What do you do when folks in expensive places can't eat while folks in low-cost areas are able to live better?
$100 had different spending power in different places. I can buy more beer in Prague than in Indianapolis. I'll buy even less in Oslo. You often get variance within a country too: A gallon of milk (and a lot of other food) is generally cheaper in Indiana than Hawaii.
I'm with you in spirit - we should tax wealthy people - but not in a way that can tax folks that already are struggling. We just don't have global cooperation like that nor are things starting on equal ground to do that sort of simple taxation. But another comment has already touched on that.
If you want AAA games, you are going to have a safe game. You get the same with movies - Bigger budgets cause safer behavior with less risk taking. You wind up with a pretty game, a somewhat safe story (that they think will sell) and gameplay they think is just good enough to keep you going.
It isn't that the other games are bad, though. It isn't like we are talking "handheld camcorder student-written movie" vs "polished hollywood blockbuster" but more.... Beautiful painting by a mostly unknown artist vs beautiful large, publically displayed and privatly funded artist. Big budgets get you more assistance and more/better tools and more space and more human help and more connections.
It is probably important to remember that a large portion of a blockbuster's budget is advertising. Advertising is often 50-100% of the production budget and I'm guessing AAA games have similar advertising budgets. I'm not sure how a large advertising budget gives you better products, though it might get you more folks if your game is online.
Of course, I'm guessing if you limit your search to FPS games, your experience might be a different.
I live in Norway, have residence and stuff. I can travel freely through most of europe without much hassle - but I can only travel 90 days out of 180 days - then you gotta go out of the area (or back to your home country if it is inside), stay out or home for 90 days, and then start anew. The closest border to me - one to Sweden - has no real security. A customs office because there is border shopping in the area and I know they very occasionally stop folks. A crossing an slightly inconvenient distance north just has signs.
On the other hand, I live in Norway. Bits like healthcare and a good safety net makes things nicer. I'm from the US originally. This nice stuff could be adapted for the US if folks would put their energy into helping others rather than spite.
Mismanagement of resources is bad no matter what system is used. Just because some under one sort of ideology and corrupt leaders failed doesn't mean that folks can't take the bits that were good, adapt and improve them, and see good results.
Norway is a petro-state that managed to amass a national wealth fund. Cherish what you have. Understand that it doesn't necessarily translate to every community.
Americans pay more for worse outcomes, so this is clearly a political/priorities issue, not an issue with wealth.
Other counterexamples are the other European countries with the same safety net which are not petro states (they do have colonial wealth though).
A lot of this was possible because of high corporate taxes and high marginal taxes on high incomes, so in theory this model could apply in most places.
Not all european countries have colonial wealth. There is universal healthcare in croatia and that nation started from scratch essentially 30 years ago and isn’t really a very strong economy today either.
If this is your take, you've missed the point. I said there is no reason good bits can't be adapted to one's society. it isn't that one system will work for everywhere or that it'll even look the same. Some things are unique to Norway, but other things definitely are pretty widespread.
You see this with healthcare in different places: Details change and sometimes it is lacking, but lots of places offer healthcare to its citizens that is low-cost to free when you need it. There is a lot of variation in what countries can do. Some places are poor but still manage to a point. Some places just refuse, like the US - heck, the US has oil and could have funded things for its citizens and keeps bragging about being rich, but they aren't gonna use it for the immediate welfare of its citizens.
That's great. It's only around 8 hours of work instead of 16.
Its still a lot of money at $16.50. 12 days a year you labor just for the opportunity to labor. Your point only makes it slightly better and doesn't really take away from my point - it's a lot of money for a good number of folks. You know, the folks that could really benefit.
A 50% discount is probably pretty hard to get - and you are still asking the poorest folks to pay 4 hours of labour for busses.
To get the reduced rate many municipalities will require you to visit an office, somewhere you likely have to take transportation to, during office hours (aka working hours), and provide documentation to prove this.
This isn't really unknown either. There's a very good story anyone can look up about Dr. V in India and what it took for him to actually get the eye care he wanted to provide to the people who needed it.
In the digital world many of us know you want to deeply understand your user and design with them in mind. Same thing here in the meat space.
we don't let our neighbors and kids become fent zombies on the main drag
Nope, you'll take homeless folks right to jail, promptly, where they can be zombies out of sight. It isn't like folks in small towns are gonna help the person with treatment. As long as they stay out of view most times, they'll just be gossip. If they are lucky, someone will invite them to church. Small towns will absolutely let folks suffer if they just stay somewhere out of sight.
> homeless folks right to jail, promptly, where they can be zombies out of sight
The best option is treatement. But the worst is leaving them on the streets. They're hurting themselves as much as they could otherwise. But they're also hurting bystanders.
Once they're arrested that screws up their chances of recovery though. Even if an officer formally books someone and puts them in the drunk tank until the methamphetamine wears off so they don't scratch their own face down to the bone, they were still arrested. That arrest follows them around, and it severely reduces their chances of finding employment that will actually motivate them to work towards financial goals instead of merely just getting by. A lot of former drug addicts end up working in construction or commercial sailing not because they're too dull to be hydronautics engineers or factory logistics overseers, but because those are two of the few well paying industries who will hire regardless of your arrest record.
The U.S. has one of the highest re-offense rates out of any developed nation because an arrest is something employers, banks, and even privately run welfare programs all see as a permanent red flag. It's like someone figuratively puts walls in the way so the person with the arrest on their record is confined to a tiny square, cut off from viable opportunities. What makes it even worse is the combination where some states don't expunge records of juvenile offenses when you turn eighteen if they're federal offenses, and records of arrests aren't differentiated by how long ago they happened. If you got thrown in juvie at sixteen for mail fraud for using your uncle's name to scam magazine subscriptions then in some places like New Jersey that'll still be there when you're forty and will be treated as if it happened yesterday.
From a macro view there's more harm done when you arrest an addict than if you had left them to teeter on the edge of an overdose, which is just really messed up. All because of zero tolerance policies from organizations that have nothing to do with law enforcement.
Arrests do not follow you around if you do just a little effort to legally fight it. Until you are convicted you are innocent, you just need to follow the process to ensure that you are never listed as guilty by no contest (which is sadly often the default if you don't ask for a court hearing).
I wouldn't expect a drug addict to know the above, but it still needs to be stated. If anyone happens to be arrested in the US make sure you don't accidentally get listed as guilty and served time (that night in jail counts as time served so if the judge would sentence you to one night in jail)
There's a heavy need for rehabilitation shelters, but the public at large looks down on addicts and refuses to fund them. That leaves organizations like the Salvation Army to take up the slack, and the results can negligible. There's very little support on the private shelter's side other than providing a roof, a cot, and some basic directions to nearby organizations. Meanwhile the addict is meant to improve their behaviour almost immediately, fight the shelter itself to maintain their cot, and facilitate setting up their own recovery. Many of them choose to be homeless rather than put up with the ridiculous standards of these privately run shelters. Meanwhile on the public side it's a problem we started working on in the 1970s after the Vietnam War created a large wave of drug users, but Reagan gutted psychiatric care in the U.S. in 1982 and that meant that any progress towards making those shelters a reality was smashed into shards. What we were left with is people being put into psychiatric facilities that don't have the type of structure needed to rehabilitate an addict.
There's no way up from the bottom other than having another person take your hand. And nobody wants to be the one to reach down their hand. They rely on broken organizations and inappropriate tools to do that because their proximity to that ruin makes them uncomfortable. Either the addict gets screwed by the police or they get screwed by the rehabilitation facilities. So the addicts decide to turn away from both, and the public decides to turn away from the addicts. As you said, those in the public ostracize and shun them.
I can provide some, specifically the section on probation in [1] and "drug war logic" in [2], though it's not really something you need a source for. If you arrest someone it affects them for the rest of their life. Drug abuse is a terrible affliction, but it's still temporary. The abuse stops when access is revoked. Revoking that access can be a difficult and sometimes even dangerous process, but it marks the end. It can begin again if it's induced by an addiction, but that merely starts another temporary behaviour.
That's not even considering systems, like how a single arrest introduces costs to the state because of the transportation, the provided meals during their stay, the hygiene standards the arrestee must go through, and the required paperwork. Or how it affects total prosperity by almost guaranteeing that someone will be stuck with less productive and less meaningful employment for the rest of their lives, reducing taxes the town/city, county, state, and federal government can take and that person's own contributions to the local economy.
When someone is a danger to innocent people walking by who didn't choose to do any fentanyl, their recovery chances are secondary to the safety of the innocent passers by. The people who advocate for leaving them on the street never want to take responsibility when one of them kills a random kid for fun. That may be something that only a small minority of fentanyl addicts are going to do, but it's not something that we have any obligation to allow in the name of helping drug addicts.
That's the biggest issue. The police aren't the correct solution, at least in their current form, but there are no other solutions. Is it worth it to unfairly limit one person's life in order to protect them and people around them from a short period of harmful behaviour? If that limitation was temporary, yes. But it isn't temporary. Being arrested and having a minor possession charge that will be erased after five years without the person re-offending wouldn't be as bad.
> Is it worth it to unfairly limit one person's life in order to protect them and people around them from a short period of harmful behaviour? If that limitation was temporary, yes
I think the question turns on scale. If one person has the capacity to harm dozens, as one does in a city, the calculus may shift towards incapacitation. If it’s a small handful of non-violent interactions, on the other hand, as would be more likely somewhere less dense, then I agree with you. (Same turn on access to weapons.)
>That may be something that only a small minority of fentanyl addicts are going to do, but it's not something that we have any obligation to allow in the name of helping drug addicts.
Yep. There is no solution except to shoot those filthy addicts, amirite?
I mean who wants to spend $35-50K/annum to keep these scum in prison, right?
In fact, why should my tax dollars pay for any of these subhuman criminals, addicts and other undesirables? A bullet only costs a dime.
That's the way to go, right soerxpso? Pew! Pew! Pew!
Somehow, you believe that jail is the best option for treatment?
So, lets jail the professionals that are addicted too. After all, it is the best option for treatment, right? They are also hurting themselves as much as they could otherwise and probably hurting bystanders and their family. But that's ridiculous - few support that. If it were the best option, it would be recommended treatment for all.
The best option for treatment is actual medical based treatment in a facility that isn't punishing you and with staff trained in caring for you in your state. The best option for not leaving people on the streets is to house them. Housing and feeding folks makes treatment much more likely to work.
If professionals harass people under drugs (or without) we do jail them. It's just the homeless in the liberal cities who have untouchable status and can freely violate all kinds of laws.
They were not saying such a thing, you can open the post and Ctrl-F for "jail" to 0 results outside the quote.The comment says that treatment would be the best option, but anything else would be better than letting dangerous criminals roam the streets unmolested.
Adults actually have to work at making new friends and few get any tips on how to go about doing so. I honestly didn't really get any until my late 30s or 40s - and that was mostly because I moved to Norway and for some folks, loneliness and lacking connections is a real issue.
Children have school. School gives you a shared experience to talk about and time to talk to others, both through actual coursework and play. Children are handed the tools to possibly make friends and they aren't even old enough to have decades of baggage and anxiety yet.
As an adult, you have to create those conditions. For many, work serves this role. Hobbies and regular activities (bowling, for example) help. Depending on the person, it can be online (Met my spouse this way - a silly online game back in the later text-based, formulaic MMORPG era). And you are a lot busier as an adult with more responsibilities filling your time. Of course it is harder as an adult.
What I said is a very general statement that broadly applies to all civilised countries, reiterated because the parent comment was very incorrect suggesting that rights are mainly protecting citizens from their state in the US. It's simply not true.
Apple trees are weird. You can take a seed from an apple tree in your yard and grow apples that taste disgusting. One of the apples from that disgusting tree might make apples that taste absolutely heavenly. You can't just grow an apple tree from seed and expect anything other than an apple only fit for making alcohol. Johnny Appleseed was keeping folks drunk, not healthy.
Hybrids sometimes produce no seeds or seeds that won't grow the same thing. Sometimes this is desirable - seedless watermelons, for example. Or having a plant that grows better in your region at the cost of having to buy seeds (which you were likely to do in modern times regardless).
I get your point, but this isn't really a problem that's special to GMOs in particular. It is a problem now, and it isn't always that horrible of one. We can support farmers better now and prevent some of it now.
What do you do when folks in expensive places can't eat while folks in low-cost areas are able to live better?
$100 had different spending power in different places. I can buy more beer in Prague than in Indianapolis. I'll buy even less in Oslo. You often get variance within a country too: A gallon of milk (and a lot of other food) is generally cheaper in Indiana than Hawaii.
I'm with you in spirit - we should tax wealthy people - but not in a way that can tax folks that already are struggling. We just don't have global cooperation like that nor are things starting on equal ground to do that sort of simple taxation. But another comment has already touched on that.