The Gaming Den

MfA wrote:

Swordslinger wrote:Humanity needs more smart people or it's going to end up killing itself off.

We have more than enough smart people, we simply need less people ...

Yeah, less people like him.

just to be the first to post it

The Vigilante wrote:Yeah, less people like him.

Average wealth is being more and more constrained by natural resources ... productivity is growing, but not fast enough to keep up with peak fucking everything.

Unless technological progress actually reaches the singularity and we get a post scarcity world everyone would be a lot better off with less people to share the pie. Not saying we need an extinction event, just saying we should stop breeding so much (demographics aren't a problem either, productivity can grow faster than aging is taking people out of the work force ... caring for the aged is a problem of distribution and governance, not economics).

Juton wrote:

DSMatticus wrote:Really, children should be going to school year round. And now that I'm no longer in highschool, I feel completely okay saying that. Funny how my opinion changed...

I'm well out of highschool and I think this is bullshit. Summer vacation was literally all I had to look forward to all school year. There are a lot of ways you can improve education, lets start with the ways that don't crush a young person's soul.

You mean just being in school and being told "No, bad, stop being creative, just do things the way we tell you to, so that we can get money for your standardized test" didn't crush your spirit?

Wow.

Idiocracy is wrong. The world is not getting less stupid, we've always been that stupid.

I felt idiocracy was not so much eugenic as it was anti-dysgenic. A small distinction, but there you go.

Prak wrote:You mean just being in school and being told "No, bad, stop being creative, just do things the way we tell you to, so that we can get money for your standardized test" didn't crush your spirit?

You know, the only time this ever happened to me was when I was in eighth grade learning percentages. For whatever reason, percentages have never been intuitively obvious to me, and so my mom sat me down one weekend and helped me figure them out. I totally got it, but I did it using proportions/fractions, not decimals.

When I turned my homework in the next school day, I had flunked the assignment because I didn't do it right. My mom had a fit.

Aside from that experience, though, school was awesome for me. But then, I gave all my teachers flack when I didn't like what was going on, and I found that as a result, they were surprisingly flexible.

It would seem that the human race is in fact getting smarter and better educated which, ironically enough, may end up being our undoing anyway, since we can be rather cocky. That being said, the whole "people are getting dumber" thing might be attributed to the vapid forms of entertainment we enjoy (which, quite frankly, are no worse than gladiatorial matches, blackface shows or any of the other forms of entertainment that people have had over the millenia). Or maybe people really are getting more vapid and self absorbed*. So perhaps it just seems like we're getting dumber because we just don't care as much.

I'm just going to stop there because I think I am making less sense (to myself or anyone else) with each word I type.

---

* That article discusses the U.S. only, and doesn't mention whether or not empathy seems to be falling in other nations, though it wouldn't shock me if empathy is declining all over the developed world. We do live in an age where the internet allows us the illusion of socialization when we in fact are rather isolated, although we don't fully realise it (Note: that link leads to a Cracked article, so take it as you will). This might explain some of the wacky hijinks that seem to be occurring with increasing frequency around here.

This might explain some of the wacky hijinks that seem to be occurring with increasing frequency around here.

no the wacky hijinks are because we're bitter nerds angry at the world.

also plebian is really annoying.

I'm under the opinion that we simply train a certain portion of our population to be under-achievers because we need someone to work in grocery stores and fast food.

I mean, law schools and medical schools turn away thousands of qualified applicants each year because the respective fields can't handle influxes of qualified members. Heck, right now most recent law school graduates have passed the bar and are still unemployed.

K wrote:I'm under the opinion that we simply train a certain portion of our population to be under-achievers because we need someone to work in grocery stores and fast food.

I mean, law schools and medical schools turn away thousands of qualified applicants each year because the respective fields can't handle influxes of qualified members. Heck, right now most recent law school graduates have passed the bar and are still unemployed.

Is it possible that this is because we basically* live in a post scarcity society?

*not all fields, but enough; for instance it only takes a tiny fraction of the population to produce enough food to feed the entire populace.

ubernoob wrote:]Is it possible that this is because we basically* live in a post scarcity society?

Possible? No, it's clearly the case. That's why we have so many people unemployed who want to work and the missing jobs are in every sector. We can produce far more than we need, but we need to have some means of wealth distribution.

MfA wrote:everyone would be a lot better off with less people to share the pie.

I propose a solution:

Swordslinger wrote:Right now the US is just the opposite where people on Welfare get more money for having more kids. Fucking stupid.

Think about what you're saying for a second, and then think if that's honestly the argument you want to make.

I say this because what you're saying is that when kid n shows up, that means that kid n suddenly gets less opportunity (due to having less resources) than kids 1 to n-1. And all those said kids suddenly have their opportunity decrease as well.

It's a good thing it doesn't work the way you're arguing it to work. Every child deserves the same opportunity.

Yeah, it's horrible, they get enough money to barely feed them. Those bastards, living off the dole, eating their really crappy food, and wearing their hand me downs.

Going to their inner city schools of lose.

Kids should suffer.

We should punish them for having more kids
We should also make abortions illegal
And Condoms are bad
Medical Assitance should not pay for birth control pills either.

Bastards having children so they can get an extra $100 a week.

The cause and effect are reversed. Compensating low-income families for having children does not encourage them to have children (the compensation is far too small for that), we compensate low-income families because they were already having lots of children and couldn't support them.

No, solving that problem has nothing to do with, "Haha, no welfare for you." That makes it drastically worse. Solving that problem involves improving those communities.

Edit: He is right about the abortions though. We seriously need to get over this fucking religious-driven god damn stigma. Fuck what your religious text says, I'm interested in improving people's lives. And fuck the catholic church and their stance on condoms. If there is a hell, there isn't a pope who shouldn't be there.

sabs wrote:Yeah, it's horrible, they get enough money to barely feed them. Those bastards, living off the dole, eating their really crappy food, and wearing their hand me downs.

Going to their inner city schools of lose.

Kids should suffer.

We should punish them for having more kids
We should also make abortions illegal
And Condoms are bad
Medical Assitance should not pay for birth control pills either.

Bastards having children so they can get an extra $100 a week.

Your disagreement with him would go over better if you didn't go directly from the assumption that we shouldn't be paying people more money to have more kids to making abortions illegal and decrying condoms, since those are unrelated points.

If you want to criticize him because welfare queens don't exist, that's perfectly acceptable, but do it based on that, not on the unwarranted assumption that he's anti condom/abortion.

Personally, I think abortions should be a mandatory requirement for anyone currently on welfare, who wants to stay on welfare. That would prevent any welfare queens if they existed, and has the positive side effect of reducing welfare expenditures and reducing the number of people in general.

Barring that, I have to side with Koumei.

http://financialedge.investopedia.com/f ... thing.aspx

Nothing good ever comes out of people on Welfare.

sabs wrote:http://financialedge.investopedia.com/f ... thing.aspx

Nothing good ever comes out of people on Welfare.

Your statement is meaningless. If they want to have kids, they can give up welfare, or, get a job, and not be on welfare, and have kids. Or they can not have kids.

I don't hold the right to have 40 kids paid for by the government to be an inalienable human right.

They can not have more kids, or they can not take public money.

I don't care if there are 6 billionaires that came out of the billions of children born into poverty. I'd just as soon have no poverty stricken kids in the first place.

Kaelik wrote: I don't hold the right to have 40 kids paid for by the government to be an inalienable human right.

They can not have more kids, or they can not take public money.

My wife and I were just talking about this yesterday. Her idea is to say that if you want to get on WIC (or some similar program), that you need to get an IUD (provided by the program) in order to get the money. She likes the IUD approach because they're easy to remove if the woman later changes her mind or gets off the program.

How many people here actually have been on TANF?

Maj wrote:How many people here actually have been on TANF?

My mother.

EDIT: It may have been called something different.

RobbyPants wrote:

Kaelik wrote: I don't hold the right to have 40 kids paid for by the government to be an inalienable human right.

They can not have more kids, or they can not take public money.

My wife and I were just talking about this yesterday. Her idea is to say that if you want to get on WIC (or some similar program), that you need to get an IUD (provided by the program) in order to get the money. She likes the IUD approach because they're easy to remove if the woman later changes her mind or gets off the program.

I've got to agree. If you are on welfare then you're admitting you can't provide for yourself, and if you can't provide for your self then you certainly can't provide for yourself and children.

Kaelik wrote: I don't hold the right to have 40 kids paid for by the government to be an inalienable human right.

They can not have more kids, or they can not take public money.

I really agree with this.

I know a couple who are actively trying to have a baby (and for whatever reason can't). That's cool, but the problem is that they're both unemployed and on of them is going to school, thus racking up some student loans in the process. They already rely on food stamps to make it by.

When someone brings up the point of "Why don't you wait until you're at least employed to have a kid?" they basically respond with "lol no". When asked about what they're going to do to take care of it, they just say that welfare will take care of it.

That's the kind of shit that has to go.

K wrote:Heck, right now most recent law school graduates have passed the bar and are still unemployed.

Good ... they should get together and undercut the Laffey Matrix to get cases. The fees are fucking ridiculous, they need to come down.

This is hilarious.
[quote="A lawyer]Because they lack the financial resources to compete with the Boutique Law Firm’s rates, existing small and medium sized law firms must try to cut prices in other ways. In such a scenario, the legal community may soon fall victim to a situation in which existing law firms are pitted against one another in an attempt to provide the lowest possible rates for clients.[/quote]
This is how lawyers really think ... of course without trying to unite it with their usual neoliberal stance on economics. Humans are all good at rationalization ... but lawyers better than most.

It reminds me of investment bankers, somehow their ability to make negligible impact on the real economy makes them think the economy couldn't run without them (in the case of investment bankers shaving a couple of points off interest on loans through arbitrage). With lawyers ... well I don't really know how they justify their fees to themselves, but a hugely inflated sense of self importance nonetheless.

Inevitably, many existing firms may be forced out of business, being unable to maintain a profitable enterprise.

Yes, I'm sure all the lawyers who grew fat on inflated fees will just go into retirement rather than work for lower fees ... so what? Plenty more where those came from.