Politics Discussion Thread February 2013

OrphanWilde

Top-level comments should introduce arguments; responses should be responses to those arguments.
Upvote and downvote based on whether or not you find an argument convincing in the context in which it was raised. This means if it's a good argument against the argument it is responding to, not whether or not there's a good/obvious counterargument to it; if you have a good counterargument, raise it. If it's a convincing argument, and the counterargument is also convincing, upvote both. If both arguments are unconvincing, downvote both.
A single argument per comment would be ideal; as MixedNuts points out here, it's otherwise hard to distinguish between one good and one bad argument, which makes the upvoting/downvoting difficult to evaluate.
In general try to avoid color politics; try to discuss political issues, rather than political parties, wherever possible.

As Multiheaded added, "Personal is Political" stuff like gender relations, etc also may belong here.

Top-level comments should introduce arguments; responses should be responses to those arguments.
Upvote and downvote based on whether or not you find an argument convincing in the context in which it was raised. This means if it's a good argument against the argument it is responding to, not whether or not there's a good/obvious counterargument to it; if you have a good counterargument, raise it. If it's a convincing argument, and the counterargument is also convincing, upvote both. If both arguments are unconvincing, downvote both.
A single argument per comment would be ideal; as MixedNuts points out here, it's otherwise hard to distinguish between one good and one bad argument, which makes the upvoting/downvoting difficult to evaluate.
In general try to avoid color politics; try to discuss political issues, rather than political parties, wherever possible.

As Multiheaded added, "Personal is Political" stuff like gender relations, etc also may belong here.

I think the most important task for the government is to handle oncoming automization in a good way.

The current trend with robotics and automization is fewer and fewer workers being necessary for the functioning of society. The end-point as I see it is one of two societies - either the fruits of automization are used to bribe the unemployed masses from rioting, or they're used to wall off safe places so that the people who own and run the robots don't care about riots.

Obviously, I'd much rather have the first case than the second.

We've lost, by my count, 1,394,100,000 jobs in the US in the last two hundred years. You may notice that is a larger number of jobs than people actually exist; this is because, if all those jobs actually existed, we'd still be farmers. (Value calculated by dividing current median income in the US by an estimation of sustenance income necessary to a lifestyle appropriate to, say, the 1700's. Not terribly accurate, as it doesn't account for the increased value of leisure time, or the automation of non-economic tasks; the actual figure in these terms may b... (read more)