What if?

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Autmn said:
What if people stopped taking themselves so seriously on this site, and instead focused their energy on improving themselves rather than wasting their efforts on appeasing random internet strangers?
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No u
 
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What if man-caused global warming kills us all eventually, and all because no one wanted to make sacrifices to slow down and reverse it?
 
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autisticdragonkin said:
I don't understand why welfare exists. What is the justification of the welfare state. To me it just seems like parasites leeching off of the productive elements of society but if it were modified (no welfare for criminals) it could become a way to pay people not to commit crime. Are there any other better justifications for the welfare state
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Traditionally the idea of the modern welfare state was to be able to provide for the most vulnerable members of society.

You need to think about when the idea of universal social security was created. There was no stop gap for the majority of people, and so when if you were in the lower classes of income earners you were suddenly unemployed, or in poor health it could spell ruination for you, and also for your entire family.

Additionally the models of state pensions were an invention of Otto Von Bismarck to basically see that retired German factory and industrial workers could be cared for in their retirement age.
Mind you when the laws were brought in and modeled by other countries, the average life expectancy for a industrial worker who met the retirement age at 60 was 65, so the state wasn't putting itself on the hook for old age pensioners like it is now, which is one of the reasons there have been changes to the retirement/old age pension qualifications since, as people are living longer and the old model does not fit intended use.

As for welfare sponging from groups like single mothers, again it was initially meant as a stop gap measure for women who had become single parents by the loss of a spouse, and not as a means of supporting a woman who had intentionally remained single after having gotten pregnant.

Positron said:
The question can be easily answered by a 2x2 decision matrix (disaster strikes/disaster does not strike i.e. false info. vs tell/not tell)

So the rational choice is not to tell.
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I'd say it would not be worth telling in the probability of a mass extinction event, as it would be of no benefit to the majority of the doomed population to cause undue stress or alarm. As well as the side effects of having informed people if it was going to happen and then it doesn't.

You only need to look at the original fallout from the broadcasting of War of The Worlds to see the effect that a mass population warning, even when prefaced with this is just a broadcast recording of a cataclysmic can have on a population.

admiral said:
Why do all old women have the exact same haircut?
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Infamous granny perm was popularized because it is less maintenance. Also with advancing age, there really isn't the same drive to maintain sexual market value as there is among younger women.
 
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Forever Train Engineer said:
What would happen if the Kuomintang won the Chinese Civil War?
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Chances are quite likely that we would have a completely different Asian history.
The Kaomintang no longer isolated to Taiwan, would unify China under a centralized republican government, after defeating the remaining regional power structure left over by the Imperial dynasty.

They would have worked towards an industrialized China with the same scale of advancement that Taiwan had during that time period, and so today would be considered a second world borderline first world power in terms of their economic output and wealth distribution, where as India would likely have absorbed at least some of the cheaper industrialization output for the world, as well as some other parts of South East Asia.

Communism would have been prevented from spreading in Asia as virulently as it did, so the likelihood of a unified Korea is outweighed by the fact that American funding wouldn't have been there to prop up the south, thus the Republic of Korea would likely be slightly less advanced than South Korea is, but alternatively it would be even more manufacturing based as it is now, and have closer ties to the Chinese markets.

Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos, likely would also have not had large communist insurgencies, in addition to the Soviet Union being checked in Asia, which would have meant more focus on the part of the Soviets in spreading international communism into Africa and the Middle East.

There is an opportunity that it might have caused an earlier collapse of the Soviet regime, though again that's not quantifiable. As well as predicting what would have happened in terms of the relationships between Republican China and Japan in the post war period.
 
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What if the non-avian dinosaurs hadn't gone extinct? Suppose the asteroid that hit the Earth 66 million years ago had flown past instead: what would have became of life on Earth?
 
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what if pence unbecomes vice president somehow and now the title goes to pelosi so we have trump as president with a dem vp?
 
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What if the tribulations spoken of in the bible actually occurred? Nothing symbolic like people theorized but an epic large scale battle between good and evil. How many of us would willingly go with the "evil" side? What if, somehow, Jesus was defeated? I mean, what's the point of this huge battle if the result is so pre-determined its in the bible. There has to be some likelihood the devil could overthrow God, right?

Would the world become a slaaneshi den of pleasure and corruption? Would everyone murder and rape one another because it no longer mattered? I'm talking complete chaos, anarchy etc. Or would the world become more controlled and Orwellian? Everyone with 666/micro chip implants, only deviancy.
 
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Kaiser Wilhelm's Ghost said:
Chances are quite likely that we would have a completely different Asian history.
The Kaomintang no longer isolated to Taiwan, would unify China under a centralized republican government, after defeating the remaining regional power structure left over by the Imperial dynasty.
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Most of the problems with China are linked to Chinese culture rather than Communism. The cheating, inequality, the corruption and crippling centralization.

Taiwan succeeded because it benefited from being a US buffer state and precisely because its culture wasn't Chinese. Only 10% of the people of Taiwan were refugees from the Civil War and Taiwan only thrived when this minority lost their monopoly on power.
 
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What if Soros was funded by someone else for the complete and utter destruction of Western society?
 
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Autmn said:
What if people stopped taking themselves so seriously on this site, and instead focused their energy on improving themselves rather than wasting their efforts on appeasing random internet strangers?
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What makes you think we haven't gone on a journey of self discovery, found out we are ultimately fundamentally broken. And decided that the only reason we keep on living is to document the depravity of the human condition for entertainment value for random internet strangers?
 
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