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Comment by devit | Hacker News Reader

The problem is caused by society/government, due to the lack of universal basic income, or alternatively a ban on having children if the parents can't provide an equivalent payment.

If everyone had access to the basic necessities of life without having to work, then nobody would accept jobs like those, and Amazon would be forced to either automate everything or substantially improve working conditions (much less hours, higher pay, ways to make the work more fun).

Even if you were to force Amazon and the like to "treat workers better", what about those who can't find work?

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>or alternatively a ban on having children if the parents can't provide an equivalent payment.

Yours is the stuff dystopian literature is made of. You want to severely limit freedom for the greater good, a tactic which never works.

I don't think people should be entitled to the freedom of having children no matter what, since having children forces significant externalities on society, especially if there's an agreement that everyone should have a good standard of living (as implied by this article) or even just that there's a right to healthcare; and even without those, since the children may become criminals and harm others.

The root causes of poverty and violent crime are people who have children but are not able or willing to properly educate them and support them financially, so the simplest fix is to prevent that from happening (by forcing them to have an abortion).

That said, an alternate solution is for the state to step in if parents can't or unconditionally, although some sort of population control might be required anyway.

>the simplest fix is to prevent that from happening (by forcing them to have an abortion

Simple doesn't mean best or even acceptible. The simplest solution for stopping many forms of crime is to institute martial law, yet we do not do so because we view it as an extreme form of oppression and tyranny. I don't see any positive outcome from a government telling people under which circumstances they are allowed to procreate unless we are in dire straights (e.g. massive, world wide, irrecoverable famine. We're not there and we're not going to be there any time soon.)

> so the simplest fix is to prevent that from happening (by forcing them to have an abortion).

Who pays for the abortion?

If someone conceives children without permission multiple times, wouldn't be it cheaper just to kill them so as to prevent them from consuming resources without permission? or should we merely forcibly sterilize them?

Yikes, that does not sound like a good society to live in.

How is this dystopian though? If you can't provide for your children why have them in the first place?

How is limiting basic human freedoms dystopian? It's textbook tyranny.

While I agree it's a basic human right to have children, there should be some limitation as to who can have them - if you're obviously not in a condition to care and provide for offspring you shouldn't be allowed to. Now you might ask - okay but who decides what that standard is, and you'd be correct in asking, but that's a whole other question.

No. While I'm completely in favor of UBI and stuff like that (although entirely against your call for deciding who can have children), shifting blame to society completely ignores that Amazon is the one who bears all the responsibility for what they pay workers, and how they treat them. This problem is entirely Amazon's to own.

UBI is an absolutely terrible idea by the way. The problems you speak of would only get worse.

Assuming UBI is feasible and denominated in goods (i.e. you get an house, food, clothes, etc. rather than X dollars that may inflate), then I assume most or all people would not choose to work in an Amazon warehouse at the conditions described.

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