The matter here is contractual, it's not a question of "that's how it works" it's a question of what the parties to the contract agreed to. In this case, the contract would be the terms that the user agreed to when they signed up for 23andMe's service. If the terms were unacceptable to either party, the contract should not have been entered into. The terms also could have been written in another way, such that the individual retains total ownership rights to their DNA, etc. But a company as sophisticated as this is unlikely to write something that doesn't give them the most possible rights that they can, and individual users are generally not sophisticated enough to read/question/negotiate/refuse these terms.

So "how it works" is that users do not perform their due diligence, and then are later surprised that the terms are not in their favor. Fixing that, is as simple as educating people to read the contracts that they are entering into, understand what rights they have and don't have, and to refuse to be taken advantage in this way. In other words, not simple at all. You could attempt to make an argument that the law should step in and regulate what sorts of contractual agreements people are allowed to enter into but... well I'll leave it up to your imagination as to why that too is a problem.

Sure, we can work with that. But in this case, my suggestion does alleviate the problem. By creating an earning exception limit, entering low-paid work DOES cause there to be significant increase in total income. If the exemption limit is 15k, you can increase your total income by up to 15k by getting a job, any job. You can further reduce or eliminate the perverse incentive by (I'm updating my suggestion here) not clawing benefits back dollar for dollar past the exemption limit, but perhaps at a rate of .50 per dollar, or you can fine tune a sliding scale such that the benefits are reduced at a greater rate the higher your earnings are. All of these are realistic, cost effective ways of helping people get out of the welfare trap without UBI. I don't think my example of a person threading the needle to maximize their benefits while minimizing their work is an example of the welfare trap, so I do not think it is a counterpoint.

Okay, by the definition above that we're working from, yeah I see what you're getting at.

We should distinguish our definition of welfare trap then. I took it to mean the strictly economic aspect, whereby getting a job that pays as much a or slightly more than one receives on welfare would actually result in a net loss to the person as a result of added costs associated with working. I agree UBI would solve this, but so does my proposal, and my proposal does it for far less resources.

Your quote from me is more focused on the psychological aspect of the welfare trap whereby folks come to prefer (for one reason or another) the lifestyle of living on welfare as opposed to working. My proposal, as I pointed out, takes this into account and attempts to incentivize, without punishing, a gradual return to the workforce. UBI does nothing to address this point.

So let me turn the question around on you, instead of doing all the heavy lifting myself. How exactly would UBI solve the welfare trap? By the standards you're holding me to, if anyone decides not to work in-spite of getting UBI they're still in the trap.

True!

Nah, that's the old way of thinking. The new hip way of arguing with people is to assert that they believe or do something so outrageous even a child could tell how dumb it is, regardless of what they actually believe or do. If they argue, try to correct, etc. ignore everything they say and just rephrase what you said the first time. Repeat until they give up.

In the province I live in (within Canada), there is Income Assistance (basically welfare), and there is Disability Assistance (DA). Welfare is about $900 a month, you need to be actively looking for work to qualify, and it gets clawed back basically dollar for dollar when you're making money. This is the one that we'd talk about the welfare trap on.

DA is about $1500 a month, but it works differently. You're not required to be looking for work (because you're disabled) but there is something called an earning exception limit of about $15k a year such that if you make $15k or less a year, you still get all of your assistance. Only after you hit that limit (per year) does the assistance get clawed back; and only if you're earning money in that month. This allows and encourages folks to go out and find work, since you won't actually get LESS money for working until you're approaching double the amount that you would make if you didn't work.

This is what I would suggest a program that encourages folks to get out of the welfare trap should be modeled on. Sure, some folks will thread the needle so they can work as little as possible in order to keep their welfare at maximum, but the result is still better than them not working for several reasons: 1. They are contributing economically with their labour, 2. They have more money to hopefully spend on food and shelter and also hopefully they get a taste for a higher quality of living which will motivate them to seek more money; 3. it costs the same for the taxpayer as if they weren't working anyways.

Not working begets not working. Maybe you've heard the maxim "The more you do, the more you can do." Folks who are on welfare are at high risk of also being depressed, not least of all because not working and being depressed are basically two sides of the same coin. Anything that encourages them to get out and work will be far more likely to lead to more work than anything else.

This is just my off the cuff answer though. It's far from perfect. But I STRONGLY challenge the idea that we need UBI to fix problems like this. In fact, I would argue that suggesting that UBI is needed to fix these issues kicks the can down the road so that instead of seeking imminent solutions, we throw our hands up in the air and give up. If we can't have our perfect ideal solution (UBI), no solution will do? Who does that position actually serve best? The folks who would rather NOT put effort into fixing the probelm.

Why not just amend the current welfare system to correct the problem that you're describing? Why do we need something as utopian (and as out of reach) as UBI to solve this issue?

I'm not so convinced that it's unacceptable in this day and age. I mean, it's a word in the dictionary, for one. He's not wrong that users are worried about enshitification under the new CEO and with an IPO coming up. Discord isn't exactly trying to replicate Microsoft and target the professional demographic either... it's still mostly gamers, who aren't exactly known for their couthness. Your point did drive home how different the times are from when I was a kid: when you would get in less trouble for literally biting someone than you would for swearing after having been bit. In retrospect, that was pretty fucked up and I was right to tell off those adults.

It's nothing like selling the gas in your car's tank to a neighbour- unless your gas tank refills itself whenever your car sitting in the sun, in which case if it is full at noon, why wouldn't you sell it to your neighbour if it's just going to refill again by the end of the day?

No, it is not.

Let's just hope Humam Sakhnini doesn't start collecting torsos when not enough users are collecting orbs.

By "may need a community" I assume you mean create a community (not find one). Discord was developed to replace previous generations of game-side chat programs like Mumble, Ventrillo, Team-Speak, Roger Wilco, etc, and the chat channels evolving into forum replacements sorta just happened along side that. Saying they replace forums isn't quite right though... they are more like chat rooms than forums; chat channels are mostly short form chatter (as opposed to medium or long form posts like Slashdot or a forum website), with a heavy focus on emotes.

With that in mind, Discord is still very gamer focused (they failed to break out of this during Covid, which would have been the time to do it [and they did try]). So, if the community you want to make is gamer focused, or at least nerdy adjacent, there are going to be a lot of discord users that will consider joining up to be virtually barrier free. On the other hand, if you're looking to make a community focused on crochet, I suspect that your target audience will not already be on discord, and probably will not want to get on discord just to join your community; for that you'd need to go to the place where your target audience already is (maybe facebook, Instagram, Pinterest?)

This criticism (if it is a criticism; I suppose it might not be intended by you as such) is a little passe, don't you think? Even Slashdot lets you go back 15+ years and see what a user wrote, as do most web forums, social media, etc. Why would you expect more privacy from Discord than you get anywhere else on the internet? I'm not under the impression that Discord is mis-representing itself in this regard. I don't disagree that a feature that lets you specify that new users to a server can only see posts from after the joined would be nice.

Speak for yourself jackass; not everyone is so partisan that we're incapable of judging individual acts on their own merits; that you assume people are says more about yourself than anyone else.

If I tell you that the earth is flat, but that's just "my truth", you'd be correct to dismiss it as nonsense. Being able to accept that there is complex nuance in the world and that people's beliefs cannot always be reduced to a binary is great, but taking that too far and failing to apply ANY critical evaluation is just as bad. Morality may be relative/subject, but that just makes it important to distinguish between a statement of morality and a statement of fact. Obfuscating the meaning of truth is helpful when discussing morality, and problematic when discussing facts.

And they've peppered the world with military bases to prove it!