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.
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.
I should have clarified that I know it can work, but not as the perpetual motion kind of system most people seem to envisage or that most projects I'm aware of seem to promote.
Everyone seems to think that carbon capture can be this little add-on when it actually needs to be a bare minimum of 1/3 our total energy production to have a meaningful impact over typical human time scales (a century or 2). Making things more complicated, none of that carbon capture energy can come from carbon fuels. I just don't see how we can do both at the same time, except as research projects to set the stage for when have gone a lot further in decarbonising our production for consumption.
I've never understood carbon capture and storage. I never went past high school and that was about 50 years ago. But I still remember the key principles behind why perpetual motion will never be a thing.
Unless there is an energy producing reaction that binds CO2 or separates the carbon from the oxygen without producing nasty byproducts, carbon capture and storage cannot work without pouring more energy into the project than what we gained from the release of the CO2.
Just imagine what anything else looks like. For every fossil fueled power plant that has ever existed, we need to build at least one larger non-carbon plant to power the capture and storage. There are several ways to reduce the fraction of our power that goes into capture and storage:
But no matter how you slice it, removing enough quickly enough will still require a large fraction of our power generation capacity.
The initiatives cannot be anything other than a shell game designed to hide the underlying perpetual motion machine.
Yeah, these ones don't look far removed from the ones I've seen on YouTube that people with plenty of options choose to live in.
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).