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Do you have a source on that, or do you think lawmakers might also be concerned with the well being of children, mums, dads, single parents, young parents–no matter how many children/parents there are?


There are various (english) news articles (for example [0][1]) and also a paper for the European commision [2] (so called ESPN Flash Report) claiming that.

But besides those sources there is also the fact that the child-raising benefits are only unconditional from the second child on, for the first child there is a maximum monthly income to get it.[2] If the main goal was the well being part, then this would not make much sense.

[0] http://www.thenews.pl/1/9/Artykul/250612,Poland-pays-out-mil...

[1] http://nytlive.nytimes.com/womenintheworld/2016/02/11/poland...

[2] http://ec.europa.eu/social/BlobServlet?docId=16077&langId=en [PDF]


If the question would have been "what would you do?", would your answer have been the same? If not, why do you think little of us other humans?


These people quit their jobs because they were happy with their child benefits of 500 per child. This given fact, that they quit there jobs, makes me suspect that they would rather choose the strategy of increasing their salary by their number of kids than by working.

If the question would have been 'what would you do', I think I would have quit my factory job as well, actually.


These people quit their shitty jobs because they are no longer forced to do them for the sake of survival, and now have more time to spend with their family, which–I guarantee you—is more valuable than whatever they were doing at work. Why do you think wanting to quit your job is anybodies fault, but the employers?

What you suspect of other people tells a lot about you, and very little about other people. I would be careful with that.


That isn't a reasonable inferrence from their actions. All one might conclude is that they find their current income sufficient.


Since we are speaking in anecdotes, have you considered they might have just disliked their particular workplace?


Sure, but they have directly said that they are leaving because of 500+. Again, this is the internet, you don't have to believe a word of it.


They can afford to leave because of 500+, they are leaving because they don't want to work there.


Well, yes, very true. Personally, I love my job and I can't imagine doing something I don't like, but at the same time I know several people to whom the idea of liking your job is extremely foreign.

Just as a side note - I think it would be extremely difficult to find people who genuinely enjoy doing hard physical work for 8 hours a day, even at a high price point.


To me it seems you imply that its OK to coerce certain people into taking certain work. I view the second paragraph as an attempt to justify that position, despite its conflict with basic humanist ideals.

Ignoring the hypothetical nature of your second paragraph, I think you miss the incentive to all "work", which depends on how much the worker thinks his work is worth.

Take my friend the farmer, who happily works on a tiny organic farm (hard physical work) for very little pay, because he feels his work is sustainable, and productive (helps others, provides food).

Also take my friend the construction worker, who would love to build houses for the rest of his life despite low wages, but won't, because he is unable to find employer that will enable his labor to bear fruit. Sure he could build mansions, and commercial monoliths to no end, embedding stone chipped from the Italian coastline into German upper class house-fronts, or build shopping malls. But he's not an idiot, he won't waste his life pouring his talent into luxury products and consumption infrastructure that won't help anyone in the end. He wants to build sustainable housing for people to live in, houses so cost effective everybody can have one.

Depending on coercion to motivate a work force, implies that the work to be done is actually detrimental to society.


Anecdotally speaking you're getting paid to exercise. If it weren't for the shit pay and the no health benefits I genuinely might go back to working part time as a rickshaw driver. I used to be a rickshaw driver and it was good work, and I was genuinely pretty happy. Also had plenty of mental energy available at the end of the day for thinking problems (which is why I said part time and not full time)


You're not being fair to the OP in saying "it's even easier to do nothing if you throw up your hands and say it won't work anyway."

He gave a very clear way out: massively reduce consumption.


Nothing like that has ever been tried before, what would "massively reducing consumption" even mean?

Locking people up who turn their heating up too high? Fines for those who eat too many cakes?

I'm being serious -- I can't imagine how such a thing could be enforced, and you certainly can't count on a significant majority of the world reducing their consumption just because it would be good for future generations.


There is actually a very simple solution to reduce consumption: The carbon tax.

Massively reducing consumption means, for instance: * Eating less meat * Frequent flyers massively reducing long haul flights across the world * Getting rid of energy inefficient appliances, such as old refrigerators

Seriously, the pareto principle applies here to, most of the emissions come from a small percentage of people.

If you think about these things from a carbon budget perspective: Whenever you take a flight you effectively rob the poorest of the world of the possibility to use fossil fuels as a way to increase their welfare.

A 2 degrees increase will kill a lot of people. And this will only get worse with a 4 degrees increase. And it will disproportionally effect the poorest of the world. An average warming of 4 degrees means massive warming of the land surface across the globe (Much more than 4 degrees, since most of the earth's surface is covered by water).

The heat wave of 2003 killed tens of thousands in developed Europe. Imagine the heat waves we will get in a 4 degrees world. Our infrastructure is not built for this. Our asphalt roads, train tracks, water pipes, emergency services will all struggle with this. A city like London has maybe food for 3 days.


In the war you could only get certain items by handing over a coupon, each family got a fixed number of them.

Should be done for fossil fuel.


On the contrary, consumption changing both ways, growing and shrinking has happened quite often in history.


I'm baffled. Without a formal grammar CommonMark is useless. Who implements a parser without a formal grammar?


CommonMark has not published a formal grammar.


The best decision would be to drop Markdown from everything and pretend it never existed. Then design a similar format with a formal grammar, and use that.

The sad thing is this won't happen. Given the traction I suspect there will be broken, incompatible Markdown implementations 100 years from now. Markdown really has the potential to become the worst universally popular standard in computing history.

What bothers me is that its not one guy (Gruber) who made a mistake and designed a language without a formal grammar (hey, mistakes happen), its that armies of developers wrote broken parsers for a language without a formal grammar. This is an impossible task, why did they not refuse to create something fundamentally broken, by definition. Now there are apparently people who want to standardize Markdown, without a formal grammar. How can they not realize that it will be impossible to ever implement the standard? How do they not see that what they are doing is professionally unethical?


Nooo.. it just needs a proper formal grammar adopted, that captures the best of the common variants.

Then people can extend their tools to use that single variant and standard parser/grammar.

Most [good] languages were implemented first without a formal grammar - lex/yacc/bnf usually came later, if at all.


Markdown is quirk mode plain text. That was probably ok for its original purpose but it is not for what it is used nowadays. There are much better plain text like formats around and it's a shame markdown is in the position it is now. IMHO a well-defined subset of LaTeX (or context) with almost plain text markup for the 10 most commonly used commands would have been the better solution on the long run.


I know a lot of people who did what you recommend and it broke them all mentally. Its really hard to regain self respect and adjust back to reality when you obey for 10+ years.

So I will give the opposite advice: Rebel. Be a pain. Skip class. Don't get into college.

If you're unlucky that might close lots of career gates, but at least you got your sanity, and that's the most important thing. A healthy mind is worth a bunch.


I agree with your critique, but I disagree with this line of thinking:

> If you need the company/paycheck and don't have enough of a background to command a change in the standard employment contract, then you have to sign away all rights.

You're not signing away your rights, your signing away everyone's rights. What about the person who doesn't like to sign his rights away, but is now expected to, because some other poor person lead the way? Accepting this kind of bondage from employers means either setting a very bad precedent, or following a very bad precedent. Either way it hurts the workforce.


This person doesn't have the opportunity or financial freedom to fight for everyone. He or she has bills to pay. The leverage dynamic is very real.

It seems the law should be improved here. It would directly promote innovation and new businesses. I don't see much downside either. Businesses would be less entrenched, which on first glance sounds good.


According to the comments in this thread google expects you to notify them when you hack on things off the job, and feels entitled to deny you those activities. Sounds quite hostile towards creative people. Nightmarish, even.


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