325 karma · joined March 12, 2015
When you see a "ready to go bill," it's either been through a dozen-step process in this legislative session OR it's been brought up in a dozen different sessions and been improved along the way as legislators have to re-introduce all the bills they are sponsoring in each legislative session.
The legislator is not an expert in the issue, and I doubt she's claiming she is. She's proposing the broad strokes of a solution to a problem she sees. The point is not to pass the bill in its current form – it's to figure out how to solve the problem, using this general idea as the starting point.
We need to get away from thinking about these problems as a way to force people to "earn" the relief, and instead think about the resolutions as a way of making everyone else's life better. I don't like that there is homelessness. I don't like seeing drug addicts poop in the street. I want folks in that situation to be taken care of for MY sake – to make my city better, to relieve me of the moral burden of thinking about people suffering, etc.
Because here's the thing: Some people are NEVER going to be able to maintain responsibility. Some people are NEVER going to be upstanding adults. NO MATTER WHAT we put them through, the worst prisons, the worst homelessness, the most outrageous policing, they're just never going to change. There is no remedy that solves this problem with a burden on the unhoused individual. It's society deciding to solve the problem REGARDLESS of whether the individual has "earned" the resolution.
And anyway, fines only penalize poor people. Someone who can afford to AIRLIFT A PLANE and disassemble it would not be disincentivized by a fine.
Advertising to kids is obviously a big part of the problem. But it's not the ONLY problem with social media – it's just one piece of a much bigger puzzle.
I bought a pretty damn big house (comparative to what I had in the Bay Area). I'm taking more vacations. The people are nicer than SF Bay Area, you can go places (restaurants on a weekend, for example!) without having to wait in long lines or park a million miles away. You can get tickets to concerts without having to be the FIRST person on Ticketmaster the moment they become available. You can get to nature a lot faster (I went skiing a couple months ago and it was bonkers how there were no lines or waiting for anything). Everything just feels easier, like you get to enjoy everything 20% more than you can in a metropolis where everything feels like a hassle and you've got people crawling on you like roaches.
We got to where we are, in the U.S., because we've got massive inefficiency in state and local government. There's only a handful of cities that are massive enough to do projects that would require hiring highly paid specialists to manage these huge projects. Similarly, most states have very few opportunities for long-term career-building public project management. (There's like 3 west of the Mississippi.)
But consolidating all of this expertise in a federal agency tasked with planning and executing massive public projects would allow us to hire career-oriented planners and keep them busy for ever. It's how we run the military, of course. And, ironically, the military is a leech on the U.S. taxpayer, massively bloated and throwing money at foreign problems in the most ham-fisted way just to justify itself – but if you shifted even 20% of the military's spending to a domestic public works department, all that money would not only be to the benefit of the U.S. taxpayer, but you could hire tens of thousands more American workers to do the jobs. It's a win-win for everyone. And it's probably something a lot of legislators could get behind.
Not only that, but a federal public works department would quickly be able to aggregate learnings on improving efficiency – knowing what works and what doesn't – while also being able to wield the power of the federal government to negotiate lower prices.
Covers of this song would be great! But probably worthwhile to exclude anything with the same name by the same artist.
This. There are 10000 children's books out there with coherent art sets and a storyline that's not just total gibberish.
This kind of crap is no better than SEO blogs. Its only purpose is to pump out massive amounts of content in the hopes of earning a small amount of money on each squirt of crap that maybe amounts to something over the long term.
Build good things. Solve problems. That's how you make money.