Where I live we shop for the week at least. Why the hell would you shop ever damn day? That's a horrible waste of time.

... For coal power plants that are backstopping the renewable system. That fact is at odds with his statements. They are backstopping their renewable program with coal power plants... not choreography.

The problem with this idea is that the renewable systems often will not produce enough PERIOD. Not because they can't but because environmental conditions at that exact time mean the power is not there. If the wind doesn't blow and the sun is down... where is your power coming from? Now you could say "if you make the grid big enough, there will be somewhere that has sun and wind." Fine. But that is going to mean transporting power thousands of miles in some cases which means you're going to lose a fair amount to transmission. And even then the idea is pretty dubious on that scale.

I would argue that we need one of two things.

1. A break through in storage.

2. Reliable power generation to backstop the system.

What is more, wind and solar are not actually this cheap... they're only that cheap WITH subsidies. And it the growth of these subsidies that is largely pushing the prices at this point.

Here someone says "oil is subsidized too!"... yeah but not to the same relative extent. In absolute terms oil might get the same amount of money but its a vastly larger industry so the point doesn't really mean anything.

Anyway, I'm not arguing in favor of oil. I'd love for everything to go all electric. BUT we need to not cripple ourselves in the process.

Professionalism is the ability to do your job. Costuming isn't most people's job. Pretty fucking sure wearing costumes isn't engineering. You're just mindlessly repeating the Newspeak definition of professionalism writing by the sleaze in power who want to stay in power by redefining their sleaziness as professional to either perform, if you're one of them, or obey, as one of their useful idiots.

Non-sleazy people won't display consummate sleaziness? Wouldn't that be a good thing especially in engineering...

Excellent then we can all just bring a bowl of M&Ms with the browns removed to the interview to prove our competency and ditch the ugly overpriced uncomfortable clothing. That'll stop the suite sleeze that don't know how to do their actual job from supposedly appearing more "professional" too.

I agree that this would be a very cost effective and simple way to administer the program, ideal in every way. Furthermore since a tax cut (even an unearned âoeearned incomeâ tax credit) is politically much more viable.

• Everyone likes the words âoetax breakâ.
• Republicans have been standing behind âoetax cutsâ that amount to giving money to companies for a long time and it would be VERY exploitable to see Republican leaders try to argue against this "tax cut".
• A tax cut avoids oversight by not being a budget item.

I feel health care is outside the appropriate scope of this conversation, so I won't address your comments on that matter.

As user sillybilly pointed out your numbers for doubling the UBI provision are off by a factor of ten. But you're underestimating the amount that can be wrung from other programs. Corporate tax cuts amount to a trillion dollars of spending. I'm not arguing that this is free money. Eliminating these cuts will have a profound and negative effect on the economy if they're not replaced with explicit measures elsewhere. Companies will stop research the tax cuts incentivise, many will try to move overseas, With all the dirty money in US politics it will be difficult to eliminate the cuts anyway. On the other hand a new law that directly eliminates the less helpful corporate tax breaks and move any incentives to a direct and openly debated form would not only help take corporate money out of politics but raise half a trillion dollars a year.

Furthermore a huge amount of the US budget and state budgets amount to welfare in the form of jobs programs. We're making hundreds of billions of dollars of unneeded military equipment to save jobs. Our military is overmanned to help keep unemployment low. We allow many governmental departments to become bloated just to keep offering those jobs. Jobs, jobs, jobs. Look in any political speech and you'll find that word. What's needed is a complete change of focus. The aim isn't to keep people active, it's to keep them fed, clothed, and mentally healthy. Eliminate every jobs program. That alone will cut the military by 1/3, speed the functioning of the government, improve and permit innovation in government work, improve overall human health, and benefit every aspect of society. But more importantly it will provide 600 billion dollars to the US government and add 30% to the budgets of most states to give back as lowered tax or use for actually useful work.

Now we have increased unemployment by 20% and, combined with aggregating all dirrect welfare, raised 2.5 trillion dollars. We can hand out $646 to every man, woman and child.* But wait! There's more!

• Giving money for each child is probably unwise

• 12 million of those people are illegal immigrants.

• People will refuse to work in overly dangerous jobs.
• People will tend to not be forced to commit crimes to survive
• People will refuse to work in particularly unpleasant jobs.
• The extra money will give people the security they need to try and start companies, make and try to sell inventions, and go to school
• People will quit their jobs to care for their children
• everyone who lives for their art will have enough money to practice full time
• People will have time to work for charity.

The net effect of these will be to disincentivise illegal immigration, (lowering the cost to prevent that) force companies to improve working conditions, encourage automation, get children off the streets (deprive gangs of new members), largely eliminate homelessness, lower crime rates, (lower the cost to prevent crime, lower the cost to house criminals) improve mental health as relates to employment, and add some further amount to the basic income that can be offered.

I recognize that many of these points are debatable but nevertheless I can't imagine anyone able to argue in good faith that UBI would be a bad idea for the US.

*This number is lower than you would have expected from the above math. I've left it conservative to account for the social programs that will still be needed to help people get off drugs, improve their mental health, and otherwise live on $646 per month if they're not used to it.

When I was 300 lbs. I could carry your average American male adult four blocks. Two with some rigging. Unsurprisingly I didn't care to and would get quite sweaty even in winter. Did you have a point besides being a midget or a stick-man who lacks reading comprehension?

You can't carry useful quantities of groceries, much less anything else, on a bike unless you're anorexic hipster douche who just likes to be seen biking around in public every other day.

I started a post with the aim to thoroughly rebuke you and refute your claim. The first place I looked was a Google search for standard warranties which gives US manufacturers' warranties as about the same lengths as foreign warranties. Next I looked for how well manufcaturers actually stand by their warranties. The number of hate articles and lawsuits over various foreign and domestic manufacturers' warranties seems about the same. Cars still on the road is another way to look at reliability. After some research I have come to the conclusion that the oldest cars longevity isn't related to quality of manufacture but rather dedication of the owners, older common cars are foreign -- but that doesn't count toward my point since the increase in US manufacturers' quality is relatively recent -- and common cars aging on the road today are about the same across country of manufacture.*

The late 1980's and early 1990's saw Honda et al. Eating Ford's lunch and US manufacturers' advertising focused on brand recognition. Later ads focused on features. Since this is a case of competing against quality with features (and because Tesla) I'm not even going to contest that US manufacturers ever fell behind on features.

Foreign cars still dominate in the mileage category but that alone is insufficient to state in the grand sweeping way I did that US made cars are inferior.

In short I stand corrected. US manufacturers have fully caught up with foreign makers in most categories of vehicle quality.

*excluding outliers.

Storms that'd blow a standing man over when they're not haling?

Audi, BMW, Porche, Volkswagen, Honda, Ford, Mazda, Mitssubishi, Nissan, Subaru, and Toyota weren't sitting on their thumbs in the 15 years it took GM, Ford, and Chevrolet to get their cars up to snuff.

In that time every category of safety, performance, features, and mileage received a huge improvement with no significant increase in cost. Across the board, across manufacturer and country borders. The gap has closed but foreign makers raised the bar again. Frankly I won't be surprised (or morn) if Chevy goes out of business completely. US manufacturers still have some innovation to do. They should start with expiring patents from Japan.

Rather then looking for and identifying bad software... look for and identify good software. White lists deal with zero days. Set up security so that all unknown code is forbidden. Obviously let the user if they have permissions exempt unknown code from the security. But anything else... no execution.

Include scripts, etc.

All of these are necessary and none are a substitute for one-another. And even in concert and combination, they are not 100% effective and never can be.

The fact is, there are people who think the ability to get beyond security measures is tantamount to the "right" to break, enter and utilize. That is the source of the trouble. And until those humans are addressed effectively, there cannot be any progress against the problem. And why isn't that happening? Should be obvious.

With government writing themselves laws exampting themselves from prosecution (and simply ignoring laws, and refusing to prosecute themselves) and business of every kind, everywhere "lobbying" [read: buying] legislation which enables them to legally circumvent personal privacy and security measures while at the same time criminalizing circumvention of playback control measures? Well the picture sure be clear enough. They can't easily go after anyone without potentially offending the people who support them -- their sponsors.

The establishment itself is the problem. The establishment problem is best addressed by a mob of rebellion. Start with simple things: MS Windows for work and Linux/BSD for home. I don't care which flavors of Linux/BSD anyone uses and variety is a great thing -- no one-virus/malware to rule them all. Similarly to "the truth" Open Source will set you free. It's simply harder and less frequent to get malware through in any consistent and predictable way. With Windows and MacOS, consistency and predictability is far greater.

We preach "defensive driving" in motor vehicle traffic. But we ignore it where communications, privacy and data flows are concerned? And of the two, which are presently more important? (Still a contest but it's not about which is "more" important... that's a matter of context)

Simple, when you try to use the state to force people not to be greedy, you end up building it into the greedy control freak you wanted to avoid in the first place.

When everyone has universal income, few will actually want to produce anything worth buying beyond basic necessities, which they will just produce for themselves. When the state sees this, it will step in and redistribute, demoralizing these producers as well. This is what happened to consumer goods in the soviet union.

and politically illiterate college kids voted for tyranny to get free stuff.