Warning! I am going to respectfully disagree with every point in your post. To keep it simple, I will take on one point at a time. But will admit upfront there is room for improvement in all areas. I do not disagree changes are needed. It is radical changes many want, that result in more harm than good, and blaming wrongfully to support agendas that I will not accept. Maybe, at the end, I will post the real cause of many of our problems, and why the cause is next to impossible to fix. Education. The USA is always ranked in the top 10 of countries for money spent per student, sometimes as high as #2. The problem is within the education system itself. It needs a good overhaul, from top to bottom.
Excellent. From my perspective the US spends more than everyone on most every service (including education) largely due to lobbying by corporate middle men trying (literally writing the policy) to limit competition and channel more business to themselves.
Please expand on this and be more specific, this is far too general of a response to discuss. Disclosure, part of my long career could be labeled as a corporate middleman. Limiting competition was never part of my job discription. Most of dealings with the education system dealt with dodging their games to delay paying bills. Same problem with dealing with every govt agency.
Sorry about that. Lobbyists pay for the benefit of writing legislation for the politicians who are in their pockets. https://publicintegrity.org/politic...ws-theyre-letting-corporations-do-it-instead/ Here is an article from 2016 explaining how the two parties force their members to sell their souls to their lobbyist overlords. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/60-minutes-are-members-of-congress-becoming-telemarketers/ This infects every nook and cranny of our country. The only reason we're able to overcome such idiocy is that we happen to live on the continent with the most natural resources, more navigable waterways than the rest of the world combined, with the most naturally defensible borders in the world, with friendly countries on the other borders.
Both good articles, however, they miss a very key point. Corporations are not corrupt. They are working within a corrupt system, legally. Think about who legalized this corrupt system, and you are on the path of finding the real cause of many of the problems in our country. To be clear, anytime there is large amounts of money, and or the power to control the lives of others. The temptation to take advantage and become corrupt is always a possibility. Just because a few people in a corporation are corrupt, does not make capitalism corrupt, or all corporations corrupt. There are corrupt people everywhere. There are corrupt people in religions, special interest groups, govt, non-profits, hospitals, and everywhere.
Yep, I agree with all of that. It's a corrupt system. Too much of anything is bad. Including capitalism. But capitalism is fine as long as it's well regulated. Social democracies (based on capitalist markets) like the Nordic and Scandinavian countries have found a much better balance.
To be fair, I'm going to take jabs at both parties here, while correcting some myths you have latched onto. I agree with you, we need a balance of both capitalism and socialism. However. The Nordic and Scandinavian countries have far fewer regulations on capitalism than we do. They help capitalism to grow, opposite of our Dem policies. Also a much larger share of their funds used to pay for so many social programs comes from huge oil revenues, which revenues Biden is killing. I saw a post a while back on sp2 explaining how raising taxes on corporations would show good benefits in 10 years. Fuck that idea. I'm not against taking money from corporations, but give back to the people that earned it, their lowest paid employees. BAM, instant results. Plus some of these higher wages will generate more wage tax revenues and increase sales tax revenue when they spend the extra money. One of our countries biggest sins is the wages we pay to our entry level workers. That sin in on the Rep party.
I don't disagree with most of that, except your apparent support of the fossil fuel industry. I don't hate corporations or think they need to be run by the government. We just need to make them pay for the damage they do to our environment. This is where an Environmental Damage Tax and Progressive Dividend would be incredible. And absolutely. Set up the tax structure so that corporations have far more incentive to pay entry level employees far better. And we should 100% have free healthcare for all medically necessary procedures, which should be decided by you and your doctor alone.
I am not for or against the fossil fuel industry. Due to the huge size of the world population and its massive energy needs, combined with being in the early stages of developing clean energy alternatives. I see the fossil fuel industry as a necessary evil. Similar to taking meds to control an illness, while dealing with the meds side affects, and waiting for a cure for the problem. And let's be clear. Alternatives being promoted today are NOT clean energy. The damage and pollution to the eco-system caused by minning the materials needed to build solar panels, wind turbines and batteries is far greater than the damage caused by drilling for oil. And that is before getting into the mess they cause to dispose of them when they no longer work.
This is a good analysis of the world wide energy situation. The good stuff starts several minutes in.
But the newer technologies are renewable energy, even if not completely clean. Mining for fuel that is used once and then expelled as poison into the atmosphere is far worse than mining for building materials that will produce energy for decades. The fossil fuel industry is a self propagating evil. It is a necessity for now, but we should be doing everything possible to dissuade its use while protecting our poor and middle class. Having said that, that's why I suggested the Environmental Damage Tax and Progressive Dividend because it would help clean up all mining and push everything to more environmentally friendly options, while helping the poor and middle class.
You make a valid point that during a "part" of the life cycle of creating, using and disposing of energy related products, renewable energy is cleaner than fossil fuel energy. But, the propaganda evil of the renewable energy sector is ignoring the huge environmental impact it is creating. Below is a good short video on the problems caused just to dispose of wind turbines, and revealing their short life cycle. Your answer to this problem is to increase taxes. Due to a near fatal overdose of paying taxes, I am now very allergec to them. As you get older, it finally sinks in that giving your hard earned money to corrupt politicians, then processing it threw a corrupt bureaucratic system, is not healthy. Good healthy green money goes in, brown smelly shit comes out. I will listen to how your tax process works, and how you plan to control it to get good results. But you better be wearing two pistols in this gunfight.
The low energy density and ROI of solar panels and wind mean they'll only ever be supplemental sources of energy. You only get like 1.4 x the energy back from a turbuine over it's life span as you put into it. In some 3rd world countries, the west is trying to force them to skip fossil fuels and jump straight to "renewables" and it's not working. Is coal dirty? Yeah, but so is burning wood, which people will do if they don't have coal. Natural Gas is also much cleaner than coal. One of the big tragedies of our time is how the environmental movement (hijacked by the fossil fuel industry) killed nuclear power.
This also happens to be the most critical part of the lifecycle. The part where renewables are a massive benefit to the environment for literal decades. I'm not surprised that Texas doesn't care about the end of life or environment impacts of these blades. But rest assured, there are solutions to these problems. There are dozens, if not hundreds of large companies working on this very problem, and making a ton of progress. Well, we often offer incentives tor these new technologies. The Environmental Damage Tax and Progressive Dividend would encourage companies to use the most environmentally friendly processes possible, and it would pay the poor and middle class more than the tax increase would cost. This way most people would have even more money with which they could support the less expensive and more environmentally friendly alternatives. Here is a video up on how a progressive dividend on carbon tax would work. I'd propose expanding to more than just carbon, but also other negative environmental impacts.
Nuclear power should certainly be a huge part of the solution. In fact, it must be in order to meet the goals set forth by climate scientists. The problem is that not every place is good for wind turbines. Not every place is good for solar. But any place can be good for nuclear. And we have technologies to virtually eliminate the nuclear waste problem. Also, deep drilling for geothermal is another solution that can work anywhere. We can move off of fossil fuel very quickly if we want to do it. @SlyPokerDog should we move this energy discussion to the Earth thread?
No sound with first video. Believe I found the same video elsewhere. So they are developing a new resin that can be recycled. Great! Can not even be nice about the second video on carbon tax. It promissed everything, and delievered nothing. All smoke and mirrors. Not even supported by their ussual Voodoo math. Just swallow this giant pill, and all will be made right. Cow dung flung!
Sorry about that. Yes, they are making blades which are more recyclable, but also they have developed processes which render all current blades fully recyclable as well. https://www.offshorewind.biz/2023/0...-all-existing-wind-turbine-blades-recyclable/ It's actually pretty simple... I'm not sure where you're getting voodoo math from. It's a fairly easy balance. It could easily be the same as a VAT (which regardless of how popular or unpopular it is, is an easily understood process that we know how to execute), however, unlike a VAT the proceeds are distributed monthly in a progressive manner (similar to the Oregon Kicker, but progressive and monthly). I'm not sure where you get the voodoo math from. It's a very well understood and fairly easily executed plan, and it would certainly expedite the move to environmentally friendly products quicker than anything else we know of, with virtually no downside to our most vulnerable populations. It would also make reusing, recycling, and repurposing our current items far more profitable. Including the aforementioned wind turbine blades.
This response, leaves me speechless. I know you mean well, and are making an honest effort to do the right thing. Let's just say our views on this subject are too far apart to discuss further without things getting heated. I will leave you with one last thought. The devil is always in the details, which we do not have on this subject. Never take any special interest groups word as being 100% honest.
