Imagine that! Actually having money allowing homeless people to get a home and increase their chances of going out and actually getting a job so they can keep their quality of life up from being homeless!
Who could have ever guessed that people with homes are more likely to try and get jobs to keep their homes? /s
getting a job so they can keep their quality of life up from being homeless!
And paying taxes while having that job. So even from a cold hearted financial perspective, this might be one of the cheapest ways to deal with the problem
This is what the “social security is communism!” crowd just just doesn’t get. Investing a tiny amount up front actually makes you money (or at least saves you exponentially more later). And hey, people get to not be homeless at the same time!
I read a lot about this and I have a friend who does social work with homeless people.
There are so many different situations for homeless people. The ones who can better their situation with $1k/mo are truly down on their luck. They need a boost and they can get back on their feet. These are the “invisible homeless” because they are generally ashamed of their situation.
Then you have crackheads. The money won’t help them.
Then you have the mentally ill. They need medical treatment. Cash is less important.
Finally, you have people who have given up. They don’t want to leave their tent. They’ve been homeless so long it’s their life. They prefer it. It’s familiar. I don’t know how money affects this situation.
This is the first Christian church I’ve ever seen that has been willing to respond to the violent rhetoric of other churches with something strong than “Oh, well, everyone is entitled to their beliefs”. They need and deserve our critical support.
Eh, there are Christian denominations in my area flying pride flags and BLM flags. Granted, I live in a liberal area. But they’re not all bad. And I say this being very turned off by the idea of religion in general.
but are they willing to go so far as to condemn the others? when someone gets behind a pulpit and says that we need to be murdered in the street, do they say “that man is not a christian” or “my brother and I don’t agree on everything”? those are the ones I’m talking about, the people that believe what they believe, but find it more important to avoid conflict than to do what’s right.
Yes, they absolutely do. But it’s the backlash that people see.
The United Methodist Church just had a schism because the bigots were butthurt by being called out, so they went and started their own denomination (Global Methodist) with hatred of gay people as a foundational principle.
The only step forward worth the name is the cancellation of all debt, and making higher education government paid. Anything else is an embarrassing stop-gap fine to avoid the only real solution to student debt and lack of access to higher ed. A educated workforce is a skilled and effective workforce, it is literally in our nation’s best interest to educate it’s citizenry as best it is capable, and it’s capable of a lot more than it is currently doing
just because it’s shit doesn’t make it untrue… what cdf12345 said isn’t wrong: conservatives challenged and rolled back previous debt forgiveness… they’d absolutely try and do the same with pretty much anything progressives do, so everything has to move in baby steps
blaming republicans for lack of progress is not their only play: you can be frustrated by the minimal progress, but to say they do nothing at all is incorrect and only helps conservatives move the US backward
The fact that the Supreme Court found that the plaintiffs had standing is what is so worrisome. I think everyone was shocked that a student loan management company in Missouri was found to have been damaged by the previous student debt plan.
That would strengthen America and make it a better, more competitive country that would have to worry a lot less about the new cold war, and also make even our military stronger in the long run... but oh no, it's "socialism" so half the voting population's too brainwashed to see how it'll help everyone, including the rich, who would have higher quality workers.
Because it's not about making life better, it's about control + sadism.
Now imagine if we’d nationalize stuff like internet like we did with Hydro-Quebec (Electricity). Maybe then we’d stop paying ludicrous prices for the bare minimum.
It’s not always this extreme, but there’s usually a few hours every week where the price is negative. I’ve heard that the reason is that the Dutch wind turbines keep running when it’s not profitable, so they crash the prices for everyone. Anyway, timing the car charger makes a lot of sense. I haven’t paid for driving in several months.
The human brain is hardwired for an “Us vs. Them” viewpoint. As Bush once said, “You’re either with us, or you’re against us.”
Advertisers, politicians, and those that seek to influence, they know this. They don’t project any shades of grey or balance into their arguments. They attempt to “match groups” with you, and then point out that other group, over there, aren’t they terrible, we should do something about that.
So you get videos going, “Look at those shoplifters, doing wrong things! We’re glad that they’re getting their just desserts, aren’t we?”
They don’t show anything that might evoke some empathy in their target audience. You don’t want people to identify with your enemy, you want them to identify with you.
The human brain is hardwired for an “Us vs. Them” viewpoint.
I kinda wonder, is it? Asked in a non-antagonistic way. One often sees kids before they are taught to hate be generous and caring towards others. I wonder if it’s less hardwired and more ingrained in societal upbringings. Especially in the USA where binary thinking is quite profitable.
I can also see it being hardwired, however, as it would likely live adjacent to the base survival instinct.
I think it’s part of the way we are socialized into a society based on economic competition. So it seems normal to us, but it’s just another way of saying “it’s not perfect, but it’s the best/only system we have!” as conservatives are so fond of saying. I don’t think it’s hardwired at all, but we’re intentionally taught that it is.
I took an anthropology class once and learned that there’s archeological evidence of early tribes taking care of disabled elderly (for the time) people. It would have taken a lot more energy to take care of a disabled person in a hunter gatherer society than it would now. I feel like a capitalist would have just left them to die in a cave because that’s what Ayn Rand would have done.
The brain is a lazy thing. It falls into patterns easily, it takes mental shortcuts whereever it can. All that comes from our evolutionary history, where energy (literal energy for thinking) was limited.
Your subconscious mind handles all the everyday trivia to maintain your existence in a low energy way, and your mind is very quick to shunt things down that low energy path. That path is all our “instincts” (fight or flight, nurturing instincts, forming into groups etc etc ) and is based upon nomadic living in the savannah plains of Africa three million years ago.
If someone presents something in a way that can easily fall into one of our evolutionary shortcuts then your subconscious will run with it without you even realising.
It fosters dependency, and it’s an economic-political death spiral. People on UBI vote for those who support higher UBI. Inflation increases due to increased monetary velocity. People demand higher UBI due to cost of living increases. Votes go to those who promise higher UBI, etc. The cycle continues until you’re wiping your ass with currency or some form of CBDC is implemented to stop the bleeding.
False. It is only inflationary if the the government prints money to fund it. If instead the government funds it by cutting unnecessary spending or increasing tax revenue in some way than it is not inflationary. There is the same amount of money in circulation but it is just moving between hands instead of staying in a bank account.
I think this is a great example of what rich people think of us. This user would prefer that people stay homeless rather than cut back on their own luxuries so that others could have a more decent basic standard of living. Those with stable basic housing feel like they’re living the normal life they have earned, while a homeless person is someone that doesn’t want to put in the work to carry themselves. The wealthy think the same way about the middle class: we want vacation days, adequate healthcare, a proper justice system, and decent wages/fair business market without earning it. However, a person with a 1 bedroom apartment they can call home is a king to a homeless person.
It fosters dependency, and it’s an economic-political death spiral. People on UBI vote for those who support higher UBI.
Here, we see the privilege. They argue that it would foster dependency because the poor would vote for better standards of living rather than contribute to society. To think this way, we have to ignore that someone cannot meaningfully contribute to society without adequate housing and stability. We would also have to ignore our own hypocrisy in that we argue that our standard of living is dependent on the exploitation of the homeless.
These are the very same arguments that the wealthy elite use. If they pay more taxes, then the poor will slippery slope the vote by electing politicians that continue to increase taxes on the rich, while also becoming dependent on that revenue.
I am in no way attacking this user. It’s a common mentality across the world. Instead, I’m using their comment to point out how this mentality works regardless of social class: 1) my efforts have created my wealth, while everyone else that is poorer just doesn’t work to earn it, and 2) helping the lazy poorer people makes them dependent on my work. Repeat these arguments in some fashion all the way down to the poorest person on Earth 🔁
Do you have a link to the original source or the name of the authors? Neither is in your article only a statement that it was sourced from another site.
You’re going to have to source that. There is no cycle of dependency, lol. Everyone making it above survival level probably won’t even spur them to vote. These aren’t people rolling in money, it’s 12k per year.
No Im saying it will provide little to no net benefit to the larger economy whereas redirecting over 50% of the budget to give $12k/yr to everyone would be catastrophic to the larger economy. I suspect the economy tanking would end up hurting more than the 12k helps.
The only way UBI doesn’t significantly harm the US economy, and to be clear Im talking about only the USA right now, is if the payments are either so small they don’t help, the payments are not universal and are targeted towards those that need money, or if the entire thing is financed by increasing the national debt which is unsustainable over the long run. None of these are as beneficial as they seem.
Unfortunately I think you’re arguing with idiots. You’re right it wouldn’t be able to be universal because it wouldn’t change anything if it was, it would just be made up for somewhere else and the problem would be a can getting kicked down the road for someone else to deal with
Because it is taken from the same economy. If I tax Bill $1 to give Bob $1 we didn’t see any net growth. The only way it produces growth is if we gave Bob $1 but never collected $1 from anyone which becomes unsustainable in the long term.
You would have to start at the most vulnerable. Then eventually, you would have to target the adults who make 70k or less which is about 70% of the adult population. Then, taper it down up to 100k. This would be app. 2 trillion. I think what a lot of people are missing is, we may not have a choice to not have some kind of UBI with robots taking over quite a few jobs in the next 50 years. We have to get corporations and billionaires to pay more taxes as well. The bottom 80% are paying most of the taxes. Don’t forget that trump paid $0-$700 in taxes for quite a few years and I’m sure that’s more common than not.
The benefits of UBI would be:
More people living in rural areas because they don’t have to go to the city to get jobs. They could work in a grocery store and live a decent life.
Have the opportunity to develop new businesses.
More people going to school because they could afford it.
More money being spent and more taxes received from that.
Right now, our money is being funneled up to the rich shareholders of these huge companies instead of going to Americans who aren’t even getting by.
Giving everyone 12k/year doesn’t foster dependency? Dude I make enough to not be homeless but if I had an extra 12k I’d spend it and my lifestyle would inflate. That’s dependency. I depend on it to live a nicer life.
This isn’t directed at you, this is for the other dude, but also answers your question a little. The entire US was given checks during the pandemic, did it make you lazy?
There’s a big difference when its guaranteed over a period of time. Then you can actually feel justified in quitting whatever job you have since you know the money will keep coming in.
Because you were rolling in checks or because it was unhealthy to do so? Having worked full-time and part time as a freelancer, job burnout and needing recovery isn’t laziness.
It was a joke… I was still working full time, just from home. And I didn’t go anywhere because there was a pandemic going on and I didn’t want to be around people. But the fact that I was 100% in sweatpants and lounging around the house for a year did feel lazy, but had nothing to do with the checks coming in from the government.
Not really. There is a big difference when the free money is guaranteed over a long period of time. I don’t think it takes any extraordinary leaps in logic that people would stop working if they were given a bunch of money every month.
What you wanted to do and what you did are 2 different things. You’re overworked and probably not doing a job that you want to do. That isn’t laziness, that’s job unsatisfaction.
Yeah, but that probably applies to a lot of people. Why would anyone choose to do all the bullshit (but necessary) jobs if they can get paid the same for sitting at home?
The main problem I always hear with this is “where does the brine go?”
It can’t easily be dumped without causing ecological chaos. In the water it can kill ocean life. On land it can make plant life never grow again in certain areas, also leeching into groundwater.
I love this technology buy am apprehensive about its deployment.
This is the actual answer - you put this in evap fields with no run-off potential (so as not to harm fresh or salt water environments), dry your slurry through stages and then sell the salts commercially for further refinement and consumption.
Total US salt production is roughly 40 million metric tons (or 40 billion kg) per year.
Let's say we use this process to desalinate water for just 10% LA County's water needs. LA County currently uses 1.5mm acre-feet of water per year. In SI units, this is about 2 trillion liters each year.
There's about 35g of salt in each liter of seawater.
So... at just 10%, we're desalinating about 200 billion liters a year and producing 7 million tons of salt.
If we desalinate for the rest of the state, or the rest of the Southwest, we'll easily be producing more salt each year than all of the mining activity nationwide.
At some point the excess salt will have no buyers, and we will still need to deal with it.
I'm a fan of the simpler approach: Build long-ass pipes out into the ocean, and slowly dilute the brine so that it's not concentrated in any one spot. The total salinity of the entire ocean will not change by any perceptible amount, so long as you don't drop heavy brine in any one spot.
Yeah. It may be "simple" but it's not going to be cheap. I still think it'll be cheaper than dedicating huge swaths of coastal land to become brine-drying fields, though.
quite true, although we already have long ass pipes/cables in the ocean for phone/internet connections between continents. So it’s entirely doable, and is already being done for another purpose besides salt.
Capitalism: purchase a snack food conglomerate, lobby to remove sodium from food labels, increase salt in snack foods dramatically, and sell at a loss; this will drive up demand for the desalinated water.
Edit: add HFCS to the food and sell it at a massive profit.
I’m pretty sure we can find more uses for ocean salt. At the amounts we’re talking about people will find uses for it. One of the things people tend to ignore is that ocean water contains a lot more than just salt. It also contains metals and organic compounds. Looking over the Wikipedia article there is a significant component of magnesium, sulpher, calcium, potassium, and bromine. There are even industries devoted to extracting sodium, magnesium, potassium, and calcium from sea water. If we substantially increase the desalination of sea water we could significantly reduce the cost of extracting them. With the amount of brine you’re talking about it would pretty much be free to anyone who could find a use for it, since the alternative is diluting it and pumping it back into the ocean, which is pure cost. At that scale you could likely also extract trace components in significant quantities. The page mentions lithium and uranium were attempted in the past, with uranium never seeing industrial scale due to it being too expensive, but economies of scale and all that.
Put it in empty oil tankers and have them disperse it through the ocean. Might have to retrofit them to put a port that leads to the ocean but besides that should be pretty cheap. No reason that empty tanker heading back to Saudi Arabia can’t be filled with brine.
Not an expert here but the word that comes screaming into my head seeing that is ‘rust’. Would the brine be easier to deal with solidified into salt? Even edible?.
That would likely make it much more expensive than tap water, rendering the device almost pointless except in cases where they probably couldn’t afford it anyways.
the fact this nice woman wasn't immediately terminated by the postal service for "getting involved, missing assigned work, and opening the service up to possible litigation" is the miracle here
Good news everyone! It’s time to present my newest invention: a solar powered CO2 scrubber! To activate it, just throw a few of these small seeds on the ground and wait a few years.
Trees burn in wildfires, decompose and there isn’t infinite space for it. You need to take carbon out of the game to make a difference. Trees aren’t exactly perfect for that.
Old growth forests naturally sequester carbon despite bushfires. New growth takes a long time to get there without additional steps but the later you start the longer it’s going to take.
Nope thats not how it works its a circle of Carbon unless we humans add it by burning literal carbon we have from the ground (coal) we need to put it back.
Nope thats not how it works its a circle of Carbon unless we humans add it by burning literal carbon we have from the ground (coal) we need to put it back.
What is coal? It’s literally dead plant matter that didn’t decay in anaerobic environments and that’s what swamps are.
While I agree that artificial carbon capture should be researched, as others already said: it has little practical use until all electricity production comes from renewable sources.
There are better and more efficient ideas than Industrial Plants needing energy, for example a system using some sort of Alge, wich grows fast, and is easy to store forever when dry.
Wait, you’re making a big fuss over the type of natural photosynthesis we should use? Seriously?
People commenting against the carbon capture as featured in the article argue about using natural ways instead and “tree” is just a shorthand for some, just as I used the broad term “plants”.
Now don’t come and start splitting hairs like “But actually, algae are different from plants because the cells that comprise algae are not able to differentiate into different plant parts like stems, roots, and leaves, so I’m arguing for something completely different.”
Most plants aren’t suitable for permanent reduction of Carbon we would need way to much area, alge is however very efficient, some also want to use bacteria, but that may be risky.
And yes, trees are important, but not the best (or if we are honest, Meaningful) way to solve the carbon problem.
Another option would be to make lots of alcohol from plants and store it somewhere permanently. (ethanol is just a very compact carbohydrate)
And further there might be industrial ways to take out carbon on mass permanently, we are just not yet shure.
Anyway, the first priority should be to reduce released of more carbon into the atmosphere.
There's risks to choosing to live away from other humans. North America is rampant with large predators: wolves, bears and lions. Humans banned together millennia ago for such protection. If you wish to live a dozen miles from more than 2 other people, that's a risk you take.
Reintroducing wolves is fixing the mistake we made in killing them all; which is causing more problems than it solved.
TLDR: Cause: “ In the 1800s, westward expansion brought settlers and their livestock into direct contact with native predator and prey species. Much of the wolves’ prey base was destroyed as agriculture flourished. With the prey base removed, wolves began to prey on domestic stock, which resulted in humans eliminating wolves”
Effect of reintroduction: “Preliminary data from studies indicate that wolf recovery will likely lead to greater biodiversity throughout the GYE. Wolves have preyed primarily on elk, and these carcasses have provided food to a wide variety of other animals, especially scavenging species. Wolves are increasingly preying on bison, especially in late winter. However, most bison biomass consumed by wolves is through scavenging bison dying from other natural causes. Grizzly bears have usurped wolf kills almost at will, contrary to predictions and observations from other areas where the two species occur. Wolf kills, then, provide an important resource for bears in low-food years. Aggression toward coyotes initially decreased the number of coyotes inside wolf territories, which may have benefited other smaller predators, rodents, and birds of prey.”
My problem with this study has always been that it takes place in Yellowstone. A huge area that is super controlled and significantly different from the rest of the country.
I think blindly believing we’ll see the same results everywhere we throw wolves is wishful thinking.
Guess we’ll see how it plays out. As a hunter I’m not thrilled to have more competition for elk and deer, but it’s always been (and should be) predators get first dibs on wildlife. What I want is to see the reintroduction and revitalization of the buffalo. You know how cool it’d be to see giant herds of bison roaming all over the wild?
It’s weird to think that ecologists, biologists, and other scientists who have studied this issue historically as well as other reintroduction efforts are “blindly” believing anything…
“ Studies suggest that attitudes towards wolf reintroduction are influenced by individuals’ beliefs about the right for wolves to exist as well as their emotional responses to wolves.”
I still think it was silly to have reintroduction of wolves up to a popular vote instead of leaving it up to the professionals. But it happened, I’m curious to see how far their range goes, the ones in WA go all over.
Be prepared to see a lot of trash people claiming wolves killed their livestock because there is a government subsidy fund for livestock killed by wolves but not other predators like bears, cougars, coyotes etc. instated when wolves were reintroduced to Yellowstone
Then you should know that cow calf operations are price takers not price makers. So as you pay more for beef at the store the ranchers are getting less per pound.
Cow calf operations are the only independent part of animal production left in the United States.
Why is there a subsidy for that? Ranchers should be able to protect their herds without wantonly murdering wolves. Fuck, get some drones with pepper spray or stun guns. The future is now cowboys!
In 2023, Hinton announced on Thanksgiving that he and Dench had gone from “family” to business partners, launching an alkaline black water called BlackMP.
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