Not just work, but ANY benefit should be denied to a hundred people if it means that one of them might "get away" with abusing it. Welfare, voting rights, due process, healthcare, you name it.

I still get a kick out of the old articles that predicted advances in automation would lead to a golden age where everyone would hardly have to work. The automation and increased efficiency happened, but the rich just pocketed the difference and kept everyone working for them. Anyone fucked by the dwindling number of meaningful jobs combined with the continued rise of living costs can...well, get fucked. Kids can ask their grandparents to tell them bedtime stories of /hour factory jobs right out of high school and other fairy tales like "pensions", "vacation days", and "sick leave".

The most glaring injustice is rent prices not only constantly going up, but constantly spiraling out of control to the tune of 9% increases a year in some places. The old rule that rent shouldn't be more than one-third of your take home pay seems like hopeful insanity to young people today.

Fuck I'm all over the place tonight. My point is, every time I hear a boomer - the generation that grew up during THE SINGLE MOST PROSPEROUS PERIOD FOR THE MIDDLE CLASS IN ALL OF HUMAN HISTORY - complain about how lazy and entitled young people are today, I have to pop a vein resisting the urge to strangle them.

Oh, and the fact that all that prosperity and opportunity was provided by a hefty tax on the rich so we could stay out of debt , provide for the poor, and drive down college tuition costs to allow unprecedented economic mobility.

Things which boomers were determined to scrap the instant they were comfortably set up thanks to those opportunities. All so they wouldn't have to pay back their share for the next generation to enjoy the same.

A small town in Manitoba tried it in a pilot project http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mincome

tl;dr the people who stopped working were moms to raise their kids and students who no longer had to trade off going to school versus help provide for their families. In other words people who genuinely benefited from it.

Well as long as people are dying off it's okay then. It's not like there aren't any workhouses.

Big frowny face on that plan.

As much as I've griped about the poor people I know who waste food, my frustration isn't that they are being inefficient with benefits that they do not appreciate enough -- my frustration is that they are making bad choices that leave them hungry for some portion of the month. If they were getting through the whole month and then throwing away remaining food just because they could, that would be one thing; but throwing away food and then going hungry is just stupid.

If anything, I'd rather see SNAP distributed on a biweekly basis, to distribute the "famine" phase.

I've said for years that food stamps should be conditional on graduation of a basic home economics course. The agribusiness lobby disagrees with me, and demands more free benefits for Nabisco, Lay's, M&M/Mars and ConAgra.

and when are we going to get around to that voting literacy test?

Looks like it

Very strange that this is kept here, but all the old PoE and PoE-news forums were trashed. Many years of epic memories and flamefests lost.