The problem is, you can't build anything bigger than a model railroad in your basement without dealing with the FRA. FRA even claims jurisdiction over self-contained tourist railroads, cable cars, and rideable toy/model railroads like the one at Knot's farm.

The FRA is, of course, a captured organization that was created in 1966 to make sure nothing happens that threatens the private railway companies in the US, including HSR. The existing railroad companies have no interest in passenger rail and only see it as a nuisance at best or a threat at worst. So FRA's real purpose is to stop development of any passenger rail in the US, which has been working admirably for decades.

This debunking has been debunked as well.

"Total electricity generation" is basically irrelevant because nobody cares about the giant 3-phase arc furnaces, and other industrial users that use the other 79% of the electricity, and have their own substations anyway.

When people talk about "the power grid" in the context of electric car charging, they are normally talking about the "residential electricity grid". i.e. "people's houses". That's the "power grid" that all these cars are going to be plugged into, and what's NOT being upgraded, or talked about being upgraded. The entire residential grid accounts for only 21% of all electricity consumption. https://rpsc.energy.gov/energy-data-facts.

It's not wrong to say switching cars to electric would be an increase of about 19% of total electricity generation, but you forgot to mention that the entire residential sector only accounts for 21% of all electrical generation, period. So switching everyone to electric car charging at home will basically double the load on the local grids. This is easy to see, if you just look at normal house service panel and car charger side-by-side. The biggest appliance in a typical house would be something like a clothes dryer or range that pulls 5kW for an hour or two a day. A level 2 car charger pulls up to 19kW, and could take a couple hours to charge a car. Not insane, but still going to easily double both the instantaneous load that each house has to be able to draw, and the total electric that has to be available. Doing this to every house in a whole country would require major grid upgrades.

Car charging is like residential solar. It doesn't require much of an infrastructure response as long as there are few % of early adopters out there doing it. It's a rounding error. But for any kind of wholesale migration to electric cars, the charging problem is still a serious problem, if not for generation, then for delivery, and there should be an answer to this, besides smoke-and-mirrors. All the governments that claim to be planning such a migration and are NOT talking about massive, tens-of-billions-scale grid upgrades, are either 1) lying, and the transition isn't really going to happen 2) incompetent, and we can expect worsening problems from over-strained grids 3) both?

Note, fast-charging stations aren't really a big problem. When you build a fast-charging station, you will just have to provision the required power to feed it. Whether that's adding a new substation or just plopping down a big industrial transformer to feed it, we do this kind of thing all the time whenever we build anything new. But when you build something new you DO have to provision the power to feed it. The residential charging problem amounts to people claiming we can build a new massive home charging network and we WON'T have to provision any power to feed it, which is magical thinking and BS if you think about it for 5 seconds.

An LVT would fix that.

This man understands that trains are nothing like airplanes. Soon, hopefully Americans will get to find this out for themselves.

I actually like riding on trains, but I'd be happy if I never stepped foot in an airport again. Once Americans get a taste of what it's like to travel on modern trains, ticket price practically won't matter.

For a Vegas train, you won't be waiting until you get to Vegas to start the party. The party's gonna start when you get on the train. Siemens is already advertising a special trainset with a new party car for this route..."Party at high speed" https://www.mobility.siemens.com/us/en/portfolio/rail/rolling-stock/high-speed-and-intercity-trains/american-pioneer-220.html

It is two things.

One thing is that local governments perversely have erected a legal briarpatch that discourages housing construction. It's not an exaggeration to say that they banned housing...it is common and universal for the local government to have completely banned new construction. In my neighborhood, it's impossible to build another house unless you tear one down and replace it, and you can't subdivide land, you can't convert to a duplex, you can't put in an ADU, you can't do shit. And/or when they do approve construction, to have requirements that ensure it is expensive. So there's really no free market here at all. The housing market is universally strangled. The only progress against this seems to be happening in states that are using state power to overrule local controls on housing, and that's rare and limited so far.

What we need is some idea of a universal right to build housing that exempts localities from anything beyond basic safety and code enforcement. And those codes need audited too because even building codes are packed with things designed to keep housing expensive. Because housing that's banned won't get built.

Second, even in the absence of government strangling the supply, is the problem identified by the OP, which is a real problem, and that's that the only way to drop rents(prices), is to construct housing in excess. Even if the government allowed it, there is limited incentive for the private sector to build housing in the excess amounts that would be required to drop rents...and it's easy to see why. Why would they spend money to build more capital, which would reduce their rents...when they could simply raise rents on their existing housing stock instead? The answer is they wouldn't, absent some extern incentive. This is why we see that, as Henry George wrote in 1830, rents always rise "to consume all available wages". And thus rents never seem to go down. His proposed solution is outlined in Progress and Poverty, and that's to tweak the tax structure to create a profit incentive for those developers to build housing in excess. It's a brilliant idea that we should have learned 200 years ago, and it's starting to be tried in a few places, notably Detroit and Pennsylvania.

OP is correct that the private market will not willingly construct in excess needed to drop rents, and one solution is public housing incentives as usually realized, but a better solution is using Georgism to incentivize the private industry to construct excess housing. And you are also correct that it doesn't matter if building is banned. The only solution to that would seem to be recognition by higher government powers that NIMBYism needs to be smacked down and banned as a human rights violation. The federal government seems to be keen on preventing racial discrimination through statute, but seems OK with everyone getting fucked at the same time. Nimbyism realistically probably still takes on racist forms despite laws against it. But we don't even seem to have recognized that exclusive zoning is an anti-human-rights evil.

Your viewpoint is common but I believe it is wrong. I believe the Georgism viewpoint that there is not a conflict between capital and labor as proposed by Communism. Capital and labor actually work in harmony and complement each other. There IS a big conflict in society, but it's not between capital and labor, but between (capital+labor) and rent-seeking, both actual land rent and other less tangible forms of rent-seeking such as natural resource extraction, patent trolling, "IP", etc.

I'm not going to say capitalism isn't the problem because that depends how you define capitalism. If you define it as what we currently have, then yes it's problematic, but it's not a problem with market economies or private ownership of capital itself, it's a problem with parasitic rent-seekers. This makes sense because European economies evolved from parasitic rent-seekers. They never specifically adopted capitalism, rather they were more or less forced to accept the capitalist elements of the economy that arose from mercantilism and international trade because their own power, which was arranged around land ownership and rent, fell in relation. So in a similar way that modern China is a layer of capitalism over top of a communist substrate, western economies are a layer of capitalism over a feudal substrate (or since the ownership is not over tracts of agricultural land anymore but other rentable resources like developable land, patents, "IP", etc, we could say neofeudal).

The solution isn't, as Marx suggested, to posit a conflict between labor and capital, but to understand the struggle is between labor+capital and rent. Unfortunately the neofeudal impulse is so ingrained in western culture, still, that engaging in rent-seeking behavior is almost synonymous with success in the cultural mind, and people have a hard time understanding any difference between capital, labor, and land. What we need to fix our "capitalism" is to jettison the remaining vestiges of feudalism, but that seems very hard to do since the economy and common law jurisprudence seem to have an escape path paved in the direction of neofeudalism im any form, but no clear paths towards any antidotes (which would probably look a lot like Georgism).

As somebody above said, the very force that has the power to stop rent-seeking behavior in the economy, is the very force that is often and most profitably co-opted to engage in rent-seeking. The solution is Georgism, but no Georgist revolution seems to be on the horizon.

<quote>So your theory is that increasing the costs associated with rental prices will decrease the rent charged?</quote>

Land-value taxation does not inherently increase costs. When Harrisburg implemented their split taxation, tax bills dropped on a large majority of homes in Harrisburg. Detroit's plan will naturally reduce rents on something like 90% of homes in Detroit, and their law goes further and provides a remedy for anyone whose tax bill increases. On average they expect tax bills to be reduce by 17%. Reduction in tax burden is not a cost increase, it is a cost reduction. Their entire point of doing it is to reduce housing costs and increase housing supply. But maybe they, along with centuries of economists, are wrong and you are right?

<quote>You just took money out of the left pocket and placed it in the right pocket. </quote>

Not sure what you are getting here. It actually matters WHAT you tax. You get more of what you subsidize, and you get less of what you tax. The purpose of land-value taxes is to shift the tax burden away from housing/capital or labor, and toward economic rent, which results in, yes, less taxation of housing, capital, and labor, which results in lower housing costs, higher wages, and greater supply of capital, which is the entire point of doing it. If you are calling that taking money out of one pocket (economic rent) and putting it in another (housing/labor) then so be it; that's the entire point in fact, because it provably results in lower housing costs, better quality of housing, and lower real rents from multiple mechanisms. Land-value tax is the most efficient tax that anyone has proposed, it is what Milton Friedman called "the least bad tax".

<quote>Nobody in this discussion is talking about reducing tax. The whole discussion is about raising taxes to pay for UBI.</quote>

The entire parent discussion was about UBI and how it doesn't work because of the problem of taxation to pay for it. He's not wrong; you can't pay for UBI with typical tax structures, but I proposed a mechanism that could possibly fund a UBI, and that's land-value taxation. It has been recognized for centuries that because LVT takes money from rent, which is economic deadweight loss, and injects it elsewhere in the economy, which is possibly economic deadweight loss, if the recipients literally set the cash on fire, but very probably not, because they will probably spend it on goods and services, so such a tax has a net economic benefit, the only such tax that does, meaning it could conceivably pay for a UBI and actually work, and it's the only type of tax that can do so. Henry George proposed funding a UBI this way in 1830, but they didn't like acronyms back then so he called it a "citizen's dividend" instead of a UBI.

<quote>Your conversation is off on a tangent that completely avoids the discussion of UBI.</quote>

You must not have read my message at all, because my message was about how to fund a UBI; a direct response to the parent's claim that UBI is problematic because it is difficult to fund by taxes.

Land value tax is universally expected to reduce real rents, not increase them. Most jurisdictions that implement land value tax are able to reduce tax bills on a great majority of properties (Pennsylvania) or even legislate that the land value tax cannot increase tax bill (Detroit), therefore dropping rents, not raising them; there is no theory by which reducing taxes would result in increased housing costs. Also, land value tax is expected to (and has been shown to) result in better quality housing and reduce formation of slums, because it shifts tax burden away from property improvements, effectively (relatively) incentivizing development instead of taxing it. Your conclusions are opposite. Do some research. https://www.jstor.org/stable/3487258.

You sort of can, but you have to tax the right thing. You are right that you couldn't find a UBI effectively from the current tax structure. Current taxes exist because they target politically weak classes and sectors, not because they are actually the best things to tax.

The question of how to raise money for a UBI has been posed for hundreds of years, and the consensus is that the only source likely to work would be a tax on economic land rent. Economic land rent refers both the literal rent of land, but other forms of rent-seeking, like holding of patents, mining of natural resources, "intellectual property", etc. would also qualify as land-rent-taking. By taxing this type of economic rent, there is a possibility of distributing the proceeds elsewhere in the economy and actually having a net benefit. Henry George proposed doing exactly this in the 1830s by taxing economic rents and distributing the proceeds to all citizens equally as a "citizens dividend". His theories are popular among economists but strangely (and that's the sarcastic "strangely") not politically popular because it would target the rich. Certain versions of this idea do exist in things like the Alaska Permanent Fund Dividend, which is straight out of the Georgist school of thought, and certain jurisdictions that are starting to raise taxes on land values and cut property taxes on capital.

So, while the modern attempts at a UBI are doomed to failure because as you say, eventually you run out of other people's money, and on top of that it would probably just be inflationary, you COULD theoretically do a UBI, but you would need to fund it from the right sources, specifically land-rent (read Progress and Poverty for a definition).

During inflation in the Weimar republic, workers would rush to the grocery store on payday, to buy groceries before the prices went up even higher. For the same reasons they started demanding to be paid more often, even daily. Because as you say, even if they are getting regular pay raises, the value of the money they were paid last week never comes back.

In a factory where I used to work, we replaced human operators with some Staubli multi-axis robots. Even though the robots were bolted to the floor, we still had to surround them with a cage. The only way to get into the cage was to disconnect the main contactor, severing all power to the robot, AND put a padlock on the contactor so that nobody could turn it on while you were inside. It was impossible to operate the door, unless the main contactor was locked-out.

That was for a robot in a controlled environment, that was bolted to the floor, and only did procedural movements. When I think of how you could make a robotic car, that drives at lethal speeds, in uncontrolled environments, around untrained people, in new and untested situations, "safe", I just don't think there's any way to do it.

English spelling is ridiculous, but its ridiculosity is often overstated. It is not random, and it's not without logic and patterns.

English spelling should be better, sure, but it is (in fact) generally consistent, and it's possible (and advantageous) to teach it as such. Classic methods for teaching English usually teach about 30 simple spelling rules. In addition, there are a handful of high-frequency "sight words" like "who" that can easily fit on one page. And then there are a few (typically unimportant) exceptions. That's it. Punting and pretending that there are no patterns in English spelling is the source of garbage "whole word" teaching systems that don't work.

In the same breath that people criticize the ridiculousness of English, they praise French. This is because French has a marketing department and English doesn't. French spelling is worse than English in many ways. French benefits from its vocabulary coming from a common source (latin). But French spelling is absurd. Consider the common homophones (Cent / Sang / Sens / Sans). How do you "know" which silent letters to add? You don't. Just like in English (their / there / they're). Both French and English spelling are bad. Children objectively take longer to learn both, and diagnoses of dyslexia are higher for both than sensible languages like German or Spanish. Both French and English are the only languages that revere dictionaries to determine how words are spelled, and engage in dubious games like spelling bees so that kids can prove they can do something that should be simple and easy for everyone. Yet nobody claims French spelling can't be taught. Because French spelling does have patterns and consistency, and it's nonsense to say it doesn't. Saying English spelling can't be taught is similar nonsense.

If you want to talk about a horrifying, malevolent spelling "system", look no further than Japanese, which is on a completely different level of bad. English may be the worst alphabetic script. But it's till better than abjads and whatever morpho-phonemic garbage that Japanese is.

Not to mention, property taxes in the US are levied mainly on the capital improvements. This means that the more housing I build on a given plot of land, the higher my taxes will be. Heck, even if I renovate or fix up a property, my taxes can go up. Cities also charge impact fees in proportion to capital built...a nearby apartment paid over $250,000 in impact fees to the city. We know that builders will build more housing only if landlords demand it, but landlords don't demand more housing if it's more profitable for them to simply NOT buy more housing and raise rents on their existing housing instead. This can be more profitable for them, even if it results in empty units and homeless people, which it does as in your example.

The problem isn't market forces as-such, the problem is that current policies do not generate any market force that would cause construction of housing to happen in amounts great enough to cause rents to drop. That's an outcome of policy and it can be changed.

The solution is to place a greater proportion of the property tax/fees on the value of the land. That would reduce the tax penalty for building housing, and penalize wasting land or leaving properties empty, not to mention penalize land speculation. And it could finally create an incentive to build that "excess" housing needed to drop rents...because doing so would increase profitability even while rents drop (more units at lower rent should still make more money, but with taxes levied on capital, taxes go up proportional to units, but rent drops, so building more units results in lower profit. There's a literal anti-incentive to build more, so it doesn't happen. As long as we increase taxes in lockstep with every unit built, excess units will never be built and rents will never drop. Rents will always rise "to consume all available wages" as described by Henry George in Progress and Poverty 130 years ago, and economists before him going back to Adam Smith.

The simple solution is a Georgist tax structure that primarily taxes land value, but the rich prefer to get rich off of speculating and raising rents, rather than actually building capital. Georgism isn't popular since it mainly benefits the lower classes who do not wield political power.

It's also not flammable, which is the reason I use it. A can of flammable brake cleaner is basically a bomb. One dropped can and a spark, and you have a giant fireball and 3rd degree burns.

No, brake cleaner is tetrachloroethylene, which is less toxic. That's like, a whole extra ethylene.