Life is made to be lived, not for working.
We should increase taxes income by making everybody pay their fair share, and these include multinational corporations, and implement some sort of UBI. Where people can have a decent life without being forced to work if it is not a choice.
> Where people can have a decent life without being forced to work if it is not a choice.
Who will choose to work rather than get something for free?
I'll tell you: the same people who would pay taxes if it were not mandated by the threat of jail - that is, people who contribute to charity.
That is typically less than 1% of earnings.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_charitabl...
I believe very few people will choose to work, and therefore "decent lives" for the masses can not be maintained with this little work.
Define fair share, it's not clear to me what that is.
That it is my opinion, and you can discard it.
But I believe that if we tax small business a certain amount, big corporations should pay, at the very least, the same amount.
Again, it is not a scientific argument, it is a political one, and honestly I don't want to be dragged in a technical discussion about taxation.
Of course emotions are involved. That isn't inherently bad.
Yes actually. And I definitely don't try to couch my political views in moral stupidity like "fairness" which you are not even capable of explaining.
>Of course emotions are involved. That isn't inherently bad.
Of course it's not inherently bad. It's definitely bad when you can't even explain your position coherently but feel strongly enough about it to get into heated arguments.
That doesn't mean we've slaves to our emotions, or must make irrational decisions based on our whims.
But it is a foolish thing to say you are 100% free of emotions in your views, especially when that incorrect view is wielded as a cudgel against opposing viewpoints (which we apparently aren't even "capable of explaining").
No it's not. You just make all these statements that are baseless. I can say my political beliefs are based on rationality because my political beliefs are simple.
I never said my views are free from emotion. I said my views are 100% based on reason. I vote in my direct self interest, my values are based on my self interest, my goals are to advance my self interest.
E.g. Is it in your self-interest, that people live in a system where 1/300 are toiling away till they can't, so a guy can sit on a rocket? Is it an incredibly simple answer?
The whole point of taxes is solidarity. If you don't understand basic principles of being civil then good luck in your life.
but too many financial hurdles in its way...
And the costs wouldn't really get lower, you just change the illness. If you are healthier, you live longer and your final illness most probably will be cancer. Expensive long te treatment. Obese people die faster and cheaper.
this means, in the current world, you get to fat-shame the obese people, have color coded id cards based on their BMI, have them off flights etc till they prove that they ran on their treadmill today...
The US could take a serious look at addressing massive over consumption - but the last serious take on that was the sugary drink ban in NYC and that turned into a "you'll pry my big gulp from my cold dead hands" affair pretty quickly. The US is in too deep celebrating the exploitation of the health of their populace to turn things around - but other countries might have a chance.
I think most workers would like to see 100% of these gains go to workers. I think most shareholders would like to see 100% of the gains go to them. I think it'd be fair to share these evenly - and so higher taxes could make it so that the non-workers and retirees get some of the benefits of productivity increases.
“The normal retirement age of men will increase in 20 out of 36 OECD countries by an average of 3.5 years based on current legislation. The highest increase is projected for Turkey, from 51 currently to 62 years. Assuming that legislated life expectancy links are applied, also Denmark, from 65 to 74 years, and Estonia, from 63.3 to 71 years, will rapidly raise the retirement age.“
You can bet that some parts of life even became more unhealthy. I don't expect to live longer than my grandparents that were children in WW2.
Can't they just reduce the tax we pay and instead state that everyone is responsible for their own pensions, so if you save up enough you don't have to work longer...
Because you cannot expect all of the population to individually make wise financial decisions spanning multiple decades well past the years they can even generate income if they wanted. A lot of people already have problems budgeting for next month.
Because spreading out the "risk" of living much longer than you anticipated prevents destitute 95 year olds.
Also, on the more utopic/hippy views, it is just nice to help others, so why not institutionalize/codify helping others.
It is worth noting that if your goal is just to handle the people who didn't make wise decisions when young, the current system does more than needed, and there's a much better way to accomplish that. You can simply force people to save n% in a retirement savings account, managed by the government; ie. take the current system, but keep everyone's money separate rather than merging it into a common pool. This is how Singapore's Central Provident Fund works.
The current system really solves 2 problems: people who choose not to save enough, and people who didn't earn enough to save enough. You can solve the 2 separately: the first with the solution mentioned above, and the second with something like a negative income tax.
Now, the problem with separating the 2 is that there may not be enough political will for the second system, because it makes it obvious that the amount you receive in retirement is not in proportion with what you contributed. That's the case now too, but it's obscured by the structure of the program.
Life is about happiness - it isn't about work.
How many 60+ people do you know? Do you honestly think they should still be working?
It's not clear that retirement is particularly healthy, longevity wise.
You're essentially saying that not working may not be healthy. That's one of the strangest things I've read today.
You may not view it as "not particularly healthy" because of the frame of reference, not because of "a fact" that not working is unhealthy.
If people "retired" at the age of 25, could you reasonably argue that we'd have an unhealthy population?
But it is true. An internal study at a megacorp I worked at showed that people who didn't retire ended up living longer.
It makes a ton of sense. Intellectual work keeps your mind stimulated and your body moving. Inaction ends up killing old people.
Not all activity has to be done in the service of providing value to a corporation. You can retire and take up fishing or rock climbing, play chess, write a book.
This idea that we've been conditioned to, that the only valid life is the life we trade for money, is insidious.
Nobody argues with this. But thinking that paid work is the only source of mind stimulation and body movement is just silly.
that generation tied a lot of value to the ability to work.
the current generation looks for all possibilities to not work.
A person who is a Uber driver and a dog sitter is unable to display much skill addition after years on these jobs.
i can only quote anecdotal data about the attitude to work among generations. On the other hand, because of the changing nature of the work, it is completely understandable.
You're getting downvoted for this statement, which is utterly ridiculous.
From what I see around me, the current generations work as much, if not way more, than previous generations (such as boomers).
it is also true that if a generation is chronically overworked, they will not be interested at all in working till their death.
Both of these people are in their 60s and have earned their retirement - we need not extract any more "productivity" from them. Leave them be.
https://www.stlouisfed.org/open-vault/2021/january/refuting-...
My parents are in their mid-60s. They are both full of energy, in great health, and very productive. As a teacher he's not allowed to work past 65, even when the classes he teaches have no suitable replacements.
We should differentiate between blue-collar and white-collar work in retirement age. I would never wish someone who's worked in a factory or doing manual labor to keep on working. But if you've been sitting in an air-conditioned office all your life there's still plenty to go.
Life doesn't last forever; keeping your head down and being a "good worker" doesn't get you shit. You need to actively fight to make sure those years in your youth are worth it - since it's always quite possible that cancer strikes you down in your thirties.
For the US [2] it's 3.4 per 100k at 20-24 years of age, and 659 per 100k at 70-74 years of age (call it 200x).
A large number of people 50-70 die of cancer however. For the 60-64 group, the rate spikes to 331 per 100k. 50 to 70 can be high quality years for a person. In response to the parent comment that mentioned solving cancer only adding a few years, the lives to be saved in the 50-70 group is a very potent counter argument for the economic value and considerable high-quality years that can be added rather than dying at eg 55 or 63.
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/cancer-death-rates-by-age...
[2] https://rivercountrynews.com/an-update-on-cancer-deaths-in-t...
And the alternative is? I mean people keep doing this "A is bad" ... okay what's B? Sometimes there's this implied, horrible option B. Sometimes there's just nothing.
Never mind that there is still pretty decent child mortality from cancer. And if you count every disease that mRNA can fight ... there's a few really bad ones in there.
> So it seems that each discovery like that will be balanced by us working longer. Personally, I as a 42 y.o. in Czechia, do not expect to get any meaningful state pension ever. There will be just too many of us.
If medicine can keep us in a fit enough state, physically and mentally, I say bring it on!
If not, there isn't a discussion to be had, because it won't happen.
But that means that we really need to push with certain research forward. If you can live to be 90 and in good health, you won't mind working longer. (Though some people may mind if that means that, say, judges stay in their offices for 60 years).
It is the intermediate stage that is bad. In that stage, people suffer from chronic diseases and bad health for decades, unable to enjoy life fully and work.
I know that this isn't easy to solve. Biology of aging is complicated like hell, to the degree that not too long ago, aging was considered inevitable, untreatable and incurable, thus attracting almost no funding and scientific attention.
This has been changing lately, but it will take some time before we see results in humans and not just in mice.
Why rightly so?
Up until now, the number young people has been increasing in pretty much all societies such that society continuously had a greater supply of labor to continue meeting the bed pan changing demands of increasing number of old people.
You introduce women’s independence and easy to use, cheap birth control (IUD), and that very well can change the parameters under which society operates, which necessitate changed to how it can operate.
We are nowhere near technology where 50+ year olds are regularly able to contribute to the workforce in manual labor jobs, especially turning people over, bathing them, and otherwise laborious work it takes to take care of extremely old populations.
We are already seeing this tussle in the US, where there are vast nursing and nursing aide “shortages”, or another way to look at it is society trying to figure out how many of its resources (pay for that kind of labor) to allocate to caring for sick/old people.
It very well may be that society could be better off investing more in its young rather than old.
For example, my one of my grandparents' kidneys stopped working when they were mid 90s. In the US, they were entitled to taxpayer funded healthcare benefits which allowed them to receive dialysis. So US taxpayers paid for a van to come pick them up in a wheelchair 3x a week, perform the dialysis at the center for a few hours, bring them back. And they had to have a translator available since they did not speak English.
This went on for 4 years until they died at 99. Even though it was my grandparent, I still think that was a ludicrous waste of society's resources. They should be given an option for assisted suicide.
I hope that I can figure out a way to take myself out if I ever come into that kind of situation. I see no purpose for me to burden others with providing me with chronic care.
If you want to see real "medical waste", by the way, you should see how much is spent on a 2 year old that gets diagnosed with cystic fibrosis. Or, up until 10 years ago, a kid born with HIV. Now THAT is wasting money. In their case, the kid has never worked, will need MUCH more (essentially constant) medical attention for 30 years, expensive medicines for all that time, the treatment will fail, it's just a matter of when, and they still won't ever be able to contribute to society. By the time they're of working age they'll be so disabled they can't work (ok maybe the HIV baby could work for 10 years, tops). It's not reasonable to even have them type on a keyboard after maybe 14 years of age.
Let's kill em all! (especially now with mRNA vaccines we're pretty close to a cure) ...
Do you think societies have unlimited resources to spend on everyone? Should they be directed only to people with healthcare problems? What about people that suffer non healthcare tragedies?
Not spending $2M of resources to keep a baby alive that has a 99% chance of not having any quality of life is not “killing people”.
But if these tools can also dramatically lessen the cost for medical care, wouldn't that more than balance out?
For example, in medical circles in my home country, smoking-related cancer prevention campaigns are widely believed to pay for themselves easily, despite low efficacy. (Sorry, I have no citation for that, but it is what is taught to students in medical school.)
In countries where the social safety net fully pays for such health issues (this includes Germany), the cost of cancer patients is itself a tremendous strain on the system.
Additionally, the decision for social security to reimburse (i.e. cover) such drugs typically involves long term economic impact computations. Access to such treatment is almost surely a win for everyone.
This is a great point, and there are also knock-on effects to consider. Say, the parent, child or sibling that removes themselves from the workforce to give daily care and ferry a patient to and from treatments.
Since your attitude is already set, there's less resistance to ending such pension plans for younger people now even as they continue paying in to support their elders. The sentiment with social security in the US is the same. If an administration ever actually tries to gracefully end it, I think it will be easier to pull off than they expect.
This is good news. In the last year I've lost 2 close ones to cancer.
In my family, we rarely suffer from heart attacks and we only had one dead in last 40 years or so that died from cardiovascular disease. He was a heavy smoker and his non-smoking brother outlived him by almost thirty years.
But cancer is our faithful family enemy, even though it mostly comes late in life. Every tool against it will meet my approval.
I'm dreading hearing about more cases since Covid restrictions included delaying a lot of cancer screenings.
On one side, old people are less likely to support new trends, starting with fashion and ending with political causes.
On the other side, they carry a lot of experience. If a sizable minority personally knows the misery of war or hyperinflation, repetition of those miseries becomes less likely. Plenty of political criminals built their careers on naivete of the young.
I think that we will end up with the best of both worlds eventually. If longevity tech succeeds, brains will stay young, but memories will accumulate regardless.
For me humanity is up for a massive shrinking. Either because we do it or (some decades later) mother earth does it.
The man is phenomenally effective in certain engineering contexts and deserves to be listened to if he's talking about rocket engines or something. He's no more credible in public health and population modeling than any other rando.
A dwindling youth essentially enslaved to take care of a burgeoning aging population is pretty dystopian. So if life extension technology gets implemented with something like mRNA technology, then it seems like that would have to be balanced out by higher birthrates.
The population dynamics of such a situation would be dwarfed, imo, by the political and wealth inequality problems. Society is structured firmly around an average human lifespan.
Life extension in the sense of average lifespan marginally increasing is possible, but in the sense of reducing aging is a very very different problem.
Using the word "enslaved" will successfully paint anything as a dystopian future, that doesn't mean it is the inevitable path of mRNA vaccines. If we have life-extension technology, maybe people will start having more kids, maybe twins/triplets will become more common, maybe the poorest countries will never achieve the technology, nobody knows.
Maybe this puts some context around it. The first nuclear power plant came online in 1951. 70 years later, only 32 countries have nuclear power plants and the content of Africa has 2.
https://investors.biontech.de/news-releases/news-release-det...
https://biontech.de/science/individualized-cancer-medicine
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-03072-8
I am really looking forward for such solutions, fuck cancer.
That said, the economic impact of such cures isn't clear to me. If your population gains, on average, say, a year or two of life, the pay-as-you go pension systems that are already under strain in greying Europe will come under even bigger strain.
So it seems that each discovery like that will be balanced by us working longer. Personally, I as a 42 y.o. in Czechia, do not expect to get any meaningful state pension ever. There will be just too many of us.