I really want to like Ska, and I really like nearly the entirety of this album, but whenever I try to branch out from there I come up dry with anything I really enjoy.
They are trying. AB 2200 aims at laying the groundwork for universal healthcare. Minimum wage just went up to $16 for everyone and $20 for fast food workers. There are experiments going on in several cities with guaranteed income. But everything comes with a cost, and the state is having budget problems. There have been job losses associated with the wage increases. Employers have begun to get very picky about who they hire for even minimum wage jobs. Hours have been cut.
Even Democrats realize one state can't offer free stuff without attracting every freeloader in the country. Someone has to pay for the benefits, and if they tax those folks too heavily, they'll find another place to live. There's a real limit to how many social programs can be offered before they break the piggy bank.
Your conclusion makes no sense. California can’t afford the policies because states don’t print their money, the federal government does. And California doesn’t get much help from the federal government. So it’s constrained by what it can tax locally.
Those policies would work perfectly and cause no budgetary issues if the federal government paid for them by printing money.
The massive printing of money from 2008 to COVID really not make people realise that? We CAN pay for everything. The government just has to print for the money, and use it for that instead of bailing out the capitalists over and over.
Zimbabwe is not sovereign monetarily. The US is the most monetarily sovereign country in the world. They can literally print trillions and it doesn’t do anything to inflation. It has happened multiple times already!! Like why would people deny reality?
Because its not a solution, it just makes the problem worse. It'll just create even more money under 100 people can gobble up.
The money exists! It needs to be liberated from wasteful uses such as arms, billionaires or shareholders. We can also print more money, sure, but without first fixing the underlying spending/allocation/hoarding issue, we'd only be feeding the dragon.
He says that, as a state, California can't afford to do this. Your response is this makes no sense, this would all work if implemented at the federal level.
So even assuming your points are valid, this isn't an option for California.
I think @novibe is oversimplifying by quite a lot, but not completely off base.
The most condensed explanation I’ve found is by Second Thought: Why The Government Has Infinite Money.
The links in the description are great as well, addressing some common questions and counter-arguments.
America has a real problem if something very bad happens to Biden or Trump during the elections (or shortly after).
The world has a problem when Trump is elected again. As he's not known for keeping peace, or understanding international relations. In fact quite the opposite.
So the next big thing really is the elections.
....
Notice though how certain massive events are barely registering here.. Imagine a third of Americans threatened to lose their home.. But that's what's currently happening in China through floods, and rain season still having to start. I would call that big, 120 million people isn't nothing.. In comparison, 7 million died from corona (out of 700 million confirmed cases)
So this very much depends on your perspective and where on the planet you live.
Our civilization is more than capable, but those who have money and power are unwilling, because that's not something they're interested or invested in.
and the potential involvement of governments in concealing or studying such entities.
Completely absurd.
The Fermi Paradox is only a paradox if you apply a ludicrously unjustified value to the last figure in the Drake equation.
Technological civilizations are very likely self-extinguishing simply because technological power grows faster than any evolved species capacity to apply that technology to the benefit of the species.
Only way out of that would be that bio life is just a bootstrap for machine life and machine life just isn't that interested in interacting with biological life so we'll never see or hear from it.
I think that we may simply be among the first civilisations to reach such a technologically advanced point. By the time a species gets tech that can destroy their civilisation, i reckon they would most likely have also made a broadcast of some sort, either through radio or light or whatever else.
Granted, there's no real way to know any of this, us being the first is just what I reason is the most likely answer.
You have to account for the fact that, even if a civilization were to broadcast some sort of signal, it would take many millennia or eons for any signals to reach us. And even then, we would have to be advanced enough to be able to receive and interpret those signals at the same time they reach Earth.
There could very well be countless advanced civilizations whose signals just haven’t reached us yet, just as there may have been countless ones whose signals couldn’t be received or understood when they reached us, and they’ve died out or otherwise stopped transmitting before we could.
Keep in mind that the first radio broadcast on Earth was only 127 years ago. That means the farthest anyone could possibly detect any radio signal from earth is a mere 127 light years away.
Idk, this seems anthropocentric. Why would we be the first? I understand that there is some degree of truth to the universe being young, but that seems as likely as us being the only advanced life, which assumes that we are some special exception.
It seems more likely that other technologically advanced life may have gone intentionally dark (minimizing signals that may leave the solar system) for safety. It's possible humans will do this some day, maybe after we detect alien life and determine it is dangerous. Or, they prioritized harmony and stewardship of their planet and stopped broadcasting (or never did) because that is incompatible with their life style.
I'm not saying we are the absolute first, as in there's nobody else, I'm merely saying that we could be among the first civilisations ever to exist. To me, it seems a more plausible explanation than civs just going dark. As far as we know, there's no way to take back a broadcast that has been travelling for centuries, so even if they no longer send anything, what they sent in the past should still be detectable, I think, unless it didn't have enough time to travel here. In which case, the broadcast has been sent relatively recently (no more than a few millenia ago) or we are very far apart.
When you go to a party and you don't see anyone else there, you don't think "Everyone must be hiding", you think "I must be first", right?
Broadcast degrade, which wouldn't mean much for already existing conqueror civilizations looking for anyone to invade, but does mean the signal isn't entirely endless and we don't broadcast with the strength to reach very far (what with our only needing to send them around our planet). Our historic signals may very well never make it to civilizations advanced enough to hear them just due to distance and the fact that space isn't a perfect vacuum; signals degrade linearly as they are overwhelmed by the comparatively much more powerful background radiation. Digitally encoded signals like the ones we send now would be even harder to detect as the information would seem random.
Additionally, if we were to stop broadcasting then our broadcast would be effectively an expanding bubble with a ~130 light-year thick surface, so while it may reach a civilization and continue to reach them for 130 years, there is a chance it would reach them prior to technological advancement and it would pass by without detection. Of course in this case we assume that a new civilization would be hostile which is an odd assumption.
The party example doesn't really work here because there is no start time to be on time or fashionably late/early to.
Fun conversation, this is the stuff I used to love reddit for 😊
I found out on Friday my best friend doesn't believe we've sent people to the moon. To be clear, she seems to believe everything else, like sending rovers to Mars. 🤷
He's not earned my vote, he just hasn't lost it because of the potential loss we may suffer at the hands of the current GOP. I believe that Biden has done quite a bit. He also seems oddly stubborn regarding Gaza, which is obviously a pretty big mistake. However, I foresee an entire world negatively impacted by Trump becoming President once again. Yeah, I heavily dislike feeling forced to vote for Biden over someone else. Yet I have seen Biden roll over on many issues and take many positive steps. At least with him there seems to be a way forward where we will still be able to voice our concerns and where the people within our borders who are not white and others who are not straight don't have to fear for their lives or their freedom.
With Biden in for a second term we will have something we desperately need now that we seem to have finally begun coming together to some degree: Time. With Trump there is a real possibility that Gaza will become lower on everyone's list as people we consider friends, family, and neighbors are targeted. It isn't that the terrible situation in Gaza isn't important. I just recognize it's being used to divide us and risks us falling into the trap of dictatorship.
He kind of already earned my vote by subsidizing my clean energy HVAC (which I reinvested in a TV, lol) but I also look at places like Japan and am glad our inflation isn't as bad as it could have been. The yen lost so much purchasing power, in particular cause of not raising interest. We support family there, so our money goes a longer way. It's nice.
From now to November, though? Harder to say given he's hamstrung by Congress. There's dozens of things any administration could do to make the U.S. a better place, with public transportation, environment and education being some of my concerns. Education in particular isn't nearly addressed enough, and early childhood education policies in particular impact me personally. I'd be so down for a free program for my 2 year old!
He's already got my vote. He's by zero means perfect, but I live in a swing state and cannot throw out "meh it's terrible, but good enough considering" because it's not perfect.
Here's some things he could do to make "meh, it's terrible but" into just "good":
Put any kind of pressure on Israel.
Expand the Supreme Court.
Executive order giving the NLRB Sectorial Bargaining at the Federal Level.
Force the FCC to regulate data collection.
Go back in time and allow the railroad workers to strike and threaten nationalization if the hedge funds that own the railroads don't play ball.
I hate him, but him losing is an existential threat to many people I care about (many who are already suffering under republican state legislatures). It will do nothing for Gaza either.
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