blarghly

Yeah, honestly OP asking "is this ablist" is a bit of a red flag given the picture they have painted. If they were an otherwise "nice" person using ablist language, then this language and possible categorization might be a clue to tell us more about who they really are. But if we already know they are a piece of shit.... it doesn't really matter what flavor of -ist they are. Just don't interact with them. Don't think about them. Problem solved. More labelling isn't needed.

In that case, I err on the side of no. While I'm not a fan of make-work, there are a lot of necessary public works projects for the docket. These should be prioritized over those that are just "nice". And beyond this, most infrastructure problems require some kind of maintenance - something we are already far behind on. Adding to that maintenance backlog by building additional things which are unnecessary seems ill advised.

Yes. I'm opposed.

Simply saying "everyone should get enough money from the government to live" has a lot of problems. The most obvious being that cost of living varies substantially from one place to another. And peoples needs vary substantially as well. So where do we set the number?

You'll also need to figure out how to combat the massive inflationary effects that would occur.

But imo, the biggest issue is what happens in the long term. Say a nation gives its citizens a UBI. Now wait 100 years. What happens? Well what happens is that, assuming this doesn't collapse the economy some other way, and assuming this is a democratic nation, everyone will start taking UBI for granted, and will start thinking "you know, if only I had a little more free money, I could afford that nice shirt I saw my neighbor wearing yesterday...". And because "free money for everyone" will be a popular political platform, the UBI amount will go up and up and up, with little thought put into how to continue funding it. The government accrues more and more debt over time funding the program, until finally the government can no longer continue paying its debtors, and the country collapses into chaos.

Instead, I'm in favor of a citizen's dividend, which is tied to the nation's economic output. A good example is how Alaskans get a dividend, since they agreed to allow private companies to extract the oil from their state. Land value taxes could work like this. Carbon taxes could work like this. If you want to make sure everyone is fed and housed, then that is a very noble goal - but it should be accomplished by providing people with food and housing. And I think it is right and fair that the people of a nation should be compensated for the use of their land and the negative externalities they endure - but how much they are paid out should not be coupled to the cost of living. It should be well known to be an independent, unpredictable, and highly variable amount that they can't rely on, so that they never gain the expectation that they will always have endless free money to spend however they please.

All bad movies

Replace all actors with Nick Cage

Building necessary public works projects is great. Building them for the sake of giving people something to do isn't

Yes to antimonopoly practices. But rent control is well known to be an extremely problematic policy. It encourages developers to not develop more housing, and encourages landlords to not fix known problems. A far better solition is a Georgist land value tax, which completely removes the ability of landlords to profit off of the value of the land itself.

Problem there is that this sort of thing tends to end up with make-work projects - digging holes and filling them back in again. You are wasting people's time and energy, and taxpayer money, by making people do work that doesn't need to be done instead of just handing them a check

I mean, yeah, get out. But in the meantime I would suggest trying your best to find some way to relate. In 2 years maybe one of those guys will hear about a good job opportunity and pass it along to you "because he's a nice guy who gets his work done - even if he's a bit screwy to not watch sports"

why… why does everything need to look the same, sell the same junk.

Because it is cheap. Build a warehouse, fill it with cheap shelves full of mass produced products. Costs come down due to economies of scale. It's cheaper to make a kid's toy if they are all made of plastic from the same mold, and it is cheaper to make buildings if they are all built from the same engineering documents. Stamp your logo on the building so that people know what quality of goods to expect at your store. You can now undercut local stores with lower costs. People shop there because they want to save a couple bucks.

Walmart hasn't had their greeters actually greet anyone in 20 years. They just stand there. Sometimes they ask to check your reciept when you leave, but you are free to ignore them and keep walking.

okay so shut down AI datacenters (reduce demand)

Lots of people think that these datacenters are doing important things - and some of them might actually be right! So this isn't going to happen. What could happen is simply instituting a tiered pricing system for electricity, where the more electicity you use, the higher the price you pay per kwh. Most places already have such a system in place for water usage. Then (ideally) we'd reinvest the profits into something like additional renewable capacity.

and smuggle in the cheap chinese solar panels just sitting in storage (increase supply)

I mean... I have to wonder why these are sitting in storage. And the answer is probably that they are defective or underperforming or are known to cause cancer in the state of California. The company that made them presumably wants to sell them, and there is certainly no shortage of people around the world who would like to buy them if the price was right. People don't just hoard warehouses full of solar panels for no reason.

I wouldn't attach myself to any particular battery tech - the field is innovating too rapidly.

Solar and nuclear can go hand in hand. Solar is great because the amout of potential harvestable power is massive - the trick is producing panels, connecting them to the grid, transmission, load balancing, and storage.

Wind is nice right now, as it is a relatively untapped resource. But we'll run out of windy places far faster than sunny places.

Hydro is ecologically destructive, but has an even bigger problem, which is that we have already picked a lot of the low hanging fruit. Good locations for dams are difficult to find, and we've already found most of them and dammed many of them. We would rapidly face diminishing returns. Plus, silt is always a looming problem.

Though, the real solution is to simply tax carbon.