Panhandling

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There's a saying, you get what you incentivize. So if you pay people to be poor, it's amazing how many people will suddenly become poor. An example is this panhandler that makes $1,000 a weekend in Texas, by pretending to be homeless and wheelchair bound. He has a home and walks just fine. In NYC one guy was making $200/hour. An Oklahoma guy made $60K/year. This is nothing new, welfare scams have been endemic since people figured out that the givers are lazy rubes that want to feel better about themselves, more than they want to prove the recipient is a fraud. FakeFact checkers like Snopes claim that the $50/hour claim is unproven -- but so are all their claims on the topic. They ignore the outliers to prove their claim -- better would be if they just admitted that's likely not the norm, but completely in the realm of probability.


Homelessness

Homelessness is an unsolvable problem, in a free society, in that you can't claim to be free and stop people from doing things you don't agree with, at the same time. So you have to pick one: tolerance (liberty) or cleanliness/civility/order. Compassion for free-range substance abuse, mental disorders, and layabouts destroying the cities, or compassion for the hard working folks trying to make a better world for themselves and their children. So while you can't cure it, you can decide whether you want to make it better or worse, depending on your tolerance for it. more...

Snopes
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All sources have a bias, and all make mistakes. I don't care that Snopes was created by California couple Barbara and David Mikkelson, who decided to covert alt.folklore.urban newsgroup into a website. Despite a cabal of liberal editors, most of Snopes isn't that bad. But mostly fair, isn't completely fair -- and they have plenty of bias, un-corrected errors, and unfair interpretations. Each article deserves separate scrutiny/skepticism, with many falling far below journalistic standards. So despite their voracity supported by partisans and rubes, Snopes is far from the paragon of objectivity that some pretend. This article offers a small sampling of errors and bias.

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Fake Facts

There's "facts" that people believe, but aren't. Worse are things that the Fact Checkers on the left have verified for people as true, that aren't true, or are completely biased or misleading. Most are sincerely mislead. The question is when confronted with facts do they argue to death using an appeal to authority fallacy ("but CNN says it's true"), or are they open-minded free thinkers that look at the new information and weigh it against the prior evidence? It's not wether they agree with me or not that changes who they are. (They might have valid reasons for still not agreeing). But it's their approach to new information that makes the difference between a conscious (self-aware) human, or a herd following collectivist. more...

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