• 2 Posts
  • 197 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: June 19th, 2023

help-circle
  • This is very common. If you really must “solve” it, the solution world be a shadow box layout. You empty it, lay stuff down where you want it, then take a picture or trace the shapes onto paper. Then model and 3d print an insert to give everything a dedicated cutout or cut it from foam or mill it from wood. This is what folks do in workshops. I’ve never seen it for a kitchen large utensil drawer, but that’s what to do if you must.


  • Probably Anarchy. Like, the political philosophy.

    Andrewism on YouTube is doing so much to make a compelling case for it. But it’s a real bummer when you get a group of anarchists together and go, ‘Damn, hanging out with these people makes me want to implement some rules and structure so we can get things done. This group is totally leaderless and directionless. I’m gonna go see what the socialists are up to.’

    It’s sad. In my experience, no one ruins anarchism more than anarchists.



  • To avoid an endless debate, I propose we agree that UBI is a good thing that we should test in more circumstances, and programs to provide more things free of cost (which do allow UBIs to achieve more spending power per dollar) are worth testing.

    If such programs perform poorly in a trial, then it’s good that we tested them. And if some perform better than you expect, it’s also good that we tested them.


  • The issues that you’re pointing out are reasonable concerns, but I think you’re falling into a common mental pitfall that assumes that the implimentation must resemble the most similar past approach, while also decrying the irrationality of using those unsuccessful methods.

    It doesn’t need to look like government cheese. It doesn’t need to look like “the projects”. All of those programs had systemic flaws that were specific, observable bad public policies.

    Universal housing can look like the government acquiring existing apartments from disinterested landlords that are out of compliance and then granting them on a $1 lease in perpetuity to local neighborhood coops so long as they maintain it well. Universal food can look like mandates for grocery stores to provide non-profit collectives unfettered access to discarded items that are still perfectly edible instead of locking up dumpsters full of food that can feed people.

    You can have a UBI too. I’m not shitting on the idea. But as you already pointed out, single payer healthcare is a great demonstration most people don’t even argue with. Implement a UBI, but where options exist for direct services, provide them and you won’t need nearly as large a UBI, and you can cut out tons of waste.

    Free public transit is another great example. Do you want to have to include bus fare in the UBI? Or would it just make sense to make the buses and trains fare-free.

    The university & school examples seem silly. Why give people a voucher instead of just reimbursing all accredited schools directly and let folks enroll anywhere without having to manage a budget? Just make them tuition free. Otherwise, you have to make a UBI large enough to pay all the administrators that exist just to process payments, and manage the size of vouchers… The UBI would go so much further if folks didn’t have to pay for things that don’t need market guidance at all. So many unnecessary middle-men.

    UBIs make sense when you want to benefit from market guidance. They’re great for that, but for lots of things everyone uses or where consumer selection mechanics break down, there are tons of ways to make them free at the point of use. Is management and corruption a potential problem? Yes… regardless of which system you implement. So you might as well use the best tool for the given need and learn to do it well.


  • Yes… BUT I’d actually encourage people to consider an even better alternative, which is Universal Basic Services.

    As you point out, giving people money is no guarantee that their spending power will be enough to cover their needs. I’ve heard it said that any UBI which is sufficient is unaffordable, and any that is affordable is insufficient. I think it’s still a policy we should experiment with, and I think even a small UBI could elevate poverty. But a more effective alternative is to try and provide essentials directly, free of cost.

    What this looks like is publicly owned housing; a robust, fully-funded public education system that includes pre-K and higher ed; universal healthcare; and free food. Some of these – like housing and food – sound shocking and difficult, but to an earlier generation, so would the others. And we already have some of these programs for the very poor. The key to executing them is to bypass markets. Markets will always raise the cost of essentials because the demand is unlimited. Instead of paying private landlords for housing, the state or non-profit entities need to own the homes. There will still be costs associated with maintenance, but there need be no dividends or investor profits. Same with food. We might not be able to make everything in a grocery store free. But if you have well-run local gardens, they’ll actually produce a substantial amount of food that you can just put in baskets by the entrance and let people take from.

    Unlike UBIs, which are inherently inflationary, UBS programs are deflationary. By offering free goods they create competition against market prices and make the stuff people still pay for (with a UBI) cheaper.

    If you’d like to see how all of this works, go check out the tabletop RPG my friends developed at c/fullyautomatedrpg, or the world guide for the setting at https://fullyautomatedrpg.com/resources.




  • Yeah. Everyone who got mad at him is basically like, ‘Hey! Fuck you, asshole, for selling before I got a chance to sell! I wanted to do that, but you did it before I could do it! No fair!’

    Also: the coins are now with far more than when he sold. So strangely, the folks who got rug pulled ended up with an actually valuable coin and an opportunity to sell at a high price. Which makes zero sense to me. But they apparently have no reason to complain. It worked out great for everyone, somehow.

    Very stupid.







  • Andy@slrpnk.nettoFediverse@lemmy.worldAnother random blip in the stats
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    7
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    26 days ago

    That looks much more like a data artifact than an accurate representation of behavior.

    I think that the trajectory of the three low dots matches the overall slope very closely in a way that looks far more like a flat subtraction of all three. If it was behavioral, I think you’d see the behavior come and go over the course of several days.





  • I think his intense commitment to getting Trump elected makes more sense when you consider this article.

    His enormous wealth is largely stored in the form of Tesla stock, and that stock has been valued based on the belief that it isn’t a car company, it’s a robotaxi service currently selling the hardware to finance the software development. The value – and his wealth – can persist indefinitely as long as investors continue to accept that premise, no matter how long delayed. But if something tangibly undermines that premise, Musk could conceivably lose the majority of his wealth overnight.

    The National Highway Traffic Safety Agency is probably the greatest threat to his wealth. He doesn’t worry about competitors or protestors or Twitter users or advertisers. They’re all just petty nuisances. But the federal regulator over roads… that is his proverbial killer snail. And I think fully capturing the entire federal regulatory state is his strategy to permanently confine that snail.

    More than anything else, I think that’s what is motivating his radical embrace of fascism.