Weird Flatmate Advice Needed

Bottom line, if it's my name on the lease, then nobody is staying on the couch without my say-so.

Do you also encourage theft of the personal belongings of someone who slept there without your permission?

Theft? No. But I'm well within my rights to box them up and put them somewhere out of sight.

Then again, I wouldn't have let the "frequent couch flyer" thing get to this point.

Then again again, I wouldn't consider living with anyone who would put me in the position of confronting them on juvenile bullshit like this, let alone complete fucking strangers who responded to a newspaper ad.

And I sure as fuck wouldn't move into an apartment I couldn't afford and just hope everything would somehow work out.

Bottom line, "Delaware" is equal parts moron and spineless mangina for allowing this situation to arise in the first place.

I agree with most of that, but I wouldn't go so far as calling him a spineless mangina.

Lots of people advertise for roommates in the paper and let out rooms to complete strangers.

As far as the rest, I think he's relatively young. He'll learn from this experience and I don't think will let it happen again.

Ya, I didn't have any flatmates at my last place (lived there from 17-19), so dealing with them is a somewhat novel experience, Earlier on (15-17) I usually lived with a few people, but I also usually knew them beforehand. Regardless, Albrecht, finding roommates via Craigslist is quite common.

When I was 17 and first had my own place, there were some big issues with genuine serial breaking and entering (and theft, especially of my pot) from socially maladept acquaintances which I wasn't able to stop for a long time due to issues with confrontation. But I learned from that and eventually put an end to it, and the current thing comes nowhere near that severity. So, like Jenee said, it's a progression.

Stupid acts of short-sightedness have always been popular.

Not to mention all the collectivist schemes you support.

All you are doing is quibbling about who is allowed to steal and which victims of theft should shut the fuck up and accept it as their duty to the unwashed masses.

You clearly don't understand the term "theft".

How is "using" a tax ID stealing from anyone?

and I don't think providing for those who can't provide for themselves is stealing.

So, Jenee. As it has been pointed out before, how happy do you think the IRS is if you file a return and neglect to list the job you've been unknowingly moonlighting on because some fucking greaser stole your SSN?

Do you think the IRS goes over every single return? It's all done electronically and unless something comes up really screwy, no red flags pull it out.

You don't think the same SS number being used, say, in Maine and in Arizona on tax documents, supposedly at the same time, isn't "something screwy"??

And using someone else's ID is not only identity theft, but fraud and illegal.

Of course not...when the charity is willingly given. When it isn't..it's theft!

If you said something like that at TNZ, you would get a screeching lecture about "social contracts," followed by a litany of insults to your intellect, lineage, and so forth for even daring to question the notion, and finally there'd be some variation on the dumb shit "accept it unquestioningly or leave the country" canned leftist jab.

Another reason I don't bother with TNZ but a couple times a year.

this is what I attempted to explain in another post several weeks or months ago. Those numbers are not pulled out of a hat and they are not given away freely to any idiot who would misuse them.

Fraud, yes. Identity theft, no - not truely identity theft in these kinds of cases.

When it's "taxes", it's the government's responsibility to provide for the general welfare of the people, therefore, not theft.

This is the argument I keep having with that smug fuckstain Davros. Choosing to interpret the combination of "promote the general welfare" + the income tax amendment as a mandate to keep everyone fed and sheltered does not settle it as an objective fact once and for all. That is an appeal to popularity and convention, not a statement of fact.

The Government - any government, regardless of any interpretation of words or even if the words are there or not - has an obligation to provide for the citizens who can't provide for themselves.

Says who? Based on what?

With that level of justification, I am every bit as legitimate and righteous in asserting that governments exists solely to secure the borders and provide an efficient mechanism for protecting individual, negative-obligation rights, without accepting any responsibility for your wellbeing.

securing the borders ..., ok. I can accept that compromise if I had to make one.

But, I think, as fellow human beings, we have an obligation to look after those who can't help themselves. We're not animals. We don't leave someone for dead just because they can no longer hunt nor have someone to hunt for them.

You do know that promote does not equal provide, correct?

And the only kind of people the government should be supporting are the mentally or majorly physically handicapped and truly disabling illnesses. I think a majority of Americans would agree with this.

Most people who get welfare can provide for themselves but won't. They should go piss up a rope.

No, it doesn't.

You, however, do.

I don't know where you guys get the idea that being on welfare is some kind of easy street. I was on welfare and believe me, you can't "live" on it.

Not only that, but I had to join the military to get off welfare. Anything I did to improve my situation was met with - not a reduction in cash or food stamps, but in medical coverage. My son was hospitalized every year for the first 6 years of his life with bronchial infections. There's no way in hell I could have paid for that.

People who work for the welfare services don't want people to get off welfare - if everyone got off welfare, they wouldn't have a job.

Not buying it.

My sister-in-law and family is on welfare and I know for a fact that the children's medical benefits are separate and are not reduced or removed until someone is completely off the tit. The adults may lose coverage, but the kiddies won't.

The fact you are not on welfare anymore kind of negates that last sentence. It may not be easy or simple...especially for people who think they are entitled, but it is not inescapable unless you are lazy and don't want to try.

And neither one of you has disproven or even slightly shaken Skin's point. If they're getting paid less than minimum wage, they're getting taxed on less than minimum wage, therefore paying far less into the system than even a legal minimum wage earner would be.

Anyway, the point of this line of discussion wasn't for you to try to justify the parasites, it was to rub in Cupcake's face that he ought to be justifying the one he's dealing with, if he's got any integrity.

The whining and screeching hurts my ears.

No disagreement there.

What I object to are the ones who WON'T help themselves.

You are an exception to the rule. You did the right things. You utilized the system for its true intent, moved up, and got off of the government tit and became self-sufficient.

Who says they're making less than minimum wage?

He's more a kid than adult for all that he's lived in an adult world and had to make adult decisions. Give him a break.

I learned a long time ago not everyone has my ... abilities. I didn't grow up 'trapped' in poverty so I already 'knew' a different life - so that was a huge plus right off the bat. I'd already had an idea of what I wanted out of life and I'm the kind of person who generally gets what I want.

Not to mention I did not have an aversion to joining the military - well, not any aversions due to social perceptions about race being placed in the front line because "the white man is out to get me", anyway. I just needed to accept the fact that the military is a "man's world" and I'd do best to just keep my mouth shut for the duration (I grew up with 4 brothers so I already had a head start there, too). I also had to accept the fact that the military is based on a rank system and that while someone may have more knowledge or experience, the person with the higher rank took charge anyway (and despite being told the American Way is the former, the real job world works on the latter).

There are a lot of things about my life that is different from many people who are on welfare. You can't judge an entire group of people based on one individual.

Didn't you?

If he's still just a kid, there's no better time for him to start showing some integrity than right now. He can go two ways with that -- either he can stick by the principle he wants to apply to the American people, himself, or he can have some empathy with the percentage of the American people who feel about Mexican colonists in the U.S. the way he feels about the guy surfing his couch. The situations, no matter how hard you might try to spin it, are analogous, and both the one that's abstract to him and the one that's personal to him ought to evoke the same sentiment.

As we've discussed many times, countries are not analogous to private property. My stance is not hypocritical. I believe in the sanctity of property rights, but the United States of America is not private property.

That's a nice cop-out, but it fails on one count: The American people are paying their full share for the operation of the United States. Every public service from the foundation to the rafters. In that sense, a country is still analogous to private property. Even the fractional taxes paid by illegal aliens, be they sales taxes or payroll taxes on illegally low wages, are not the same full share paid by citizens.

Are welfare scum paying their full share?
Are top income earners who pay in the vast majority of all tax money paying theirs?
Do you really think you can generalise so broadly?
Anyway, there are two solutions, and I happen to advocate for both of them:
1. Abolish social services.
2. Legalise and tax migrant workers just like anybody else.