notdrunkatall

The welfare system in Sweden IS seen as a massive success because it HAS been a massive success, and didn't have many serious problems because people respected it as a temporary thing, and receiving welfare came with a social stigma.

That is changing as a direct result of increasing immigration, and welfare reform is on the horizon across Europe, not just in Sweden.

Instead of asking them a loaded question in order to receive the answer that you want to receive, why not try asking them an unloaded question? Something like: do immigrants treat the welfare system differently than do native Swedes? Obvious answer is obvious.

But you've already said enough to refute your own argument: the immigration problem. It's a problem, is it not? And it's a problem because those people respect the system less than Swedes do, thus necessitating reform. It's not a major problem because the Swedes are proud of their system which has worked so well, with so little abuse, until just recently, and they're certain that they can figure this problem out as well before it gets too bad. But it is a problem nonetheless because, well, I'll just let you go back and read my original assertion.

How the fuck is it that a forum of supposedly intelligent people have such a massive problem with basic fucking logic?

Which is more ridiculous: that AMC actually called the FBI, or that the FBI actually respond in this way?

What the fuck is wrong with this country?

You have my position wrong.

You people suck at this.

The right thing to do would be to test the idea before shoving it down voters' throats.

It would not only be morally correct, it would provide great ammunition for fighting against those who would be against it.

But that's not going to happen, because despite the rhetoric of the left, no one knows whether it would work or not, and a failure would be catastrophic for the left politically.

So we'll trudge on, doing the same shit, implementing the same policies not to fix actual problems, but to appease our consciences and to feel like we've won some kind of political victory against that evil other side.

The whole game is a farce.

Is it a shocker that I misread that table? Obviously, you meant that facetiously, suggesting that you believe that someone who espouses views contrary to popular liberal ideology is necessarily a stupid person. But the fact that I made a mistake no more means that I'm stupid than does the fact that I disagree with liberal ideology on many points; on the contrary, the fact that you believe it does says much more about you than it does me.

At any rate, the rest of my points stand. Now that you've pointed out my mistake, maybe you'd like to follow up with a quick 1-2 punch and knock the moron out of the ring, eh? Come on, it should be easy, right?!

I would like to volunteer myself to slap the shit out of everyone with this mindset.

As a Swede, you're shockingly uninformed.

https://www.google.com/search?q=sweden+welfare+immigration&o...

Do you know what the Swedes didn't have a problem with a decade ago? Welfare abuse. All of a sudden, they have a problem with it now. Do you know who are the ones abusing the system? Hint: it's not the Swedes.

Every other country which has accepted middle eastern immigrants in the last decade are experiencing the same problems.

If a population does not respect your system, they will abuse it, period.

If you can get over yourself for a second, I'm sure you'll be able to figure out why.

Forgive me for offending your politically correct sensibilities, but it seems that I'm going to have to be even more blunt: if you want to convince white people in this country that doling out free money to the poor is a good idea, you're going to have to convince them that blacks and latinos aren't going to abuse that system en masse. The only way to do that is to try something similar in neighborhoods that are comprised predominately of minorities and cross your fingers that it is a success. It doesn't matter whether those below the poverty line are 65% or 5% white - it's the minorities that they're concerned with. That's just the political reality of the situation.

And while we're on the subject of statistics, I may as well go ahead and ask about yours: where did you get that figure from? Because I found something much different:

http://www.census.gov/newsroom/releases/archives/income_weal...

According to this, only about 25% of people living in poverty were white, and that includes the somewhat dubious category 'white, not hispanic.' (It's near the bottom, Table B)

That also includes white retirees, which inflates the figure as you're taking the number of retirees from a large category and sticking them into a smaller category, which means they will be over-represented in the smaller category.

And that's not even mentioning the rate of poverty or welfare participation, which is where the common perception that blacks and latinos abuse the welfare system comes from in the first place. It's much higher than it is or other races. When you dig into the data, it usually turns out that stereotypes exist for a reason, and this appears to be no exception.

Dependence.

Turns out that when you incentivize something, you get more of it. Who knew?

Correction: this is what happens when poor Cherokee receive a stipend, but let's not pretend that the Cherokee are the ones we're worried about here. There are differences between the subcultures, and those differences almost certainly extend to how they treat money.

Furthermore, the psychological and social difference between receiving money from a source which a population would consider to be 'theirs' cannot be overstated. If you're a poor black person (or latino, or Cherokee, or whatever), and you're living in a land that's dominated by a group that's not like you, you are less likely to respect that money than if a) that money came from a source that was yours, and b) you knew that if that source believed that you were disrespecting that money, they would cut it off.

Both stipulations apply here. Giving a small band of Cherokee profits from one of their own casinos =/= giving poor blacks and latinos federal assistance. They aren't even close.

Successfully repeating this experiment in poor black and latino populations a few times would go a long ways towards convincing the skeptical that free money for the majority of the poor is actually a good idea.

Anything else, as I said in another thread, is half-measures.

Excuses. Everyone has nothing but excuses.

People who speak about things which they know nothing about are the worst kind of fools.

The withering of mechanisms to effect change follows directly from apathy. Conversely, those mechanisms flourish with the existence of an engaged, informed citizenry.

We have no one to blame for the current state of affairs but ourselves. To attempt to pin the blame on anything else is to fail to accept that responsibility, which is tantamount to failing to recognizing the problem. And of course, if we fail to recognize the problem, nothing will ever change.

Incentives incentivize things; who knew?

That's because the rest of you don't understand what an all-out financial collapse would mean for you because as a result of the FED's actions, it didn't happen.

It's refreshing to find someone who gets it.

Do you even marketing, somewhat obtuse bro?

I'm a fan of Snowden, but I agree. He needs to be more selective in what he releases.

It would certainly make me happier.

YOUR FACE IS STUPID!!!

He stated "doing jobs white people don't like doing." How do you interpret this? This is, by definition, stating that by being white alone, the population carries a characteristic.

Only if you're a twat.

He was making a general observation: that minorities tend to do jobs that white people don't want to do.

And he's right. That's a simple observation, one which carries no value judgment. It just is.

That's not being racist; it's making an observation. If you think that any statement which differentiates between the races in any way - even if only tangentially - is a racist statement, then frankly, you need to get over yourself.

Nice casual racism.

That's not racism.

While I question the notion of a "clash of civilisations[sic]," you're saying this like it's a bad thing.

I don't see where he assigned a value to this prediction. It seems to me that you've done that for him, both in this comment and the one accusing him of racism.

It's the first day.

Your 'potential threat' level with the NSA has risen from 10 to 9.

...except you're wrong. Bitcoin participants have developed a solution to the 51% problem, without any regulation, without any government stepping in and telling anyone to do anything.

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Getblocktemplate

Your post is a poorly argued attempt to inject politics into a technical discussion. It reads like the top comment at /r/politics, not HN.

I've been resisting getting a smartphone for years because I didn't want to either pay $300+ for a phone or $80+ per month with one of the big carriers.

Then a couple of weeks ago, someone on an HN thread told me about the Nokia Lumia 520. I checked it out, decided to buy one, and I'm damn glad I did! Windows Phone is frankly amazing - it does everything I need it to do, it's beautiful, and it just works. I ordered a sim card from Straight Talk for their Bring Your Own Phone program for $7, and voila, I have unlimited everything on ATT's network for $45 a month.

You're saying a black person who grows up in a white subculture then is less at risk of poverty? I call bullshit on that.

Do you mean they're less at risk of poverty than a black person who grows up in typical black subculture? Of course they are.

http://www.eastbayexpress.com/oakland/rich-black-flunking/Co...

Allow me to give you a little insight into my insight. I live in the ghetto, in a place that is 75% black, in the deep South. I grew up here, I still live here, and I know the people. They're typically good people, but as a whole, they don't have the same mindset about work, about frugality, about financial success that your typical middle class white guy does. And the reason isn't that they're black per se - it has nothing to do with their skin color, with their race. It does, however, have everything do with their culture, and it's not racist in the slightest to acknowledge that! If you don't acknowledge a problem, how can you ever hope to fix it?

Allow me to enlighten you a little bit. A people are brought to a foreign land and forced to work. Their culture that they knew is destroyed, so they build another one, but as any people who've been subjugated will do, they develop a strong resentment towards those who subjugate them and they integrate that sentiment into their new culture. They see the entire establishment as the creation of their oppressors, of their enemy, and for a long time, they were right! Post-slavery, racism was rampant, and it was damn hard to be a black person in America. I don't blame them one bit for initially thumbing their noses at the system that 'whitey' built, for telling us to fuck off, for generally believing deep down in their soul that white people were their arch enemies.

But times have changed. Yes, racism still exists (it exists everywhere, and is arguably the mildest in the USA, believe it or not), but post the civil rights movement and affirmative action, there is really no excuse for anyone - man, woman, white, black, whatever - to decide to be a leech on society. Well, outside of permanent disability, of course. Opportunity exists for everyone, and if you're a black person, it exists even more so for you. There are a plethora of excellent black-only schools which take low-income black kids who show a willingness to work hard to succeed. MIT absolutely loves to give free rides to the underprivileged minorities, as it improves their diversity figures, and the same goes for just about every college. We have a black guy as our President, for pete's sake. The difference was that his parents raised him to embrace the establishment, not to rebel against it. They taught him to follow the rules, to work hard, to join 'our' system and to change it from the inside, if he so pleased. And he did. A black guy.

Finally, acknowledging that a subculture is different from your own isn't racist. You're just a dumbass.

My definition of work is most certainly NOT worthless! "Work" is what produces the interesting books, the couches they sit on, the lights and heat which keep them warm, the houses, and everything else they depend on, ad infinitum.

If less people work, there are less things being produced, period. If less things are being produced, there are less things to go around. If there are less things to go around, we are ALL less wealthy.

Is this decrease in wealth trumped by the increase in mental, emotional, and physical health which would supposedly occur under a basic income economy?

I don't know, and neither do you. It would, however, be relatively trivial to do some experiments, gather the data, and analyze that data.

It would certainly be preferable to do this than to dive headlong into a basic income scheme, only to find out that your posterior-derived claims are entirely false.

We're talking about basic income here, not increasing housing available to people under the poverty line.

The data isn't available, at least not where you've said it was.