Moralizing sermons have never solved problems and never will; only actual reform work can do that. Why are you so opposed to getting your hands dirty with reforming our system?
I know we here at Hacker News are entrepreneurs and are dead set on trying 100 new crazy ideas of which 99 will fail and cost investors hundreds of millions and 1 will succeed and exit, ipo, or fizzle out in 5 years. We're so crazy we even try ideas that have already failed 12 times over thinking we're going to do something different this time. Humanity doesn't change as much as you think. You can't take the human out of the human. And this plan for giving away money or housing or food (which has already been tried numerous times) is dead on delivery.
No, but treating humans like humans gets us to behave like good humans. Even in our own country we've seen murder rates go down year by year, with few anomalies, as we've cleaned up things like child abuse and spousal abuse and so on.
Primitive human behavior used to include bear-baiting and beating children bloody for not being able to recite a Latin passage correctly. Is it any wonder that reducing that has lead to fewer people who have no real compassion?
> You can't take the human out of the human. And this plan for giving away money or housing or food (which has already been tried numerous times) is dead on delivery.
Except in all the countries where it's worked for decades, right? Is the Nordic Model a fantasy, then?
The people of a country determine the majority of its success. Not just it's laws. People from different countries, people from different backgrounds have different levels of civility. It may be cultural (which can be changed) or it may be genetic (which cannot be changed unless weeded out genetically). This is why I'm saying what works in one country won't automatically work in another.
I have absolutely no time for racism. BTW, I'm American, born and raised.
I live in Romania and here we always have had all kinds of immigrants from all around us. Maybe there were inter-ethnic tensions but the environment was always civilized, and the minorities integrated themselves (mostly) as a part of society. ...well, with one notable exception - the gypsies. The rest of the Europe are blaming us for not putting enough efforts on their education and integration but they do not seem to have an idea who the gypsies are and that is especially irritating. There are all kind of... let's say "peculiar" people in this world with whom it is difficult to accomplish things, but many of us are not willing or prepared to acknowledge this.