Re: Animal abusers
Most of the people I know that do drug trials on animals are pretty normal.
1099 publicly visible posts • joined 11 Jun 2009
"So I stopped having fancy holidays and nice cars and stuff and paid off the damn mortgage"
Ah but what about the increasing proportion of the population, who don't have fancy holidays and nice cars and stuff, but do have to pay rent? If you can't afford to own your own shelter, you have no way of escaping your serfdom.
If the plan is to raise the cost of UBI through taxation alone, then you're right it doesn't work. That isn't the plan though; the whole point of introducing a far simpler universal system is that you'd also save a lot in administration costs. Also, the hope we'd have a more productive society overall, and thus generate more taxes anyway. Whether either of those to benefits are feasible is something that needs to be assessed quite thoroughly though.
Indeed. Someone who doesn't have to toil on 12-hour, 7 day a week shifts on zero-hour contracts just to keep a roof over their head and their children's bellies full, can afford the time needed to improve their own lot in life. OK, some people will choose to do nothing, but so what? They do that now.
Also there are plenty of people who work their arses off without actually getting paid, e.g. people caring for elderly and infirm relatives, who'd otherwise need to be looked after by the state.
I agree that automation probably won't suddenly make everyone unemployed, but attitude expressed by the article is distinctly unhelpful. It just says "no UBI will not work!" without providing any alternatives.
Nobody wants it to fail, just to say "I told you so". The very idea is laughable. That doesn't mean that remainers should just "Put Up or stfu", rather than desperately try to avert what they see as a disaster being orchestrated by idiots and/or those with their own agenda.
@Phil: I'm pretty sure I did say "some of them will have rational reasons for voting out (honestly there are a few)".
To be clear, I do think there are good reasons for wanting to leave the EU, but on balance I favour the status quo. I don't, however, believe that most of those who voted out did so in an informed and rational way.
Government "spending on research" doesn't mean the government directing research, it means the government giving a budget to a research council who issue grants to research organisations that apply for it. The only control the government should exert is in deciding which research councils should get some money and how much of it they get.
The Brexit angle is that, at the moment, some of that funding comes from the EU's central research councils. When we Brexit, we might be cutting ourselves off from that source of funding, so our researches will have to rely on the pittance provided by our own government.
It's a bit much to call them racists. Some of them were/are, but some of them will have rational reasons for voting out (honestly there are a few). However most will have just been generally pissed off with their situation and had their minds poisoned by years of anti-immigration, blame the EU for everything, propaganda from our media.
In which case, it becomes the government's (with the consent of parliament) job to go for a form of Brexit that would be best for the country. Or, if that's not workable then forget the whole thing. The problem seems to be that government are going for the best political solution (for them), rather than the best scocial and economical solution for everyone.