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>I live in South Africa and government handouts do nothing but keep the poor oppressed and uneducated.

I live in Australia, one of the best examples of how government handouts can ruin a race, and I'm saying this as someone coming from a low-income family with poor education and working+educating myself to a $100k/y job before I'm 30.

>I think paying for people who lose their jobs because of new technology is way past that line.

I think completely supporting them would be a bad idea, but as said in my original post, assistance in re-education should be partially paid for. I am always of the opinion that education should be at least partially subsidised - full subsidy encourages a poorer quality of education.

Example: You're 26 and have just spent $80k and 8 years of toil studying furiously for a degree, and the market for your chosen field evaporates. Sure, you've got the rest of your life ahead of you, but now you're significantly in debt because of something you had no control over.

This is a difficult analogy to compare with taxi drivers, but I hope you see the point - and over the next 10-40 years we will see this happen more and more as machine intelligence replaces more and more jobs.



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