#our agency is so fucking mismanaged and it’s going to run us into the ground

[justtogetthrough]

My workplace is having an epidemic of people not doing their fucking jobs and idk how it still manages to shock me at how helpless and incompetent people are getting, but not a week goes by where someone throwing in the towel before even looking into a request or issue makes me and my manager go what the FUCK????? Seriously?!?!?!

(The issue is that things keep getting brought to us being like oooh nooo CAS/a family/a kid is asking for [something], whatever will we doooo. And it is not our role to figure it out. We are not case management. It’s so fucking obvious what to do 85% of the time and we can’t figure out why everyone gives up so easily when all it takes is 10 minutes of critical thinking and bouncing some ideas around. Our jobs have gotten cumbersome because of how much time we are required to spend doing other people’s jobs lately. It’s garbage.)

[jadelyn]

I am literally sick with anger.

So, for those who don't know, California is burning again. A fire sparked Thursday morning up near Chico, was 8,000 acres by midday (when I walked out of my office to go get lunch, took one breath, looked up, and went "oh shit, how close is it this time?" because of how thick the smoke was), almost 20,000 acres by that night, and as of this morning was nearing 100,000 acres. It's only about 5% contained last I looked. There are nine confirmed fatalities, 35 people missing still. The town of Paradise, population a bit under 30k, is just...gone. Like, the whole town. 90% of the structures in that town were destroyed. The fire came through so fast, people had to abandon their cars on the gridlocked streets and run for it on foot. I've heard that this is the most destructive wildfire in California history. It's Really Bad - worse even than the Sonoma fires last year.

And guess what the fucking fascist occupying the fucking White House said today?

First of all: Our forested land? More than half of it is under management of the fucking Feds, not state agencies. We don't GET to manage SHIT, you towering lump of human excrement. If mismanagement is the problem, look to your own, except that you seem to like that kind of incompetence so you'd probably praise them for it.

Second: You probably don't know this, because you haven't heard it on Fox and Friends and we all know that's your only source of education, but California is one of the 13 "net payer" states that fucking subsidizes the rest of this fucking country. On average, most states get back about $1.20 per dollar of taxes paid to the feds. This is only possible because of states like California, who actually pay MORE to you useless fucks than you send back our way. So don't you fucking dare act like you're pouring money into us out of the goodness of whatever passes for your "heart", giving you any right to judge what gets done with it. That flow goes the other fucking way.

Third: You ignorant, lying sack of assholes, shut that fucking prolapsed anus on your face masquerading as a mouth. Wildfires will always happen, to some extent, in a climate that's as dry as ours. But they've definitely gotten worse within my lifetime, and it's accelerated over the last few years, and you wanna know why? It's because of you and your fucking cronies who have gleefully driven the global climate into the ground. It's a coastal desert, sure, but our regular droughts have gotten worse and worse, rain comes later and later and stops sooner and sooner each year, setting the stage for red-flag fire conditions that take what should have been a small blaze, quickly contained, and whip it into a monstrous disaster consuming WHOLE. FUCKING. CITIES. And that? Is LITERALLY YOUR FUCKING FAULT.

I am sitting here in tears, shaking and ready to throw up from the force of my suppressed, futile, useless rage. People have DIED, you fucking cunt. A whole fucking town that was here two days ago is GONE. Just fucking gone! The whole town is gone, do you understand that? The survivors have lost EVERYTHING.

And your first response is to sit there and smugly tweet these lies and that victim-blaming horseshit? You're going to sit there and try to make this about the money? Take this opportunity to try to kick us while we're down, because you're a bitter soulless creature who can't pass up a chance to put the boots in when you see someone who's defied you in a moment of vulnerability?

I am personally going to throw the biggest fucking block party in history when you finally fall off the face of this planet. We will plaster the buildings with huge posters of your least-flattering photos and most humiliating moments. There will be an effigy that everyone is invited to come piss on. Bring your dogs, have them piss on it too! Prizes for getting your aim closest to the mouth or eyes!

And I've reblogged stuff saying this before, but it bears repeating again:

IF YOU VOTED FOR TRONALD DUMP

IF YOU SUPPORTED HIM

IF YOU LOOKED THE OTHER WAY WHILE YOUR FRIENDS SUPPORTED HIM

IF YOU "VOTED YOUR CONSCIENCE" BY STAYING HOME THAT DAY AND ALLOWING THIS TO HAPPEN

GET. THE FUCK. OUT.

Unfollow me right the fuck now. I don't care if you're a mutual since the day I started this blog. Get out. Go. I cannot sit here, smelling smoke even through my closed doors and windows, that bastard's words in front of me, and find it anywhere in my heart to forgive you for what you've caused. Even if you've changed your mind since then. That's cool, I guess, but take your shame and your changed ways somewhere else, away from me.

[trekwiz]

UBI anon here (💚). I understand your position on UBI and I don’t necessarily disagree with it. I suppose my verdict on it is still out. But I’m an asshole, and love advocating for the devil... To me, your positioning is quite interesting. Especially considering the reasoning behind the Corona virus stipulations... as I could use the same logic during normal years to justify a UBI as part of the role of governance. (I.e. Lack of livable wages -> crime -> government duty) (crime affects all)

Hi anon. I apologize in advance for the long post.

I would address your comment in three parts: first on the difference between population and personal issues, second in terms of defining "need" in regards to government duty, and third in regards to personal rights.

I would suggest there needs to be a pretty bright line between population issues and individual issues in regards to government action. When that line is blurred, we get really weird agenda-driven communal values. As I mentioned in my previous answer, that is especially apparent to LGBT people who were on the receiving end of that logic.

I'm not sure if you saw the news and public reaction when gay kids finally started demanding the right to participate in dances with same sex partners in the early 00's. But schools and communities argued for a communal value that went something like this, "We need to protect our children from becoming gay, so these gay kids should sacrifice a bit of joy for the good of everyone."

Ultimately, the country was meeting the needs and desires of one group, at the expense and detriment of another. They chose who has to lose something, without their consent.

No one ever sees themselves as the bad guy. Universally, your beliefs are protective, or positive in some way, from your perspective. It's very easy to argue for a personal bias/agenda to be seen under the lens of collective behavior, when there's no reason it should be seen as anything but an individual desire.

Any individual concern can be reframed to appear as a population issue by focusing on numbers. Having eggs for breakfast wasn't a personal experience; millions of people had eggs for breakfast. But having eggs for breakfast really was a personal choice, and it didn't impact my neighbor; having eggs didn't make them eat eggs. The outcome was the same, but the decision was independent. As another example, it's the difference between listening to loud music on a farm, vs listening to loud music in a densely packed apartment complex. One is inherently a personal action, and the other is inherently communal.

A virus is inherently communal. Individual protections, at least with this kind of virus, are impossible. Your behaviors won't protect yourself; there is nothing you can do to avoid getting infected by acting alone--unless you're super rich and can hide in a bunker for a few years.

And, like the loud music in an apartment complex, your behaviors have a distinct impact on other people. It might sound dramatic, but you literally have the power to determine if someone else dies, or ends up with a lifelong disability. There's a distinct, and undeniable communal need, and it's similar to the reason we ban indoor smoking. While it's a soundbite, the old standard, "your right to swing your first ends at my nose" is the driving force here: once your behavior affects others, it's up to you to change, not them. By taking actions that hurt other people, you're infringing on their right not to participate--it's a decision you don't get to make.

On the second point, I would suggest linking government to crime via livable wages muddies the idea of governmental need in a particularly dangerous way. I briefly suggested that police don't need to be militarized, and so that's not a necessary government expense. I'll expand on that as an example, as I think it demonstrates how a muddy standard like that can be abused.

Those who have come to defend police brutality and a police state suggest that military equipment is necessary for police because it protects them. Their job necessarily involves danger that puts their lives at risk. Protecting law enforcement officers is certainly a government interest; they spend money on training, and wages theoretically correlate to experience that would be lost when an officer dies. Military equipment protects the people and the investment.

But is it necessary? Necessity is a combination of factors, with no one being the sole decider--and this list isn't exclusive, just a good start to the conversation. Does it make them more effective? Can the same goal be achieved through alternative means? Will the government cease to function in an important way if it doesn't have this funding?

When we examine militarized police in that lens, it doesn't really meet the standard for necessity. They're less effective when they have this kind of equipment: they increase violence and violent crime in communities as an instigating force, and they decrease communal trust, which necessarily impacts their ability to investigate real crimes in the future. It also encourages vigilante justice when the police are seen as this ineffective and untrustworthy--people are circumventing the law, which has a serious impact on governance.

The intended goal can be achieved through alternative means; there's good science around de-escalation tactics, and they're known to work in other developed countries. Ending the arms race between criminals and police generally reduces overall violence rates, and is protective to communities. And by foregoing the funding for militarized gear, no function of governance has been impacted. Laws will still be enforced; there's no negative impact on governance. The idea that it's a "need" is weak; it serves a personal agenda, not a necessary governmental function.

During a pandemic, there's a strong argument for governmental need for UBI. I won't outline all of the reasons, I'll stick with the most easy to apply one: if every member of government does everything right, someone in their community who didn't have the means to stay home could still infect them. If we think only about those we can reasonably care about, (so, assuming we're all unswayed by the impact of Trump being infected because--well, fuck that fascist) what happens if CDC employees become compromised due to an infection in the community, and that infection spreads throughout the agency?

The impact isn't temporary or localized. We'll be losing a large amount of expertise necessary for running the agency. An agency that works solely to protect populations, rather than individuals. The expertise that could prevent another botched pandemic response would need to be rebuilt from the ground up, with people who may not even be familiar with the relevant government processes. That will necessarily impact the government and the public for an extended period of time. We're already feeling some of that impact just from it being merely mismanaged (maliciously); imagine how much worse it would be if that expertise were simply wiped out and not available again when Trump is out of office?

UBI is an effective way to back up a stay at home order, and other similar precautions. It means bills won't go unpaid, and people can still eat. They won't be forced to choose between eating and preventing spread; if they're in a position where they can't choose to stay home, that risk to government personnel remains. There isn't really a great alternative; suspending regular bills won't reduce the need to pay for food, and deferring payments only increases the risk of someone needing to defy stay at home orders to prevent bankruptcy later. And depending on who is impacted--which is hard to predict--parts of government can cease to function without it, during a pandemic. A pandemic of this nature could theoretically wipe out the whole judicial branch of government, as an example. That would be disastrous.

Under situation normal, there's no real argument to be made for a government need. There are other ways to reduce crime, especially from a regulatory standpoint. Education is a start--and preventing education funding from being tied to property taxes is a good way to ensure poor communities don't get stuck in a cycle of poverty fed by poor education. Putting money into infrastructure explicitly meant to undo the impact of redlining would help.

And if you've tried to apply for a job in the last 15 years, you know there's a lot the government should be doing in regards to regulation and enforcement of labor laws. The issues leading to unlivable wages are relatively well known. It's no secret that many companies are using illegal unpaid internships (unpaid internships are only legal under a narrow set of criteria), or are misclassifying employees as contractors--which is a serious tax evasion scam at the worker's expense.

There are no enforcement mechanisms against companies that advertise these practices until a worker complains about it, even if they state their intentions to ignore the law in a job listing. And sometimes--with Uber as an example of a company breaking long-standing law about employee classification--enforcement doesn't happen unless workers spend a lot of their own money suing.

Stronger minimum wage laws tied to the local cost of living (and by local, I mean reasonable commute--employees should not be expected to live an hour+ away from where they work because the company doesn't want to pay them enough to live locally) is a good start, but the loopholes related to that need to be closed.

For example, companies react to wage increases by cutting hours and hiring more people in retaliation--there's no real need to do it, it's just an excuse to coerce employees into acting against their own interests. The true impact on pricing from reasonable wages is negligible. One possibility is to lock the ratio between part time employees and full time employees, with some exceptions based on necessity. If you have 4 part-time cashiers, you can probably do well with 2 full-time cashiers.

Whereas a workplace that needs extra bodies for a short period of time--for example, maybe a facilities management office that sometimes handles construction will need additional people to transport and handle materials every so often, but not regularly--should be able to operate that way with evidence that there's truly a need.

Arguably, a shorter work week would make a difference as well. 40 hours is a lot to begin with, and some salaried people are regularly working 50-60 without additional pay. Balancing a living wage for a 30 hour week would greatly assist people in getting more education to aim for even better paying jobs. And the additional leisure time should reduce the stresses that lead to crime.

Hiring practices are currently obtuse, and a lot of resumes are never seen by a human. Banning the use of screening by ATSes (and by people unfamiliar with the relevant field--a scientist shouldn't be screened out by an HR employee who failed intro biology) could make hiring a bit more fair for everyone. And blinding interviews as much as reasonable could help--look up information about how gender ratios started to become more even when orchestras switched to blind interviews using carpeted floors, it's really interesting. (The sound of heels on hard surfaces led to decreased hiring of women when blinding alone was in use.)

I'd even suggest that a wage ratio cap would be reasonable. Largely because it doesn't prevent the top members of a company from making unlimited money, so long as they pull up everyone below them.

And it all necessarily needs to include regulation and enforcement against predatory lending practices in regards to student loans, housing, and "payday loans." Crime and poverty are a complex interaction of systems, and you can't choose just one area to focus on.

Back to the point: there are alternative ways to solve the underlying problem. It doesn't necessarily make the government more effective: it's addressing one facet of crime when a coordinated effort against multiple causes could do it better through acts of governance*. And ultimately, parts of the government won't fail because it doesn't have UBI.

*I'm generally very uncomfortable when the government takes action that's outside of "governance." That kind of behavior is too easily abused by personal agendas. Governance is, generally, regulation and enforcement. When you creep out of that scope, you get into my third point: infringement of personal rights (in contexts that are personal and not population).

Ultimately, we're not a hive-mind; we're not a collective. While issues with a population-scale impact should necessitate individual action, the status quo should have the minimal impact on our ability to lead our lives as we see fit.

We've lost our understanding of what the freedom of religion clause of the 1st amendment is about. It was meant to put a barrier between religion and government, so the government couldn't coerce you, even minimally (like, say, the 10 commandments in a courthouse), to follow someone else's religious beliefs. But there's an underlying "why" there.

If I force you to eat Key Lime Pie because my religion demands it, or I force you to eat Key Lime Pie because it's simply my favorite dessert, is there a difference? The clause was created not because forcing religion on others, in specific, is bad. It was created because religion was a common method of forcing your way of life onto someone else, and that is bad.

It's couched in secular terms, but UBI is based on a set of personal beliefs about how we should behave, with an underlying assumption that we should all be collectivist. It compels collective financial support on an issue with a personal scope. I've seen how that plays out, when homophobia was a communal value. And it's the most easily abused model of governance.

You win, so you get to have your personal values made standard for the next 2-8 years. Great. But then you lose, and your opponent now has the power and means to have their personal values made standard for the next 2-8 years. Trump should be a caution against this mindset; the things you think you're doing for good, offers someone like him the power to do similar things for bad. You want to give out a basic wage, Trump wants to give out militarized weaponry to police and Nazis.

A system that permits personal belief to be the driving force of tax and government policy is a system that permits these kinds of wild, dangerous swings. Gerrymandering is the result of a system that empowers personal beliefs to rule over others.

As a final thought, consider this: in the US, something like UBI could be weaponized by people like Trump. Take part in protests? Sorry, no more income for you. Formed a union? You're not eligible. The government agent who sends the UBI payment has religious-based bigotry against gay people? Sorry, they have a right not to pay you. You're writing politically "hostile" news? You and all of your coworkers have just lost a significant chunk of your income. Convicted of a felony? Income suspended, sorry, good luck staying out of prison.

If your ability to survive is heavily tied to a government payment, AND the system permits and encourages personal beliefs to be a valid reason to guide government policy, marginalized people will always have the most to lose.