Do you want to talk to your representative or AG in this case? I also have a wild idea: software engineers can actually lobby this change. They form a non profit organization, make contributions (say 10k each) and go talk to the right politics. This what corps do, but thus is what people can do to.
This is an attempt to divert attention from real monopolies like Comcast and healthcare monsters. What we really need in the tech space is UK-style laws to enforce competition between ISPs, GDPR-style laws to protect personal data and CA-style prohibition on NDAs. But politicans won't get paid for any of this. Instead they go for easy and profitable targets, such as pretending to care that Amazon is a monopoly.
What would that fixed child tax credit be? 75k/year to cover education, healthcare, food? Probably not and it would be closer to 15k. It all depends on what kind of families we want to support: some may be happy with 15k.
Not only housing is expensive, there is a good chance to lose this expensive house over a divorce.
Perhaps you know better, but my uneducated guess would be that just an ambulance vehicle costs 15k/month, then every medic costs 10k/month at least and there will be expensive weird things like commercial insurance that costs another 5k/month. 100k/month might make you break even in the long run.
I disagree. People have less sex in our society for about the same reasons they don't have kids. Contraception makes no difference when men and women don't bother to date each other.
Simple solution: 1%/year tax on wealth and give these money to families with kids. The tricky part is wealth is often stored as shares and if you tax Bezos, he'd have to sell 1% of his shares, thus driving the price of those shares down; then if some hedge fund keeps buying the shares he sells, eventually he may lose control over his company, which is unfair. We might want to define wealth as savings above 5M dollars. This would be easy to work around: register a few companies with highly complex structure of ownership and spread money across them.
Subsidies can be tied up to mortgage: the entire cost of housing can be made deductible from taxes, all expenses related to kids can be reimbursed (by IRS in April: you show checks and they give you money back). On top of that your income can be backed by the government for an extended period of time in case something happens to you, while you still need to pay for everything. You may ask where do we get money for all this? Tax on wealth. Many countries tax investments at 1% a year, not income, but investments. This won't bankrupt the rich people because investments usually make 5-10% per year and the government can take a small fraction of that. And no, the rich won't move their money abroad because safety that the US gives is worth a lot.
This is a very smart way to organise society, if we think about it: people have to do more and more work to bid against each other for the limited amount of resources. The only flaw is that this reduces birth rate to unacceptable levels. I don't believe that this can be fixed: this very smart ratchet mechanism won't let us work less. Rich countries like USA counter this problem by immigration of qualified individuals. Not so rich countries like Europe have to let everybody in. But this solution won't last for long and eventually the so called advanced countries will be replaced by people that don't give a s..t about women's and anyone's rights and don't have troubles with birth rate. Oh well, maybe this can be fixed, but nobody likes the solution: reimbursement for all kids related expenses and extra to compensate for time - schools, universities, healthcare are free for anyone under 25; better laws related to marriage, kids and divorce - it makes no sense to give up half of your earnings and the house, and this alone deters a lot of otherwise qualified men from starting a family; and there should be an option to delegate raising kids to those who are good at it - the best age to make kids is early 20s when you're healthy, but in our modern society it's a financial suicide to start a family until you are well off (35 if you're lucky) - this type of advanced childcare would be a big shift in our society. Or keep extracting profit from full time working men and women and watch the sunset of the modern civilization in 50 years.
I can't use most of the sites at work because of ads and I can't install an adblocker because it would have access to corp data. When I search for something related to work, I know that most of the sites would display inappropriate junk on half screen with my colleagues probably watching behind. The solution I use us to search on stackoverflow only, but it too displays some garbage, and I have to scroll the page so the ads won't be in view. It's a hilarious situation.
It depends. Your credit card company knows what you bought and when, while the ad network knows the phone number linked to the PC where the ad was shown. Join the two tables and we can track you to the grocery store.
GRM can be as simple as a corporation owns rights to certain genes and thus owns a part of the income of those who happens to have these genes. Yes, children inherit the genes and thus owe to that company. The GRM rights can be bought or sold, like IP rights. Various regulations will determine how much we owe per gene.
Who is smarter: someone who was frugal, saved a lot of money, retired and died or someone who kept spending everything, got whatever he could get for the money, retired and died with 0 in savings?
TBH, 50k wouldn't help. It's a petty amount of money when it comes to investments. On average you can aim at 3% per year. That should be enough to support your lifestyle which is 30k if you are ok with being frugal. Would you live like a homeless if you had 1M in your investments accounts? No, you'd be paying off mortgage on a nice house while figuring out how to make more money, deal with inflation and rapidly rising property taxes, so you won't end up on streets when you retire. If 50k could solve your problems, I'd give it to you now because I believe that fixing someone's life is worth way more than 500 hundred dollar bills.
IMHO, local sacrifices is a dead end approach because it expects coordinated good will from billions of people. This won't happen: people are as bad as they are allowed to be. The solution should be going after the popular business model that makes consumers buy new items because the old ones break: this applies to everything, from cars to toothbrushes; it even seems to apply to newly built houses now. The manufacturer can't care less if an average buyer has to leave 3 cars behind because those cars were designed to break, as long as it brings profit. Axe this business model, bankrupt these manufacturers by holding them accountable to how much of their products end up thrown away and we'll see how reliable products will take their spot. No more useless waste, no more icebergs of plastic in the ocean, no more need to burn gigatons of coal to make all these intentionally flawed items. I'm sure everybody sees this solution, but nobody has balls to implement it because blaming individual people is easy and safe.
I wonder if this is partially because the people working on AI/ML intentionally don't put enough efforts into this. I'm one of those people and while I'm to increase accuracy of an existing ML model by 0.3% and collect a fat paycheck, I'd never release any really novel ideas if I happen to come up with some. The reason is our society isn't ready for AI: it's bent by greed and doesn't even recognize this as a problem. Bezos makes billions out of literally slave labor and is cool with that. The US ships containers with firearms to middle East and Africa for profit. The first world people are ok with slave labor in Africa and China as long as it makes the next iPhone cheaper. China and UK are proud of making fast progress in making the survelliance state happen. Australian billionaires open new coal mines and don't care about the rest of the world as long as they have clean air where they live. American healthcare mafia extorts outrageous prices for basic meds and services and would rather let millions die than cut it's profits. What can AI give to this world? Superpowers for the tiny ruling elite? Private armies that can't possibly be challenged by common people. I don't want to live in that world.
I don't believe in "offsetting personal footprint". This idea appeals to personal guilt, while aims at filling the pockets of the founders. The solution should be going after companies who make products that break by design after certain time of use, thus forcing the customers to buy new items. If done right, this will be painful for both companies (many will have to close the shop) and for the people who are used to cheap shiny stuff, but the result will be a cleaner planet and healthier business model.