andrewducker: (Default)
[personal profile] andrewducker

Date: 2017-08-25 11:06 am (UTC)
drplokta: (Default)
From: [personal profile] drplokta
You can't end relative poverty with a basic income, because people living on just the basic income will still be poor relative to people with jobs. They may be poorer.

Date: 2017-08-25 03:14 pm (UTC)
wildeabandon: picture of me (Default)
From: [personal profile] wildeabandon
Well sure, but you can't end relative poverty without getting rid of money altogether - the people with the least money are always going to be poor relative to the people with more. But you can end absolute poverty with a basic income.

Date: 2017-08-25 03:20 pm (UTC)
drplokta: (Default)
From: [personal profile] drplokta
You can end absolute poverty much more easily and cheaply by simply setting the poverty line at an income of 1 cent (US) per week. That's an extreme example, but any policies regarding absolute poverty are always going to be very sensitive to the threshold that's chosen. And in any case, much poverty is relative. You'd think that If I could afford to spend the weekend on the Moon, I'd be rich. But if all my friends were taking a two-week trip to Mars, and I couldn't afford to go, I'd still be poor.

Date: 2017-08-25 03:55 pm (UTC)
wildeabandon: picture of me (Default)
From: [personal profile] wildeabandon
That's sort of true, but although absolute poverty isn't constant and well-defined, I do think that there's a broadly shared sense that it means not having the ability to meet your basic needs.

I suppose that that shared sense is likely to change over time, as society becomes wealthier, so there is a relative element, but in that sense basic income obviously can address relative poverty, because as total wealth increases, the resources available to fund it do likewise.

Date: 2017-08-25 11:47 am (UTC)
cmcmck: (Default)
From: [personal profile] cmcmck
'the British media are part of a disconnected elite'

Some of us belonging to certain minorities knew this decades ago!!

Date: 2017-08-25 11:47 am (UTC)
calimac: (JRRT)
From: [personal profile] calimac
The fantasy maps article says, "Tolkien was fine withholding the massive background mythology, most of it wasn’t available until his children decided to cash in on it after the author’s death."

Both parts of this are false.

Tolkien desperately wanted to publish the Silmarillion, which is what "the background mythology" was called, and at one point even insisted to his publisher that it appear as an indivisible part of The Lord of the Rings. The problem was that, as he'd been working on it for decades, the conception had changed over time, and would require massive recasting to fit with the version of the story told in LOTR, recasting he was uncertain how to do and, in the end, unable to accomplish.

Nor was any motive of his estate to "cash in." That's an unjustified insult. The estate was doing very well financially from the works already available. But an audience clamored for The Silmarillion and both the estate and the publishers thought they deserved to get it. What they got, after enormous editorial work by Tolkien's son incompatible with any idea of casually "cashing in," was a kind of photoshopped snapshot of the mythology as best compatible with Lord of the Rings. But that didn't convey the depth of the invention, and by necessity left out much fine work that wasn't compatible. So, after another 20 years of painstaking editorial work, even more incompatible with casually "cashing in," he produced more volumes laying out the whole thing. These have sold moderately well, because Tolkien has a large fandom that wants them, but they're no monster bestsellers, they're no cash cow, and above all they're no instant quickie novelizations gingered up to milk the readership. They're scholarly editions of Tolkien's actual work.

Date: 2017-08-25 05:00 pm (UTC)
adrian_turtle: (Default)
From: [personal profile] adrian_turtle
I wonder if the people doing the experiment with caffeine are aware that caffeine itself is intensely bitter? They might not have tasted the stuff in its pure form.

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