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.

You shouldn't even have to ask them. But really their opinion isn't what matters most, it's the intent of the body that passed the law.

Coincidentally I started listening to them only a few days before they went encrypted, and then obviously I stopped.

There are multiple public safety interests served by allowing access, and only some of them are related to police malfeasance.

Mod me down with a sock puppet because your argument is crap, good times

Like funding for food banks, which has already been cut, SNAP is on the chopping block.

SNAP also stands for SUPPLEMENTAL nutrition ASSISTANCE program. It is not intended to nor for many, many people does it meet their food needs. And it is pathetic how many people cannot get it at all. Especially pathetic is how this includes many students. It's harder for students (half-time or more) to qualify for SNAP, they have to meet an exemption from student restrictions like a disability, caring for a child, or working 80 hours/month. You also cannot get it if you have a meal plan that on paper provides a majority of your meals, even if the meals are only served at certain times when you cannot go get them.

Many food banks are already unable to meet demand, many people already cannot get SNAP, if they do and they are on a fixed income their monthly benefit amount is often $23 because "unearned" income is treated differently from earned income even if it's social security which they paid into and therefore actually earned, and the maximum benefit of $292 for a household of 1 (it's less per person in households with more people) is already hard to buy nutritious food with in many areas — if you don't have a discount store you're going to be living on crap.

Pop quiz, what's the price of ground beef done over the last decade?

This part I quoted here is literally everything needed to understand why your comment is stupid, if a person knows anything at all about agriculture or industry.

If you had ever seen a banana plantation, even in pictures, you might understand why.

Fuck me running. Everyone knows that tariffs can be useful, but everyone intelligent knows you don't institute massive ones overnight or turn them on and off and fuck up all the spreadsheets for everyone. Most people also know that sugar can come from multiple sources, e.g. beets instead of cane, but that bananas can't come from a beet plant.

It not only doesn't fix any problems, it creates new ones. A huge part of the benefit of UBI is that it replaces a number of other programs. It reduces eligibility determinations to only two questions: 1) are you alive, and 2) do you have a disability that means you require more aid. The SSA is already quite capable of tracking the first thing. They do a spectacular shit job of handling the second (the determinations of whether someone is disabled enough to be eligible to disability benefits are made by people who are not medical professionals and it should therefore be a violation of the law for them to do that job, as they are provably unqualified) but UBI wouldn't make that any worse.

If you restrict UBI to the unemployed, now do you not only have to figure out who is or isn't dead, you also have to figure out if they are or are not employed. And what about people who are employed, but not sufficiently to support themselves? So you've got to also figure out how employed people are.

Holy FUCK that's a let them eat cake* kind of thing to say. The vast majority of the population is barely meeting needs, they already have no upward mobility. You want to not help people because you might take away something they don't have? What the fucking fuck are you on? You'll use any excuse to avoid helping people, even an obviously idiotic one.

* Yeah I know she didn't say it. You are.