CMV: I have yet to hear a compelling argument against the implementation of a UBI : r/changemyview - "You missed the most obvious reason, which is that it would cost trillions of dollars a year, and you can't raise that amount of money from taxes without destroying the economy.
we'll never know unless we actually try
Lots of trials have all show the same thing. You get some small benefits, but nothing proportionally to what you'd expect from spending that much money. The Gulf Oil nations basically are doing UBI already because all citizens are guaranteed a job with zero expectations. The result is that almost all real work ends up being done by foreigners. Many of these people have to live in slave like conditions because no citizens have to work these jobs themselves, so they would rather stretch the amount that free money can buy. This is only somewhat sustainable for these countries because they have have trillions in free money (fossil fuels) in the ground, but it would be impossible for a large diversified economy like the US."
CMV: I have yet to hear a compelling argument against the implementation of a UBI : r/changemyview - "Where do the taxes come from? You’ve already said we can all live off UBI.
”If everyone had money given to them they’d become lazy!” perfect, let them
What income are you taxing? The only money we have is from UBI. You’re going to take the UBI from us to give us the UBI? Is next month just deficit spending?"
CMV: I have yet to hear a compelling argument against the implementation of a UBI : r/changemyview - "If no one values it enough to pay you for it than no, they’re hobbies. I like playing video games it’s of no value to anyone except me. You should give an amount of your paycheck so I can dedicate myself to video games and excessive masterbaition"
CMV: I have yet to hear a compelling argument against the implementation of a UBI : r/changemyview - "Because someone has to feed a lazy person. Somebody has to work for people to survive-- distributing the work equally is the kindest and fairest way to do it (yes, we are not very good at this currently, but that doesn't mean we should make it worse). If you lived in a house with two flatmates, and they 'choose' not to do the dishes, they have chosen for you to have to do it all, or otherwise that you should have no clean dishes whatsoever. Likewise, if you say we should allow some people to just opt out of contributing to society solely because they choose not to, then you also are saying we should demand some people work twice as much to pick up the slack. It is cruel to expect anyone to be in the latter group."
CMV: I have yet to hear a compelling argument against the implementation of a UBI : r/changemyview - "I hated getting my baby teeth pulled out. I hated getting shots. Excercise can be exhausting and painful. Doesn’t mean people shouldn’t do these things. Painful things can be good. And some pains prevent worse pains. Work sucks but feeling like a dependent or moocher can suck worse."
CMV: I have yet to hear a compelling argument against the implementation of a UBI : r/changemyview - "The problem I am seeing with your logic is that it’s simply not kind at all. Just because you haven’t thought through the consequences of this proposal, doesn’t mean it isn’t cruel, because it is. This system has to be paid for, and even a paltry $500 per month balloons the federal budget to the point that we’d have to print so much money that inflation would completely cancel out the $500 increase in income. It’s cruel to tell people “we will give you free money for simply existing” and then not also tell them “but this policy caused so much inflation that goods cost way more, plus we have to pay for this UBI so we are taxing you $800 so you can get your $500 payment back” To answer why being lazy is bad. There simply is not enough automation for humanity to survive if everyone was lazy. Until there is, being lazy will be considered a bad thing."
CMV: I have yet to hear a compelling argument against the implementation of a UBI : r/changemyview - "I don't think you fully grasp how unpleasant some of the jobs are that are completely necessary for the maintenance of modern civilization. Why would anyone clean sewers if they were provided a livable wage to not work? UBI removes the incentive to work. Our society would fall apart if people didn't have to work.
Edit: also it IS well studied. Studies consistently show it reduces work incentive: https://www.heritage.org/taxes/commentary/universal-basic-income-not-the-panacea-its-advertised"
Giving people money helped less than I thought it would - "Just give people money. It's the simple, brute-force solution to so many problems. In low-income countries, charities are sometimes measured against whether their interventions are better than simply giving people cash. Even in high-income countries like the U.S., when disaster strikes, often the best thing you can do is get money into the hands of affected people immediately. They know whether they should use it to buy gas, rent an Airbnb or fly to their cousin's house one state over. So it wasn't that crazy to assume — particularly once promising pilots were released — that the same should be true for addressing chronic poverty in high-income countries. If you give a new mom a few hundred dollars a month or a homeless man one thousand dollars a month, that's gotta show up in the data, right? Alas. A few years back we got really serious about studying cash transfers, and rigorous research began in cities all across America... Many of the studies are still ongoing, but, at this point, the results aren’t “uncertain.” They’re pretty consistent and very weird. Multiple large, high-quality randomized studies are finding that guaranteed income transfers do not appear to produce sustained improvements in mental health, stress levels, physical health, child development outcomes or employment. Treated participants do work a little less, but shockingly, this doesn’t correspond with either lower stress levels or higher overall reported life satisfaction. Homeless people, new mothers and low-income Americans all over the country received thousands of dollars. And it's practically invisible in the data. On so many important metrics, these people are statistically indistinguishable from those who did not receive this aid. I cannot stress how shocking I find this and I want to be clear that this is not “we got some weak counterevidence.” These are careful, well-conducted studies. They are large enough to rule out even small positive effects and they are all very similar. This is an amount of evidence that in almost any other context we’d consider definitive. And yet, you'd be hard-pressed to hear about it in the media: “Overall, the larger and more credible studies in this space have tended to find worse effects, and yet the press seems to prefer to cover the small pilots that show positive impacts,” Eva Vivalt, a co-author of one recent OpenResearch study on guaranteed income in the U.S., told me. The war on poverty is the unfinished business of American liberalism... Winning the war on poverty will require more than just transfers, it will require building and improving institutions that provide education, health care and housing... researchers did point out to me that some much more narrowly targeted cash programs that are currently underway were pulling their weight... While exciting big results from pilots tend to make headlines and travel quickly on social media, sobering results from RCTs generally don’t... Perhaps the most egregious offender is the Denver Basic Income Project — the most bizarre set of findings I reviewed... One researcher said that the university press office seemed to lose interest in a press release about their paper once they learned it was a null result, saying that publication could affect support for public assistance programs... Among the many studies still underway, there are much more specific and targeted cash programs — say, aimed at pregnant women, people just leaving prison or those recovering from a major negative life shock — that look promising. If we hesitate to say what works and what doesn’t, money will be wasted on things that don’t work: money that could have gone where it would make a difference.
I still see left wingers claiming that the studies prove that universal basic income works. But their gospel is more money solves everything
Clearly, the problem was they didn't give them enough money
Thread by @LoganLancing on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "In 1966, Richard Cloward & Frances Fox Piven published an article in The Nation magazine outlining a strategy to force the US government to create a basic universal income by overwhelming the welfare system. 🧵
They argued that forcing more people onto the welfare rolls would create such massive bureaucratic disruption and strain on local & state budgets that a national solution would be inevitable. They believed this strategy was more likely to succeed than previous efforts to mobilize the poor because it offered immediate economic benefits and did not require mass participation. They suggested this strategy could also help build political power in the ghetto by delivering millions of dollars to the masses, which could translate into political support for those who helped them. This strategy was the perfect wedge to help catalyze what Herbert Marcuse would later call the "Great Refusal" of the established order. Marcuse envisioned a total rejection of America's morality, culture, and Constitution. Both Marcuse and Cloward & Piven recognized that the working-class was stabalized by advanced capitalist societies. Marcuse observed that the working class had become integrated into the system, adopting its values and resisting radical and revolutionary change. Cloward & Piven argued that their strategy could overcome the inertia of traditional movements by offering tangible economic rewards; a catalyst for a revolution that would start at the bottom and eventually break everything, including the counter-revolutionary working class. Marcuse described the "biological need for socialism" as a "new sensibility" to emerge among anyone who had a grievance with the status-quo. He suggested that this "new sensibility" had the potential to catalyze broader social change, even if it originated in minority groups, or "ghetto populations," as he called them. The Cloward-Piven strategy, by directly benefiting and empowering "ghetto populations," could contribute to the development of this "new sensibility." The promise of guaranteed "free money" could spark a sense of solidarity and radical consciousness - a "biological need for socialism" - potentially leading to a tangible revolution.
All of this is to say that communists and their allies have been trying to overwhelm the system by intentionally breaking things for a very long time. The strategy is simple: overwhelm systems and break them. "Immiserate the workers" so they will demand socialism. Make people poor and miserable by intentionally breaking things. Then, those people will be more susceptible to giving up their Constitutionally protected rights for what they think is going to be a miracle cure. It's never a miracle cure. It's always more poison."
Thread by @Athan_K on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "Yet another Universal Basic Income study was released just before the holidays. While being given ~$500 per month in free money, participants only ended up $100 richer and smoked more cigarettes. The full results are eye opening.
The study gave about $500 per month to 695 households over two years in Compton, California. Another 1,402 were designated as a control group. The findings:
“Receiving guaranteed income had no impact on the labor supply of full-time workers, but part-time workers had a lower labor market participation by 13 percentage points.”
“Income (excluding the transfer) was reduced by $333 per month on average relative to control households, and expenditures were reduced by $302 per month.”
“At the same time, average non-housing debt balances declined by $2,190 over 18 months relative to the control group, although the drop is not statistically significant.”
“We find a significant improvement in housing security, but no overall effects on indices of psychological and financial well-being.”
“The recipients of twice-monthly transfers were more likely to own a car, had lower credit card debt and greater food security than recipients of quarterly transfers, but otherwise transfer frequency had little impact.”
“In sum, the cash transfers have a strong positive impact on the index of housing security, but no clear impact on the indices of psychological well-being, financial security, or food security.”
“The list experiments show strong evidence of relative reductions in IPV, weak evidence of reduced alcohol consumption, and moderately strong evidence of relative increases in tobacco consumption.”"
Collin Rugg on X - "NEW: 'Wakanda' inspired city in Africa, which was going to become the real-life version of the city from Black Panther, has officially been scrapped. Phase one of the $6B futuristic 'Akon city' was set to open in 2026; however, only a single building was made. Senegal granted singer Akon 136 acres to build the "smart city" back in 2020 to be a symbol for Africa's future. Only a single building was built. People living on the land were asked to move and promised they would receive money. Akon has since been accused of "Ponzi schemes and pyramid schemes" and that his "Wakanda" city was "likely a scam," according to his former business partner. Now that the 'Wakanda' city is no more, the land will be used for a much smaller project, a $1.2B tourism development managed by Sapco."
Damn colonialism and white supremacy!
Owl of Athena 🇮🇱🎗️🐿️ on X = "Remember when I told you Sal Khan was evil? I didn't know the half of it! Meet the Civility Score, courtesy of Khan's "Dialogues." Get your kids used to having a social credit score, and make sure they understand their highest value should be the opinion of their peers! What could possibly go wrong?!"
Stop Killing Games - Wikipedia - "Stop Killing Games (SKG) is a consumer movement with the goal of preserving video games after they are taken offline. The movement was started in 2024 by Ross Scott after the shutdown of The Crew, a racing game that required a constant internet connection despite being mainly single-player. A central concern of the movement involves online-only games and downloadable content being listed on storefronts prominently as a purchase, instead of as a rent or lease, despite the possibility of access being remotely denied to the purchaser (without an expiration date at the time of purchase) by the publisher unilaterally. The movement quickly gathered popularity, being covered by various YouTubers and news outlets. The movement has launched multiple government petitions, of which the most prominent is an European Citizens' Initiative named Stop Destroying Videogames... He is critical of online-only games being shut down, describing the practice as an "assault on both consumer rights and preservation of media" and comparing it to movie studios during the silent film era "burning their own films after they were done showing them to recover the silver content", while also pointing out that "most films of that era are gone forever.""
Dexerto on X - "Minecraft creator Notch responded to Pirate Software’s disapproval of the Stop Killing Games campaign "If buying a game is not a purchase, then pirating them is not theft""
Daniel Foubert 🇫🇷🇵🇱 on X - "I am a Western supremacist. The West is the greatest and most advanced civilization that has ever existed. Everything we import is inferior. From Greek philosophy to Enlightenment science, Western thinkers formalized logic, developed mathematics, and rejected appeals to custom or hierarchy as sources of truth. This rationalist tradition laid the groundwork for modern science, engineering, and governance. Centering the individual rather than the group enabled the West to develop unique legal and political frameworks. Roman law introduced legal personhood; later, thinkers like Locke and Montesquieu advanced the idea of inherent rights. The result was the emergence of constitutional states, civil codes, and democratic institutions based on individual consent and accountability. The systematization of knowledge gave the West a long-term innovation advantage. Medieval universities, the printing revolution, and the scientific academies of the 17th and 18th centuries created a pipeline of cumulative learning. Peer review, replication, and classification (e.g., Linnaean taxonomy, periodic table) enabled continuous refinement across generations. Scientific abstraction allowed nature to be modeled, predicted, and manipulated. From Galileo’s mechanics to Maxwell’s electromagnetism, from Pasteur’s microbiology to Crick and Watson’s discovery of DNA structure, the West turned observation into technology. These breakthroughs directly led to industrialization, modern medicine, and applied chemistry. The codification of law into universal, abstract systems enabled scale. Roman law, canon law, the Napoleonic Code, and English common law introduced principles like equality before the law, contract enforcement, and property rights. These legal structures became essential for commerce, administration, and state formation across continents. Western empires imposed institutions rather than just extractive control. They introduced censuses, railway grids, modern bureaucracies, court systems, and educational models. These weren’t just instruments of dominance — they replaced pre-existing structures and left lasting administrative frameworks still visible in many postcolonial states. Abstract finance made capital scalable and mobile. The Dutch and British pioneered joint-stock companies, stock exchanges, and marine insurance. The Industrial Revolution was fueled by these tools, which allowed unprecedented pooling of risk and investment. Central banking and credit markets followed, enabling global economic coordination. Applying scientific knowledge to mechanical systems led to overwhelming technological supremacy. Western societies developed steam power, electrical grids, internal combustion engines, airplanes, rockets, and digital computers. These technologies transformed production, warfare, and daily life — with no comparable parallel elsewhere. Western languages became the default codes of global exchange. French ND then English dominated scientific publishing, aviation, diplomacy, and software protocols. This is not due to cultural preference, but because the West created the institutions — universities, regulatory agencies, technical standards — that defined modern professional and scientific activity. The global adoption of Western models is what distinguishes it from all other civilizations. Its principles — legal uniformity, individual rights, institutional science, scalable finance — have been implemented worldwide. Even regimes opposed to the West use its tools to govern, trade, and wage war. No other civilization has achieved that level of structural universality."
bernoulli_defect on X - "The depths of Britain’s mismanagement can be seen in the fact that not only is it the poorest large Anglo-sphere nation, but it’s also the poorest Germanic, Norman, and Celtic(!) nation. Horrific.
Noticing this puts to rest all the imo very dangerous narratives of ‘colonial looting’ as an explanation for modern Britain’s wealth. It’s doing *worse* than comparable non-imperial nations, not better!"
Married man secretly wed again, got busted after second wife gave birth at hospital where first wife worked - "Vaithialingam Muthukumar, a 49-year-old Indian national, was sentenced to three months and three weeks' jail"
Too bad he didn't know about the loophole for polygny in Singapore
Why are Liberals the sorest winners ever? : r/CanadianConservative - "Maybe my sample size of Twitter/Reddit/Youtube/Tiktok is a poor sample size, but EVERY post is the same gleeful rubbing salt in the wound to conservative voters for having the audacity to vote wrong. And it's same insults every time
-Pierre lost because he wouldn't, or couldn't, get security clearance
-He was too divisive/negative
-He was too maga
-He has no experience
-lost his seat
-blew a 25 point lead
-He's the Stornoway squatter wasting money on a byelection to steal a seat
And like. The insults don't even make sense. I can refute all of them. See below comment."
The only thing worse than a sore loser is an ungracious winner
Cory Morgan on X - "The leftists howling about Pierre Poilievre parachuting into an Alberta seat were dead silent when NDP leader Naheed Nenshi parachuted into an Edmonton seat a few months ago."
Meme - "Alberta Dippers are crying
Cost for Battle River-Crowfoot by-election for Pierre Poilievre? $1.95 million.
That's $22.91 per voter in a riding that was already going to elect a Conservative no matter what Now here's what that money could've done instead:
1. Pay for 20-25 full-time nurses for a year in rural hospitals.
2. Fund a mobile mental health team across the riding.
3. Hire 80 classroom aides so kids with learning 'needs don't get left behind
4.Cover several rural school bus routes for a full year.
5. Build or refurbish 2-3 hockey arenas/community halls.
6. Give $25,000 grants to nearly 80 small 'businesses or farms.
But nope, all of it went so Poilievre could parachute into a "safe seat" and keep his job.
Funny how there's "never enough money" for health care, schools, or crumbling rural infrastructure... but there's always a blank cheque for political theatre."
"I'd gladly pay 23$ versus the 400$ I was paying monthly in carbon tax Imao. Sorry but 23$ is a drop in my the bucket compared to federal waste of tax payers money"
Of course, when it comes to things left wingers approve of like renaming Yonge-Dundas Square, the cost is nothing because the normal budget is so big
Alberta Dippers are crying : r/CanadianConservative - "Where are these people when the long ballot people waste tens of thousands of dollars in administration and paper costs to achieve nothing? They complain when democracy takes place and costs money, but not when attacks on democracy take place and cost money? Where are they when tens of millions are sent to a place for aid, but everyone knows it will simply end up funding the terrorist regime's weaponry? That $150m could do a lot more for healthcare rather than to cause deaths, but the $2m for democracy is a problem? These people are hypocritical, idiotic losers."
Alberta Dippers are crying : r/CanadianConservative - "But yet 214 candidates ran in this election that was going to elect a conservative anyways"
Alberta Dippers are crying : r/CanadianConservative - "I'm willing to bet that not one single of those Libtard or Dipper welfare and handout queens on r/alberta said a single word or raised a single objection when The Turd called the '21 election two years early at a cost of $650 million dollars."
"And, he called that election to thwart the SNC Laviland investigation. 2015 Harper bad, 2019 snc scandal, 2021 Manitoba Lab Leak, 2025 SDTC scandal , said orange man bad. They rule by fear. Justin was the puppet. Carney, is the architect. of, Canada's misfortunes."
Alberta Dippers are crying : r/CanadianConservative - "Since when can you build 2-3 hockey arenas or community centres for $2 million? 1960?? You couldn't build even one with that. One of the newer Alberta arenas (Cenalta Centre, Medicine Hat) cost $80 million ten years ago, when our dollar was like 40% higher and prior to massive inflation."
Meme - "r/OLED_Gaming
Is this burn-in? How screwed am i? Got laid off and need to return this work laptop
*jerkmate*
I cant seem to get rid of this text no matter how many pixel refreshes i do, is this burn in?"
""Is oled right for my usecase? I goon for 14 hours a day at peak brightness""
