If UBI enables people to not have to work, I would rather have nine people playing video games, and one passionate creative person starting a society-benefitting business, than make all ten do make-work. Many would hate the video-game freeloaders, but I’m fine with them if I get new great services and technology from the unleashed passionate people.
If you have five people who want houses in place X, and there are four houses in place X, something has to give. The government could choose which of the five gets kicked out of place X (rent control does this, basically), the government could force the four houses be demolished and replaced with more, smaller houses (the character of place X would change, which probably no one wants), rents could rise until one person decides going to live somewhere else is their best option or two people decide being roommates is their best option. In none of these situations do the five people who want one of the four existing houses all get what they want.
If a popular, growing community has a plan for housing densification, but it’s going to take five years to build out, rent control is a reasonable bridge policy to keep the community together while the construction happens. But this idea that rent control can somehow by itself solve the underlying problem of not enough housing units in the places people want to live is a pipe dream.
Inflation happens when demand increases faster than supply can keep up. The pandemic supply chain disruptions are a large recent example: none of the supply bottlenecks would have been difficult to solve, but the solutions would take two to five years to spin up. Absent some kind of regulatory rationing or allotment system, increasing prices let customers self-select on who really wanted the stuff that year and who did without.
As long as UBI was rolled out incrementally over years, supply would have the time it needed to expand, thereby preventing inflation. As a real example, the Alaska Permanent Fund has been going for decades, and I’ve never seen an argument it has increased inflation.
There are legal requirements for how much money you have to have set aside to qualify as “self insured”. Car insurance is not required for your own costs: that kind of “full coverage” is optional. “Liabilty insurance” to cover the damage you do to other people’s property is legally required, and self-insuring is allowed, but the required liquidity to self-insure is more than most people have.
Great to see this staying in the headlines. Maybe the country won’t keep going down the “corruption is fine as long as it’s my side” path.
In Amsterdam, seniors and those with disabilities can drive tiny cars (like the Japanese Kei cars, I think) on bike paths. They have the protection they need for their health issues, they go slow so their slowed reaction times aren’t a safety risk to themselves and others on a regular car road, and they have full access to groceries and medical appointments and social visits. Win-win.
Recent Democrat presidents have not gone after legal immigration the way the Trump administration has. And in recent years, the only proposed comprehensive immigration reform bills - to try to make the process less broken - have only had Democrat support.
You are correct the deportation numbers are similar, but the picture is bigger than just deportations.
Structurally, I don’t think anything is stopping a conservative safe space community from being spun up on one of the more neutral instances. But if conservatives have mainstream safe spaces already on x, Facebook, reddit, and smaller more extreme places like patriot.win, why would they come to lemmy?
“Conservative” can mean a really wide variety of things to people who identify that way. Like the other reply to you, I am not sad there aren’t lemmy communities dedicated to celebrating bad things happening to brown or non-Christian people. But it does seem like a hole to be missing discussions of fiscal responsibility (actual responsibility, not the “two Santas” scam) or how to effectively increase the proportion of children in two-parent households (actual increase, not the “redirect welfare money from poor people to middle-class marriage counseling”).
US conservatism broadly used to have policy pieces I agreed with, but the fake implementation in the times and places they have had power has made me really disillusioned.
It worked to keep gun sales hugely high volume and high profit for decades. “The dems are about to take away your right to buy guns, go buy them now while you can! We’ve said this every election for the last thirty years, but this time it’s serious!”
It sucks so bad that it’s such a long-term effective strategy. Fighting it would mean figuring out how to regulate both social and traditional media to reduce engagement bait lies, but I don’t know if we have a path to that.
In first-past-the-post election systems, campaigning on fear is well established as the winning strategy. In this case the fear the D candidate is playing on - loss of health care access - is more fact-based than the fear the R candidate is playing on - xenophobia - but both campaigns know fear-driven turnout is the only way to win.
I hope ranked choice voting makes more inroads. I am under no illusion it would break the two party system (Australia has used it for eighty years and still has two main parties), but by making second choices relevant it gives a winning election path to a pro-cooperation, get-things-done style of campaign.
You see the same effect in person, too, with HOAs being the most notorious example. But there are many volunteer-based organizations that do incredible good work. Power tripping is a thing to watch out for and build guardrails against, but thankfully it’s not universal.
Insider trading is a bipartisan rep problem for sure (legal! since they make the laws!) Not sure it’s any better or just different: in the case of the reps, the corruption wealth gains are not direct money from taxpayers. Stockholders get the short end of the stick on that one.
But the president historically has held to higher standards. What Trump is doing is a new level of corruption, both for the specific office of president and for the direct taxpayers source of his wealth gain. It’s reasonable to have fresh outrage over it, even for people with outrage fatigue on the Congress insider trading issue.
Trump famously slammed Obama’s frequent golfing at a rally in February 2016, promising that, as president, he would give up visiting his courses in Scotland and South Florida.
“I love golf, but if I were in the White House, I don’t think I’d ever see Turnberry again. I don’t think I’d ever see Doral again,” Trump said. “I don’t ever think I’d see anything. I just want to stay in the White House and work my ass off.”
And this is a conservative estimate!
Most of the costs come from military and law enforcement salaries, which haven’t kept up with inflation, so the figures aren’t adjusted to current dollars… the real costs are almost certainly higher than these unadjusted estimates.
What do you mean by “it” that they all do? Because it’s definitely not spending this much time, or amount of money per trip, that they’re all doing.
In contrast, former President Joe Biden’s trips to Wilmington, Delaware, and Rehoboth Beach cost far less than Trump’s golf trips because he used smaller aircraft or helicopters, as the local airport cannot accommodate a 747.
Former President Barack Obama was also known for his frequent golf outings, but they were far cheaper than Trump’s, as he would also use smaller aircraft or play at nearby courses, including on the course at Maryland’s Joint Base Andrews.
The apologist say it’s good for networking. Which maybe in theory, but doesn’t hold up to scrutiny how he’s using it.
Trump has also used golf as a tool for influence and relationship-building. Politicians and world leaders, from Finnish president Alexander Stubb to US senator Lindsey Graham, have played rounds with him, seeking to win favor or maintain alliances.
And the stretch to justify continues:
Trump’s latest health report also cited his frequent golfing as proof of his physical fitness, framing it as part of an active lifestyle.
The “use that money to buy something else” part means the premise of the title is not just misguided for all the reasons others point out, but it’s wrong even from a pure “capitalism must go up” view. The people who are keeping phones longer are spending money on other things, driving the economy just as much or potentially more. The extreme rich people and corporations who are hoarding wealth (thus withdrawing it from the economy) are still buying new phones every year as a status symbol.
I believe it depends on the latitude, since away from the equator the Sun rises at an angle and not straight up. It can be low enough to still be below the visor, but risen enough to have moved far enough south (if in the northern hemisphere) to be problematic when driving southeast in the morning or southwest in the evening.
I found this image on Google search that I think illustrates the phenomenon: https://share.google/okYRf16lB1vegnVax
http://stevekluge.com/astronomy/riseazimuth.html
At the Equator, where the Sun rises and sets perpendicular to the horizon, the Summer Solstice Sun rises 23.5° north of due East, and sets 23.5° north of due West.
The Sun moves around a lot over a year. I don’t think it’s practical to try to plan a grid around it.
Ships having these larger areas with live plants is newish, I wonder if bird stowaways will become more common. Sad that birds of prey would go hungry in those cases, unless the humans are interested in their welfare as in this instance. Maybe ships will develop bird deterrent designs to their parks.