There's a lot of people in and more importantly (and numerically significant) around health care whose job is to figure out who gets health care, what bucket the money is coming from... If you get rid of their jobs at the same time as we get rid of all these other jobs you're really going to wish you had UBI running.

In states which chose to fully implement all of the allowable provisions of the ACA, including Medicaid expansion, it is fairly well-broken. In my area most of the health care providers accept Medicaid, we have a servicer who handles billing so they don't have to do it themselves. If you don't qualify for Medicaid you can still get APTC, and most people who are just a bit over the income limit for Medicaid get their premiums covered 100%. (Of course I would like to do away with the insurance companies in this equation, but that's another discussion.) It's also much easier for people to get coverage for their children than for themselves, and adults get linkage to share of cost programs when they are caring for dependents for catastrophic coverage.

Only ten states didn't expand Medicaid to cover adults 18-65. They are pretty much the states you would expect. Kansas state gov. Laura Kelley has full expansion in her proposed 2026 budget. Most of the others are planning some kind of partial expansion (usually up to 100% of the Federal Poverty Level instead of 138%, and often with additional caveats and/or work requirements) which does not qualify for matching funds. It's still weird to me every time that states would leave money on the table, especially since these states already generally depend on other states' money to function.

Shitty terms for welfare are a bipartisan effort. Maybe it would have been futile to veto it and try to get it changed up, maybe it was intentional, it doesn't matter; the welfare reform act of 1996 signed by Clinton created the 60 month limit for welfare as well as the work requirement (ABAWD) for SNAP that the GOP now wants to bring to Medicaid. ABAWD is stupid when SNAP is barely adequate in most markets (as the food at the supermarkets gets more expensive much faster than the SNAP benefit amount is increased) and there is already a "work registration" requirement which prohibits quitting a steady, 30 hour/week job without a good reason.

We can hold Democrat politicians accountable without false equivocation, I think we should give it a try.

Yes, but there's lots and lots of counterexamples, especially there are a lot of conservative brown people. Mexicans (and many other Latin Americans) have historically tended to vote conservative because so many of them are Catholic. There's also no guarantee that they are not racist against other brown people. Just this morning I was looking at a post on feceboot about cleaning up a BLM street mural in Santa Cruz which someone did a burnout on. Around a third of the haha reaccs were from people with hispanic surnames and, upon inspection of their profiles, light beige to I'd say medium brown skin.

I thought we had all seen the "I thought they were only going to deport the lawbreaking immigrants" posts? Truth is, though, most of even the alleged leftists are still refusing to call it fascism. The supposedly left-wing news is talking about the rise of "authoritarianism"! I cannot express enough what fucking clowns these people are if they don't think this nation full of jackbooted SWAT teams that can be summoned to attack real or supposed enemies by any asshole with a phone is already authoritarian. Nobody seems to want to call anything what it is, so anyone who wants to can pretend it's not happening.

Microsoft had one called Access ;)

hm

Its largest shareholder is South African media company Naspers, which owns roughly a quarter of the company through its affiliate Prosus. Other significant shareholders include China Asset Management, Fidelity Management, and Ramirez Asset Management. Ma Huateng (also known as Pony Ma), the co-founder and CEO, holds a significant stake, according to business news sources.

So it does name Ma and not Bekker, but it does say a South African company is the largest shareholder. Rating partially true

Whether you learn to type in one of the approved ways, or any other way that allows you to type without looking at the keyboard, being able to do so is a critical skill for any kind of typing. The less time you spend thinking about how to type, and the less time you spend correcting edits, the more you can allow your thoughts to turn into text. I can do a certain amount of punctuation without looking (All the usuals... and of course including parentheses and brackets) and that's handy even while just scripting — or trying to quit vi.

Climate change, of course.

Ha ha, only serious: Ukraine has a number of resources which are important to Russia, including cropland. Russia invaded Ukraine historically for the same reason. Ukraine also used to be an important manufacturing center for Russia. Notably, they produced cast tank turrets. You may have noticed that Putin is experiencing an armor shortage.

It's certainly true that some people will do this. But you also don't necessarily need to set the UBI benefit at levels that will allow people to do it everywhere, or to take up much space doing it. And people who want more or better drugs will still go pick up cans. Basic income trials generally show that people usually still work so long as the payments don't affect anything like eligibility for other benefits, which for large families can be critical. Many of those programs are not even paying very much.

The people you see mostly have jobs. You have to have a job to be worth ferrying around on a spaceship, or taking up space on a station. (Or you have to be the annoying child of someone who fits that description.) You have to have a job to have a lot of stuff, or big expensive things like a spaceship. But it doesn't seem like most humans in the Trek universe have to have a job unless they live on a colony.

We might also have to prevent profiteering on some items, like housing and groceries, or provide alternatives to the commercial options. There's no reason why people should be able to make more than a reasonable profit providing necessities. Businesses need to serve communities in a mutually beneficial relationship. They depend on the apparatus of the state to exist. Of no communism! But we already have many laws on how much you can charge for many things.

The alternatives to UBI are far larger changes than it is, especially since a lot of people are already receiving a BI in the form of Social Security. Nearly 74 million Americans are receiving some amount of Social Security benefits, with a pretty wide spread of benefit amounts which average around $1900. Even some people with an acknowledged disability are only getting a few hundred dollars, because they are doing some work. And if they do very much, they lose the rest of the benefits.

It takes a bunch of administration to do all that screwing people over.

UBI is already a good idea, along with national health. Expand Social Security and Medicaid to cover everyone over time. Exactly how much/what it should entitle you to is a matter for debate, but if this capitalism thing is going to not eat itself when it's based on there being consumers then it will need them to continue to exist and have money.

Obviously the plan is to make sure some number of us die, which is why they're doing all this malicious bullshit to the public health apparatus. They clearly don't think they need as many of us. They are no doubt correct about that, although I don't think the system will work well if they get it down as far as I suspect they would like.

It's not good for them either. It's not good for us sooner, but it's not sustainable. The technology is nowhere near ready to replace enough of the plebes to keep them from danger.

Sadly, it's possible to make killbots much more cheaply and quickly than humans. The "waves and waves" approach will not work against palm-sized drones which can fire say twenty ~22lr shots or so, which is extremely feasible and "bounce around death round" bullshit aside, still plenty deadly. It will not work because there will be waves and waves and waves and waves of them. You can try the jamming devices, that hasn't got much spam in it.

It's also to make everyone work for everything unless they can prove that they shouldn't have to, and then they make determinations about who can or cannot prove it without medical qualifications.

There is a broad spectrum of opinion on what SNAP should be for, and who should get what kind of food aid, and how much. The intent of the program from a federal perspective is to provide supplementary food, it's right in the name, which implies that they think that everyone should be dependent upon either labor or literal charity for at least some of their food. Some state do their utmost to avoid handing out food aid, while others do their best to provide it. Recalcitrance in relation to feeding people is unexplainable from an economic standpoint because the money benefits everyone in the state, and it seems like it should be difficult to justify for people who commonly like to cite Jesus as their reason for voting one way or another, but it does exist.

Some people feel, as you invoke, that one should not be able to purchase luxury food items or even unhealthy ones with food aid. Indeed, there is a program for pregnant and nursing mothers called WIC which operates on that premise, and you have to request approval for a substitute product when the items on the approved list are out of stock. But some people are of the opinion that you should be able to buy yourself a steak, or yes a lobster tail, or buy a child a birthday cake because have a fucking heart. (I'm not accusing you of anything, only finishing my sentence for effect. Pax.)

You are of course correct. I would still work. I might work less. I might work doing something else. If you have a truly functional UBI that's actually tied to the cost of living somehow reasonable - more on that in a moment - then you can reduce or even eliminate the minimum wage, if you can show that it really works. You can remove or scale back a number of other programs because the UBI is covering needs. Those programs themselves employ a number of people, but since they would have UBI, a number of them wouldn't need much more income to be making more than they're making now. Government jobs famously do not usually pay much, unless you are a licensed professional. Even then they are only generally barely competitive, and that only because otherwise there would be no takers.

If people's needs are genuinely met, then they will have time and opportunity to create new jobs, new things, etc. A lot of energy and expenditure will be saved, as well. We need to either get a lot more efficient, or do a lot less, in order to reduce our impact. There's absolutely no good reason so many of us should have to work so much and get to keep so little of what we produce.