Another Reddit thread, lightly edited.
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My heart grieves to think how many more people are likely going to be thrown into the situation [tent cities].
I now don't think basic income is going to happen in the US. Rather, some kind of food delivery is about as far as I see it going -- soylent here we come. If I ever do some writing about it, I think I'll call it manna.
All these tent cities in such near proximity to tech workers shows me that is a quality of life they are willing to see other people live in. I was such a hardcore doomer even just a few years ago that I thought starvation for others was A-OK to these people as well, but the more I think about it, that's pretty rare. Trump has kids in cages, but the story isn't that they are starved to death, or executed.
It seems like a consortium of a few billionaires could fund a delivery mechanism for the manna. Giving someone a house, however, brings down property values, so will never do it.
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A reply:
I think I read somewhere we have like more vacant houses than homeless people (and elsewhere, that if you put people into a home, they might actually take care of it and keep it from falling apart). There's this link https://sf.curbed.com/2019/12/3/20993251/san-francisco-bay-area-vacant-homes-per-homeless-count about the Bay area, for example. In other words the problem of shelter, at least, is artificial. I imagine the food supply stateside at least is another artificial problem. And so on.
I really wonder how much is actually fixable via redistribution and how much isn't. Both stateside and globally. Like if there's actually enough to go around, in a way that it can be spread around, or not, and what stands in the way of that. Not that such is an easy undertaking or endeavor but...
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My response:
I use the distinction of wandism/probablism in my thinking a lot.
I'm pretty sure that in the US we have built enough. If we radically changed zoning laws over the top of people engaging in NIMBY activism to protect property values, we could make this work -- 1/4 of the energy use, everyone with at least a flophouse, healthcare in line with, say, Costa Rica. But that requires a magic wand. In all probability, we are a people too trapped in stories of separate individuals and our only community orientation being the delusional, cultist expectation of ever-appreciating assets. We will distort all realities -- violently, if we have to -- to make assets that don't obey the gravity that is regression to the mean.
Globally, I think most other cultures can move more gracefully through a future of energy descent. We are starting to give the rest of the world a demonstration of what not to do. The UK has become our stupid lapdog, but other than that policy makers in other nations are starting to take notice. China moved 300 million people into a experiment to copy and paste our brand of capitalism, down to a monstrous housing bubble and more college graduates than jobs that you need college graduates for, but that still leaves one billion peasants. I believe they'll be able to re-tool much better than US, not even counting the bonus inflows they will get if and when they become the last great power standing. India might start looking a lot better to the global community. It is said that India is very good at moving people out of absolute poverty, but very bad at moving people up the next few dollars-a-day. Well, that might be all the planet has to give. . . the Kerala model is probably a best case scenario.
