I suspect Russia is worried about how well their nukes will work. The small tactical ones (battlefield nukes) are the most complex and so most at risk of a maintenance failure.
Russia’s worst fear is deploying a nuke, only to have it fizzle. At this point it’s strategic or nothing. Deploying a strategic nuke would cause massive political fallout. Far more than Russia could cope with. No-one, including China and India, want that genie back out of the bottle.
Just hard a read through, and there are a lot of problematic flaws in your concept.
In the first section, corruption will be a HUGE issue. The groups deciding on pay rates will have insane power, which will attract bribes etc. E.g the powerful pushing down wages in their field of interest for short/medium terms profits.
On top of that is the inefficiency problem. Very few jobs are equal. E.g. a sawmill worker, working on the outskirts of a big down will want different compensation to one working completely out in the sticks. There’s also no system to adjust for changing demand. If you’ve not got enough builders, tough shit, no pay increase to pull in talent.
Trying to cover these will create an insanely complex and problematic bureaucracy, that will grow rapidly out of control. It’s basically a version of what the USSR and communist China did. Reading up on how they failed could be enlightening to you.
On to the second point. You’ve again got massive inefficiencies. Often the blemished bananas etc don’t go to waste. They are used to make things like banana ice-cream or banana bread etc. You also jumped straight to processed foods. There is no accounting for making something better from cheaper, but higher quality ingredients.
It’s a LOT more efficient to just work out the cost of feeding a person (in a particular location). If it costs $X to feed a person for a month, then just give them each $X. They can decide how to most efficiently use that money. Some will buy basic meals, others will cook using higher quality ingredients, still others will add to it to cover take away each night. All get fed, and efficiencies get maximised on a local level.
As for taxation. It’s a good idea in principle, but would have problems in implementation. It’s already a problem that unphotogenic causes get underfunded. Your idea would be equivalent to America using “Go fund me” to cover medical costs. It works, ish, but is horribly unfair.
A better solution might be a donation match system. You pay $Y and the government diverts $Y of your taxes (up to how much you paid) to a cause of your choice. The UK government does something like it already. Gift aid allows UK tax payers to donate to a charity. The charity can then claim 25% of the amount from the government. E.g. a £100 donation becomes £125 to the charity.
Your ideas are a good leaping off point. A few useful bits of advice.
Check to see how an idea can be corrupted.
Check if it’s been done before, and how it worked/failed. Also look at how inefficient your idea is.
A large amount of inefficiency can be worse than unfairness. A split where some get $300 while others get $100 looks unfair. However, if the fix leaves everyone with $80 then the unfair version still wins overall (everything else being equal).
That would effectively create a planned economy. In theory it could work. Unfortunately, the human element cripples it. How do you rank the value of doctors against cleaners? How do you rank bananas against bread? The core elements were tried with communism, and found to fall severely short.
What has been found, in Africa, with micro loans/grants is that people are a LOT more efficient at maximising value locally than a lot of applied rules. Giving them money (e.g. to start a business) is a lot more effective than giving them resources directly. It uses capitalism to optimise on the local scale.
One of the key things with UBI is letting people and businesses sort things out on the small scale. While capitalism has massive issues, it’s VERY good at sorting this sort of problem.
My personal preference would be a closed loop tax based system. Basically, a fixed percentage of money earned (e.g. 15%) is taxed on everyone. That is then distributed on a per capita basis. There would be a cutoff point where you pay more than you receive. The big advantage is that it’s dynamic to the economy. If the economy shrinks, then UBI shrinks with it, encouraging people to work more to compensate. It provides a floor of income, letting people negotiate working conditions, without the fear of homelessness. It also channels money from the rich, where it moves slowly, to the poor, where it has a far higher velocity.
No sane UBI plan will do this. The goal is to cover Basic needs, not replace working. What it does attempt to do away with is the requirement to work yourself to the bone to barely survive. Working to pay for things more than the basics is still expected.
A useful side effect is to rebalance the power dynamics between larger companies and their employees. It’s a lot harder to abuse someone if they won’t be homeless within 3 months if they quit.
It’s more the power that can be applied. Most people capable of getting a pedal bike up to those speeds also know how to read the road for safety. Even then, bikes can basically disintegrate in a (initially) minor accident.
A powered bike is capable of destroying itself if misused.
That’s a trick many/most breeds of dog can pull off. It’s amazing how well a wet nose, and a slobbery smile shoved in your face can break a bad cycle.
There’s a reason they are used as emotional support animals so often. They can guard us from ourselves almost as well as this dog did the sheep from coyotes.
Not quite.
Yet implies they expect to.
Thus far is more neutral, erring towards not expecting to find anything.
Proviso of this is that, globally, politicians grow a spine, along with a sense of morality, and long term planning. It would also require them to deal with the money hoarding issues with the hyper rich.
The first step is a massive push for renewables. They should be representing 200-500% of grid demand regularly. If nuclear can get up to speed and be part of this, great, but we can’t wait on it.
That excess power should be soaked up by large scale, portable, energy storage. Green hydrogen is the current best option, but synthetic fossil fuels could also take up the slack. Depending on the area, desalination could also be combined into this.
We seriously decarbonise the transport networks. For vans and smaller, electric vehicles win. BYD have demonstrated that low cost electric cars are viable. For larger vehicles, where electric becomes inefficient, hydrogen is viable. This is where a lot of the excess hydrogen will be going.
Carbon credits with teeth. Rather than relying on a planned economy mindset, we can make capitalism work for us. We need a global fixed carbon emission limit. This limit should trend towards net zero on a preset timetable. Credits are bid on, akin to stock market trades. Companies must have credits by the end of the year/period. The fine for not having credits should be a multiple of the closing credits price (10x?). The fine for falsification should be multiples of that, erring towards corporate execution levels.
This will force easy savings out of the market quickly. It will then force compulsory emitters to factor in Carbon costs.
An example of this might be large scale bio capture on the open ocean. Grow seaweed etc on pontoons, and turn it into a solid. This can then be locked up (old coal mines?) taking carbon out permanently.
None of these require massive reductions in quality of life. They do require changes in how we do things. It’s also worth noting that I’ve not covered the numerous problems to be solved e.g. power grid upgrades to account for renewables. None of these should be insurmountable however, just engineering, or political/policing challenges.
An no, I’ve no fucking idea how to get politicians to grow a spine and do what’s required for our long term comfort/survival. Fixing the planet? That’s just a (really big) engineering problem. Fixing human nature? …Fuck knows.
Some beds have storage underneath. They have a lift mechanism that lifts the whole mattress. If you used one of those as a base, then cleaning gets a lot easier.
Off the joke topic, but something that made it make a lot more sense.
Scientists have studied this. Women do what are known as IOIs (Indicators of Interest). Most men can pick up on these. When they flirt, the rate doubles, or even more.
The problem lies in the base rate. It can vary a lot, from 5/hour to 120/hour. At this point men are left with a conundrum. Is a 60/minute lady a 10, desperately flirting, or a 100, who’s slightly off put by you. The lady’s friends have an instinctive read on this rate, so it’s quite obvious. Most men have been burnt however, so tend to be over cautious. This can lead to a lot of flirting at oblivious men, who think you’re just being polite.
Context also matters. A funny joke to 1 group will fall flat with another, without the social context.
It’s also worth notice that /jk indicates a joke, while /s indicates sarcasm. They are related, but not the same thing.
We used to, but too many arseholes used it as social cover. They would say something racist/sexist etc then, if it turned out people called them out, they broke out the “it’s just a joke” card. By tagging at the beginning, they lose that excuse. 90% of the time, it’s not needed, but we also don’t want the arseholes hiding behind us. I’d rather clarify than help them.
It also helps, since this is an international community. What is obviously a joke to you, won’t be to another English speaker from elsewhere. Let alone someone with English as a second language.
ChatGPT is useful for casual discussion facts. As seen as anything remotely important leans on it, it shouldn’t be trusted any more than a guy down the pub.
In the UK, they’ve taken some tills out. About 4 tills become 16 self checkouts. They still have plenty of tills for normal checkout.
It definitely lets less staff get more people through, in less time. So far, it’s not been excessively abused over here. It’s also made my life significantly less annoying.
To be fair, that’s a fairly universal problem. In the UK it’s a basket Vs trolley split. They do have trolley self checkouts, but it’s separate, and mainly intended for scan as you shop.
On a side note, what’s with American supermarkets not having baskets at all. Did I just have really weird luck?
I went to the US for a few days. Their self checkouts seem to be universally awful, compared to the UK or German equivalent.
While the hardware is far less reliable, and more convoluted, it’s the users that seem the main issue. Self checkout is generally intended (over here) to shift the fast, small shops out of the main queues. 1 big line and a dozen or more tills. In the states they treat it as just another till. Built for trollies, and 1 queue per till. Combined with a slow user and it becomes hell rapidly.
I’ve got one of the bands (10, I think). That seems to be a solved problem. I can’t interact with it in the shower, but it doesn’t go haywire.
As for the heart rate, it’s at least consistent. It matches what my blood pressure measurements report, and follows exercise, rather than steps.
I’m bad at breaking or losing watches. I don’t buy expensive smart watches, I aim for a cheap, functional one.
I think it’s more that if you stop advertising, you start seeing a significant drop in sales. It’s an easy experiment to test.
The dark art is increasing sales via advertising. That’s where the marketing people pull off the real bullshit.
Apparently it’s mostly about familiarity. Even if we are annoyed at the time, we will often forget about it completely between then and shopping. By the time we are in the shop, we just have a vague sense of familiarity with the product. We instinctively buy the more familiar, as the “safer” option. It takes conscious effort to overcome this (which most people don’t have to spare).
In saturated markets, this leads to a zero sum situation. Every customer you get is stolen from a competitor. Apparently the tobacco companies actually loved the UK ban on tobacco advertising. Their ads were intended to counter the ads of their competitors. None of them were roping in new smokers at a high enough rate to matter. The only ones winning were the ad agencies.
That’s exactly what I do. I also have IoT devices that are still trucking along a decade later. I fully expect them to likely do a decade more.
Both Tasmota and ESPhome provide open source firmware for many IoT devices. They throw up a local API interface that other systems can talk to. Providing legacy support is as hard as using HTML put and get commands.