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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   25595 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 16, 2026

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Given that with mass automation due to A(G)I, many more of us (possibly all of us) may be living off of a form of welfare before long, it’s time to have what has long been a taboo discussion, namely that government should enforce standards of behavior on welfare recipients.

To me it’s not really a question of generosity. If recipients didn’t use hard drugs, dressed well, behaved decently, were polite and generally didn’t disturb anyone else, I would even be in favor of more generous welfare in certain cases. But welfare for slobs, addicts, the obese, antisocial people, and groups with a track record of poor interaction with mainstream society should be curtailed to the point of making life very difficult.

In general, the greatest failure of liberal universalism is that it does not adequately distinguish between categories of citizen by social contribution. It did originally (eg almost every 19th century democracy initially limited the vote to landowners or taxpayers) but these restrictions fell - long before even female suffrage in most cases. Welfare initially was often led designed to promote prosocial behavior in the underclass, but again, much of this fell by the wayside.

Idea: Tiered welfare, including food stamps. Very low, third-world-beans-and-rice level baseline. Take a drug test every x period and come back clean, get 25% more money. Have kids? If they all attend school 97% of school days and are on time 90% of the time, get 25% more money. Kid scores in the top 20% of his grade on a standardized test? 50% more money. Kid is arrested? 30% reduction in money (or down to baseline, whichever is higher) for 2 years, rolling reset every time a child is arrested. Your ‘welfare tier’ also determines your tier of social housing, more recently renovated apartment in a better location etc. Every year of full time tax paying employment prior to going on welfare also increases your welfare. Local beat cops can also allocate a pool of welfare to ‘trusted’ informants, making snitching higher status.

The divil is always in the details for these kinds of social credit schemes.

Have kids? If they all attend school 97% of school days

If the AIs cure viral infections first, I suppose.

Kid scores in the top 20% of his grade on a standardized test?

The main reason people currently (often) get paid more for being smarter is because we need that intelligence for important things like good decision making. But in a world where their parents are putting all their intellectual effort towards gaming the social credit system, this will end badly, as currently seen in places like South Korea. Anyway, in a world with ubiquitous AI programs, why wouldn't the student just talk directly to the AI, and get rewarded for asking about socially beneficial things, and generally sounding like an upstanding young person in the AI's professional judgement, rather than doing standardized tests at all?

I like the general shape on principle, but I'd hate to see it grow into 50,000 well-paid bureaucrats overseeing 15,000 beneficiaries. Also, they tend to morph into millions of exceptions and administrative hearings for "yeah, 3 of my kids got arrested but here's why the rules shouldn't apply to me right now."

I don't understand this. If we're talking about ~universal welfare in the age of AGI-granted post-scarcity, it becomes ridiculous to try to police the "social contribution" of citizens: nobody's "contributions" will be worth a damn anymore, that's exactly why everyone will be on the dole in the first place. Tiered welfare of the kind you propose might be a useful framework in a society for whose long-term survival the existence of a growing chronically-unemployed underclass is an existential risk, but it loses all meaning in a world where everyone is unemployed and human labor has become permanently irrelevant to the survival of human society.

Why? Even in such a society, the behavior of fellow people is important to us. We don’t want violent addicts on the subway, we don’t want ugly people covered in tattoos, we don’t want people who are antisocial, rude, vulgar, loud etc to the point of damaging their community or the broader social fabric. We want to minimize scammers, cheaters and criminals.

Putting everyone on UBI doesn’t solve any of these problems alone.

If it's truly post-scarcity, you just make a tiered society. The only difference between them is access to other humans. The violent addicts get all the drugs, food, and medical care (provided by robots and/or masochists, presumably) they desire, and the normal people don't ever have to see them or their effects. The beautiful people live in their own mirror-covered world away from the depredations of the glance of uggles, etc.

Of course, we'll never actually GET post-scarcity, but if we did the problem would be solved.

you just make a tiered society

This is, of course, what economic stratification already does. The question is how you do that when people are no longer differentiated by economic contribution.

In practice the only way to do this is with block grants through a rum millet system; you know that the fat violent addicts have to be given access to the hall of mirrors.

We want to minimize scammers, cheaters and criminals.

I think that can more straightforwardly and more humanely achieved by, you know, making laws against those things and enforcing them. You don't need to start gatekeeping access to food like a Charles Dickens villain.

And also, reducing welfare to disincentivize actively harmful behavior is one thing; setting the bar at positive "social contributions" is still another. In a post-scarcity world where there's no need to incentivize human beings to pump their time and energy into the economy rather than spending it on more pleasant pursuits, there is no ethical justification for placing any artificial barriers in the way of someone who just wants to collect their share and then go off to live as a reclusive hermit, keeping to himself and never affecting other people's lives one way or the other. In the real world, we rightfully discourage people from becoming unproductive hermits living on welfare, because they're unfairly leeching off other people's sweat and toil, and if too many people defected in that way, the economy would collapse. But if the economy starts literally running itself then preventing hermits from being hermits is just senseless tyranny.

Perhaps senseless tyranny is the end goal.

Well - social contributions will be worth something, that's the point. We (at the risk of manufacturing consensus) want a UBI society to look like the glass utopia from that one meme where everyone is fit, pleasant and driven, not cyberpunk.

Cyberpunk dystopias are defined by the social order itself being oppressive in one way or another, not by the behavior of the citizens - but regardless, if citizens' good behavior isn't producing anything I object to calling it "social contribution". If what we are talking about is some kind of social conformity tax, its advocates should own up to what they are proposing, without hiding behind language associated with the fair allocation of scarce resources between productive and non-productive members of an economy.

Many cyberpunk-adjacent works nowadays put focus not just on the oppression, but also on the ignoble state of the people.

That may be, but "evil state-sized megacorps make you pay through the nose for the very air you breathe" is still a core enough part of the aesthetic that "in order to avoid a cyberpunk dystopia, we should establish a regimented system where people get less food to eat depending on a social credit score" scans to me as almost comically backwards.

Hey, if we're talking megacorps, then presumably the people can pick which megacorp's social credit score they want to maxx. We could have a plausible explanation for the origins of different factions within one city, that way!

In addition to the childhood nutrition issue, thé Anglo underclass does not know what to do with rice and beans. They would just starve if you handed them dry goods.

‘Three hot meals a day from the canteen’, sûre, that could be worked with.

Problem with that, though, is that if you do have growing kids, they need good food and nutrition. Restricting it to "beans and rice third world baseline" to start off means that parents will feed the kids processed/junk food because that's cheap calories. Not the greatest.

I agree about not buying snack foods and rubbish, but if you're going to buy decent meat and real vegetables, and more importantly cook proper meals, that will necessitate a better food budget than "on this tier we can only buy the frozen own-brand mystery meat nuggets".

Some states offer, in addition to free school lunches, to let people bring their children to eat remade lunches during breaks as well. That's fine, they can keep doing that. I'm generally impressed with the free lunches around here, the kids' school lunches are better than what I bring to work.

I will observe that EBT exists in parallel with WIC, which does have a pretty set of eligible items --- judging from the WIC signs on the price tags at my grocery store.

WIC covers literal rice-and-beans, but not frozen dino chicken nuggets.

I wonder if those meal boxes that are growing so common are an option. Upper-middle class people like them, so they're not punishing the poor.

Envisioning a system that everyone who applies to it can choose online between a selection of 15 or so meals, rotated out by a team of chefs and nutritionists. Most are pretty basic - spaghetti with canned sauce, some kind of chicken and sauce on rice, etc. Maybe 1 or 2 meals a week with some nicer cuts of meat.

Every meal comes with directions on how to cook it. When you are selecting your meal, you can sort by how long it takes to cook it, which is calculated by the median of self-reports from the users (no bs chefs claiming onions take 2 minutes to cut and sautee.) Most meals target cooking in 30 minutes or less.

Additionally, every week comes with powdered milk, choice of oatmeal or cold cereal, instant coffee, sliced bread, deli cheese, deli meat, salt, pepper, butter.

People pick up their kits from participating grocery stores nearest them. When you first enroll, a free pot and pan is thrown in with your bundle.

I don't think this will cut EBT costs but it might improve medicaid costs over time. At least it might remove some of the resentment.

Or just issue everyone MREs. The government already has the supply lines set up. Just need to ramp up the manufacturing. And you don't even need a heat source to make hot food.

MRE's are not intended for long-term consumption. They are much lower in water content than the regular meals that people are used to, so soldiers tend to underhydrate, causing constipation. Also, they tend to lack sufficient vitamins and minerals.

Research also shows that soldiers would not eat all of it, causing them to eat fewer calories than with regular meals. Of course, this could be a benefit for regular people, who often overeat. Then again, the calories in an MRE are aimed at a very active young adult, so it may could also cause worse overeating than a regular meal. I think that this would require research to see what regular people would do.

MRE's cost the USG about $10-$15 a serving. They are very not economical compared to a box of spaghetti noodles mixed with 4 Tbps of melted butter and a Tsp garlic salt served to a family of four.

When I’ve tried to game out UBI in practice, it’s looked a lot like this, where Amazon and Walmart turn into giant government contractors and welfare is paid in scrip to fund super corrupt qpq consumer spending.

Forcing the unrepentantly incompetent poors to have all their food and medical options be restricted to Hello Fresh and Better Help? Sounds like a pretty decent way to soak up the VC slop.

Well, I'm imagining something more socialist, run out of the USDA or something. Not just giving money to Hello Fresh and having them do it.

Nooooo! At least Hello Fresh is building something aimed at passing the profit/loss test. Why rebuild it asa government agency?

Has hellofresh ever been profitable? AIUI none of those mealkitbox services have been.

The whole reason I approve of hellofresh being the food distributor of choice is that this will accelerate their bankruptcy and we can stop having those fucking ads shoved everywhere. If your marginal revenue is negative and you get the big contract that'll just accelerate your death, and hopefully put the experiment of 'the druggies just want fresh food!' to rest since none of the druggies lack for food they lack for easily tradable goods for drugs.

I think the key words here are "aimed" and "government agency". Amazon famously didn't make its first annual profit for nearly a decade, but investors were still expecting profit eventually, estimating the likelihood of net profit in the long run, and wouldn't have funded it indefinitely if that expectation ended. A government agency has no such aims and no such limitations, whether or not it does its own production, but at least if it has to procure from among competing third parties there's someone who has an incentive to keep costs down.

Why would Hello Fresh need to worry about profit/loss once they have infinite government money?

Does it become like Medicare where prices are fixed by a centralized government agency?

Or does it become like colleges where prices to everyone balloons until everyone needs a subsidy to attend?

We are already messing enough with the free market to ensure that the poor do not starve, which is what the market would demand without government or charitable intervention.

Yeah, I'm not saying I advocate for this program. Just that in the world where wee decided meal kits were something the government offered, better to use an existing market company than to build it from scratch as a government institution.

The poor wouldn't starve even if foodstamps was abolished; they might eat shitty diets, but even the literal homeless do not starve, and you kinda need a kitchen to make use of foodstamps.

The homeless have charitable interventions keeping them alive.

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The issue with tiered welfare is that controls are expensive. You are essentially taking money that could have been spent on food, and using it to pay for lab tests and full-time bureaucrats whose job it is to verify test scores and family size. This would have to result in some pretty significant savings for it to be justifiable in my mind. If you end up spending the same amount of money overall, but now poor people get less of it while more goes to the bureaucracy, at the same time making the process harder for those in need (as they now have to spend time dealing with said bureaucrats), I don't think you have really solved anything.

Given that with mass automation due to A(G)I, many more of us (possibly all of us) may be living off of a form of welfare before long, it’s time to have what has long been a taboo discussion, namely that government should enforce standards of behavior on welfare recipients

In practice, how long would it be before those standards of behavior included things like "don't say things which are deemed to be racist"

Probably I am at least as disgusted as anyone else here by the image of the 300 pound illiterate welfare queen spending her food stamps on junk food. But I think we need a rule that you get your government benefits even if you are a disgusting person. Because I am acutely aware of the fact that to a large percentage of the voting population, I (a conservative white man) am far more offensive and disgusting than this hypothetical obese welfare queen with 4 kids from 4 different baby-daddies.

In fact, here's an idea: Food stamps for everyone, even if you are a millionaire.

Make it like public education, which everyone pays for and everyone gets for free.

I think that assuming AGI doesn't destroy us, there's really no alternative to some form of UBI. And arguably the most expedient way to get there is to broaden eligibility rules for food stamps, unemployment insurance, disability, and so on.

This works pretty well with universal free school lunch in my area. Rather than having to load money on cards and check everyone's meal each day, the kids simply present their school ID and get food. Those who don't want it on a particular day (or ever) can eschew it, or give it to their friends. I'm not sure how well that will scale, but it definitely agrees with my internal fairness adjudicator.

Because I am acutely aware of the fact that to a large percentage of the voting population, I (a conservative white man) am far more offensive and disgusting than this hypothetical obese welfare queen with 4 kids from 4 different baby-daddies.

Are you getting some government benefits that could be gatekept in this way?

Are you getting some government benefits that could be gatekept in this way?

Not at the moment but (1) I think there's a pretty good chance I will lose my job and investments as a result of a hypothetical future AI revolution; (2) in that case, it's pretty likely that there will be some form of UBI; and (3) I would rather not have a precedent of "gatekeeping" government benefits in such a scenario.

Are you getting some government benefits that could be gatekept in this way?

It doesn't matter; they'll make something up that might rhyme if you stretch it, and insist that it's the same but worse. Much as when trying to discuss robbery and burglarly someone will chime in and say that no really "wage theft" is the real problem, or as in this discussion this

Typical things used might be the mortgage-interest tax deduction, or policing (a "subsidy" to the wealthy and safe areas -- no, this doesn't make sense on a number of levels), or schools (also doesn't make sense on a number of levels, but doesn't matter), etc.

And how many social credit points do you think you should lose for criticising the gove- uhh, I mean “subversive activities”?

Because this is the universal failure mode of any attempt at conduct-prorated welfare: it would inevitably descend into political patronage.

The mistake is in assuming this won’t happen anyway. The system already ruins your life, shuts you out of flying, having a bank account, shames every would-be employer for hiring you etc if you have a disapproved-of opinion, and in most of the West you can even go to proson for it, where you are likely to be the victim of ethnic or religiously motivated gangs if you’ve said anything or done anything to offend or hurt them before your incarceration. During Covid there was even plenty of chatter about prioritizing “higher risk” Black and Brown patients over white people.

You have - by the way - stumbled across a more general reality of the welfare system or entire modern state (discussed elsewhere in this thread): the system already exists to extract money and dignity from you and give it to others; you cannot destroy it, only redirect some of that extraction and humiliation toward others and some of the loot towards yourself.

It's funny you should mention social contribution because to my knowledge both of California's biggest welfare programs (Calfresh and Medical) are going to be restricted unless the person has a job, is disabled, in education, or performs a certain amount of community service. They say they're going into effect this year for Calfresh and next year for Medical but I'll believe it when I see it because they were already postponed by years at this point but in any case they already did pass laws that at least in some way tried to restrict eligibility aiming toward some kind of prosocial behavior.

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