We have found tons of genes for intelligence by now, and brain scans are now capable of accurately predicting your IQ. In other words, science has moved past the point where it's even debatable that IQ is real, varies between individuals and groups, and is rooted in inherent traits. There's no point trying to raise the self-esteem of destined losers. Nor is there any real point in trying to educate them or give them jobs. The only thing you can do with the genetically ungifted is pity them and give them money so that they can live a comfortable life even without a job. In the modern world brains are all that matter, skills can only be acquired through rigorous study, and those who can't understand the content of books and lectures are unfit for any sort of job. Machines have taken over all muscle power based work and in twenty years are slated to take over half of our remaining jobs anyway. As such, welfare is going to have to include a larger and larger segment of the world's population no matter what we do unless we want half the world to starve to death right in front of us.
The amount of people a nation has on public support is a sign of its progressiveness, not a sign of failure. It's like the number of people who have access to clean water, electricity, or the internet. It's a basic human right and human necessity that everyone in the civilized world should have access to regardless of their individual life history. In the past 100 years, the average hours worked per person has halved. It's only going to keep going down as automation takes over more and more jobs. Wages have petrified at the 1970's level for the same reason. Workforce participation is at record lows for the same reason. It's the same anywhere you look. The world has way more people than it has useful jobs, which is the main reason people aren't reproducing anymore. They themselves can't afford the children, and they know for a fact their children would be screwed and even less likely to get a job thirty years from now, so what's the use of cruelly bringing them into existence in the first place? Until a basic income is guaranteed, giving birth to a child in these circumstances is just child abuse.
The majority of Americans think their children will have lower quality lives than they had. They are right, so long as we don't pass a basic income. That's exactly the cliff we are heading for. A land without opportunity, without work or welfare, but just starvation and death for all.
Until the majority of a nation, the common masses, understand the things the intellectually aware have known for a long time now (virtually every tech website has advocated for the citizen's dividend and warned about automation replacing everyone's jobs by now.), all we can do is wait.
The situation is very similar to someone with extremely good eyesight announcing to a crowd that he can see a pink elephant in the distance. No one will believe him, no matter how vociferously he argues for its existence, until the elephant gets close enough that all the normal eyesight can see it just as plainly as he can.
Intelligent people pretty much across the board, from Paul Krugman to Charles Murray, all want to pass a citizen's dividend. It's only the stupid people who are preventing this miracle solution from occurring, even though they are the ones the law would help the most. There's nothing we can do about this stupidity, because they are too stupid to even understand the arguments we make that are so convincing to our own group but utterly unconvincing to the stupid.
Events will eventually prove everything we said to be correct. Automation will replace employment in nearly all fields, and there won't be any new jobs boom in any new category of makework to pick up the slack. This is just a future fact. There is no doubt that this will come to pass. Likewise, there is absolutely no doubt that all the genes for intelligence will eventually be found, and that they will be found to vary between the races, thus proving once and for all that blacks are innately less intelligent than whites and Asians. It is impossible to keep learning about our genome and avoid learning this truth sooner or later. At such a time, both eugenics/genetic engineering and a citizen's dividend will suddenly dawn on the world as the right social policy, and the world will turn on its axis a complete 180 degrees from what it was previously thinking and doing. How can they possibly argue against it once the facts are definitively in?
Sometimes being intelligent is useless, because just knowing how things will unfold doesn't mean you can hasten them any quicker. You still have to wait just as long as everybody else until everybody else 'gets it.' This is why it's best not to focus your intellect on social policy.
To use up our excess brainpower, games and fiction end up being much more rewarding.
And in these categories, smart people still have a wealth of productive options to drawn upon.
Square Enix has just announced that it's producing Star Ocean 5. I've always liked Star Ocean, though it doesn't compare to the likes of Final Fantasy or Tales of Graces. It's still a very solid role playing game franchise and it's been a long wait since its previous PS3 entry which was also very fun.
Speaking of Tales, Tales of Zestiria has been announced to include dual audio tracks, so if people want to enjoy the game in its authentic Japanese voice talent they can finally do so for the very first time in the Tales franchise. (Dynasty Warriors has had this option for quite a long time, it's a shame it took Tales this long. Now we just need Final Fantasy to do the same.)
World of Warcraft is already hard at work on its new 6.2 patch, which will open up the Tanaan Jungle zone for the first time. Didn't this game just release a few months ago? Impressive.
Meanwhile, Fate/kaleid liner prism ilya 2wei subbed blu ray has come out in full, so now's the time to rewatch the show before Herz starts this summer and continues the tale.
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