So while it is great that the Republicans fixed this one thing (that they themselves broke), asking why the Democrats didn't fix it kinda feels like you have been living under a rock for these last few years. If they break something, and they regret breaking something, let them expend the political capital to get it fixed. There is no free lunch in politics. If you spend your time on something like this, it means some other priority is getting ignored. And doubly so if your counter party has been operating on such bad faith as of late.

Further more, my wife works in biotech so I have seen first hand the compromises one has to make to secure private funding. They care about things like market size and revenue potential when making these investments, which means you end up with most of the money flowing towards diseases that largely affect rich people and solutions that are either expensive or recurring. And lets also not forget that almost all of these companies are working off of or spinning out from research programs that were funded by the government. I have yet to meet a single company where that wasn't the case.

At least in the current setup, they are required to maintain and fund a vast propaganda apparatus, lobbying efforts, and political organizations in order to secure their power. And even with all that effort, they still only have a tenuous control over our institutions. Your proposal would literally just hand the keys over to them.

> I don’t think my tenants ever thought I was greedy

As a lifelong renter, who has for the most part had relatively good relationships with my landlords over the years, I can assure you that they do. At the very least, they probably don't have a very positive opinion of you, even if they are nice to you in person. After decades of financialization of our housing market, we now have an entire swath of our population locked out of the housing market. And if you think these folks like handing over a significant chunk of their income each month to a bunch of rent-seekers, I think you are solely mistaken.

You are joking right? Honest, question, what life experiences have you had that make you think that this would be a good idea. It would effectively mean a handful of billionaires would control the country.

> I also want to see all landlords structure rental contracts so that the renter pays the property taxes

It is a free market. Outside of a handful of places with rent control, nothing is stopping them from doing that. And if you think splitting out property taxes as a separate line item will somehow make tenants think that landlords, the vast majority of whom increase their rents to the absolute maximum that the market will bear, are somehow not greedy, I think you have a pretty bad handle on what it is like to be in the renter class.

So this is in fact very different from how things normally work.

Passing laws to make it harder to vote, and easier to challenge a persons voter registration and ballot, and then running an operative campaign to specifically target voters on the other side of the political spectrum is a bit different than "just politics". Legal, sure. Ethical, moral, fair, absolutely not.

It does not. THE primary difference between UBI and unemployment is that UBI does not disappear once you are unemployed. So in my hypothetical scenario above, the person would be making Y+X. Assuming UBI is paid for via income taxes, and that those income taxes are applied progressively, at some point up the income ladder you will be paying more in taxes than you receive in UBI, but at the lower income scales it is all accretive making for a strong incentive to work.

> Then I think we should also guarantee a job for anybody who wants one, with a significant step up in income. (And right now that job should be capturing carbon.)

I think we should have a UBI and then combine that with eliminating the minimum wage. Maybe we limit that to just nonprofits, but the goal would be to make it easier to pay people to do work that is currently not incentivized in our current economy. For example, near me, I volunteer for beach cleanups and at the community garden. These groups are well funded, but they need to rely on volunteers because the minimum wage near me is over $17 and the operations are very labor intensive. If you have a UBI, the idea of paying people a few bucks an hour to clean the beach becomes much more palatable. Right now, we need to try to strong arm companies into paying livable wages, but there is only so much economic activity that is profitable at those levels. A UBI that provides very basic subsistence (we are talking squalor levels of assistance, FYI), combined with reducing barriers to employment would go a long way towards resolving some major ills in our current economy.

Overtime, you could move away from the software in question as various functions are replaced with other services or internal code. Or if you realize that replicating the software in question would be too prohibitive, at least you have some folks that are adept at dealing with that type of stuff.

It is worth mentioning that when managing software projects, the complexity and frustrations tend to sneak up on you. The first prototypes tend to come together fast, and are nice and clean and crisp. But overtime, the feature set grows, the complexity grows, and the cost and time it takes to iterate grows. If you only need a very small slice of the features of the software in question, and you are paying an arm and a leg for said software, then it might make sense to roll your own. But it is easy to underestimate the complexity of what you need accomplished and rolling your own could end up being a very costly mistake.

A few words of advice from someone who has been dabbling for a decade or so, but never really managed more than some half baked prototypes and a few kit builds. You need to consider these three trade offs: time, skill, and money.

Time: If you have a lot of time, you can learn what you need to learn to build a robot. Learn 3d modeling/printing to make a chassis (my local library has a 3d printer if you don't want to buy one). Learn how to piece together microcontrollers, motor controllers, BMS, and sensors, etc... And learn how to program everything to work together.

Skill: If you already are pretty good building things, programming, etc... you can leverage those skills. For a robot chassis, it can be done with things around your house, but you need to have the skills and a bit of creativity to make a good one. If you know the arduino ecosystem pretty well, you can pretty easily put together a prototype board, etc...

Money: You can buy a prebuilt chassis, or a board that has integrated motor controllers and BMS, etc... This will save you time and you will probably end up with a nicer end product than what you could build yourself. Of course the more you lean into this, the closer you are getting to a kit build robot. And FWIW, a kit robot is probably going to be cheaper than mixing and matching prebuilt components + some DIY.

Also, it kinda depends on what you want to do. Do you just want a little robot that drives around the house (cheap and easy). Or maybe does some line following (also easy). Or do you want a self-balancing robot, or a robot arm (a bit harder and more money). Or something really fancy like a self landing model rocket or a self driving lawn mower (expensive and difficult). You will probably want to start with the easy stuff first, just so you can get a feel for it. And then move up the difficulty ladder from there. But from my experience the time/skill/money trade off goes up fairly exponentially. Getting a half baked prototype for a simple rover is a weekend long project. But doing something really sophisticated or polished is months/years of effort (unless you want to drop some coin to speed things up). It is a fun hobby, but it does require a bit of investment before you start getting impressive results. If you think you and your kid are up for it, then dive right in. But if you think this might be more of a short term curiosity, then a kit or something similar is probably your best bet.

And this in turn would provide some monetary inflows into those areas that could help revitalize them. A lot of these areas are occupied by seniors living off of social security. An influx of younger folks with UBI checks would help balance things a bit better.

At the end of the day, if someone is making $500k/yr and we give them $12k/yr in UBI, that isn't really going to move the needle for them. And from a practical standpoint, we are probably going to have to raise their taxes by a bit more than what they are getting in UBI to pay for the program. So it is kinda pointless. NIT solves this. And as an added bonus NIT can be implemented by the IRS, eliminating the need for another bureaucracy (although some UBI folks suggest that the social security admin can handle things, but I would argue that we should get rid of social security and just have a bigger NIT for seniors).

I still consider NIT to be "universal", because everyone would qualify for it. You do not need to apply for it. And it will kick in automatically when you need it. A lot of our current welfare programs are a bureaucratic nightmare. There is an entire industry of non-profits that exist solely to help people navigate that mess. A lot of people don't get the help they need because of this, or because they don't like the stigma of being on welfare. NIT/UBI eliminate that, so that is why I consider both to be "universal".

This is why I like NIT. It is much more transparent about how the benefit scales with income. At this point if anyone mentions UBI, I just mentally substitute that with NIT as it is a much more practical and easy to understand implementation.

Further, if a UBI-like program is funded with new taxes (or cuts to existing programs), it should have a negligible impact on inflation. It is only when you do deficit spending that you risk inflation.