Wait what's wrong with voluntary eugenics? Perhaps the fact that something both "feels like eugenics" and is understood as the "correct medical and scientific thing to do" should cause one to reassess any unexamined, knee-jerk, blanket revulsion to the concept of eugenics that one may have.
James Yeh, Ken Griffin's "first quant" and eventual co-CIO of Citadel, used to say, when annoyed by a junior who was overfitting to the backtest, "I don't let the computer boss me around! I tell the computer what to do!"
All experience has shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.
"There are people who have done great evil, who perhaps want to be forgotten if they were dead. But it would not be morally right to forget their deeds and the lessons we can draw from them. Because of that, the right to be forgotten upon death is a conditional one."
The above is the moral reasoning expressed in the comment you are responding to, and of course whether or not one agrees with this line of reasoning can vary from person to person and belief to belief.
It's noticeably improving, though! Over the last 10 years or so, both their GDP per capita and household income per capita have roughly doubled. Now when I visit medium-sized cities there I am amazed to find latte-slinging coffee shops and craft beer-pouring gastropubs that would look right at home in Brooklyn.
>Now when I visit medium-sized cities there I am amazed to find latte-slinging coffee shops and craft beer-pouring gastropubs that would look right at home in Brooklyn.
True, but that's not an accurate measurement of the quality of life or income of the average Romanian. They're are just businesses serving an afluent urban clientele (mostly corporate/IT workers and other high income people) that's like what 10% of the național population or something but overly represented in much higher proportions in the big cities.
Go to the smaller cities or villages and you'll see a different picture: lots of people with precarious education, unemployed or making minimum wage in dead-end jobs and living paycheck to paycheck unable to afford to fix broken teeth, hospitals and schools falling apart, etc.
The country's still much better to live in (especially in the 5 big cities) than what the average of the planet has to deal with, but there's a reason why statistically it's at the bottom of the EU charts. Tech workers sipping gourmet coffee in the big cities are the exception but don't represent the norm.
$8,400 over three years is about $230/month. And aside from the opportunity cost of your labor to optimize that, you should also theoretically account for any purchases that you wouldn't have made if you weren't trying to optimize your points (if any; I'm sure it's hard to attribute).
With current interest rates of around 5%, one could get the same stream of income ($2.8k/y) by just plonking $50k or so into a high-yield savings account or money market fund.
I have likely spent 1 hour applying for cards, loading them into Apple Wallet over 3 years. If you are doing the math on opportunity cost for something you spent 1 hour over 3 years, you are already wasting your time.
To be honest, the $50k argument isn't comparable. It's like saying "Oh you have a side gig making $10k/year, why don't you just invest $200k in a money market fund instead?" First, someone could do both. And second, it's not even a logical comparison.
Mark Twain had just finished building that house the year prior, and he would die the next year; the house itself would burn down not long after that :-(
