LordsFire
Internet Wizard
He literally linked a page on the crime statistics in Alaska. Click the link.
American Political Policy Discussion Thread
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He literally linked a page on the crime statistics in Alaska. Click the link.
Bear Ribs
Well-known member
The link I gave literally breaks it down by location. Try again.
ShadowsOfParadox
Well-known member
I did. The crime statistics are state wide, the map thingy is a bit more specific though and really looks like evidence that it's one neighbourhood dragging the rest of it down.
Chicago has a crazy high crime rate... in specific places.
Whitestrake Pelinal
Like a dream without a dreamer
Easier for who, precisely? It's a lot easier to see thread titles and participate or pass, than to wade through yet another bundle-thread with multiple topics discussed without actual threading and anything new buried at the bottom.
ShadowsOfParadox
Well-known member
So, I look at the map, and it gives me a general idea of where has a higher crime rate than normal, I click the map to try to see what the individual differences are so I can actually figure this out... and paywalled.
Soooo eh. Based on the map there's like two areas right next to each other that are more dangerous than the rest of Alaska and a few areas that are somewhat risky crime wise, can't get any specific numbers because paywall but that's enough for me to be of the opinion that it's not State policies causing high crime rate.
Alaska has issues a lot of issues that cause crime and general social disfunction.
My sister said she thought she saw a guy being choked/strangled on the street in Anchorage there once, and it is the only place I've seen people passed out in the street from what is likely heroin use. Even heard a car chase and had it crash and a foot pursuit below/next to an apartment area I staying at.
Also, the officers in AK have to be able to due moose control on the spot any time of year, and that takes up more time than you would think, leaving less time for actual human issues. The place gets...weird during the long nights, when there are not many jobs open/people around, and there are a lot of DV issues people like to pretend doesn't happen.
The AK state gov and investors also put a lot of money into projects that assumed continued good trade with China and decent oil prices/cheap logistics/DC not being stupid with regard to oil policy. So the state budget is kinda fucked right now, and has been since long before the Wu Flu came along; they can barely afford to run the state ferry, which a lot of outlying communities and businesses rely on.
AK also has issues with homelessness, and what happens with them in the winter, that causes crime issues.
However, the Permanent Fund is something that cannot really be touched by the state gov for any other purpose, without damn near rewriting the AK state Constitution, so it's not a piggy bank they can rip off like DC does with Social Security.
The Permanent Fund works, even if the rest of the state's economy is kinda fucked currently, and external issues mean there are high crime/increasing poverty rates.
My sister said she thought she saw a guy being choked/strangled on the street in Anchorage there once, and it is the only place I've seen people passed out in the street from what is likely heroin use. Even heard a car chase and had it crash and a foot pursuit below/next to an apartment area I staying at.
Also, the officers in AK have to be able to due moose control on the spot any time of year, and that takes up more time than you would think, leaving less time for actual human issues. The place gets...weird during the long nights, when there are not many jobs open/people around, and there are a lot of DV issues people like to pretend doesn't happen.
The AK state gov and investors also put a lot of money into projects that assumed continued good trade with China and decent oil prices/cheap logistics/DC not being stupid with regard to oil policy. So the state budget is kinda fucked right now, and has been since long before the Wu Flu came along; they can barely afford to run the state ferry, which a lot of outlying communities and businesses rely on.
AK also has issues with homelessness, and what happens with them in the winter, that causes crime issues.
However, the Permanent Fund is something that cannot really be touched by the state gov for any other purpose, without damn near rewriting the AK state Constitution, so it's not a piggy bank they can rip off like DC does with Social Security.
The Permanent Fund works, even if the rest of the state's economy is kinda fucked currently, and external issues mean there are high crime/increasing poverty rates.
Bear Ribs
Well-known member
This is the first time I've seen an area over half the size of California and split across several counties including the state capital, largest non-capital city, and several dozen other cities, which is not contiguous but split across locations, called "Just one neighborhood." What a flexible word that must be.
Correction: You already had that opinion and you're seizing any possible excuse to support it. There is no reason you'd need exact breakdowns of crimes per neighborhood to tell if the crime is localized when the map already breaks it down by location and the spread is bigger than most states and includes over a dozen major cities and towns.
It's also highly irrelevant to the discussion at hand. You can't knock down @LordsFire's claim about increasing crime by quoting a dividend in a state with radically higher crime rates than average, regardless of how much you stretch the definition of "neighborhood." The crime still exists, ergo the dividend does not argue crime won't exist.
Edit: And a bit more proof.
96% of states have less crime than Alaska. Regardless of nitpicking about "neighborhoods" there has to be some reason 48 other states don't have those "neighborhoods" (which are bigger than those entire states).
ShadowsOfParadox
Well-known member
Honestly, this whole crime thing has also been a distraction, because my claim was never "Government Welfare Good" it was "Current system creates a barrier to exit and NIT and UBI don't have that barrier to exit".
Would Government Welfare going away entirely to be replaced entirely with private charity make me happier? Sure.
But in the meantime, I'd rather have a system that doesn't go "Well, getting that next raise will take you just out of the group our welfare is targeting, too bad for you I guess."
Would Government Welfare going away entirely to be replaced entirely with private charity make me happier? Sure.
But in the meantime, I'd rather have a system that doesn't go "Well, getting that next raise will take you just out of the group our welfare is targeting, too bad for you I guess."
LordsFire
Internet Wizard
The problem is, once you enshrine 'the government owes you a basic living' into law, it is absurdly difficult to go back from that, and if you can't it will inevitably end up with you heading down the same path every other communist hell-hole does.
We already have food stamps, WIC, EBT, Welfare, and other gov 'basic living' type programs.
The only difference between those and UBI is that UBI doesn't have 'Welfare Ceiling' trap, and is available to everyone once they are 18, unlike WIC and food stamps, which are another part of the 'Welfare Ceiling' trap which incentivizes staying in 'comfortable/livable' poverty indefinitely.
UBI is not a perfect solutions to our issues, but it does streamline the existing 'basic rights' bureaucracy that is now split between multiple agencies/depts and removes a lot of bureacractic waste from the process.
This is a blind spot a lot on the Right have; they keep thinking that the changing nature of society, jobs, the internet, and automation means can just be ignored in favor of 'old fashioned' ideas that are out of step with political, economic, social, and cultural realities in the US these days.
Simonbob
Well-known member
How likely is it that we'll be able to get rid of all the existing programs to replace them? Because it's near impossible to cut any of them right now.
Oh, and here, in Australia? We've had Welfare for decades. There are families where everybody from the great-grandfather down, have never held a job. Great-grandfather, grandfather, father, son, and the women of that families as well. Lot's of crime, mental issues, drug use, just bad all round.
Australia has a terrible, well, quite a few things, but entire Aboringinal villages and some sububan neighborhoods living on booze and welfare..... Free money just doesn't fix peoples problems.
LordsFire
Internet Wizard
No, it's a blind-spot that you have.
If you look at the places where chronic dependents on foodstamps, subsidized housing, and etc live, they're places where you can see visible social decay. There are rare individuals that are exceptions, but overwhelmingly, people respect what is given to them less than what they earn, and when they take the entitlement mentality that 'other people owe me the fruits of their labor just for existing,' they become increasingly toxic members of society.
All of the current government-run welfare programs were a bad idea, but at least they conceptually have the idea that they're supposed to be temporary measures while you get back on your feet after hardship and become a productive member of society again.
UBI is giving up the ghost, and just surrendering to socialism. And it will get you the same results that every other socialist experiment has.
The fact that you refuse to understand these things, that you buy pie-in-the-sky futurist fantasies about automation and permanent unemployment, changes none of the consistent, observable patterns of human behavior across millenia.
We haven't had AI, automation, the internet, or global scale comms on both hardline and sat comms before, and they have massively, massively changed the social and tech patadiagm around 'labor value'.
You view of 'labor' is a relect if when jobs used to be created/modified, more often than outmoded/done away with completely, and also fall into the trap of always looking backwards, to try to regain a reality that is no longer there, instead of figuring out how to adapt to the future. Your view on labor will become relavent again once we start having human settlements on other planets, and light lag enters the equation; till then, there are going to be less jobs, and less good jobs, to go around going forward on this ball of rock.
Of course the elite understand this, which is why they are pushing population control measures, including trying to get grinding wars going, so as to reduce how many people will end up needing UBI and less competition for jobs.
ShadowsOfParadox
Well-known member
Except they create a situation that is the exact opposite.
Let's say, for sake of illustration, the cut off is 100 dollars in wages, we have a person trying to do better, trying to drag themselves up by their bootstraps, they are currently earning 99 dollars in wages and recieve 20 dollars in Welfare, for a total of 119 dollars, they are a single parent(how doesn't really matter, they are right now), they spend those 20 dollars in Welfare on things their kid/s need. Their boss raises the idea of a 2 dollar raise, taking them to 101 dollars in wages, just past the cut off, and would leave them 18 dollars short of what they are budgeting for, they are already spending as little as they can get away with, what do?
This is the Welfare Trap, or Welfare Ceiling, or whatever you wanna call it, a point that anyone trying to get out of Welfare hits, where they are JUST below where they'd lose all benefits and are looking at a small increase in income that will result in less money available for needs.
This, as far as I can tell, is a major contributor to all those problems with Government Welfare you get so up in arms about, because the Welfare Ceiling takes getting off Welfare and sticks a major hurdle in front of people who are at the finish line.
Why should they try when getting off Welfare involves making a single step class jump because of how the Welfare laws are stuctured?
LordsFire
Internet Wizard
The 'welfare wall' creates an incentive for working X amount to earn Y income, and no further.UBI removes most of the incentive to work at all.
Why bother when you can instead just vote yourself a bigger paycheck?
ShadowsOfParadox
Well-known member
...Maybe it's just me, but when I put in effort and am then barred from advancing my position through no fault of my own, I stop putting in effort.
I know what the Welfare Wall would do to me and my motivation to do anything productive. Maybe you have a different reaction to treading water though.
LordsFire
Internet Wizard
Yes, so clearly let's instead create an incentive not to work at all. That's so much better.
Bear Ribs
Well-known member
They will continue to work even then. Notably, two different studies have found that 85-90% of lottery winners keep on working after winning, and about two-thirds keep to the same company after winning. Jobs that were psychologically and financially rewarding were strongly correlated with lotto winners continuing to work for them while the ones that quit working tended to have terrible dead-end menial jobs.
People will work on their own, as long as you don't disincentivize them and punish them for working.
loyalty begets loyalty.
LordsFire
Internet Wizard
Yes, because lottery winners are the same as a whole society on UBI.
As it was said in the USSR, 'They pretend to pay us, and we pretend to work.'