Oh FFS. Food banks are locally run, staffed, and financed.

I don't believe you.

Who's stopping you from writing a check?

It's not our responsibility.

I'll just have to learn to live with the knowledge that you disapprove.

Except that the cash is drying up anyway, per the article source. And it was inevitable that enrollment would slow down as soon as China ramped up their higher education system enough to provide for their own needs. That's been their M.O. in every other sector of their economy: get Western help until self-sufficient, then kick the West out to protect their own markets. Education is no different from factories in this case.

In 1950, most women were married and stay-at-home moms, with the female labor participation rate at just over 30%. Most men did the working. We have a vastly different social situation now. The women's labor rate is now 57%. Men are now under 67%. In the year you citied, 1950, men had an 86% participation rate. The male rate has been steadily dropping since the 60's. So there's definitely been a change in attitudes and work ethic since the 50's.

Such revolutions always end up with the revolutionaries killing the very people they were supposedly fighting for. Ask the French how that turned out for them.

That's not the argument. The argument is that simply giving people money all their lives with no requirements for work in return will make them permanently dependent on others. Worse, they'll come to have a sense of entitlement that their neighbor owes them a living. The West has always prospered with the worth ethic: He who does not work, shall not eat.

So, if AI takes that work away to an extent that will truly leave masses of people permanently unemployed? Then better a Butlerian Jihad than Behavioral Sink.

When work and purpose is taken away from Man, he rots.

Americans would have no problem temporarily helping a nation that had a crop failure one year, or had food supplies destroyed by a hostile force. What they have a problem with is permanently taking responsibility for feeding that nation, when that nation is more than capable of feeding itself. And that became the problem with USAID. It became a permanent burden, often with the expectation that US tax dollars were always going to show up to do the job that the native people and their governments should be doing themselves.

I also suspect that much of USAID wasn't for humanitarian purposes as much as it was for buying influence abroad, under the guise of humanitarianism. One of the primary objections to cutting the USAID budget at places like the Brookings Institution and CSIS is that if the US stops paying foreign food and medicine bills, then China will step in and play sugar daddy. Well, good. Let China drain their coffers then. As far as I'm concerned, that's not a bug, that's a feature.

The people of the United States are exceedingly generous in giving their money to charities, foreign and domestic. Americans sent almost 30 billion dollars abroad to foreign recipients in 2023. Americans pretty much have decency covered. But this isn't about decency. It's about responsibility.

So, I ask again: who is responsible for feeding those children abroad? The implication of the parent post is that the responsibility is squarely on US taxpayers, and not the parents of those children or their own governments.

I'm presuming here that you're speaking of the cutting of USAID's budget.

Why is the United States responsible for feeding the children of other nations? Shouldn't that be the responsibility of those other nations? Don't tell me that they can't do it, because you know that isn't true.

So Who'll .. do the tough jobs

I think that for most use-UBI-to-deal-with-AI advocates, the premise is that robots will do that, and presumably would already be doing it by the time UBI is enacted.

If this is a problem (i.e. robots can't do it yet, or they can't do it as economically as humans), then you're not in a post-work situation yet, so you can't have a post-work utopia yet.

Keep improving those robots! You're not done until unemployment is over 90%, and ideally not until 100% though that may be asymptotic.

What does *he* envision a hypothetical scenario where AI has taken over an extremely large amount of the labor?

Your question wouldn't make any sense to him or any other Trump supporter. Let me rephrase it so that it can be answered by MAGA.

What does he envision, in a scenario where the people Trump currently steals from, no longer have anything to steal? How does a thief find new victims once the old ones are used up?

I think the best MAGA answer to that, is that someone will own the AIs, and reap the "wages" that the AIs earn. Steal from them, because they'll have something to steal. AI will be no different than anything else which changes the distribution of prey: you just gotta keep up with who and where the prey are.

I don't know why people are surprised by any of this. None of it is new. SV has been selling gear and services to the Pentagon since SV existed. SGI was famous for providing high-end stuff for Air Force/Navy simulator systems. Microsoft famously tried to sell the Navy "Windows for Warships". And Sun made what at the time was the single biggest sale in their history to the Army.

At one point the Pentagon was the biggest customer Sun had. It was only until Google came along that you had the granola types bitching about the military, and they were always the exception to the rule in SV.

This is Slashdot. So no one else is going to hear about them either .

If people boycotted the expensive software options for one year and slammed the IRS with paper forms, this would be reversed post haste.

If we did that, do you know how much it would inconvenience every House member and Senator?

None at all. Their lives will be as damaged as a bulldozer that just ran over Arthur Dent.

Reforming the tax code will cause some people to pay less tax and some other people to pay more.

Whatever your approach, the people who would end up paying more, think your "reform" idea is stupid and evil. I don't remember all their detailed criticisms, but their overall tone was clearly unfavorable.

They hate it. They hate you. Why didn't you make someone else pay more instead?