Are 60% of bankruptcies from 20 year olds who get cancer? If not, then your rebuttal makes no sense at all.
But I’m done with this topic. Many of you have girded your loins with the belief that all sorts of preventable problems are just life’s misfortunes, and no amount of me arguing to the contrary will make you wake up and see that people really should be expected to take care of themselves.
Unemployment should not be classified as government assistance. It’s an insurance benefit.
I’m not sure if you’re genuinely misunderstanding or being deliberately obtuse.
No one here is claiming that all preventable problems are just life’s misfortunes. They’re saying that many many problems are NOT preventable and ARE misfortunes.
They’re also saying that some (not all) preventable problems are only preventable if you have the time and resources to prepare for them.
It’s all very simple, and it’s beyond me how someone cannot understand it.
It’s all very simple - Mr. Rover is convinced that being rich makes him a better human being in every way, and he just can’t conceive of a universe in which he is NOT in total an absolute control of his destiny.
He believes not only that it makes him a better human being but that people should be punished for not being as great as he is.
Am I the first person to point out the OP has completely misunderstood how the caste system works? It’s not a lifetime achievement award - you’re placed in a caste at birth according to what your ancestors did.
So somebody who’s a hard-working intelligent law-abiding family man will be low caste because his great grandfather was a bum.
In the real world convicted sex offenders are at the bottom of our socioeconomic caste system. Above them would be other convicted felons and perpetual roustabouts. Above them would be the dirtbags (the dropouts who are constantly messing up). Above them, maybe the embittered menial toilers. Above them the working poor and middle class who live lives of quiet desperation. Above them, the quasi happy middle class.
Beyond that, I don’t know. But I think Mitt Romney should be on the top. He looks like a guy who would have a lot of points.
I score a 6.
A lot of those criteria revolve around education, income and criminal status. All issues that are strongly tied to things out of a persons control. A person doesn’t choose to be born black and poor, or choose to develop a mental illness, or choose to develop cancer. But all those things will knock tons of points off of the list.
Tin-eared, bracingly undemocratic, inhumane, elitist claptrap.
Go find some other country to ruin.
What’s disturbing is that there is an angry person there who spends his free time fantasizing about ways he can use the state to punish people based on his personal opinions about the people around him, particularly the “barnacles on the ass of society.”
Can anyone forget that there actually were and are societies where some people have to shut up and do what they’re told? And that our society was designed specifically not to be like that? And even then we’ve had to work hard to build up level playing fields.
Unlike the indignant responses of many in this thread, I’m happy to play along with a thought exercise, even if I think it’s a terrible idea. As a matter of fact, because it’s an exercise, I think the best way to illustrate why it’s a shitty idea is to play along, not to dismiss it outright with disgust.
A big problem I see (not the biggest, because that would have more to do with the moral objections), is the scale is out of whack. I rate a 14. I’m a fully productive and responsible member of society. If some people are drains on the system, I’m the one whose labor’s fruits they’re mooching. I have advanced degrees and a stable, professional career; I pay my taxes; I’ve never received a dime of public assistance, filed for bankruptcy, or had a criminal record. And somehow there are two classes of citizens above me?
I’ll assume I could sexually pleasure a 4 to get an endorsement to bump me up to a Level 3. And I may be cheating myself out of some volunteer hours in my quick and conservative mental calculation. But even with those concessions, how can I be in the middle of a scale that is mainly built to punish deadbeats and criminals?
I’m not worried about whether the set of criteria is flawed. It surely is. But my point is that even accepting the criteria, the “grades” that result have their borders in all the wrong places.
A perfectly repulsive proposal. Even the wettest dream of the hardest core Teabagger pales in comparison.
I do take exception to the notion that military service should be worth any bonuses. The military is a perfectly fine career, no better nor worse than barbering or assembly line work or the law. The idea that people should get their dicks sucked in perpetuity because they were in the military is obscene.
The item most conspicuously missing from the “points” list is having a job.
(not that adding that would make this idea any better)
Nah, what it’s really missing is a color-coded system of badges. Perhaps, then, some of the people on the lowest rung could be brought together–one could say concentrated–into areas where they might serve some actual benefit to society. Sort of like big camps. I mean, the persons who thought up the caste system would have to come up with some final solution to the points system first, but, really, if they got it reich they could have it last for a thousand years.
I saw what you did there.
::: clap ::: clap ::: clap :::
What? You’d penalize the job creators? Don’t you know that people who live off investments are the real heart of the economy? The people who work and have jobs are just, you know, equipment or something.
Come on…you’d have to be blind to nazi that coming.
Hey, hey, hey! Let’s not be Goering there. Godwin doesn’t belong in this thread.
I’ve never used this quote before but it seems entirely appropriate to this idea.
“Fuck Dis Shit”
I think we’re pretty much there. Have you noticed that there are all these user fees you can pay to get out of hassels that regular people have to put up with? For example, at airports you can pay extra money to avoid some of the security headaches. My friend calls it the George W. Bush Citizenship Plus Plan ™.
So my bachelor in a liberal arts college is worth the same as a surgeon’s? Yep seems good to me.
The poor only seem to get the votes in a revolution, maybe what the OP is doing is setting up the USA for a revolution by level zeroes!
Viva La Zero…