Mmm…it depends. So, one particular example I recall calling for UBI without giving any details and urging people on /r/Europe to sign up for it was at an international level in Europe, and I don’t know what, exactly, the implications of that petition were.
But there are definitely systems of government where petitions do make a difference. The popular initiative exists, and there it’s explicitly part of the process.
I’m not really a huge fan of the popular initiative and referendum – I live in California, which uses both, and I think that some of the policy that I think is most ill-considered in California has gone through via that process. However, it certainly can – and has, on a number of occasions, has – had dramatic impact on the state’s policy, as with California’s unusual property tax situation.
Initiative Statute: Petitions proposing initiative statutes must be signed by registered voters. The number of signatures must be equal to at least 5% of the total votes cast for the office of Governor at the last gubernatorial election. (Cal. Const., art. II, § 8(b); Elec. Code, § 9035.)
The total number of signatures required for initiative statutes is 546,651.
Initiative Constitutional Amendment: Petitions proposing initiative constitutional amendments must be signed by registered voters. The number of signatures must be equal to at least 8% of the total votes cast for the office of Governor at the last gubernatorial election. (Cal. Const., art. II, § 8(b); Elec. Code, § 9035.)
The total number of signatures required for such petitions is 874,641.
Depends on the implementation, and I think that that’s something of an issue in discussion about it – because its effects depend a great deal on the specifics.
There is a portion of the small government conservative crowd that sees it as a replacement for welfare programs where the government mandates policy. Like, instead of getting, oh, food stamps or such, where the government precisely spells out policy in each area (“this is what you are permitted to buy with this”), people who are poorer than a certain amount would simply get a flat cash payment and choose how to use it. In that sense, it’d reduce the degree of control that government has, which is a goal that they’d like to see.
There’s also a portion of the redistribute-more-wealth crowd on the left that sees it as existing alongside existing welfare programs, rather than as a replacement. For them, if the government has progressive taxation policy (like, income tax brackets or the like), a flat benefit to everyone will tend to redistribute more, which is a goal that they’d like to see.
Both implementations would qualify as UBI – they both provide an unconditional basic income. But the actual effects depend on the implementation.
So when someone says something like “sign this petition for UBI”, I think that a really good question is “tell me what sort of UBI you are aiming to have implemented”, because the details have a very considerable impact on what it is that you’re signing up to support.
If one wants an occasional old gizmo that’s no longer made, eBay can be helpful.
Specifically for cables – which aren’t that pricy relative to other items people buy, and are often marked up a lot by retailers – I’ve gone to Monoprice for quite some years. Useful if getting a bunch of cables.
My understanding – and I’m not a New Yorker – was that he has been often credited with reducing crime in NYC. Part of that was, as I recall, by cracking down on minor crimes, things like aggressive panhandling, with the idea that that was kind of a gateway drug to more-severe crime.
I don’t know whether that approach or him in particular was responsible for it, or whether it was other phenomena at the time – my gut is that changes like that usually aren’t just driven by one person – but my understanding was that crime did considerably fall off around the time, and crime was something that a lot of New Yorkers had been really upset about.
Ironically, I just noticed this morning that the pizzaria on the corner (here, in the US) can take orders via fax (as well as in person, via phone, and on the Web).
I don’t know about today, but back around 2000, stuff on the Japanese market was quite a bit ahead of the US in small, portable, personal electronic devices, like palmtop computers and such. I remember being pretty impressed with it. But then I also remembered being surprised a few years later when I learned that personal computer ownership was significantly lower than in the US. I think that part of it is that people in Japan spend a fair bit of time on mass transit, so you wanted to have small, portable devices tailored to that, and that same demand doesn’t really exist in the US.
Then everyone jumped on smartphones at some point after that, and I think things homogenized a bit.
At my mom’s place — air-source heat pump, double-paned windows — I can’t hear the thing at all from inside the house, and can only hear it if I go on the side of the house where it’s operating, which doesn’t get a lot of foot traffic. You can hear the fan there.
Generally, I haven’t heard people complaining about it in the US. I have seen some people talk about it recently in the UK, which is in the middle of a push to transition to them, and I’m wondering if that’s because townhouses are more-common there, with houses packed closely together.
I understand that you can get noise-reducing enclosures:
There are also water-source heat pumps. I don’t know how the noise differs, but I’d bet that it’s quieter, because you’re moving water through a pipe rather than a lot of air. However, their installation cost is considerably higher (though their energy efficiency is also higher).
If OP is in the US – which I assume he is, from the inch measurement – I’d bet that he can probably rent one at a large hardware store, like Home Depot, if he doesn’t have any use for one outside of this.
There is a strong consensus among cosmologists that the shape of the universe is considered “flat” (parallel lines stay parallel) and will continue to expand forever.[2][3]
The ultimate fate of an open universe with dark energy is either universal heat death or a “Big Rip”[12][13][14][15] where the acceleration caused by dark energy eventually becomes so strong that it completely overwhelms the effects of the gravitational, electromagnetic and strong binding forces.
Neither a universal heat death nor a Big Rip — and we expect one of the two to occur — seems likely to be conducive to capitalism.
The heat death of the universe (also known as the Big Chill or Big Freeze)[1][2] is a hypothesis on the ultimate fate of the universe, which suggests the universe will evolve to a state of no thermodynamic free energy, and will therefore be unable to sustain processes that increase entropy.
The theory suggests that from the “Big Bang” through the present day, matter and dark matter in the universe are thought to have been concentrated in stars, galaxies, and galaxy clusters, and are presumed to continue to do so well into the future. Therefore, the universe is not in thermodynamic equilibrium, and objects can do physical work.[15]:§VID The decay time for a supermassive black hole of roughly 1 galaxy mass (10¹¹ solar masses) because of Hawking radiation is in the order of 10¹⁰⁰ years,[16] so entropy can be produced until at least that time. Some large black holes in the universe are predicted to continue to grow up to perhaps 10¹⁴ M☉ during the collapse of superclusters of galaxies. Even these would evaporate over a timescale of up to 10¹⁰⁶ years.[17] After that time, the universe enters the so-called Dark Era and is expected to consist chiefly of a dilute gas of photons and leptons.[15]:§VIA With only very diffuse matter remaining, activity in the universe will have tailed off dramatically, with extremely low energy levels and extremely long timescales.
In physical cosmology, the Big Rip is a hypothetical cosmological model concerning the ultimate fate of the universe, in which the matter of the universe, from stars and galaxies to atoms and subatomic particles, and even spacetime itself, is progressively torn apart by the expansion of the universe at a certain time in the future, until distances between particles will infinitely increase.
In their paper, the authors consider a hypothetical example with w = −1.5, H0 = 70 km/s/Mpc, and Ωm = 0.3, in which case the Big Rip would happen approximately 22 billion years from the present. In this scenario, galaxies would first be separated from each other about 200 million years before the Big Rip. About 60 million years before the Big Rip, galaxies would begin to disintegrate as gravity becomes too weak to hold them together. Planetary systems like the Solar System would become gravitationally unbound about three months before the Big Rip, and planets would fly off into the rapidly expanding universe. In the last minutes, stars and planets would be torn apart, and the now-dispersed atoms would be destroyed about 10¯¹⁹ seconds before the end (the atoms will first be ionized as electrons fly off, followed by the dissociation of the atomic nuclei). At the time the Big Rip occurs, even spacetime itself would be ripped apart and the scale factor would be infinity.