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Comment by VvR-Ox | Hacker News Reader

THAT is exactly the problem:

OUR SYSTEM doesn't care how happy you are, as long as you're productive enough for some people to get rich.

No one cares if you have a job, if you are homeless or have to suffer poverty.

OUR SOCIETY values power and wealth (at least here in the west, I heard about other countries who don't do this so dedicated). If you're poor, sick or have no job than there is even people who'd argue for mercy killing you as not being strong enough for our good society.

I think the report about this experiment shows how far away we moved from humanity.

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“No one cares if you have a job, if you are homeless or have to suffer poverty.”

What on earth is this comment. Where do you live in “the west”? Western societies are structured around redistribution which ensures that most people are looked after (nothing is perfect). Your rhetoric is baffling.

I live in Europe and see how things go down the sewer here. Why can't you?

As a child people had enough money for a good end of life and now they crawl around and collect food and other stuff from waste containers.

Also statistics clearly shows this development. Look at stuff like this (https://www.theguardian.com/business/2019/jan/21/world-26-ri...) and tell me what you think about that please.

What's baffling about that, can you further explain it to me?

> Western societies are structured around redistribution which ensures that most people are looked after

Do you live in Disneyland?

Maybe you should get out of your ivory castle, look around and show some empathy for your fellow human beings. There's people living on highway on-ramp embankments and Skid Row in LA almost doubled within the past decade. You don't seem to see that there's a lot of people hurting because they're broke from automation and productivity gains, like the rest of the neoliberal inequality denialists.

> If you're poor, sick or have no job than there is even people who'd argue for mercy killing you as not being strong enough for our good society.

Where do you meet people who argue for that? I Have never heard that outside of (very) dystopian novels.

Homeless people and people living on social wellfare are seen as a pest pretty much everywhere in western societies.

https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/the-containment-plan/

That's a top city in one of the most powerful / rich country in the world, you don't have to look very far to find other examples.

As someone from a small European country with huge social safety nets, this is quite insane to read.

But still, are people talking about mercy killing all of them? I might have to reclassify the meaning of dystopian, the books I read are only half as messed up as this..

Thank you for this article. People should open their eyes and at least read stuff like this to check with their self constructed reality.

Seems some of them live in a dome where you can't see all of this development. Nice for them - I could cry sometimes because it's so unfair.

Come to the SF Bay Area and drive around the highways or take a long-distance railway ride: there are hundreds to thousands of people living rough. It's like a diffuse favela, and most people don't care and a number of people actively hate people, and express violence, for them being poor. This is the result of Nixon and Reagan defunding JFK's community-based mental healthcare centers because they couldn't, or didn't want to, relate to people in different circumstances.

Ironically it was Nixon who came within days of a speech announcing UBI. He saw adequate welfare as a thoroughly Republican thing to provide. Only after he was lobbied with evidence based upon lies did he relent.

First link search turned up: https://www.jacobinmag.com/2016/05/richard-nixon-ubi-basic-i...

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