"The people "that need the most help" are the people that live as high-on-the-hog as their means allows. They have a higher standard of living than the average person within their own income bracket."

No, the people who need the most help are the people who did the right thing, saved up, had a stroke of bad luck eat those savings, and then a second dose of bad luck shat on them while they were already staggering and knocked them on their arse.

Which happens a damn sight more than people tend to think, because they don't really comprehend statistics or large populations.

"Now, we propose to give these people with higher than average standards of living, living as high-on-the-hog as possible, more, and we propose doing so by taking money from people with a less than average standard of living who responsibly do not live as high-on-the-hog as possible."

No, UBI is so all the poor sods with fuck-all discretionary income to put into savings, and/or anyone who gets shat on before they can recover from the last time they got shat on, have a better buffer between them and getting long-term fucked in the wallet - something that is inevitable on a national scale and a problem which can and does snowball into dragging down others. The current mess of social security systems are both shit at dealing with this and easily manipulated by lobbyists who want to shove their snouts into the trough.

We need something better. "But wah someone'll rort it" is a pathetic appeal to status quo when the status quo is already being rorted, and rorted hard.

Could you add some explanation of where your question is coming from?

I can't tell whether (a) you somehow think the State doesn't already rely on armed enforcement, (b) you're sarcastically suggesting UBI is doomed to fail because it'd require violence to overcome the entrenched interests exploiting the inefficiencies of the existing welfare system, (c) you think that any welfare system more complicated than having the local sawbones check the company flophouses for fleas is still too big-government for your tastes, (d) you're just trolling, or (e) something completely different.

You've misunderstood their post. Specifically, you've misunderstood this part here:

"On the back end, we withhold somewhere between 0% and 2000% of the UBI from people's paychecks, depending on how much they make. Most plans call for withholding $1 for every $2 or $3 you make over the poverty line. For most people, most of the time, UBI into their bank account is balanced with UBI withholding from their paycheck. When that paycheck goes away, UBI remains, and they don't need to do anything to tap into that resource."

That's not withholding from the UBI, that's describing a method by which to fund the UBI; i.e. a straightforward pay-as-you-go progressive income tax.

Neat. And I'd actually prefer the halfway font (50% each) more than either of the original fonts.

That wasn't the violation. The violation was that the surveillance system was equating "they're poor" with "they must be committing fraud" and proceeding to run detailed searches of databases that are normally kept separate, targeting low-income areas without reasonable cause to suspect a specific crime, all without a warrant.

For a car analogy, it would be as if the police decided to automate searching the cars of everyone who happened to be driving while poor because someone, somewhere, must be speeding.

Hmm. What's the rate of change, of the rate of change? Acceleration is no less important than velocity.

(or as a related joke goes, "it's not the fall that kills you, it's the sudden stop at the end")

Yeah, a bunch of greedy assholes perverted copyright into a societally-damaging farce by extending it into infinity and beyond. That's pretty much true. However, the Mandalorian still cost money to make and it hasn't even been two months since its debut, never mind copyright's original fourteen years. You could instead have decided to:

1- simply just not watch it; this isn't the X-Men, you actually do have a choice here
2- wait seven, ten, fourteen or whatever years that you feel would actually be an equitable societal trade
3- find someone who has Disney+ and set up a movie night/weekend/whatever, chip in for some snacks
4- admit you want it now, that you can afford it, and pay for it like a civilised being.

Choosing to pirate it just means the Dark Side^W^W^W Disney's advertising execs have your hindbrain clutched between their cold, undead fingers.

That is awesome. I wish it was more common.

You mean the one you linked that says "If a driver cannot stop in safety, the driver may drive cautiously through the intersection"?

When my choices are "risk causing an accident" or "proceed through the yellow light" I will do the latter - as the law allows.

"This law protects whistleblowers."
"The people who blew the whistle under that law were imprisoned!"
"They're protected by armed guards, I don't see the problem."

The "somehow" is because there's actually a difference between permafrost (what the study is about) and a glacier (what entombed those planes). Wikipedia has rather decent articles on both, if you're interested.

Actually, UBI would be an opposing force to real-world communism, since it reduces an avenue of government control over the populace in a very democratic manner: every citizen gets a vote, via money in their wallets, on the spending of a large slice of the nation's budget. Yeah, individually it's not much, but it's not meant to be - the point of UBI is so that no matter what stupid crap the government decides to spend the rest of our tax pie on, each and every citizen should at least be able to vote for "I get food and shelter this week" and have that happen.

Remember, while in _theory_ communism is the ownership of the means of production by the people, in _practice_ it's always worked out to be the total control of the means of production by a corrupt government. And in a modern first-world economy, money is _effectively_ the (control of the) means of production as far as any given individual is concerned.

Modern (bureaucratic) governments can and do create any number of hoops of arbitrary difficulty for any desired demographic of their citizens to jump through before those citizens can have any income (i.e. money, i.e. control of a means of production) at all. We follow "our" government's rules or we starve. That's an _enormous_ stick for those in power to wield, no matter how "free" and "democratic" their PR claims them to be.

"It's an intellectually lazy solution: simply input a minimum income floor into the system."

This overlooks that there is already a minimum income floor inputted to the system: zero is a real number.

"But what people need isn't money. What they need are things like water and housing. My gut instinct tells me that providing those things directly will be more efficient than having all kinds of middlemen (landlords, Pepsi co) in charge of administering the funds."

As little as that has to do with UBI, part of the point of UBI is that it vastly reduces the amount of middlemen involved in deciding who's eligible to receive the money.

"But these days, politicians seem to be allergic to the government actually providing anything, unless there is a way for their buddies in there to skim money off the top."

Which is one of the reasons they're allergic to a UBI, because it's difficult to hide skimming and nepotism in a system that is so much easier to audit.

You can download the files that compose the individual iterations from the Github site you linked:

Webfonts are available in fonts/webfonts
Opentype fonts for installing locally and for print applications are available in fonts/otf
Variable fonts should be considered experimental, but can be found in fonts/variable
Source files are available in source as Glyphs files.

E.g. traversing to fonts/otf/PublicSans-Regular.otf will bring you to the page where you can download the OTF file to install the Public Sans Regular font.

I've used Windows for a long time, as an end-user, as an IT technician and occasionally as a network administrator. Recently I've been experimenting with Linux.

I quickly came to a realization: Windows was developed _with the expectation that the user has no idea what they're doing_. It's not as prevalent these days, especially since Windows Vista, 8 and 10, not to mention the horrific idiocy that is dimensionless design, but back in the good old days? The GUI was designed to hold your hand and I could usually hit F1 and expect to get a contextualized help window that presumed I had no idea what I was doing and needed my hand held. Even the help for the OS's CLI utilities tended to be written in a plain and simpler style.

Linux, however, _expects the user to already know what they're doing_. Which makes complete sense given its origins, but doesn't help it penetrate Windows' primary demographic: everyone else.