxes".  The legislative fix for that is to crack down on under-the-table pay; regardless of the pay being to citizens or non-citizens.  That issue doesn't really have anything to do with immigration. And especially for the cases where non-citizens are paid above-board and so have taxes withheld.

EDIT: sniped by @smjjames!

So...philosophical question. Based on the fact that much of the ire here is surrounding the issue of attempts to curtail non-citizens from doing things (e.g., voting) or being subject to certain things (deportation) that only citizens should be allowed (or excluded from)?

The question is - if you have certain privileges available only to citizens, how should you go about ensuring that only citizens are exercising those privileges?  Barring some kind of identification registry - how would you do it?

Even further - if you aren't even going to ensure that citizens are the ones exercising certain privileges, what's the point in citizenship in the first place?

Quote from: McTraveller on January 25, 2017, 01:22:18 pm

Hey look, we've rediscovered the one major flaw in using popular elections for leaders: a person's popularity doesn't have anything to do with what kind of leader they are/will be but only about how popular they are!

Only a small fraction of the population voted for Trump. Most people didn't vote... a misguided but forgivable sin considering the offensive pungency of both candidates. If the parties had been healthy, democracy would have worked.

The problem with the parties, of course, is naked oligarchy and nepotism.

I'm not sure how that is a failure of democracy.  That is - you can't say "democracy didn't work" - because it did exactly the only thing that democracy is capable of: choosing something based on the votes of the people - and note that 'abstain' is actually a vote.

Low voter turnout isn't a failure of democracy - it's a failure of the overall society to impart the fact that being involved actually matters and the character and quality of your leaders matters*.  It's not "the party's fault" that the party doesn't field a good leader - it's the people's fault (at least in an environment where the people have the say; in a system where violence or might chooses, then I suppose the people have a more valid complaint).

EDIT* It doesn't help that humans are odd creatures and can be convinced not to vote by abusive personalities, or through policies that make it difficult to vote, etc.  At least in the US, yes, it might be hard to vote, but it's never IMPOSSIBLE - and if things mattered enough, people would just take the time out of their day to vote, potential job loss be damned, because they really want a good leader.  But most people are unwilling to experience immediate pain for potential future reward - especially when they themselves may not even experience the potential reward.  And that is what it would take to fix things.