In that case, I err on the side of no. While I’m not a fan of make-work, there are a lot of necessary public works projects for the docket. These should be prioritized over those that are just “nice”. And beyond this, most infrastructure problems require some kind of maintenance - something we are already far behind on. Adding to that maintenance backlog by building additional things which are unnecessary seems ill advised.

Yes. I’m opposed.

Simply saying “everyone should get enough money from the government to live” has a lot of problems. The most obvious being that cost of living varies substantially from one place to another. And peoples needs vary substantially as well. So where do we set the number?

You’ll also need to figure out how to combat the massive inflationary effects that would occur.

But imo, the biggest issue is what happens in the long term. Say a nation gives its citizens a UBI. Now wait 100 years. What happens? Well what happens is that, assuming this doesn’t collapse the economy some other way, and assuming this is a democratic nation, everyone will start taking UBI for granted, and will start thinking “you know, if only I had a little more free money, I could afford that nice shirt I saw my neighbor wearing yesterday…”. And because “free money for everyone” will be a popular political platform, the UBI amount will go up and up and up, with little thought put into how to continue funding it. The government accrues more and more debt over time funding the program, until finally the government can no longer continue paying its debtors, and the country collapses into chaos.

Instead, I’m in favor of a citizen’s dividend, which is tied to the nation’s economic output. A good example is how Alaskans get a dividend, since they agreed to allow private companies to extract the oil from their state. Land value taxes could work like this. Carbon taxes could work like this. If you want to make sure everyone is fed and housed, then that is a very noble goal - but it should be accomplished by providing people with food and housing. And I think it is right and fair that the people of a nation should be compensated for the use of their land and the negative externalities they endure - but how much they are paid out should not be coupled to the cost of living. It should be well known to be an independent, unpredictable, and highly variable amount that they can’t rely on, so that they never gain the expectation that they will always have endless free money to spend however they please.

All bad movies

Replace all actors with Nick Cage

Building necessary public works projects is great. Building them for the sake of giving people something to do isn’t

Yes to antimonopoly practices. But rent control is well known to be an extremely problematic policy. It encourages developers to not develop more housing, and encourages landlords to not fix known problems. A far better solition is a Georgist land value tax, which completely removes the ability of landlords to profit off of the value of the land itself.

Problem there is that this sort of thing tends to end up with make-work projects - digging holes and filling them back in again. You are wasting people’s time and energy, and taxpayer money, by making people do work that doesn’t need to be done instead of just handing them a check

I mean, yeah, get out. But in the meantime I would suggest trying your best to find some way to relate. In 2 years maybe one of those guys will hear about a good job opportunity and pass it along to you “because he’s a nice guy who gets his work done - even if he’s a bit screwy to not watch sports”

I very annoyingly have yet to see this suggestion - go talk to your fucking coworkers!! If everyone is showing up every day, then you have a whole office full of work friends to make! Make a habit of hanging out at the coffee maker or water cooler or whatever and shoot the shit. Ask people how their weekend was. Introduce yourself to people you haven’t met before. Just chat with people for 15 min or so at a time, and then go back to your desk and do something fun/for personal development/for professional development. Then you have things to talk about - and then just always have some job related task on the backburner that you can keep working on, so when people ask about what you are doing at work, you can say “oh yeah, I’m working on X, which will have Y benefit.”

THIS IS HOW YOU PROGRESS IN YOUR CAREER. Yeah, working on your skills is super valuable. But the people who go far, the people who are never short on job offers or pay raises, are the people who have lots of friends.

I like them, and they aren’t controversial. Content warnings have been around since tv stations invented the PG rating

How do you automate removing rule-breaking posts?

Seriously. I wouldn’t be surprised if rock stars in the 80s bragged about how many teen girls they fucked on tv. And then everyone watching would nod along and think “yes, of course. That is what rock stars do.”

I’m confused… go outside?

Yeah. You could also search for staging companies in your city. Two big ones you could look for are Rhino and Upstage. Also, lots of people get the job because they like going to concerts - so if you are part of the music scene in your city, you can start by just striking up convos with event staff at concerts/festivals/raves/clubs etc that you attend. Even better, probably, is to just volunteer for a festival and talk to the organizers - then you can show you will actually do your job, and you get to go to a festival for free. Big bonus points if you have previous experience in theatre or AV, even if you were just in a high school club or something.

I will note that winter is the worst time of year to get hired in most markets, since there is a lot less work and the companies have lots of mouths to feed. Not that you shouldn’t try, but know that your odds are worse, and even if you get hired on, the gigs might be pretty sparse. But around springtime they’ll go on a hiring spree as the ramp up for summer, when they need to build whole stages in arenas for touring bands.

Show up on time, take the occasional abuse from an asshole boss, and get your shit done. If you do that and ask for advancement opportunities, you can pretty quickly get trained in various specialties - lighting, sound, fork lift, boom lift, safety, rigging (that’s what I do), etc. Then get good at a specialty and work on expanding your social network and you can get to the real money - going on tour. If you get hired to tour with a band, you will make bank while having basically no living expenses. Talked to a girl who did lighting for Coldplay - apparently they’d been touring continuously for 3 years. She’d been to Europe, Saudi Arabia, S America, Mexico with the band. Def a lifestyle choice - but can be a good one if it jives with your personality.

Sure. But also some of my favorite media is podcasts, and many of these exist because of the low barrier to entry. Eg:

Econtalk - a hypernerdy, super in-depth, and sometimes winding and verbose semi-academic economics podcast that sometimes dips into poetry, philosophy, political science, and anthropology.

Hardcore History - Dan Carlin’s much-acclaimed history podcast where he gives book-length lectures on gruesome historical events.

The Power Company Podcast - a podcast exclusively about training for rock climbing

There’s no way any of these shows would have been syndicated on old radio stations. But the freedom of podcasting let them create something awesome and find their niche audience.

I thought this was gonna be, like, a comminity for clearing out you life todo list of various chores… but nope. Vidya 😮‍💨

Whats the job?

I mean, hopefully positively

Dunno how you define “good”. But it is really easy to become a stagehand. Like, unbelievably easy. You can be a meth addicted felon with bad face tattoos and get that job - and even keep it as long as you just show up on time! The job can be physical, but the work isn’t super repetitive so it tends to make you stronger rather than weaker over time. Because of the non-standard schedule, you are paid well for what is essentially menial labor. Spend most of your workday kinda bullshitting with coworkers while you move something from A to B or turn a wrench or whatever.

In the trades that are hard on your body, learn the trade, then start your own company or work your way into management at a corporate outfit.