I am having some difficulty that Jake may not have eaten the pastries and may not know what happened. But the adversarial situation asks him to somehow solve a puzzle he had no hand in creating. How do you deal with the fact that 'turning up heat' like this pretty much begs for speculation anyway?
As soon as I imagine an actually innocent Jake in this situation, his next line is, "Chocolate does not make all dogs sick, nor necessarily consistently do so. For that matter, a friend of Gillian's could have stopped by or something. I don't know, I was in my room playing video games."
Relevant information might include whether mothers sometimes have differing degrees of care for each of their own daughters. I am guessing without looking that there are studies indicating favorites can exist among equally-genetically-related-to-oneself children, also breaking the strong link to "caring in proportion to their genetic similarity to you."
Any information on false positive rates?
Quality in dentistry has been going down. The custom work of crowns, quality of fillings, and etc, have been going by the wayside for cheaper options that the consumer doesn't grok the downstream expenses of. Generally the chain dentists don't even present options. I found this out recently after getting some miracle filling that just seems so easy and cheap as "technology has improved" but I would have happily paid for gold or amalgam and a more professional job. Hadn't had one in about 28 years, so I took their sales pitch as fact. I also understand that Crowns are similar, and vary in expected lifetime, quality, etc. I made a contact in the industry who actually runs a shop making them, but she informs me the industry is running the other way, towards cheap and will need replacements down the road.
But on the business side, the "Blue Oceans" Strategy (see the book) of removing options, cutting cost, removing details, and making off with a ton of cash like Yellowtail Winery is an easy sell. It's just that with eyes, teeth, my body, etc, I would prefer a different model. It's hard to be educated enough for all to be caveat emptor and up to recently I at least trusted a dentist when I walk in. Now I don't even know how to buy quality or who to trust.
Interesting case. Are there other cases where VC-run businesses have similar issues, perhaps in other industries? I would like to see and understand a pattern if possible.
>UBI may reasonably give people at the bottom of the market sufficient money to become participants.
The incentive is still going to drive a businessperson to come up with a way to take that money from those people (as it is now). So the rent seeking could expand to include something like slum-lording trailer parks in areas which are even further from possible employment, potentially locking those residents into a radius where no one around does anything but pot and video games.
Meanwhile, since there is more money available to the middle classes, can't I just sell/rent them a house with more bells and whistles? Maybe they're discerning customers with an extra thousand dollars, so we build the house on 16" centers again instead of 20" and sell them their new, wonderful, higher-quality lifestyle. Or maybe we just put a thousand dollar countertop on the same crummy house.
Or is something more fundamentally changed by UBI in the basic system underlying rent-seeking and inflation (in essence, the dynamics of capitalism)? To me, rent-seeking is only a specific incarnation of that greater dynamic of exploiting whatever source of income you can by whatever advantage you have within the system to take money from whoever can and will give it to you, and not as distinct as people make it out to be. The only thing UBI fundamentally changes in this equation is who can render funds, and how much they can render.
This is probably true in an internal sense, where one needs to be self-honest. It might be very difficult to understand when any conscious person other than you was doing this, and it might be dicey to judge even in yourself. Especially given the finiteness of human attention.
In my personal life, I have spent recent months studying. Did I emotionally turn away from some things in the middle of this, so that to an outside observer I might have looked like I was burying my head or averting my eyes? Sure. Was I doing that or was I setting boundaries? I guess even if you lived in my head at that time, it could be hard to know. Maybe my obsessive studying itself is an avoidance. In the end, I know what I intended, but that's about it. That's often all we get, even from the inside.
So while I agree with you, I'm not sure exactly when we should cease to be agnostic about parsing that difference. Maybe it's something we can only hold it as an ideal, complimentary to striving for Truth, basically?
It's also possible that an opposing effect happens where your shouting into the void about dragons connects in some vague way with my belief in the Ilithids, which I then end up coopting your dragon evidence into my own agenda. Especially if you find anything close to material evidence. Heck, your material evidence for dragons now gives all kinds of creedance to Ilithids, beholders, gnomes, and all sorts. So the gnome people and everyone else is now coming out of the woodwork to amplify your work on dragons. And I think this would be regardless of the specific nuances your attribute to dragons. I would expect those nuances to get smooshed in the fray to cite your once-and-for-all-proving-dragons strategy.
I mean, if Pons and Fleischmann was true, for example, I bet it would get trotted out with all kinds of half-baked theories on free energy, along with Tesla's name. And the reason I'm making this bet is because these already do get trotted out into such discussions.
(Not that I would ever read those reports or have done any such research into repressed Pons and Fleischmann evidence or Ilithid conspiracies)
If I am a lending shark, I will lend more predatorily to people under a UBI regime, even if that income is protected. It changes the risk management calculations towards "they now have more ways to figure out a way to pay before going bankrupt" and "after bankruptcy pool of money I can extract is higher." Again, maybe you've technically protected UBI, but I can surely garnish wages in either case, pressuring them to give me as much as they can. People can miraculously make money appear when you squeeze them, and now I know there's more there to squeeze them for in every case.
People with protected savings often raid that. I will count on the "raid the IRA" effect, but with people for whom that money wasn't earned, and they don't culturally have the tendency to want to protect it. And anyway, you can only file bankruptcy once in seven years, and I can get more blood in the interim. In essence, I'll redo all my risk management calculations on how far I press this because now you have two choices, you're either going to be dirt poor -- nothing but UBI and quit your job and live in the gutter, or else you're going to "magically make some money happen" to get me off your back.
My guess is this dynamic screws over people just above the poorest, and deep into the middle.
Look, I personally find all that distasteful. I won't even buy Altria stock. But I expect a flourishing of those businesses in a UBI regime, and they will prey upon many who UBI is trying to help. That and the increased inflation, I think the middle poor and the lower middle classes will get really screwed by the whole thing in the end. Basically the people who work and struggle, whom UBI most wishes to help.
Kind of adjacent: Add in investment scams targeting the undereducated, and lots of toys to decorate trailers. I would expect Sony, Nintendo, etc stock to go up (GME, LOL), and Altria as well due to the additional pot sales. The "Video games and drugs" class will expand fast, because UBI will not likely be enough to do anything actually interesting.
I think it's a step that has to happen and will happen. The writing is probably on the wall that we're going to enter a very redistributive regime in the USA. But I am not optimistic about it until we're at near Star Trek levels of Universal Wealth.
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There's still a principle I feel needs addressed. An authority figure (or at least someone who is supposed to be my ally) seems to be turning up the heat, adding pressure, escalating, questioning my veracity, fishing around for lies. And in that situation, evasive, defensive (possibly offense as a defense) and justifying tactics could be a natural response for the innocent.
Simply put, how do you make useful distinctions within that?