Economic Facts and Fallacies

[ravingdave]

> I dare say there isn't anyone that is going to
> get away with making them do double duty.

Oh I don't think the regular police force here would be happy with that either!

But I do reckon a private funded security force would be willing to. (People seem to do anything if you pay them enough..)


> Over here it costs (Last I heard) $50,000.00 per
> year to house an inmate

From a logic point of view, it would probably make more sense to pay them half that not to live in prison and be well behaved in exchange for the money!
.

It is logical in terms of math. It is not logical in terms of human nature. If you started paying people this much money, you would have everyone on the dole. (except the people for whom this much money is insignificant.) As a result of so many people having this much money, it would require significantly more to induce them to work. The prices of everything would imediately skyrocket (hyper inflation), the currency would devalue until $25,000.00 was virtually worthless, and the whole economic mess would eventually settle back to a condition not terribly different from what it started out as.

To put it simply, it is like an unatural vacum in economics, and nature abhors a vacuum.

> I have long worried that the stupider people in
> the world are going to get us all killed

I worry about that also, and have seen over my lifetime at least, the stupider ones getting more and more of the upperhand in every day life.

Hence another reason why I want to create a community where this isn't the case.
.

Much occurs for reasons that are not always obvious at first. There are causes for the conditions you describe, and I cannot help but think they are a result of a fundamental misunderstanding of human nature.
I believe people are basically evil, and only by training and higher level thinking can people be made to overcome their basic self centered nature. Children have to be taught to respect others and not pick on people who are different or weaker than themselves. It is the supression of our worst natural instincts (by higher level thought) that has made it possible for mankind to create what we now call "civilization."


Unfortunately we are the victims of our own success. I have long suspected that it is prosperity that has made it possible for us to do some of the more foolish things that we have done and are doing.

Conservatism causes Liberalism.

> and of course they go and screw it up

I have noticed politicans have a habit of taking a good idea and not fully implimenting it.

(Point in case, a city government wondered what to do about all the empty buses that cost a fortune to run and didn't make a profit, and it cost say $10 to go from one side of the city to the other. Someone had the bright idea of charging a flat fee of $1 to go any distance, and suddenly the buses was full, they had profits! local shops was full of shoppers, everyone was happy! but then the politicans decided that the 'experiment' was over and went back to the old ways!)
.

Ha ha ha... Yes, I know exactly what you mean. I could go on for days pointing out similarly wrong headed examples. The common denominator seems to be a beuracrat at the bottom of it. Hence, as bad as the market is, it still isn't as foolish as beuracrats.

> I realized giving them money for food is stupid

Agreed.


> What would work better is requiring them to
> buy staples

Agreed.


> At some point I came up with the idea that
> welfare should not be fun.

Agreed.


> best way to do it is to make it unattractive.

Agreed.


> I propose something like public housing

Agreed, I have had a similar thought myself to include some of that type of housing/welfare in my community design.


> This is nothing more than I would ask for myself
> if I were destitute.

Agreed, I base many of my design thoughts on what would I be prepaired to do myself.


> Death Penalty does indeed work, and
> Saudi Arabia proves it.

Agreed.

.

I'm reminded of the time I spent at school, I lived during the period when we ended physical punishment in our schools, and I can remember how one year in a school of 1,500 kids we had maybe 2 or 3 bullies, with everyone else behaving for fear of the cane.

The next year, with no more can, we had 100+ bullies as now if you did something wrong the worst that could happen is you'd be told not to do it again..

So many people nowadays regard spanking as a barbaric, not realizing the quantity of pain avoided later as a result of it.
Letting bullies and their victims suffer by not teaching them better is more barbaric.

> Positive and Negative reinforcement works.

Agreed.

I reckon if I had a really nice community for people to live in, that banishment (And minor punishments such as say, community service orders.) from it would be an effective punishment. As in the UK at least, you can be quite a criminal and yet still live in your comfy government provided home!


(Its interesting that looking at the figures here, a single parent with 2 kids is given the economic equalivant of $80k a year in government benefits, and with minumn wage jobs offering you only $20k you can see the reason why so few people once on benefits stay on them.)

It's not quite that bad here, but it is a similar problem. There are Many people working here that cannot make as much as someone receiving welfare benifits. There are many people on welfare that don't really want a job and only pretend to go apply for one.

(Amusingly, if you can call it that <grrr> I'm not entitled to any, because of some weird loophole that exists, if you go to university but you didn't take out a government loan, then that potentional loan is counted as capital and disqualifies you from benefits. And as you never had it, its impossible to ever spend it!).

Catch 22 is the story of my life. I have the most amazing talent for finding all of the oddities in a beuracracy and tripping over them. I guess it's because I just don't try to follow everyone else's footsteps.

So I reckon that a private funded community could provide very low cost rented housing, its own social welfare system, high wages from cooperative style business practices, and with something like 20% of the population security guards, keep crime at an all time low, making it an attractive place to work. That at the end of the day also makes stakes of money for all of its residents, rather than just a few.

There are charity organizations here that do similar things to what we are discussing, and by and large they work decently. I'm not sure they could make a profit, (perhaps if Government competition was eliminated? ) but were you to attempt such a thing, your number one enemy of getting anything done would be your various governmental beuracracys. You are, after all, competing with them, and are therefore a threat to their livelyhood, so they will come after you with a vengance!

Apart from that, I think you are very reasonable, and I have long believed that if people are given the same information and allowed to ponder it, they will usually arrive at the same conclusions. Unfortunately, our knowledge base is our own experiences and what we can garner from others, and as a result we all have different patches missing from what we know. Therefore we often come to different conclusions on various issues. If people are willing to discuss things without provoking each other,
(a problem all too common on the internet) then often times, everyone can fill in some patches.

I am always ready to learn something new.


David

[MSimon]

Too much freedom of choice, and we end up making lots of bad choices,

The ability to make bad choices is how you learn. The problem with centralization is that if the choice is a good one (rare) all to the good. If the choice is bad then that bad choice is multiplied.

BTW organic (adaptable) systems make choices that are general (build a liver here) but are conditioned by local conditions (we have too many blood vessels in this area we need more liver).

In the USA if you need a zoning variance you can often get one. The Federal system lets states adapt their laws to local conditions. And states defer to counties and then to cities and towns.

The problem always starts out with a vision of a perfect system.

Think about modern management. The rule is to push decisions down to the people affected as much as possible vs corporate management deciding as much as possible.

Many of the things you ascribe to the evils of individuals are really the fault of the system. i.e. can large estates be easily subdivided? How much land is under government control? etc.

[jmc]

I'm reminded of the time I spent at school, I lived during the period when we ended physical punishment in our schools, and I can remember how one year in a school of 1,500 kids we had maybe 2 or 3 bullies, with everyone else behaving for fear of the cane.

The next year, with no more can, we had 100+ bullies as now if you did something wrong the worst that could happen is you'd be told not to do it again..

Wow, I've long suspected the removal of corporal punishment may had been the origins of juvenile dilliquency in the U.K., but I've never heard it put so dramatically before.

[jmc]

The difficulty with Hull and simlar places is the very high crime and unemployment levels means its not realistic for many to live there.

(I have attempted previously to live in such places, but you end up litterly povety striction with no home (because someone burn't it down..), no job, and no means to improve. (No education or training facalities.))

(Where I am at the moment is slightly better, in that the crime is low enough that you can stay alive and keep your home and possessions, but jobs are pretty hard to find above minumn wage levels, housing costs are insane, and education/training either non-estistant or beyond ones ability to afford. (Eg. to go to university and get a degree would cost me $150,000 up front, if I had that much I could afford to buy a house!)

Much a catch 22 situation for many people.


> unemployed peoples existence miserable

I wouldn't class it as being miserable to have a roof over your head, to be fed and yet to be restricted in things you can do beyond that.


> just going to make the lives of those who have committed
> no crime worse

I disagree, look at Monaco for example, it has the highest ratio of police to people, yet none of the rich people complain about all the guards!

What poor people really want is lots of police on the streets keeping them safe! (Sure we don't want the wrong kind of policing, like getting fined for dropping litter say, we want them to just target the muggers/murders/rapists and leave the little things alone.)


> Place them in an environment full of like minded criminals where
> they organise themselves and form gangs

I've always wondered that perhaps prison should be a place where you cannot communicate with anyone, TV is on 24/7, your not allowed to exersize and your force fed a diet to make you hugely overweight so you really don't feel like getting off the sofa to commit any crimes when you come out!


I tend to see education as an investment aspect, pay to train someone today and they can earn more tomorrow to pay back your investment and generate more income.

Is Hull really that bad everywhere? Its a fairly big city, surely it has good areas aswell as bad, it also has a university. I went there to visit a friend that attended it only twice mind. Its also got a large aquarium although the streets in the centre became eerily empty as dusk approached.

While I agree that money should not be thrown at unemployed people, I'd don't see the point in going out of our way to restrict them from bringing furniture into their house and having guards watching them day and night.

Regarding Monaco, I think your mixing up the chicken and the egg, first the rich people came, then they hired police because they were rich enough to afford it and they needed to protect their wealth. The U.K. has considerably less GDP per capita and so could not afford that many police per person. Anyhow police spend too much time filling out forms these days, if they spent more time on the beat there'd be enough of them as things are.

Additionally another problem is that its harder and harder to convict people. This makes the evidence gathering ridiculouslty cumbersome. Someone I knew had his car broken into, the window was smashed and the steering wheel was broken, he had to take a day off to appear before court to inform everyone that he hadn't invited the thief to smash his window and break his steering wheel or else they couldn't get a conviction!

If you read the newspaper, there was a case where a jewellery store owner was forbidden by the police from handing out pictures of the thief to neighbouring jewellery stores as it would "violate her human rights".

In another area the police had a policy of not pressing charges for any cases of shop lifting where the ammount stolen was less than £80.

The problem is the police spend almost as much effort protecting criminals from law biding folk as they put into protecting law biding folk from criminals!

Reinstate corporal punishment in school, so that children will learn respect for authourity at an early age, and hang all drug dealers and I guarantee you crime will plummet even if every 5th person isn't a policeman!

[MSimon]

In the states we used to have a tremendous problem with alcohol dealers. They were shooting up cities. Going on crime sprees and buying politicians.

Know how we solved that? We made the stuff legal and then licensed dealers.

Besides the market for drugs is inelastic because the people who take drugs need them.

http://powerandcontrol.blogspot.com/200 ... sease.html

http://powerandcontrol.blogspot.com/200 ... ystem.html

Lots more on my sidebar.

The fortunate thing is that only about 10% to 20% of the people need drugs.

But think about this: suppose your government in its infinite wisdom outlawed water. What would you be willing to do to get some?

Better example. Suppose your government decided that you needed 20 needle punctures every day. What would you be willing to do to make it stop? Which is exactly why we have a problem with drug criminals. People will pay an awful lot to make their pain stop.

It is all about the amygdala and the embedding of fear/pain in the brain.

http://www.mpg.de/english/illustrations ... ws0217.htm

Here is a nice one on the tobacco "problem":

http://www.classicalvalues.com/archives ... t_439.html

Well any way, 99.9% of the time government is doing the wrong thing. Sometimes it doesn't matter. Some times it hurts a LOT.

[MSimon]

One of the things that interests me is that this information has been out there for years and yet the ignorance of it is pretty general.

Nobody is asking (generally) why do people take drugs? Where are the scientific studies? What do we know? There is absolutely zero evidence that drugs cause addiction (habituation is different and we know how to fix that). And yet most people think that just taking drugs can get you addicted (absent other factors). In fact there is a lot of evidence against that. And yet most people think that it is the availability of drugs that causes addiction.

Since the recent posters on this topic thread are Brit may I suggest you look up the Heroin trials of Dr. John Marks of Widnes, Cheshire (Merseyside?). Britain used to be a leader in rationality when it comes to human behavior. No longer.

[ravingdave]

ravingdave:

Maybe your foodstamp/ID idea might have a point, the whole guard in the house and going out of your way to make unemployed peoples existence miserable is something I cannot condone. Frankly I think it may be the result of never living during a recession. Sometimes people just lose their jobs, sometimes its not their fault making them put up with misery and a lifestyle close to incarceration in the interim period does not seem a good idea. If someone moves into these state housing and comes across some secondhand furniture that being thrown out anyway, or a spare TV why shouldn't he bring it in?

My entire family went through the great depression in probably the hardest hit part of the country. Oklahoma. My mother is constantly telling me about eating roadkill and living under trees for a year as well as numerous other hardships. All my Aunts and Uncles have this depression era mindset that by today's standards is quite strange to most people. Never the less, the lessons they learned going through the Dust Bowl have been ingrained in me, and I daresay the conditions which caused it are not so different from what they are today. (makes me worry all the time.)

As to making out of work people's lives miserable, that is not the goal, but is the unintended consequence of insuring that people don't turn a safety net into a hamock. Remeber, these people are refugees, not criminals. I think there is nothing wrong with a refugee camp when you are a refugee, but if there is not some positive and negative incentives for people to move ahead, they will just stay there. The idea about prohibiting stuff is to prevent people from getting the idea that this is going to be their cozy home. People's property can be stored in storage facilities which they can take with them when they leave. Apart from that, if there is no loose furniture around, there is nothing for anyone to hit anyone with.

All those guards acting as Big Brother over all these "evil" unemployed people who've been temporarily fired are going to cost taxpayers money and are just going to make the lives of those who have committed no crime worse, why should tax-payers pay for that?
.

Well, my opinion is that everyone is evil, but most of us manage to control it. I don't think poor or unemployed people are any more evil than the rest of us. The reason taxpayers should pay for that is because (if the theory is correct) it will have a greater benefit to more people at a lower cost than the current methods being used which have so far proven themselves to be very unsatisfactory.

I think in the U.K. when you add up rent allowance, to unemployment allowance, to housing benefits, you actually end up finding that the lot of someone working 10 hours a day on a poorly paid job is about the same as someone completely unemployed, unemployed people alsio end up getting more benefits in the U.K. then pensioners who have worked their whole lives. That seems completely insane. Its a miracle unemployment in Britain was so low for so long, I can only ascribe it to a good work ethic!
.

That is one of the things which is terribly wrong with the current system. We have the same problem over here, and it's caused by the same thing. Silly do-gooders getting themselves into government to "help" people. It's Feeding people fish instead of teaching them to fish.





* * * *

I'm not completely against the death penalty either, though I would limit it to murderers and drug dealers, as a huge amount of crime and misery is linked to drug abuse, and those who support it deserve to die. What's more I think only something as extreme as the death penalty is enough to overcome the lucrative nature of the industry.
.

It worked in china after the Opium wars.

To me prison seems like one of the worst ways of dealing with someone who has committed crime. Place them in an environment full of like minded criminals where they organise themselves and form gangs and then let them out early before they've served their term to reduce the overcrowding problem in prisons!!!!!!

The cheapest, non-lethal way to punish someone is to flog them and unlike fines it hurts the rich as much as the poor.

Additionally while I'm all for reform when it works, I get the impression that many criminals just join up onto these reform programmes to get out earlier and then go back to crime.

If you take up a reform programme and are disingenuous and don't actually reform then you have wasted tax-payers money to hire all these social workers to visit you and hold all these reformative courses. As such you should be punished more for reoffending. I agree if a criminal participates in a reforming programme their sentence should be lightened somewhat, but if they reoffend after that, then their sentence should be made far harsher then if didn't waste everyones time in trying to reform them.

I agree.

Finally and this is a bit futuristic, if someone hasn't committed a crime meritting death, but is likely to reoffend, and you want to put them away and give society a break from them for a while, the cheapest way I can think of to do it, may well in the future be to put them into a state of suspended animation. No prison riots, no prison suicides, no arse-raping in the shower, less guards required, the criminal could be placed in a box 2 feet by 3 feet by 7 feet rather than having a cell and a mess area, thus it would also be more land efficient.

What you are proposing doesn't result in any reformation and a small punishment if any. Because I believe that human social dynamics is virtually a constant, I have long thought that incorigibles should be offered the opportunity to create their own community apart from the rest of humanity. I dare say that they would very likely recreate a relatively ordinary community with the same basic structure as exists elsewhere in humanity. There would be the rich, the poor, the middle class, the law enforcement, etc. Of course it would be a dictatorship with the baddest guy in charge, but that's how all our societies started.


In any case, while we're getting futuristic, guards will be very cheap when they finally get the software written for them.


David

[MSimon]

jmc wrote:

I'm not completely against the death penalty either, though I would limit it to murderers and drug dealers, as a huge amount of crime and misery is linked to drug abuse, and those who support it deserve to die. What's more I think only something as extreme as the death penalty is enough to overcome the lucrative nature of the industry.

It worked in china after the Opium wars.

There is a difference between putting a lid on a problem and solving a problem.

All the death penalty did was to make drug use less public.

BTW Saudi Arabia beheads hundreds of drug users and dealers every year. They don't seem to run short. You would think if the tactic worked the supply of dealers and users would decline over time.

Here is an interesting stat. Before national Heroin Prohibition in 1914 we had about 1.8% of the population using Heroin to varying degrees. After 96 years of prohibition we have: 1.8% of the population using Heroin to varying degrees.

That has worked.

But we have it figured out. With drug tests users now find it nearly impossible to get jobs. So what do they do for a living if they are not on the dole? Deal drugs. Now that is brilliant.

What is the old saw: for every problem there is a simple solution that is guaranteed to make the problem worse.

Did you look up Dr. Marks yet? I'll give you the short answe. By supplying users with drugs crime in the neighborhood decreased by 50+%. About 1/3 of the users were able to join the work force.

I suppose that is not perfect enough.

Or how about the current Mayor Daley of Chicago. He says that 85% of the crime in Chicago is Prohibition related. A police Chief in Conn. said the same thing about his city. I guess reducing crime by 85% is not enough incentive to change our addiction to prohibition.

Or how about this: go to any psychological intake nurse in any hospital in America. Ask that nurse why people take drugs. The answer: self medication. Why do those nurses know the truth and the rest of the population remains ignorant? Well it is an inconvenient truth.

[gblaze42]

I get uneasy when the concept of engineered evolution is discussed. I always get the notion that I might not live up to the standard necessary to be a survivor. Unfortunately, I see it comming. Once the science of genetics becomes sufficiently precise, people are going to engineer their kids to be "homo superior" .

Of course, we already do that. it's called picking the best mate that you can get !

Anyone see GATTACA ?


David

David,

I wouldn't worry about the coming of "homo superior". Evolution isn't hierarchical, it has always been about adaptation to an environment, some species luck out and are more successful at one time but typically are not "more" or "less" adapted. It's funny how so many people rate intelligence as the pinnacle of evolution, when you look at the survival successfulness of a class, we have some 100 million years to go to beat out the class Sauropsida (Dinosaurs).

[Nanos]

> If you started paying people this much money,
> you would have everyone on the dole

Would you though ?

Being that some people volunteer to do work today, would there maybe be enough such people to keep the wheels of society turning ?

(On the basis that perhaps you need only 20% of the population working, so if everyone was paid whether they worked or not, maybe you really would get 20% of the population working just because they enjoyed it!)


> and I have long believed that if people are given
> the same information and allowed to ponder it,
> they will usually arrive at the same conclusions

Agreed.


> we all have different patches missing from what
> we know

Agreed.


> everyone can fill in some patches

Well put and agreed with. And is why in many ways I hunt for information and encourage as best I can people to speak in the 2,000+ forums I'm active in.


> Is Hull really that bad everywhere?

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/4136342.stm

> Hull is the worst place to live in the UK

There might well be expensive hotspots, but even those are probably not immune from the reaches of criminals.

I lived in a crime ridden estate once (right next door to middleclass land, not that they was spared any.) and in the road I was in, about 300 odd houses, in a single year all but two was robbed (One poor teacher had their house broken into 6 times in a year, they eventually put steel plate on their ceiling to stop them breaking in through the roof.), one of those being mine as I took security very seriously. (6" thick reinforced doors, 3 ton concrete anti-ram raid blocks out the front of the house.) Its really hard to get anything done when people are pulling machine guns out of their cars to threaten you with because you refuse you bow down and buy stolen goods off them.


> The U.K. has considerably less GDP per capita and
> so could not afford that many police per person.

True, but if you had a community where the police was privately funded and your GDP for that area was far higher, then you could afford to blitz the place with security guards.


> Anyhow police spend too much time filling out
> forms these days

Agreed, sadly.


> Additionally another problem is that its harder
> and harder to convict people

Also, sadly agreed.

Though, I'd want to create a community where the police are there to stop crime from happening, or interupt it when its happening, rather than arriving well after the event, I litterly want a cop on every corner of every street. (Hence the idea of having 20% of the population in security, so there is a cop around when you need one.)


> This makes the evidence gathering
> ridiculouslty cumbersome

Agreed, another reason why I'd want 24/7 CCTV plastered all over the place to help in that direction.


> Know how we solved that? We made the stuff legal
> and then licensed dealers.

Whilst at first glance I quite like that idea, I'm reminded that in the UK at least, 1/3 of reported crime has an alcohol element to it. That all this legal booze helps cause an awful lot of pain to a huge number of people caught up with effects.

Whilst I'm not religous, having visited religious communities which forbid alcohol, I can tell you it is a refershing change to go out at night without some drunken yob wanting to bash your face in.

(And one of the reasons I choose to live where I am now, a religious heartland, which sadly is slipping away from its roots with drunken groups on street corners, graffitti now adorning walls/cars which only a few years ago was clear and drug dealers shooting people in my own street.)


> It's Feeding people fish instead of teaching
> them to fish.

Agreed.

I wouldn't want to just build homes for the poor, I'd want to build workshops, factories, teach them skills and employ them working to make more money so we could afford to build more homes/etc.

[ravingdave]

jmc wrote:

I'm not completely against the death penalty either, though I would limit it to murderers and drug dealers, as a huge amount of crime and misery is linked to drug abuse, and those who support it deserve to die. What's more I think only something as extreme as the death penalty is enough to overcome the lucrative nature of the industry.

It worked in china after the Opium wars.

There is a difference between putting a lid on a problem and solving a problem.

All the death penalty did was to make drug use less public.

BTW Saudi Arabia beheads hundreds of drug users and dealers every year. They don't seem to run short. You would think if the tactic worked the supply of dealers and users would decline over time.
.

Somehow I knew this topic would initiate a response from you.

My theory, (To me, a theory is just a model for understanding. )
on this is that perfection exists in the abstract. Real world results can be optimal, but seldom perfect. No matter what you do, there will be some component of criminal activity (and it doesn't matter what you make criminal) that cannot be reduced.

Silly as it seems, the human race seems to have a distributed caste system, and somebody's got to be the criminal ! If that position isn't filled, someone will change jobs so they can fill it ! (I'm joking. Sort of. ):)

Seriously, out of the population of Saudi Arabia (~28 million) a few hundred a year would represent 0.00012 % of the population. That's far better than we manage.

In any case, i'm not completely decided on this issue and many (if not all) of your arguments have merit.

Here is an interesting stat. Before national Heroin Prohibition in 1914 we had about 1.8% of the population using Heroin to varying degrees. After 96 years of prohibition we have: 1.8% of the population using Heroin to varying degrees.

That has worked.

But we have it figured out. With drug tests users now find it nearly impossible to get jobs. So what do they do for a living if they are not on the dole? Deal drugs. Now that is brilliant.

What is the old saw: for every problem there is a simple solution that is guaranteed to make the problem worse.

Did you look up Dr. Marks yet? I'll give you the short answe. By supplying users with drugs crime in the neighborhood decreased by 50+%. About 1/3 of the users were able to join the work force.

I suppose that is not perfect enough.
.

I remeber following all the links you posted last time we discussed drugs, and I found the information very interesting. Much of it I already knew, but some of it was new. I'm not good with names, so I don't remeber Dr. Marks.

Or how about the current Mayor Daley of Chicago. He says that 85% of the crime in Chicago is Prohibition related. A police Chief in Conn. said the same thing about his city. I guess reducing crime by 85% is not enough incentive to change our addiction to prohibition.
.

Not nearly enough incentive. The problem can be summed up by the famous words of Richard Mulligan (George Armstrong Custer) in the movie "little big man."

" Your miserable life is not worth the reversal of a Custer decision!"


Human nature being what it is, you are going to have to do a lot better than that to get the powers to be to admit they made a mistake. It's far easier for them to keep throwing people in jail.

Or how about this: go to any psychological intake nurse in any hospital in America. Ask that nurse why people take drugs. The answer: self medication. Why do those nurses know the truth and the rest of the population remains ignorant? Well it is an inconvenient truth.

I have known many people who took drugs. Many of them used drugs for the same reason that some people use(d) alcohol. Their life's suck, and drugs make them feel good for awhile.
I have a friend (Gulf war veteran) that takes ... I dunno, maybe 15 different (his own perscription) drugs, and drinks probably a fifth a day. In any case, he's always drunk. He tells me that if he didn't drink, he would go out of his mind.

I have known many other people that told me something similar. If they didn't do drugs they would kill themselves. Drugs are the only thing keeping them sane or alive.

Maybe.

There are a lot of simultaneous factors at work, and this argument precludes the possibility that something else might work as well or better.

This argument also overlooks the possibility that them dying or being insane is a natural outcome. ( though not a good one to them.)

Evolution can be ugly, and mankind can artificially interfer with the natural ugly outcomes (we do it all the time. Welfare is an example) but sometimes nature reasserts itself.

In any case, Drug usage is not a subject I feel strongly about. I've never used them myself, and i'm not highly critical towards those that do. Many drug users do commit crimes in the pursuit of their habit, and so it is only natural for some people to blame the habit because it is far easier to deal with that than the greater underlying problem of what is wrong with the people.

David

[ravingdave]

I get uneasy when the concept of engineered evolution is discussed. I always get the notion that I might not live up to the standard necessary to be a survivor. Unfortunately, I see it comming. Once the science of genetics becomes sufficiently precise, people are going to engineer their kids to be "homo superior" .

Of course, we already do that. it's called picking the best mate that you can get !

Anyone see GATTACA ?


David

David,

I wouldn't worry about the coming of "homo superior". Evolution isn't hierarchical, it has always been about adaptation to an environment, some species luck out and are more successful at one time but typically are not "more" or "less" adapted. It's funny how so many people rate intelligence as the pinnacle of evolution, when you look at the survival successfulness of a class, we have some 100 million years to go to beat out the class Sauropsida (Dinosaurs).

Or the cockroach.

There were two friends walking through a clearing in the forest when a bear came ouf ot the woods. One of the men imediately started adjusting his shoe laces and his friend said "What are you doing ? You can't run faster than a bear ! " The other man replied "I don't have to run faster than the bear, I just have to run faster than you ! "


Evolution can be a bear. Sometimes you get the bear, sometimes the bear gets you.



David

[Nanos]

> Their life's suck

I wonder if we made peoples lives better, would they use drugs less ?

As a general rule, I notice the more money/wealth anyone I know has, the less chance they are using drugs as regularly.

Except for the very religious people, who can be dirt poor and not use drugs.

Interestingly I once knew a heavy drug user who found religion, they stopped taking them, but none of their other bad habits changed! (Eg. they still stole/cheated/etc.)

[MSimon]

I have known many people who took drugs. Many of them used drugs for the same reason that some people use(d) alcohol. Their life's suck, and drugs make them feel good for awhile.
I have a friend (Gulf war veteran) that takes ... I dunno, maybe 15 different (his own perscription) drugs, and drinks probably a fifth a day. In any case, he's always drunk. He tells me that if he didn't drink, he would go out of his mind.

I have research to back that up. And it is genetic. Trauma and genetics. So yeah. To prove we are civilized let us have a war on the traumatized who are genetically different and don't get over their trauma the way the rest of us do.

So the guy wants to live. Why not respect that? If we did we could stop financing criminals and terrorist with our stupid prohibition laws.

Well you know the old saw - the stupid will be punished and collective stupidity is punished hardest of all.

We love our prohibition. And we are being punished for it. There is a God.

You now how it is. You want more criminals? Enact price supports for them. I think it is an economic law or something.

The Drug War as a Socialist Enterprise by Milton Friedman
http://www.druglibrary.org/special/frie ... ialist.htm

It amazes me how many of the people who hate socialism love drug prohibition. It has always been a wonder to me.

Price supports for criminals. It is the American way.

Oh and let us get to the good part. Why were the first drug laws enacted? Health. No sir. It was a way to punish the different. In this case by race. Mexicans and Negroes. Now there is a swell idea. Well we kept the laws and changed the reasons. Same people going to jail.

http://www.druglibrary.org/schaffer/History/whiteb1.htm

Well that was the old story. What is the new story? Class warfare. The rich against the poor. And who are the poor in America (disproportionately)? Negroes and Mexicans. Different rationale. Same results. I call that progress.

http://powerandcontrol.blogspot.com/200 ... s-war.html

Oh. Yeah. And what do our masters tell us? It is for your own good. Isn't it always.

There are consequences. Gangsta rap is one of them.

http://www.issues.org/13.2/courtw.htm - Demographics

[ravingdave]

> If you started paying people this much money,
> you would have everyone on the dole

Would you though ?

Being that some people volunteer to do work today, would there maybe be enough such people to keep the wheels of society turning ?

(On the basis that perhaps you need only 20% of the population working, so if everyone was paid whether they worked or not, maybe you really would get 20% of the population working just because they enjoyed it!)

(this may sound like i'm going off the rails, but i'm not really.)

I find it very unlikely. A mistake that one of my friends is fond of making is assuming that everything is about money. It's not. Money is just a score keeping system in the game people play with each other.
The real prize is position in the pecking order. Why else do people display the trappings of wealth ? Jewelry's main purpose is to demonstrate to everyone around that the wearer is higher up the pecking order than those without it.

It's all about sex, and attracting better quality mates.

The 20% working would be the servants that would decide they need to be the rulers. If they put themselves into a position of controlling the vital resources they would soon be hiring people to work for them and thugs to beat or kill anyone who opposed them. (this happend before. It's called Government.)

Altruism exists, but not in a context that isn't possible.

> and I have long believed that if people are given
> the same information and allowed to ponder it,
> they will usually arrive at the same conclusions

Agreed.


> we all have different patches missing from what
> we know

Agreed.


> everyone can fill in some patches

Well put and agreed with. And is why in many ways I hunt for information and encourage as best I can people to speak in the 2,000+ forums I'm active in.
.

2,000+ ? Are you serious ?

> It's Feeding people fish instead of teaching
> them to fish.

Agreed.

I wouldn't want to just build homes for the poor, I'd want to build workshops, factories, teach them skills and employ them working to make more money so we could afford to build more homes/etc.

What is to be done when no usefull skills will be needed ? A trend i've seen for years is the mechanization of everything. As machines do jobs better, cheaper, and with less complaining, what is to become of us human workers when our services are no longer needed ?

When robots are sufficiently advanced ( a time which is not that far off.) they will be capable of taking over the more menial jobs, and eventually far more complex jobs. The people who own the machines will be the rich who have no further need for the poor.

When I was younger, I used to rave about the frivolity of the people and how silly were the things that they would buy. Cars, Yachts, magnificent houses, jewelry, paintings, designer clothes, etc.
My thinking was "How much stuff does a person need ? , and why should it need to be so expensive ? "

I have long since decided that MOST of our economy is frivolous. Only a very small portion of it constitutes necessities (food, water, housing, protection, etc.) and the rest is entertainment, pleasure and egos.

So if you eleminate all the frivolous stuff in an economy, what do you do with all the people who make all the frivolous stuff ? They become unemployed and destitute. (That won't be good.)

To put it another way, a Friend of mine was telling me about his experience in China where he was overseeing the construction of a Water or Wastewater treatment facility. The plans called for a long entrance along a road to the main building, and he recounted how a crew of about a hundred chinese showed up every day to dig holes on either side of the roadway to install poles for luminaires. After each hole was finished, about thirty of them would get together with ropes and bambo to erect the light poles. He noticed the facility had lots of construction equipment, and one machine in paticular could do the job faster and with far less people at a greatly reduced cost. He mentioned this to one of his chinese colleages and the colleage responded, "Then what would we do with all of these people ? "
He said the work was excellent, and the poles were all perfectly aligned, and there could be no improvement on the quality of their work.
However, he did learn that things are not always as they seem, especially when it comes to people.


Thank God rich people buy so much frivolous crap !


David