I just retired a machine that's 18 years old. Its only problem is that it needs a new main bearing for the tub (it's a Maytag horizontal-axis washer, one of the first Neptunes), and it's a lot cheaper to just get another 10-year-old washer off Craigslist than to repair this one, which is what I did. The new(er) one isn't new, but works great.
So yes, I do expect new washing machines to last roughly 20 years.
Why would she need to beg for her old job? Have you seen the size of her golden parachute ($200M IIRC)? The longer she drags this out, the more she gets paid. Why should she resign? She can hang on and keep getting paid, and then when they fire her she'll still get that golden parachute. After she leaves this place, she'll have so much money she won't need to bother with working any more. Sounds like a resounding success to me.
You probably wasted $600 on those manuals. These days, if your vehicle is fairly popular, you can just download the manuals for free if you look around some.
What's bad is that cars have very stringent emissions controls, yet those are easy for regular Joes to work on these days. You can buy an OBD-II scanner for less than $100 (they have really cheap ones at Harbor Freight, probably $50), which you can plug into your car's diagnostic port and it'll tell you the codes thrown by the ECU which will generally point you to any problems you're having. If not, you can Google for those codes and quickly find out what they mean, and usually find discussion forums where other people with the same car discuss the problems they've had: usually whatever problem you're having is not unique. After you fix the problem, you can use your scanner to clear the codes. No mechanic necessary, and certainly not an expensive dealership mechanic.
Now of course, this doesn't encompass "tampering", just using the proper tools as you're supposed to. But thanks to OBD-II standardization, we're able to do much of this work ourselves using 3rd-party scan tools.
And if there's something you can't do, frequently you can buy a Chinese-made device on Ebay that's a clone of the official manufacturer diagnostic tool.
Dude, you're on the wrong site. This is Slashdot, which is full of both extremist libertarians and conservative Christian evangelicals. Neither one of those cares about LGBT rights.
If you're looking for intellectualism or socially progressive politics, this isn't the place for it. This is the place for curmudgeonly assholes to spew venom.
Oh please. This is Slashdot, a haven full of morons parroting nonsense. If you thought it was a place full of smart, technical people, you're about 15 years out-of-date.
ctually, with a UBI allowing people to move to less expensive areas, the economies of such small towns will boom, leading to more jobs, which will then be available to those new people. Rather than be stuck at 10k or whatever, they'll be able to afford even more, leading to a growth in housing (leading to more jobs), making way for more jobless people to move there, and so on.
To a certain extent, maybe. But remember, there's a LOT of small towns (and large towns and small cities) throughout the country. Only so many people are going to want to pack up and move to one, and spread out among all those places across this big continent, that's probably not going to equal a really large population density increase in those places.
Otherwise, I think your plan sounds mostly good. However, I'd suggest instituting a stock-transaction tax to pay for some of this. And flat taxes don't work; they have to be progressive to redistribute wealth effectively without crushing the middle class. Also, corporate taxes are too high and should be lowered, not raised, so they're more in-line with the corporate taxes in Europe. But they actually need to be enforced and the loopholes eliminated so the corporations actually pay them.
Another post in this thread already showed how $10k/year is sufficient to live in small towns in America. What people want is irrelevant: if you want to live in an expensive place, you need to get your own money for that. UBI is for providing the basics, not providing a luxury lifestyle in a hip urban community with a high cost of living. And yes, small cheap towns will stay small and cheap: there's countless such towns in America right now that are drying up and dying, literally, because the young people have all moved out to the cities, and the remaining occupants are dying of old age. An influx of UBI recipients spread out among all the little towns in America isn't going to drastically increase their population much. There aren't *that* many people who want to just live off of $10k/year. Most people are going to want to work for more, and that'll keep them in higher-cost areas (the cities and suburbs). For those who want to relax or can't work for some reason, they can move out to the small towns. And WTF are you talking about with urban growth boundaries? Small towns do not have urban grown boundaries.
Where does the money come from? Have you not bothered to read everything else here? We already spend trillions on social programs: welfare, section 8 housing, food stamps, etc. Those programs are wasteful because they need so much administration. Get rid of all that, and also Social Security (that has to be phased out), and that'll account for most of the needed money. Increasing taxes in everyone middle-class and up will take care of the rest (so that middle-class people end up paying as much more in taxes as they get back in UBI, making it a wash, and people above that pay progressively more). You can also drop the minimum wage laws since there's no reason to make sure people get a "living wage" when they have a UBI check; this will reduce the burden on businesses and reduce prices.
As for costs going up, obviously the UBI has to be indexed to inflation. Is that not obvious? Every social welfare program is tied to inflation.
As for "punishing" people who work, that's just plain stupid. Most of the wealth is now held by the top 1%. Increase the taxes on them the most. What are they going to do, move to Brazil? Middle class people should either see no change or maybe a slight boost to their income, depending on exactly how it all works out. Also, a stock trade tax would be a great way to generate revenue for this, without impacting the middle class significantly.
They do it in Japan. Earthquakes aren't a problem for tall buildings, the problem is the composition of the ground. I don't know what the ground is like in Santa Monica. I've been told there's some problems with trying to build too tall in SanFran because of the geology, but Santa Monica is a very long way from there.
Thank you! This is a great post, and shows that UBI actually can work, even at $10k/year. This is exactly the idea behind UBI too: give people who can't work (or just don't want to, and who we'd prefer to not become criminals) just enough that they can live on. The only social program we'd need then is a small one to help people at the bottom to move to these small cheap towns and restart their life there. A handful of social workers could easily handle that for a sizeable population; once they're relocated you probably won't have to deal with them much any more.
But every person who lives in a swanky, high cost-of-living locale relies on people doing low-end jobs that nobody, nobody is willing to pay cost-of-living-adjusted wages for. Your toilet cleaners, your bus drivers, your grocery-store clerks, your drivers. A high-end district still needs those people -- are they supposed to earn not only pennies, but then have to pay for public transport for three hours a day to get from their low-rent neighborhood to the one they work at?
No, why should they do that? They can move out to SmallTown Idaho or wherever and just live on their UBI and not work at all. Why should they bother sitting on public transit for 3 hours a day? If they really want to, then sure, but the UBI will be there regardless for them.
What you're failing to understand is that this is not a problem for the government to solve. The government does not need to oversee every single job in the country and make sure it pays enough, and that someone's willing to do it. That's a command economy, just like the Soviets had. It doesn't work.
With the UBI, we can just let the market solve these things. Of course, the free market doesn't solve every ill, but in this case it will: in a high-cost city, if you really want workers to drive buses or clean toilets, you're going to have to pay them enough to make it worth their while to come to work there. So you either need to pay them enough for them to live nearby with the expensive real estate, or you need to pay them enough for them to put up with a long commute from a cheaper area that's within commuting distance. If this means the expensive city has serious problems because they can't find people to keep the streets and toilets clean, oh well: this will cause economic problems which will then cause the real estate prices to fall (because who wants to live in a nasty, stinky city with nasty toilets everywhere?), which will then automatically correct the problem because now it'll be cheap enough for those workers to live closer.
Also, there's room here for local governments to address the issue (I know, it's not really free market, but that's OK): local governments have zoning power, and could push for more lower and middle-income housing to give people like this a place to live, instead of being like SanFran and refusing to build anything new. Some decent high-rises would be perfect here. Right now, local governments either refuse to build anything at all, or they only build stuff for richer people. Well, under the UBI system, those localities would be screwed because they wouldn't have a place for the low-end service workers to live, so the service workers would move to places that do consider them, and the shitty cities would then turn into garbage dumps until their citizens screamed enough for them to build some low-end housing.
Don't forget, many of these low-end jobs are going to be automated before long anyway. We already have self-driving cars, sorta. I'm actually surprised we don't have self-cleaning toilets, but I'm sure those are coming soon, just like we already have self-cleaning cat litter boxes. Grocery store clerks are already somewhat obsolete thanks to self-checkouts (you just need one clerk to watch over everyone). This is one of the big reasons UBI is being looked at more seriously now: before long, many of these jobs will simply disappear.
So yes, totally ignoring cost-of-living problems *will* make the cost-of-living issue go away.
Honestly, your complain sounds like tech companies whining that they can't find highly skilled people to work for them for peanuts. If you can't get someone to take your job, it's because you're not paying enough.
Furthermore, cost of living varies widely across the country; how are you going to deal with that? I mean, a $10000 UBI is below the federal poverty line, and you can't possibly live on that in many metropolitan areas.
If someone wants to live in a swanky, high cost-of-living locale, they need to fund that themselves. The UBI is a *basic* income, to provide the *minimum* standard of living. That doesn't mean living in the highest-rent part of the country on the taxpayers' dime. If we did that, nearly everyone would want to move to the expensive places.
If that means you need to move away from your family, too bad. They can move with you, or they can pay for you to live near them.
Will UBI recipients have to pay full price for health insurance or are you still going to subsidize that?
UBI really needs to be coupled with a proper universal healthcare system to work, IMO.
Are you going to give UBI to every adult, or even person, or what?
Adults only.
Do people living together each get their own UBI?
Yes, why not? You want to police people to see if they're spending it "right"? That's why we have so many problems with welfare programs now, and why welfare has high administration costs. The whole point of UBI is to give everyone a basic, minimum standard of living that's guaranteed and they don't have to worry about being thrown out on the street if they lose their job or have some financial hardship. It's not meant to facilitate social engineering.
Now, it won't obviate all government social programs; we still need CPS to protect abused kids, for instance.
After you sterilize most of the population, leaving only the richest to have children and create the next generation, the population will collapse and pretty quickly go extinct since rich people don't make enough kids to replace even themselves, let alone keep the population levels where they are. With the population suddenly contracting to a million or so over a couple generations, pretty soon culture will stagnate, new learning will stop, people will forget how to fix the machines they do have, and it won't take much to push people into extinction.
However, based on my observations of people lately, especially ones on this site, maybe extinction would be the best thing.
What if the property they are renting on AirBnB is unsafe?
If that's the case, then why is the local government allowing someone to live in the house in the first place?
As for the driving slow in the left lane thing, that's another good example of the failure in government to do what's right. They'd rather collect ticket revenue than make rules which promote safety and are backed by evidence. It's no different than the Drug War.
The buildings are so close together that you could reach your arm out your window and grab the salt off the neighbor's table almost. So many people are packed into every square foot that you have to circle your block several times just to get a parking spot. Building apartments or condos on the remaining properties that aren't wouldn't create enough supply to make any significant dent in prices. Where the fuck are they going to build more housing, and where the fuck are those people going to park?
Oh please. It's very simple: the buildings are too small, so they need to tear them down and build bigger buildings, just like they do in Manhattan. When you run out of space to build out, you build up. Are you unable to think in 3 dimensions?
As for parking, that's what parking garages are for.
If the land is really *that* valuable, then high-rise condos with underground garages are perfectly affordable. It's only restrictive zoning that prevents it from happening.
Are you fucking kidding me? Some guy dies on a rope swing and you think that's a reason to not allow people to rent out their homes (or rooms within their homes)? How stupid.
If you really cared about this, you'd be campaigning for the government to go to every single house in America and inspect every rope swing in someone's back yard. The guy could have died just the same by visiting a friend's house and trying out the rope swing in his back yard, but somehow that's not a problem, it's only a problem when the house's owner rents a room on airBnB?
1) $10k/year was a made-up number the OP created out of thin air just to illustrate his point about anti-UBI arguments being stupid and invalid. It's not an actual number proposed by UBI advocates. The actual number is likely higher. But as a UBI proponent myself, I also acknowledge that UBI really needs to be combined with some other changes for it to work well: actions to decrease housing cost are desperately needed, and also we need universal healthcare.
2) No, programs like UBI do NOT exist in England, or anywhere else. Those are welfare programs, just like we have in America: they pay you to not work. That's the whole problem with them. Either you work and struggle and don't get any welfare, or you get on "the dole" and don't work. There's no middle ground. That's the whole problem with these programs. The whole idea with UBI is to eliminate welfare, and its disincentive to work, and give everyone a guaranteed paycheck. Then, if they want more than that, they can go work for more, and that extra work will not decrease their UBI paycheck at all. If you want the lowest classes to at least try to be productive citizens, you have to do it this way. Otherwise we'll simply continue to subsidize them to live in projects and not work, and raise kids in that environment.
You've just identified yourself as someone who doesn't belong on this site, since you can't even conceive of having multiple phone numbers. Shut down your account and go somewhere else more suitable for you, like TMZ.com.
It sounds to me like you're describing things that are no worse than, and generally better than, what we've been dealing with here in the US for quite some time, and we're still surviving and still have a much higher standard of living than most countries on the planet (except the western European ones and probably Japan). People have been telling me for over a decade now that the US is going to turn into something out of a zombie apocalypse movie "any day now". There's big problems to be sure, but there's no hyperinflation, and there's been big problems for decades; have you forgotten how turbulent the 60s were? Or how much crime there was in the 70s?
I don't get your comment about "printing presses" (also, Switzerland, Norway, UK, Denmark, and Sweden don't use Euros). We have upcoming problems with Social Security too. Our economy is doing pretty good for highly-paid professionals and great for the 0.1%, and shitty for everyone else. Our education system has been failing the bottom 25% and graduating functionally illiterate people and people who can't multiply for literally decades now; my mom complained about this when I was a kid. Heck, we even graduate them from college if they can throw a football, and again, we've been doing that probably for my whole lifetime. And we've had immigration issues and controversies for at least 150 years now.
Probably every country is a "mess" in one way or another. It's all relative. The question is: which ones are doing the best? AFAICT, western European nations are generally doing the best, and quality-of-life surveys back this up. Switzerland and Sweden and Norway consistently lead in these metrics (note that 2 of those are not EU members, and the 3rd still has its own currency), and Finland is also doing extremely well, which is remarkable considering where it was 25+ years ago during the cold war. There is no perfect country. But in many ways, European countries are doing better than the US.
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You need to go read about the Magnusson-Moss Warranty Act of 1975.
When there are no brands that offer "fix it yourself" tractors, where are these smart farmers supposed to go?
According to another poster in this thread, New Holland tractors have all their repair manuals easily available to customer and spare parts too.
Yep, but luckily you can buy a Chinese clone of VIDA for $100-200 on Ebay.
I just retired a machine that's 18 years old. Its only problem is that it needs a new main bearing for the tub (it's a Maytag horizontal-axis washer, one of the first Neptunes), and it's a lot cheaper to just get another 10-year-old washer off Craigslist than to repair this one, which is what I did. The new(er) one isn't new, but works great.
So yes, I do expect new washing machines to last roughly 20 years.
Why would she need to beg for her old job? Have you seen the size of her golden parachute ($200M IIRC)? The longer she drags this out, the more she gets paid. Why should she resign? She can hang on and keep getting paid, and then when they fire her she'll still get that golden parachute. After she leaves this place, she'll have so much money she won't need to bother with working any more. Sounds like a resounding success to me.
What are you talking about? Marissa has been extremely successful. Look at how much she's getting paid.
Whether Yahoo! fails or not is irrelevant. What's important is that Marissa has amassed a sizeable personal fortune. I wouldn't call that a "failure".
Check Ebay. There's probably a cheap Chinese-made clone of the special manufacturer scanner.
You probably wasted $600 on those manuals. These days, if your vehicle is fairly popular, you can just download the manuals for free if you look around some.
What's bad is that cars have very stringent emissions controls, yet those are easy for regular Joes to work on these days. You can buy an OBD-II scanner for less than $100 (they have really cheap ones at Harbor Freight, probably $50), which you can plug into your car's diagnostic port and it'll tell you the codes thrown by the ECU which will generally point you to any problems you're having. If not, you can Google for those codes and quickly find out what they mean, and usually find discussion forums where other people with the same car discuss the problems they've had: usually whatever problem you're having is not unique. After you fix the problem, you can use your scanner to clear the codes. No mechanic necessary, and certainly not an expensive dealership mechanic.
Now of course, this doesn't encompass "tampering", just using the proper tools as you're supposed to. But thanks to OBD-II standardization, we're able to do much of this work ourselves using 3rd-party scan tools.
And if there's something you can't do, frequently you can buy a Chinese-made device on Ebay that's a clone of the official manufacturer diagnostic tool.
Dude, you're on the wrong site. This is Slashdot, which is full of both extremist libertarians and conservative Christian evangelicals. Neither one of those cares about LGBT rights.
If you're looking for intellectualism or socially progressive politics, this isn't the place for it. This is the place for curmudgeonly assholes to spew venom.
Oh please. This is Slashdot, a haven full of morons parroting nonsense. If you thought it was a place full of smart, technical people, you're about 15 years out-of-date.
ctually, with a UBI allowing people to move to less expensive areas, the economies of such small towns will boom, leading to more jobs, which will then be available to those new people. Rather than be stuck at 10k or whatever, they'll be able to afford even more, leading to a growth in housing (leading to more jobs), making way for more jobless people to move there, and so on.
To a certain extent, maybe. But remember, there's a LOT of small towns (and large towns and small cities) throughout the country. Only so many people are going to want to pack up and move to one, and spread out among all those places across this big continent, that's probably not going to equal a really large population density increase in those places.
Otherwise, I think your plan sounds mostly good. However, I'd suggest instituting a stock-transaction tax to pay for some of this. And flat taxes don't work; they have to be progressive to redistribute wealth effectively without crushing the middle class. Also, corporate taxes are too high and should be lowered, not raised, so they're more in-line with the corporate taxes in Europe. But they actually need to be enforced and the loopholes eliminated so the corporations actually pay them.
Oh please, this is just plain dumb.
Another post in this thread already showed how $10k/year is sufficient to live in small towns in America. What people want is irrelevant: if you want to live in an expensive place, you need to get your own money for that. UBI is for providing the basics, not providing a luxury lifestyle in a hip urban community with a high cost of living. And yes, small cheap towns will stay small and cheap: there's countless such towns in America right now that are drying up and dying, literally, because the young people have all moved out to the cities, and the remaining occupants are dying of old age. An influx of UBI recipients spread out among all the little towns in America isn't going to drastically increase their population much. There aren't *that* many people who want to just live off of $10k/year. Most people are going to want to work for more, and that'll keep them in higher-cost areas (the cities and suburbs). For those who want to relax or can't work for some reason, they can move out to the small towns. And WTF are you talking about with urban growth boundaries? Small towns do not have urban grown boundaries.
Where does the money come from? Have you not bothered to read everything else here? We already spend trillions on social programs: welfare, section 8 housing, food stamps, etc. Those programs are wasteful because they need so much administration. Get rid of all that, and also Social Security (that has to be phased out), and that'll account for most of the needed money. Increasing taxes in everyone middle-class and up will take care of the rest (so that middle-class people end up paying as much more in taxes as they get back in UBI, making it a wash, and people above that pay progressively more). You can also drop the minimum wage laws since there's no reason to make sure people get a "living wage" when they have a UBI check; this will reduce the burden on businesses and reduce prices.
As for costs going up, obviously the UBI has to be indexed to inflation. Is that not obvious? Every social welfare program is tied to inflation.
As for "punishing" people who work, that's just plain stupid. Most of the wealth is now held by the top 1%. Increase the taxes on them the most. What are they going to do, move to Brazil? Middle class people should either see no change or maybe a slight boost to their income, depending on exactly how it all works out. Also, a stock trade tax would be a great way to generate revenue for this, without impacting the middle class significantly.
They do it in Japan. Earthquakes aren't a problem for tall buildings, the problem is the composition of the ground. I don't know what the ground is like in Santa Monica. I've been told there's some problems with trying to build too tall in SanFran because of the geology, but Santa Monica is a very long way from there.
Thank you! This is a great post, and shows that UBI actually can work, even at $10k/year. This is exactly the idea behind UBI too: give people who can't work (or just don't want to, and who we'd prefer to not become criminals) just enough that they can live on. The only social program we'd need then is a small one to help people at the bottom to move to these small cheap towns and restart their life there. A handful of social workers could easily handle that for a sizeable population; once they're relocated you probably won't have to deal with them much any more.
But every person who lives in a swanky, high cost-of-living locale relies on people doing low-end jobs that nobody, nobody is willing to pay cost-of-living-adjusted wages for. Your toilet cleaners, your bus drivers, your grocery-store clerks, your drivers. A high-end district still needs those people -- are they supposed to earn not only pennies, but then have to pay for public transport for three hours a day to get from their low-rent neighborhood to the one they work at?
No, why should they do that? They can move out to SmallTown Idaho or wherever and just live on their UBI and not work at all. Why should they bother sitting on public transit for 3 hours a day? If they really want to, then sure, but the UBI will be there regardless for them.
What you're failing to understand is that this is not a problem for the government to solve. The government does not need to oversee every single job in the country and make sure it pays enough, and that someone's willing to do it. That's a command economy, just like the Soviets had. It doesn't work.
With the UBI, we can just let the market solve these things. Of course, the free market doesn't solve every ill, but in this case it will: in a high-cost city, if you really want workers to drive buses or clean toilets, you're going to have to pay them enough to make it worth their while to come to work there. So you either need to pay them enough for them to live nearby with the expensive real estate, or you need to pay them enough for them to put up with a long commute from a cheaper area that's within commuting distance. If this means the expensive city has serious problems because they can't find people to keep the streets and toilets clean, oh well: this will cause economic problems which will then cause the real estate prices to fall (because who wants to live in a nasty, stinky city with nasty toilets everywhere?), which will then automatically correct the problem because now it'll be cheap enough for those workers to live closer.
Also, there's room here for local governments to address the issue (I know, it's not really free market, but that's OK): local governments have zoning power, and could push for more lower and middle-income housing to give people like this a place to live, instead of being like SanFran and refusing to build anything new. Some decent high-rises would be perfect here. Right now, local governments either refuse to build anything at all, or they only build stuff for richer people. Well, under the UBI system, those localities would be screwed because they wouldn't have a place for the low-end service workers to live, so the service workers would move to places that do consider them, and the shitty cities would then turn into garbage dumps until their citizens screamed enough for them to build some low-end housing.
Don't forget, many of these low-end jobs are going to be automated before long anyway. We already have self-driving cars, sorta. I'm actually surprised we don't have self-cleaning toilets, but I'm sure those are coming soon, just like we already have self-cleaning cat litter boxes. Grocery store clerks are already somewhat obsolete thanks to self-checkouts (you just need one clerk to watch over everyone). This is one of the big reasons UBI is being looked at more seriously now: before long, many of these jobs will simply disappear.
So yes, totally ignoring cost-of-living problems *will* make the cost-of-living issue go away.
Honestly, your complain sounds like tech companies whining that they can't find highly skilled people to work for them for peanuts. If you can't get someone to take your job, it's because you're not paying enough.
Furthermore, cost of living varies widely across the country; how are you going to deal with that? I mean, a $10000 UBI is below the federal poverty line, and you can't possibly live on that in many metropolitan areas.
If someone wants to live in a swanky, high cost-of-living locale, they need to fund that themselves. The UBI is a *basic* income, to provide the *minimum* standard of living. That doesn't mean living in the highest-rent part of the country on the taxpayers' dime. If we did that, nearly everyone would want to move to the expensive places.
If that means you need to move away from your family, too bad. They can move with you, or they can pay for you to live near them.
Will UBI recipients have to pay full price for health insurance or are you still going to subsidize that?
UBI really needs to be coupled with a proper universal healthcare system to work, IMO.
Are you going to give UBI to every adult, or even person, or what?
Adults only.
Do people living together each get their own UBI?
Yes, why not? You want to police people to see if they're spending it "right"? That's why we have so many problems with welfare programs now, and why welfare has high administration costs. The whole point of UBI is to give everyone a basic, minimum standard of living that's guaranteed and they don't have to worry about being thrown out on the street if they lose their job or have some financial hardship. It's not meant to facilitate social engineering.
Now, it won't obviate all government social programs; we still need CPS to protect abused kids, for instance.
So you want the human race to go extinct?
After you sterilize most of the population, leaving only the richest to have children and create the next generation, the population will collapse and pretty quickly go extinct since rich people don't make enough kids to replace even themselves, let alone keep the population levels where they are. With the population suddenly contracting to a million or so over a couple generations, pretty soon culture will stagnate, new learning will stop, people will forget how to fix the machines they do have, and it won't take much to push people into extinction.
However, based on my observations of people lately, especially ones on this site, maybe extinction would be the best thing.
What if the property they are renting on AirBnB is unsafe?
If that's the case, then why is the local government allowing someone to live in the house in the first place?
As for the driving slow in the left lane thing, that's another good example of the failure in government to do what's right. They'd rather collect ticket revenue than make rules which promote safety and are backed by evidence. It's no different than the Drug War.
The buildings are so close together that you could reach your arm out your window and grab the salt off the neighbor's table almost. So many people are packed into every square foot that you have to circle your block several times just to get a parking spot. Building apartments or condos on the remaining properties that aren't wouldn't create enough supply to make any significant dent in prices. Where the fuck are they going to build more housing, and where the fuck are those people going to park?
Oh please. It's very simple: the buildings are too small, so they need to tear them down and build bigger buildings, just like they do in Manhattan. When you run out of space to build out, you build up. Are you unable to think in 3 dimensions?
As for parking, that's what parking garages are for.
If the land is really *that* valuable, then high-rise condos with underground garages are perfectly affordable. It's only restrictive zoning that prevents it from happening.
Are you fucking kidding me? Some guy dies on a rope swing and you think that's a reason to not allow people to rent out their homes (or rooms within their homes)? How stupid.
If you really cared about this, you'd be campaigning for the government to go to every single house in America and inspect every rope swing in someone's back yard. The guy could have died just the same by visiting a friend's house and trying out the rope swing in his back yard, but somehow that's not a problem, it's only a problem when the house's owner rents a room on airBnB?
1) $10k/year was a made-up number the OP created out of thin air just to illustrate his point about anti-UBI arguments being stupid and invalid. It's not an actual number proposed by UBI advocates. The actual number is likely higher. But as a UBI proponent myself, I also acknowledge that UBI really needs to be combined with some other changes for it to work well: actions to decrease housing cost are desperately needed, and also we need universal healthcare.
2) No, programs like UBI do NOT exist in England, or anywhere else. Those are welfare programs, just like we have in America: they pay you to not work. That's the whole problem with them. Either you work and struggle and don't get any welfare, or you get on "the dole" and don't work. There's no middle ground. That's the whole problem with these programs. The whole idea with UBI is to eliminate welfare, and its disincentive to work, and give everyone a guaranteed paycheck. Then, if they want more than that, they can go work for more, and that extra work will not decrease their UBI paycheck at all. If you want the lowest classes to at least try to be productive citizens, you have to do it this way. Otherwise we'll simply continue to subsidize them to live in projects and not work, and raise kids in that environment.
You've just identified yourself as someone who doesn't belong on this site, since you can't even conceive of having multiple phone numbers. Shut down your account and go somewhere else more suitable for you, like TMZ.com.
It sounds to me like you're describing things that are no worse than, and generally better than, what we've been dealing with here in the US for quite some time, and we're still surviving and still have a much higher standard of living than most countries on the planet (except the western European ones and probably Japan). People have been telling me for over a decade now that the US is going to turn into something out of a zombie apocalypse movie "any day now". There's big problems to be sure, but there's no hyperinflation, and there's been big problems for decades; have you forgotten how turbulent the 60s were? Or how much crime there was in the 70s?
I don't get your comment about "printing presses" (also, Switzerland, Norway, UK, Denmark, and Sweden don't use Euros). We have upcoming problems with Social Security too. Our economy is doing pretty good for highly-paid professionals and great for the 0.1%, and shitty for everyone else. Our education system has been failing the bottom 25% and graduating functionally illiterate people and people who can't multiply for literally decades now; my mom complained about this when I was a kid. Heck, we even graduate them from college if they can throw a football, and again, we've been doing that probably for my whole lifetime. And we've had immigration issues and controversies for at least 150 years now.
Probably every country is a "mess" in one way or another. It's all relative. The question is: which ones are doing the best? AFAICT, western European nations are generally doing the best, and quality-of-life surveys back this up. Switzerland and Sweden and Norway consistently lead in these metrics (note that 2 of those are not EU members, and the 3rd still has its own currency), and Finland is also doing extremely well, which is remarkable considering where it was 25+ years ago during the cold war. There is no perfect country. But in many ways, European countries are doing better than the US.
That's the elephant-in-the-room question right there.