I tell my relatives that I'd gladly pay them in exchange for work, but they never seem to want to earn a living. They just want me to give them hand-outs.

Buncha lousy slackers...

Let's hear it for birth control! It's made women a lot more independent and free since the 1950s!

Just as well there is birth control the last thing I would want is a footy team for a family. Two children is enough.

Don't give up on jobs MNZ. Kids is optional (I don't blame you avoiding the Every Sperm is Sacred skit).

Work is your bread and butter, your identity, having comfortable living. SSDI is intended to keep you alive and encourage you to get off it either by working or getting married or whatever.

SSDI is a vow of poverty.

What is SSDI Shrek?

Social
Security
Disability
Insurance

It's what the U.S. government pays you for being too disabled to work. Rarely does it allow anyone to pay all their bills, buy groceries, and afford even a studio apartment in a seedy motel row.

Social Security Disability Income. Usually that includes Medicaid health insurance for the poor.

SSDI means one is generally incapable of earning a living wage (defined as a certain dollar amount). I don't think we are being creative enough getting them into jobs. The Soviets would have displaced an able bodied person to put a "disabled" person into a job they could perform despite their limitations.

From each according to his gifts
To each according to his need

But the Soviets wanted to reduce the "disability" roster.

I'm not sure what they would have done about the unemployment roster. Afghanistan seems to come to mind, though.


We also have related Supplemental Security Income

OK. Its called a disability pension here in OZ. And is about $1,000 per fortnight plus cheap medicines ($2.50 per script), half price travel. Discounts on power, gas and a telephone allowance as well. Needless to say more than a few make out they are disabled.

It was said the Soviets cleared a minefield by marching a company of soldiers through it..... or at least Stalin would have.

That was often done by Stalin in WW11. March a penal battalion through the minefield. BOOM. Good riddance to the old USSR, it won't be missed.

It is difficult to establish being too disabled to earn a living or survival wage. Social Security will fight you on it. Lawyers on TV advertise fighting with you.

The same principle has been compared to Palestinian terrorists willing to produce nuclear weapons without radiological safeguards. They would ultimately die of cancer to create nuclear weapons for Osama bin Laden or whomever else to go to Paradise and have 72 virgins.

The Soviet government outlawed unemployment, so unemployed people were sent to Siberian work camps -- Solzhenitzen's "Gulag Archipelago" -- to mine ore, log forests, or to simply "disappear" forever.

You have been watching too many movies.

The problem with them creating a nuclear weapon is, using the old gun cannon design, it takes a tremendous amount of U235. The implosion type needs an initiator and that needs a rather expensive reactor to produce the required isotope (a neutron source) on an ongoing basis. Something they won't have available.

So that leaves them with two options. Steal a nuke or take over a country with nukes (Pakistan??). I suspect their long term agenda is precisely that. Iran or even North Korea is hardly going to supply them if they value their existence.

Solzhenitsyn

Most Gulag inmates were not political prisoners, although the political prisoner population was always significant. People could be imprisoned in a Gulag camp for crimes such as unexcused absences from work, petty theft, or anti-government jokes.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GULAG