There is no problem. You are making up a non-existent problem. You may as well ask what if the ocean freezes around Florida.

My plan produces no disincentive to work. It produces a disincentive to steal and commit crimes and to take abuse and unfair pay by providing for life, for shelter, for food; but it provides for a horrible life that nobody wants to live, a life that is separate from a life in the gutter eating food out of trash bins only in that you are secure with a locked door, a bed, and food that isn't rotting and rodent-shit-infested.

Under my welfare plan, the unemployed live a life of misery and suffering, with full bellies and with security of person, rather than with empty bellies and the threat of slow death looming over their heads. You tell me this is a disincentive to work? I tell you you are insane.

You lived on government subsidies in college; you weren't paying 100% of your way.

No, you explain a unicorn.

You have said to me that you would not work if you could live a life in a tiny, cramped apartment, a small 224 square foot thing, half the size of a studio apartment, with no money, with only the cheapest food, with no television, no Internet? You would live as a farm animal, kept in a small cage, fed slop, with no attention, no life?

Sir, I have found the solution to your life. Quit your job, buy a can of kerosene, and set fire to a fleet of police cruisers parked outside a precinct. They will take you to prison, where you will need no employment. The most major difference between your unemployed life under my plan and your unemployed life in prison is you are not allowed to just up and leave prison.

I think we can conceptually do a rolling release without trouble. I've even written up how to do it: add DT_RUNPATH into each binary in a package pointing to /usr/packages/$PACKAGE/$VERSION/lib; install any compatibility packages into their own /usr/packages/$COMPATPACKAGE-$VERSION/; and symlink those binaries from /usr/packages/$PACKAGE/$VERSION/lib/liboldshit.so.1 to /usr/packages/$COMPAT-PACKAGE/$VERSION/lib/liboldshit.so.1.

When the binary loads, it'll look for every library in /usr/packages/$PACKAGE/$VERSION/lib first. If it finds nothing, it'll look in the usual places; otherwise, it'll load that library. gtk2-2.1.3 breaks shit that works with gtk2-2.0.1, but they both install to /usr/lib/libgtk2.so.2 and so can't be installed together? Well, install gtk2-2.0.1 to /usr/packages/gtk2/2.0.1/lib/libgtk2.so.2, and symlink to it from /usr/packages/oldshit/1.3.9/lib/libgtk2.so.2; when the user runs /usr/bin/oldshit, it'll load libgtk2 from the latter path, instead of loading it from /usr/lib/libgtk2.so.2.

The DT_RUNPATH can be left in place always. If a package becomes incompatible, upgrading a library may involve moving the current library's files under /usr/packages, creating symlinks for the broken program under its /usr/packages tree, and then installing the new version of the library. When a newer version of the incompatible program has been tested and vetted, you can upgrade it and use the new library; likewise, brand new programs requiring new libraries that break 90% of the system can use those libraries in the same way, rather than replacing the system library--until that library is considered system-stable.

You can go by degrees. You can, in fact, say that parts of this rolling release are stable, but other parts are not, and so those other parts will be left at an older point until well-tested. You can essentially mix together various incompatible stages of release.

This is a false problem.

Let us say we find a woman, yes? We take this woman, and we put her up in a frat house. Every morning, several men come in, rip her from her bed, and violently rape her. Now, this woman is getting laid, she is having sex, because men are coming in and pounding her brains out, every day. She may even get pregnant if it keeps up long enough.

You have a woman who is having sex and will soon have a family, so she has no motivation to search for a boyfriend and get married. What do you do about this disincentive to date?

This is the argument you have lain out.

You see, you would live in a bedroom the size of a twin bed. Six feet on one dimension, nine on the other; half the room taken by the bed, a quarter taken by an end table holding your clothes, and the remainder just enough for the door to open. You would exit into a sitting room, ten feet by nine feet, which is coupled to a small kitchen built with a counter-bar separating the room to maximize space efficiency and act as your dining table. Your bathroom would have a basin mounted to the corner in a shower stall, just above the spigots which turn on the shower; there would be no bathtub, only a shower stall and toilet. You would have no money to buy anything; your life would be that of a priest.

Does that sound attractive to you? I have seen garages larger than this space, and I have afforded actual stuff to put in them.

In our current system, people on welfare lose money when they get jobs. Leaving unemployment would have made me poorer, so I did not work until someone offered me a substantial amount of money. Anything below $10.50 was negative; if we assume that only $8/hr was worth my time, then only a job making $38k/year would have been attractive. Some of the poor are getting food stamps, housing assistance, and unemployment: if you can't pay them above $58k/year, employing them will give them less than remaining unemployed; $8/hr is about $16k/year, so raising their income by minimum wage would mean they'd only see a $75k job as attractive.

In my system, you collect no matter what. Getting a job always means you get more: working means having more, not less, and not the same amount. In my system, you don't work to be a productive member of society and get yourself off the public dole; you work because you will be fully, one-hundred-percent compensated for your efforts, without losing the hand-out you're getting in the process.

There is no disincentive to work.

I don't have a problem with that. You will be the lowest slime in society, barely alive, unable to afford any luxury. Occasionally, you will be able to scrape together twenty ... thirty dollars, to buy yourself some small trinket, if you don't rip your pants first and require a needle and thread to repair them instead. You will eat the worst food, live in the worst home, have no television and no video games, no laptop, no tablets, no smart phone, no music. Perhaps the public library will keep you occupied.

Good luck with that; I wish you well. When you are ready for more income, you will have a hot shower, clean clothes, and a fixed address to write on your McDonalds application; and if they refuse to pay you a fair wage to elevate your quality of life by at least as much as the hardship of working for them, you can just go home.

Yeah, of course. As long as those morons go into debt and get compsci and engineering degrees, we can sift through 40 or 50 resumes and remind them that they're basically worth the dog shit on the bottom of our shoes, and pick the few who are willing to lick our boots. The other 74% can work at McDonalds for the same pay.

Let's get more available talent deep in debt so we can push their salaries even further down, reduce their benefits more, and generally abuse our employees. If they get snippy, we fire them; there's like 4 times as many employable degree holders out there as there are jobs anyway, we won't have a problem filling our positions.

4 more years without a job to get what amounts to a high school diploma--because damn near everyone has a bachelor's degree, so you're not really getting elevated--is not lifting anyone out of poverty. It's putting risks and demands on them that will impact their lives forever; it's putting risks on them that they can't afford, that they don't have the money to control. It's putting strain on them that more affluent people can better manage and survive.

Businesses ultimately benefit from mass college education through a labor market surplus, resulting in reduced salaries. Instead of paying $150k for a programmer in 1995, they pay $63,700 for a programer in 2010.

I'm not talking about where money comes from, but how.

You, the individual, have to get a college degree. What degree do you get? If you look at the job market, you will see Project Managers are coming into high demand. In the coming years, entry-level salaries of $85-$100k are on the table. So you become a Project Manager, you get your degree in 2019, you get your PMP; and, in 2019, you find that the fastest-growing career field has become a glutenous mess like computer programming, and a good Project Manager makes about $65k, possibly $75k when your career is developed out, if he can get a job at all. Enjoy your unemployment.

When a business examines its operations, it projects growth in the coming years. It sees expansion, sees that it needs more Project Managers, more Computer Programmers. It hires some new people with minimal qualifications, possibly uneducated and untrained, for cheap. It then begins training and educating them, paying for their tuition, moving grunt work from the high-dollar labor onto the lower-skilled labor. It builds a workforce, because it knows what workforce it needs; the business takes almost no risk in this, and the laborer IS BEING PAID TO BE EDUCATED and so takes no risk.

As long as the business can just wait for the individual to make themselves into the labor force needed, the business will do nothing. It's not a matter of chipping money in; if you wanted to do that, pay for college entirely in business payroll taxes, and you would still have a sub-optimal system with fewer jobs, higher unemployment, and lower salaries, with individuals taking risks and spending four years or more incapable of entering their career field and basically wasting their time sitting in a classroom.

You want a horrible idea? Government subsidizing the labor market to prop up businesses at the expense of the individual, at the expense of the poor. That's what public-funded college is: putting the screws to the poor, the minorities, the disadvantaged, and sucking them dry to make the rich and powerful fat.

\
Now you will just have to hire hit men on amazon prime. Dude, he tried to get 5 people killed. He's not a hero just because you think he stuck it to the man and sold you your drugs on line.

indeed, assuming he was guilty, and the jury thought so. Press accounts pretty damning and red handed in the arrest. then it seems like those charges omitted what Id consider the most heinous crime: soliciting the murder of 5 people.

I loved his lawyers theory that the Mt Gox mogul was really the mastermind. That would have been such a wickedly cool story. Since the FBI seized the assets of Silk Road about the same time Mt Gox had some liquidity problems it even seemed failntly plausible. I'd love to hear what the jury made of that piece of spaghetti on the wall.

Every time someone disagrees with me, I'm either called a Conservative or a Liberal, a Republican, a Democrat, a Tea Partier or a Socialist. Even on the same discussion.

The truth is I have no friends, have no social life, have no desire for a social life, and work directly in strict facts and reality. The things I say come from facts, from analysis, from science and mathematics; if all you have is political bullshit, then I can simply point and laugh and dismiss you as a kook along with those Xenu worshippers.

You're doing it wrong.

The total individual income in 2013 was $7,229 billion from wages. Business income was $2,100 billion. The total taxable personal income was $9,329. GDP isn't a real thing; you can't tax it.

17% of that, divided by 240 million adults, is $6,557 per year or $546 per month.

I have personally rented a 750sqft apartment for $725/mo, at about $1/sqft. I paid $56/mo for utilities. A 224sqft apartment at an overpriced $300/mo would cost around $30/mo for utilities. With a food budget of $100/mo, personal care budget of $35/mo, and clothing budget of $35/mo, we are left with $46/mo of leeway.

That is enough for a single individual to survive, off the streets, with a warm bed, food, water, a shower, clothes. That is enough to end homelessness, to end hunger. At the 3.4% normal growth rate, it becomes $584/mo in 2015; and a couple living together would have $1,093/mo in 2013, growing to $1,169/mo in 2015. I own a 1350sqft house plus basement, and I personally live on $1100/mo including Internet, cell phone, $300/mo heating, food, water, and my mortgage; it is more money than you think.

Healthcare has always been a difficult problem. Systems which cost $3,800 per capita in one country would cost $150,000 per capita in another. Canada's system is interesting: a single payer system plus private insurance required for every employed Canadian, putting 74% of Canadians on an American-style healthcare system and the rest on a Norway-style common fund. The ACA, on the other hand, is a mess: the Government treats the health insurance system as a command economy, dictating that people must have health insurance, and dictating what that insurance must cover, dictating how the insurers must cover it, and even dictating how much it will cost for people at a low income level. Lenin would have been proud.

Getting people off the streets is a first step: desperation and homelessness are terrible. Hunger, lack of sleep, exposure to disease, to the elements, to rotting food, to despair, these are terrible poisons. This, in itself, is a great step forward for public health; do not think of healthcare as solely the domain of hospitals and pharmacies, but as system encompassed by the whole of society.

The ACA was a mistake My first step would have been to impose a direct-managed tax on hospitals: based on their size, their income, their patient load, I would require them to provide fully-stocked clinics and some number of clinical care hours, spread across a space based on clinical care density. There would be a schedule or a formula, and guidelines to move clinical care outward if the clinics are idle: If you staff ten clinics in a ten mile radius thirty-six hours per day, but they are idle for eight hours per day, then staff them for thirty hours and move the remaining eight hours to queued clinics or to new clinics further out.

This step is cheap and self-managing. No taxes are taken: it is left to the hospitals to fulfill the needs of the community by extending a portion of their capacity, of their profit, to community services. People could get wounds treated for free, fix bones and sprains, get vaccinations, health checkups, the like. As the population and its health needs expand, hospitals expand; as hospitals expand, they are obligated to expand free clinical care services.

For added balance, you are required to provide insurance if you have it, but the clinic covers the deductible (service is not free, but 100% hospital covered); all funds collected in payment are added to the hospital's responsibility: if a $1 million clinical service generates $500,000 in revenue from insured patients, then the hospital is now obligated to fund $500,000 more clinical service. This is, of course, an order of magnitude more complex than anything I've said.

We would build from there. Healthcare is expensive and difficult. The ACA has raised our insurance costs and increased poverty across America; we should have gone slower. What is done is done, though, and I have no appropriate measures for this new world; I fear the above is now just a fantasy of what could have been, what should have been, and not what can now be.

Yummy neurotoxins in their shrimp and fish, melamine in their infant formula, firewalled global internet, and censored bloggers. Before the Pure Food and Drug Act in the US it was common for bakeries to add sawdust to bread, and then there's the great killing fogs of industrial england.

freedom from regulation isn't freedom in all cases.

That's not an answer. Or rather, it's almost the answer I suggested.

Student loans are Federally guaranteed--and now Federal. Bankruptcy for Federal loans is just a roundabout way of saying "free college, but we destroy your life in the process" (bankruptcy will liquidate your assets and shit; it's not just a straight 7-year mark on your credit). Bankruptcy for private loans just means we shift the burden off the Government and onto the banks, who then need to perform their own risk analysis; but bankruptcy can be quick, and default would likely be around 75% (same as underemployment: 74% of STEM degree holders do not have STEM jobs), so the availability of private loans would collapse due to the impact on banks's profits.

I don't believe banks would take on the risk. It is too much, too volatile. Student loans can be mishandled through no fault of the student, and aren't very diversified: they're a bet on the market in the future, and the student may need to change direction mid-flight, or may come out the other end to a brick wall--either of which results in greatly increased risk for the lender. Other lenders making loans also increases risk: the more students you have, the more likely each individual is to default, and thus the more risk you have per debt object. This is not a good place for a business to put itself.

No, bankruptcy for student loans is only a natural aspect of what I have said: no government intervention, no free college, no Federally-backed loans. As soon as that happens, students can get out of loans by bankruptcy; those who do will find it a terrible answer, but they will also find it a great relief. The banks will find it severely damaging to their profits, and will pull out of the Daddy Warbucks business of sending everyone's kids to college. Student loans will be small, largely for continuing education, lent to people who already have developed careers; but the vacuum of skilled labor will require fresh blood too volatile to fund, and the employers will need to take up that risk because the banks simply will refuse.

Focus effort on K-12 education. Stop funding college education for everyone. No government support for student loans; no free college from taxpayer money. When the businesses sweat, tell them ... tell them we have workers here, and that they can certainly find our fine, educated young men chomping at the bit, ready to take low salaries and transfer time-consuming grunt work off those high-salaried professionals while their employer works with them and funds their further education.

You know, make the people who know what jobs they need, what expansion they expect, and what it is their business does take the social responsibility of building the American workforce.

We're so obsessed with putting high risks on the individual, demanding they speculate on the greater market, take on the risk of unemployment themselves, go years without building their career to get an education, and then hope that everyone else didn't see the same opportunity and speculate the same way and flood the market. It is the poor who can least sustain themselves when this risk fails them, and the rich who stand to benefit most from this method of operation. This arrangement benefits businesses by producing cheap, surplus, skilled labor; it benefits the middle class and upper class by providing them a stronger position in their self-driven education than the poor; and it benefits the poor least by burdening them with the consequences of dicking around in college hoping for a future career when they could be trying to get into their career now, immediately, for pay--a burden that the poor are less capable of carrying than the more affluent.

But no, we don't see the poison; we only see the plate.

Because the Food and Drug Administration decides how to regulate the production, sale, marketing, and use of drugs; the Drug Enforcement Administration decides how to schedule a drug's legal standing, including whether research on the drug for medical use is allowed, whether medical prescription is allowed, and whether possession or OTC use is allowed.

Something recognized as a drug follows different FDA rules than something not recognized as a drug. Scheduling something as a drug makes it a drug.

Marijuana is actually a Schedule 1 substance, known to the DEA to have no potential medical use. Phenibut is not, so it can be OTC, but only if you don't tell people what it does.

To put this into perspective: phenibut can be used once per month to any real effect, unless you ramp up the dose heavily. It produces immediate tolerance, and the withdrawal effects are worse than hard opiates. Based on these things, it obviously has no medical use, as it can't treat anything in one use and it can't be used even short-term. Why isn't it Schedule 1?

But, yes, weed is scheduled. Scheduling isn't automatic; a bureaucrat decides what to schedule.