• PunnyName@lemmy.world
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    1 month ago

    Or the post office. Or consumer protections. Or wage increases. Or UBI. Or housing. Or food distribution. Or infrastructure maintenance. Or nuclear. Or teacher pay.

    Or anything else has that a proven track record of being beneficial to our country.

    • AmbitiousProcess (they/them)@piefed.social
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      1 month ago

      AI investment is expected to reach $1.5 trillion dollars in just this year alone.

      Housing every single homeless person in the entirety of America would cost anywhere from $11B to $30B, per year.

      That’s anywhere from 50 to 136 years of housing, full paid for, for every single person currently homeless in the USA, at current market rates without any investment in affordable non-profit federal/state/city housing.

      You could do so much fucking good with this money, and yet they choose to throw it all away on things that when they are successful in delivering value, deliver much less than the value that could otherwise be gained from that money, and at worst, create their own problems, like actual, direct deaths.

      • Digit@lemmy.wtf
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        8 days ago

        Imagine what that’d do for the economy… all those people homed, able to access services, able to get themselves back into being productive members of society…

        • AmbitiousProcess (they/them)@piefed.social
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          8 days ago

          Not to mention how the safety net of something like that can drastically improve innovation and economic growth even for those who aren’t homeless!

          When you don’t have to worry that starting a new business could make you homeless, because you always have a form of housing to fall back on, you’re more likely to start new businesses, take risks, develop things with your own money, et cetera.

          Currently, the only real way for normal people to avoid this risk is to go to venture capital firms, who will then in turn only fund the businesses that could have the highest ability to either extract money from you, or fetch the highest sale to an existing large company, rather than make the best product or service possible.

          If people don’t have to worry about homelessness, you don’t just get better outcomes for those who are homeless, you create better outcomes for anyone who wants to try building anything!

    • amino@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      1 month ago

      all of those solutions are based except nuclear. nuclear reactors rely on colonial acquisition of nuclear ore in order to keep their prices competitive with the other energy solutions. and even then, they can’t compete since they’re more expensive and risky than solar.

      there’s no way to keep a nuclear reactor going without also feeding into Russia’s nuclear markets and funding their war effort. https://engelsbergideas.com/notebook/russias-global-grip-on-nuclear-energy/