jadero
Missed the swing bike and the skatebike.
I don't know where Dad dug these things up, but he started supplying us with strange and wondrous ways to hurt ourselves on 2 wheels, starting with a home made small penny farthing in 1962, an early banana seater, and a circus trick bike (20" wheels, vertical fork tube, and 1:1 fixed gear).
Which goods and services? Cars and doctors? Or Big Macs and pizza delivery?
There is no shortage of legitimate experts who say a proper progressive tax regime will handle UBI just fine. And if it doesn't, then at least we failed honestly instead of sitting on our hands.
Consider just the labour market. You imply that taking people out of the labour market is a bad thing, but how?
If a person can further their education as a result, that sounds positive.
If a student is better able to focus on their studies, that sounds positive.
If a parent is able to stay home with young children or work only part time with older children, that sounds positive.
If an adult is able to care for elderly or infirm relatives instead of putting them into a long term care facility, that sounds positive.
If a worker is able to retire a bit earlier, opening up opportunities for those struggling to enter the workforce, that sounds positive.
Your "labour market impact" makes it sound like you think businesses are entitled to the labour of others.
As for the rest, much can be avoided by appropriately funding universal services, thus limiting the role of ready cash.
But your example includes the context. If James was arrested without incident, "get him" is obviously nothing nefarious.
My favourite workspace was when I was just stuffed under a stairwell. There were very few interruptions because the only way to talk to me was to stand in the hallway blocking traffic.
I showed up, got my work done, dicked around with research projects, wandered the halls talking to people about the kinds of issues they were having and offering ad-hoc training, went home. It was more like a hobby than work.
No problem! If that's as nasty as we ever get, then I'd say we're doing pretty damn good!
People make bad decisions all the time. Far worse than maybe adopting instead of procreating. Where were the babysitters when I was doing actual stupid stuff?
Okay, those tactics seem sound.
On the subject of wood specifically, I've read a few articles in the last decade or so about techniques for treating and using wood in ways that have the potential to dramatically reduce our use of concrete. Given the carbon footprint of cement, that seems like a positive development.
Fair enough, but that strikes me as picking away at the edges of the problem. Maritime shipping represents about 3% of the total.. If research projects can offset that in ways that can be scaled up when we're ready, then that's great. But offsetting 3% here and 3% there doesn't accomplish much when net negative is where we need to be.
We need those projects and we need to describe their results in terms that garner and maintain support. That doesn't mean we should be diverting more than a few percent of our green energy to capture and storage at the expense of rolling out non-carbon energy production and eliminating carbon-based heating (and personal transportation?).
Trees are a lot slower at sequestration than most people think. They are also don't provide long-term sequestration, because they burn or rot somewhere along the line. Given that most existing forests are on land otherwise unsuitable for agriculture, every extra tree we plant takes cropland out of circulation. Without a way to take biomass out of the carbon cycle, it will never be more than carbon neutral.
A few people are pretty cranky over the size of the bill. Here's my take.
The bill is $80 million for 10 years of work. We have lotteries that pay out that much a few times a year in a single drawing.
I don't know how many full-time equivalent staff-hours went into into it, but if someone wants to put together a law firm whose only job is to take the federal government to task over things like this, I'm happy to chip in $10/year. I'm sure we can find a million other people to do likewise.
All things considered, it sounds like a bargain. Considering the size of the judgement, I bet the plaintiffs wouldn't even blink had they been stuck with the bill. This just sounds like someone is a sore loser.
I'm not sure how it works as a delaying tactic when the energy requirements of anything meaningful just delay migrating our grid, heating, and transportation off of fossil fuels.
By all means, divert some our energy into research projects, but I don't think we can expect to be in a position to do meaningful capture and storage for 2 or 3 decades.