Lifted from Wikipedia (Margaret Sanger);

(for distribution of contraceptives) Sanger and Byrne went to trial in January 1917. Byrne was convicted and sentenced to 30 days in a workhouse but went on a hunger strike. She was force-fed, the first woman hunger striker in the US to be so treated. Only when Sanger pledged that Byrne would never break the law was she pardoned after ten days. Sanger was convicted; the trial judge held that women did not have

"the right to copulate with a feeling of security that there will be no resulting conception."

Sanger was offered a more lenient sentence if she promised to not break the law again, but she replied: "I cannot respect the law as it exists today."For this, she was sentenced to 30 days in a workhouse.

Yeah, the crutch of it for me is the UBI moniker.

What you describe at the end of your post, minimum income, is really just a rewording of the existing social security and welfare systems across the western world. I know they look different in each, but here in Canada what you describe is more or less our already existing system's design goal. Welfare money exists for those that straight up can not work, and an employment insurance system exists to protect those inbetween jobs, meanwhile other multiple programs are aimed at distributing financial assistance to the lower income groups.

Despite all of that already existing, UBI is still being heralded up here in trials as well as a replacement. The problem being that for the needy the UBI pitches are generally a step backwards.

Eg. $500/month is the UBI pitch, and they say it'll be great because everyone gets it no matter what so it's simple and fair and nobody is left behind. The trouble though is that the reality is the truly in need people were already benefitting more than the $500/month under the existing systems, and the cost was much less because it was targeted.

I here UBI and get very worried about folks just selling snake oil 'solutions' that in the end are just a demand to adopt their own particular flavor of wealth redistribution.

I'm gonna have to be that guy. $500 a month for a family of four is $2k, which is a very good chunk of money to drop in your lap.

That works out the same as it they were on a single income, working 40 hour weeks at $10/hr, so almost equivalent to a full time job. No doubt that's gonna be a big deal and noticeable financial improvement to the recipient(s).

As always with UBI schemes, the devil is in how you pay for it. If it's truly universal, paying $500/month to ~330 million Americans would cost $1.98 Trillion dollars, meanwhile the current entire US gov budget for 2022 is estimated at $1.2 Trillion.

So, to implement $500/month universally in America would require not only increasing overall tax revenues by almost 50% it would also require the cancellation of 100% of every single other expenditure. That not includes military spending going to zero, but even cancelling the jobs of everyone that collects taxes and would presumably have been responsible for distributing the $500 checks.

If the 'fix' is to just tax the pants off anyone earning more than the $500/month, or limiting who we give it to, then it ceases to be a UBI scheme, and is instead just a mundane modification of the existing social security scheme by shuffling more money back and forth between different folks.

*quality engineering, sadly only required because the original contractors cut corners and no regulators caught it before it failed. IMO, the companies that built it should be paying that $1 billion price tag. They’re the ones who used low quality concrete, left out literally tons of rebar, and decided a soft dirt emergency spillway on an earthen dam was good enough.

This is why we need a $3 trillion infrastructure bill. Really, we likely need ten times that. We haven’t invested in infrastructure for decades.
Had there been regular real inspections they likely would have noticed the problem when repairs only cost $100 million. There are literally thousands of dams in America with similar, or worse issues, and no money to even properly inspect them, much less fix them before they fail. Waiting for them to fail costs at least 10 times what pre-failure repairs cost, but we only care after they fail.

Thanks Manchin, our nation is crumbling thanks to you joining the obstructionist Republican Party, someone needs to burn his yacht with his family on board while he watches, then burn him in his mansion and distribute his hundreds of millions back to the state he stole it from.
Edit: Btw- Goldman Sacks has revised their 2022 estimate for gdp based on Manchin killing the infrastructure bill from over 3% to barely 2%. >$200 BILLION just gone with his vote against America. This as Manchin says “the Democrats aught to push me into the Republican Party”, but you’re already there, Joe. They aught to deny you funding and primary you, but not hand another seat to Republicans as you suggest, traitor. They really aught to strip you of all assignments, all funding, all security, and start broadcasting your location 24/7 until you are gone. If you ask me, they aught to drop you feet first in a slow meat grinder and make a day of it, televised. Then they aught to forced feed you to your family before taking every dime they have and denying them any assistance from anywhere. That’s what aught to happen to skidmarks like you.

What did I tell you!?! States rights! Suckers! Bwaaaahahahahaha!

“I am outraged by yesterday’s U.S. Supreme Court decision allowing Texas’s ban on most abortion services to remain in place,” Newsom said. “But if states can now shield their laws from review by the federal courts that compare assault weapons to Swiss Army knives, then California will use that authority to protect people’s lives, where Texas used it to put women in harm’s way.” Newsom said he will work with his staff, the Legislature and California Attorney General Rob Bonta to craft a bill that would let citizens sue anyone who “manufactures, distributes, or sells an assault weapon or ghost gun kit or parts” in California. They could seek damages of at least $10,000 per violation plus costs and attorney’s fees, Newsom said.

Read more at: https://www.sacbee.com/news/politics-government/capitol-alert/article256524466.html#storylink=cpy

I told you this would happen.

BTW, the Presidential coup Plan PowerPoint handed over by Meadows pretty much obliterated the lies that 1) it wasn’t an attempted coup 2) it wasn’t expected 3) it wasn’t planned 4) it wasn’t Trump supporters being violent and 5) the white house wasn’t directly involved.
Contemporaneous records of the planning, including texts to organizers and militias claiming that the national guard is poised to protect Trump rioters from arrest or attack….as if any non cultist needed more evidence beyond the live broadcast of the coup attempt, but now there’s publicly available physical documentation/evidence directly from the highest levels in Trump’s cabinet of their own direct involvement in the planning to overturn the certified election by fraud and force.….which I’m certain you will dismiss as fake news with no hint of evidence because your little brain can’t handle facts.

the PowerPoint laid out a plan to effectively use the military to steal the election outright, undeniably. That’s treason.

The plan was to use the military, specifically the national guard, declare a state of emergency, throw out most of the ballots from the 2020 election, and then have the national guard run by people that Trump handpicked himself count only the paper ballots that they deemed to be legitimate. essentially giving them a free ride to throw out any ballots that were for Biden. Only count the ones for Trump and boom, Donald Trump gets all the electoral votes. That's how the coup was supposed to happen. So again, these lawmakers were briefed on this two days before the capital riot. So they knew exactly what Donald Trump was trying to do, what his administration, what his friends, what his allies had suggested to him. There is no indication at all that one of these lawmakers alerted the department of justice, the FBI, local authorities, anyone, they had this information and they did nothing with it.

Any official who knew and didn’t report to the FBI or DOJ should be removed immediately, get the firing squad, and their entire estate (and their spouses estate, and minor children’s estates) seized. That’s a lot of Republicans.

Also, Fox hosts, the same ones who now claim Jan 6 was a peaceful picnic, families calmly touring congress, and it was BLM and ANTIFA and the FBI that perpetrated the violence that didn’t happen, were all frantically trying to reach the president to stop the attack on January 6, outraged he wouldn’t tell his supporters to stop attacking America, explaining how not acting to stop the coup was destroying his legacy and theirs.

Duh....install as many high power using carbon sequestering designs as there's room for. Use that surplus clean power to offset some of the enormous dirty power emissions...suddenly there won't be enough wind and water power again.
Too much clean power is only a problem for the completely unimaginative.

He touched on why I've said for 20+ years that it's already too late to stop out of control climate change or save civilization as we know it. Even if we managed to produce more clean energy than we can distribute, switching older polluting technology over to clean energy is a bigger problem than clean generation. Assume we had the ability to power every form of transportation using clean and cheap energy....it would still take decades and tens if not hundreds of trillions to replace the combustion engines alone, with the corresponding new ecological issues of creating, building, and implementing a new power usage method across the board. In order to reverse the carbon trend, we needed an excess of clean energy and the desire to use it exclusively decades ago, because the change over will take decades after the clean power generation ability exists.... decades we no longer have.


Side note, aren't they worried all those wind turbines are going to give them all cancer?

That would be amazing.
I look forward to understanding what the heck happened.

Hysterical reaction?

On the tox screen; that stuff is funny. I think the reason Anesthesia likes it is its super short half life --so--I hope someone thought to get samples before it (maybe?) got metabolized....

"Fentanyl is a synthetic opioid with µ-agonist pharmacologic effects. After intravenous injection, fentanyl plasma concentrations fall rapidly, with sequential distribution half-lives of about 1 minute and 18 minutes, and a terminal elimination half-life of 475 minutes."

The problem is, it's complicated.

First off, is the legacy of historical damage still scarring aboriginal communities in Canada.

Even disregarding that complexity though, current structure of governance in Canada makes the problem harder to identify and resolve.

Singh's return question is what would you do if Toronto faced the same problem? The answer is the federal government would by and large do nothing, because water supply is a municipal responsibility and the Mayor and city council of Toronto are responsible for fixing it, and thus federal funds don't go in and instead municipal tax money is used to keep the water supply going. Across Canada that model is working pretty decently, by and large.

The real question then is why are reserves having a harder time? Well, afore mentioned historical trauma aside, reserves represent small communities directly comparable in size and make up as municipal communities. However, the reserves are NOT managed like municipalities. Instead Canada still has a two tiered system of governance, one for reserves and another for municipalities.

In term so governance municipalities report to the provinces and the provinces report to the federal government. Reserves report directly to the federal government.

The affects everything related to governance and is responsible for a host of confusion and difficulty.

Services: Education and Health are provincially funded, and so the federal government transfer money to the provinces and tells them to figure out education and health services. Municipalities then just get those services. Reserves however sit outside that, and get entirely different intermediaries.

Taxation and funding: municipal, provincial and federal governments all gather taxes and distribute funds up and down. Reserves only deal with funding though directly to the feds, again cutting out the provincial intermediary.

Both of the above mean making an apples to apples comparison of communities to try and ensure both are treated 'equally' is impossible. It also means that solutions that work on one side don't in the other.

It's a big mess, and just throwing money at the system and saying that will fix it is just wrong. Not only that, it's been TRIED and failed. The above mentioned differences also apply to rules surrounding transparency, accountability and fraud prevention. Meaning there are a great many more loopholes available on the reserve funding side for anyone involved or attached to providing services(be that council members on reserve, or any number of external entities hired in good faith to perform services). That in turn means the amount of money lost to direct and indirect corruption is harder to find/stop.

So fix all that is the next obvious response. The problem is still complex though because when does 'fixing' becoming simply white folks making aboriginals do things the 'right(white) way that was already the source of lingering historical damage I didn't even consider yet...

It's a hard problem to solve and Singh's just trying to score cheap political points peddling easy and false answers to a complex problem.

this guy covers interesting topics, but is really longwinded. I wish someone would make a "digest" version of his videos... I bet this 25 minutes video could be cut into 5 minutes.

also for near the end (not sure which prior video he was defending) - it's not the voltage that kills, it's the current. And is why GFCI trips on a few mA.

UK and EU also have power strips, but 220+ Volt systems need half the current to get same power, so overloading those wires is less likely.

I've seen a UK power strip that failed and actually shorted hot to ground/earth (fuse didn't help), and a TV was plugged into it, so energized the satellite TV coax cable's ground, which fried the expensive distribution equipment in the wiring closet (which must not have been properly grounded either).

that's the perfect response.

why bother the bothered. (not buying bob)

The trouble ain't that there is too many fools, but that the lightning ain't distributed right. - More Maxims of Mark, Johnson, 1927 [Mark Twain]

why from now on your nickname is " lightnin' "


https://youtu.be/inKnXViv3XI

just let that mill burn down.

By definition there's no such thing as vegan ice cream. They make sorbet. Not a good start, misrepresenting the product.

I think the problem might be they want a three million investment in a company that struggles to make maybe $750 worth of product per day (no word on profit margin, might be zero) and already has huge debt, sounds like they have no distribution partners, and seems completely unprepared to expand....not necessarily due to their race. The shark tank would need >1000% of the company to invest that much.

Bob, as much as this'll surprise you, I totally agree with what you're saying. The distribution of the stimulus money to couples making up to $150,000 is friggen ridiculous -- and I'm in that category. I will do what I did with the last two checks: give to local charities helping the homeless and communities of color (as much as I hate that term).

The worst part of this is that it sets up a liquidity trap. The Fed can't reduce buying crap debt (that BBB dogshit is at 4% should terrify anyone who understands how debt and the rating agencies work), nor can they allow rates to rise (thus totally screwing responsible savers). This is the cusp of a financial disaster that blew past 1929 on 9/17/19 and is now approaching the cataclysm of the South Seas Company collapsing. As far as I can see, this is a total melt-up in the markets because there's no stable returns and everyone is now in speculation mode.

Were it my call, I would scale the money along income (or non-income) lines: $10k for the lowest incomes, sliding scale from there. I'd also set up government-backed savings accounts that pay 10% for those people and only those people. I'd also pay off/down student debt along the same income scales.

I do not begrudge the wealthy for their wealth. But capitalism can't be a winner-take-all system. We live in a society, and society will always have winners and losers. The least we can do is ease the burden for those at the bottom by taking some from the top. I'm tired of the homeless camps and mentally-ill people wandering the streets of Seattle. They are the least of us and thus should be the ones who get the most help.

If this was originally posted on Twitter, he could have gotten potentially nothing. The Twitter TOS grants free, unlicensed use of any words, videos or images posted on their site. You basically sign away all First North American Serial Rights when you tweet something (AFAIK / IANAL).

From Twitter's TOS:

"You retain your rights to any Content you submit, post or display on or through the Services. What’s yours is yours — you own your Content (and your incorporated audio, photos and videos are considered part of the Content)."

So far, so good, buuuuut ...

"By submitting, posting or displaying Content on or through the Services, you grant us a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free license (with the right to sublicense) to use, copy, reproduce, process, adapt, modify, publish, transmit, display and distribute such Content in any and all media or distribution methods now known or later developed (for clarity, these rights include, for example, curating, transforming, and translating). This license authorizes us to make your Content available to the rest of the world and to let others do the same. You agree that this license includes the right for Twitter to provide, promote, and improve the Services and to make Content submitted to or through the Services available to other companies, organizations or individuals for the syndication, broadcast, distribution, Retweet, promotion or publication of such Content on other media and services, subject to our terms and conditions for such Content use. Such additional uses by Twitter, or other companies, organizations or individuals, is made with no compensation paid to you with respect to the Content that you submit, post, transmit or otherwise make available through the Services as the use of the Services by you is hereby agreed as being sufficient compensation for the Content and grant of rights herein."

*promote
Not a silver bullet, but a useful system where it's feasible. I would like to see home systems designed that could store home solar/wind/thermal generation for later use. Batteries suck, are expensive, wear out relatively quickly, and are usually not "green". Micro pumped hydro could eliminate distribution issues (a big deal in California where they shut down the grid during wind storms now), and decentralizes power storage/generation, eliminating a major terrorist target, the power grid.