Going by the presented graphs, something happened in 1960.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1973_oil_crisis

I'm starting to think the solution is some big government intervention.

In general, I agree, but this would require actually competent planning and policies... which is fundamentally impossible in a political system where money buys off the vast majority of representatives.

To fix that, you have to have ranked choice voting, abolish Citizens United, ban private money in political campaigns, make it only funded out of a commone government pool... stuff like that.

The easiest thing is Land value tax which is happening in some countries but it's not (sic?) really enough.

I agree, that's part of a solution.

The next solution would be forced purchase of land (bureaucracy needs to improved here) ...

Again, agree, Emminent Domain exists and forms a foundation that could be expanded on.

...and then market driven bidding for manufacturing high density housing. The thing is the government doesnt need to aim to make a profit here. The loss of the building process can be gained back by taxes in growth in the economy elsewhere.

You seem to have similar ideas as to what I've outlined in older comments:

My conception of how to solve the housing crisis... well for starters, massive zoning law reforms + earlier mentioned expansion of Emminent Domain.

Then... institute a progressive, continuous, not tiered, tax on rentals. Houses, condos, apartments, whatever. Index it by some equation around AMI and an equivalent Area Median Rent.

As a private rental rate goes higher and higher away from Area Median Rent, the landlord is charged a larger and larger tax.

The money from this tax goes into a massive city level fund that is only to be used for constructing, maintaining, and otherwise purchasing and then converting housing units that are run entirely not for profit.

These housing units are available to people/families below AMI... generally, go along with a framework of being whatever % under AMI as paying a lower total rent.

Start with prioritizing transitioning the poorest into these affordable units.

Private renters landlords (EDIT: derp) will have to balance cost pass through with having an actual reality check on the actual number of people willing to spend more for luxury units.

Functionally, this achieves a very similar effect as rent control, but with less downsides, and acts as a stabilizing factor in the city's rental prices.

Luxury units can still exist, but ... less of them, or less extravagant ones, and its a much more direct way of the wealthy subsidizing the poor and thus closing the wealth/income gap.

And hey, if a wealthy person wants to live in a spartan place and avoid the luxury tax?

Nothing stops them from doing this.

In totality, it isn't totally state directed, it isn't totally free market, its much more hybrid, and ... oh boo hoo, the private landlords have a smaller profit margin, cry me a river and drown yourselves in it landlords, Adam Smith himself hated all of you a century (two centuries?) before Marx was even born...

...oh and this also incentivizes making new constructions that have reliable, basic, working features, and cutting out all the fake luxury bullshit that is used to justify a much higher rent, when in reality, it isn't necesssary and or nobody uses it.

Stop putting co working office spaces and gyms and dog parks and rooftop bbqs in every single new multi family highrise... all that shit isn't properly maintained from basically day one, and is basically unusable by year two, three, four anyway.

(side note: the entire ... its either BLS or FRED methodology for estimating rent ewuivalent home values based on 'what if you tried to rent out your home right now' is a farce, toss it out, start over)

Energy and food are looking like they will get cheap soon with renewables and precision fermentation and lab grown meat. But taking land that has been horded by the rich, building high density and building railways will need government intervention.

I'm pressing X to doubt on much of this.

Renewable energy? Absolutely possible, if done properly... but thats a whole other discussion, and you'd basically have to Luigi the boards of every major oil company, possibly multiple times, before that would even maybe be politically possible, due to aformentioned massive money in politics corruption problem.

...

Lab grown meat? I dunno, seems like thats still a ways away from being comparably edible and cost effective.

Embrace the bugs.

Make cockroach or cricket paste into patties. Not too different from our current pink sludge paradigm, but is astoundingly more cost effective.

...

And yes, of course, all of this needs to go along with massive investments in public transit infrastructure.

Do so by either tolling every major roadway in and out of a city, make the suburbs scream... or just tap into the GPS that is now literally built into every modern car.

Tax people per mile driven in a high traffic, congested zone.

Make having a slog commute so expensive that people actually realize " oh wait ...i AM the traffic " and tell them to start taking a bus or light rail or subway... and of course use those taxed driving funds to make public transit as close to free as possible.

... That'd all be the scale that you'd need to do to actually generate the money to do this, but I have no clue how to make this politically palatable in many areas.

Americans are terminally car brained addicts who can't quit the lifestyle, even though its killing them, the planet, and the economy in the medium/long run.

I actually believe that, though this is what you'd need to do to avoid infrastructure and economic collapse... at this point, outside of a few major cities... Americans are too angry and stupid to do it, and will just prefer to slowly kill their way of life by continuing to demand it 'just work', no matter how you explain that its unworkable.

space is infinite, and as such, infinite growth is possible

• A finite portion of the universe is within our cosmological horizon. The universe is in fact not infinite.

• The speed of light (the speed of causality) places hard limits on over what distances economies can operate on an interstellar scale.

• Interstellar travel is not a solution to population growth and resource depletion, as it costs orders of magnitude more energy to ship someone across interstellar distances than to keep them alive for millennia at absurd comfort levels.

• You can keep your economy localized and instead go out and grab resources from distant Suns, but that has real diminishing returns. And if you cram too much matter in too small a volume of space, you cook your civilization in its own waste heat or collapse it into a black hole.

Space travel, especially interstellar space travel, is not a cheat code to infinite resources. Colonizing distant stars is more like throwing seeds into the wind than it is extending your own civilization by settling the next valley over. When you start an interstellar colony, you're founding a new civilization, and ultimately a new species, not building an extension to your own. The speed of causality demands this.

Sure, you can hand waive these concerns away by speculating about faster than light travel. But at that point, you might as well be arguing that we'll solve all our resource problems by building a perpetual motion machine. If you can build one, you can build the other.

WoodScientist already hit a bunch of relevant points, to which I'll add:

Spaceflight requires immense amounts of money and capital.

So... it'll only ever be meaningfully done by either nationstates or megacorps, likely both in collab, and likely necessarily is part of the MIC in a very major way.

That means that without massive societal/political/governance reform... you end up with Weyland-Yutani, but with the quality control of Boeing and SpaceX.

Not ideal, arguably guaranteed to be so massively long run inefficient, and dependant on an extreme wealth imbalanced underlying economy/society... that it ends up functionally destroying Earth via climate change / nuclear apocalypse, and if any spaceborne humanity remains... they're the Enclave from Fallout, basically.

Yep yep yep.

Except... for those folks, UBI is basically viewed the way a promised feature is in a highly scalable app.

That is to say, entirely optional, subject to terms and conditions, subject to market conditions... likely just a marketing gimmick that only a few naive truely believers think was ever really seriously on the table.

What they actually want is technofeudalism.

Ironically, I would basically describe myself politically as an Anarchist.

But... I am actually entirely terrified by the idea of just suddenly collapsing the entire economy without very, very solid plans in place for the transition, and the future.

If done poorly...literally billions could die, or be made into slaves.

I am all for detaching yourself from the capitalist death machine as much as possible, setting up alternate systems, mutual aid, co-ops, etc...

But if you just pull the legs out of the entire economy all at oncr and let it freefall... that'll be the layman's idea of anarchy: total fucking mad max / fallout style chaos.

20 years ago, we might have been able to do something like collapse neoliberalism entirely... you know, back around when Seattle rioted againt the WTO.

Its too late now, it would be way, way way too hard to just pivot suddenly back to much less global trade and more autarkic societies.

Farming alone is a nightmare to try to imagine that for.

On the other hand, climate change will basically cause that same economic near total collapse in most places within 20 years, by my reading of projected future impacts.

So uh yeah, we're just fucked, unless we somehow have a massive revolution and also a very competently executed plan to transition the economy off oil ... and that scenario is nearly impossibly unlikely.

As these companies become larger and larger, they start behaving more and more like Soviet central planners.

I think you've hit the nail on the head. We've become a centralized economy through weak monopoly enforcement.

Combine that with everyone $500k poorer because the billionaires acquired it. A recipe for depressed, anxious, angry, feed-addicted rats in a cage.

Competition? Send 'em south
They're gonna drown? Put a hose in their mouth.
Do not pass go, go straight to hell
I smell that meathook smell...

What's the difference to a kids' ball pit? A special corner for having existential dread?

IKEA does use a higher quality particle board than say Canadian Tire. Or at least it's better than what it used to be at Canadian Tire, since I stopped buying furniture from there (so who knows if it's still that bad). After one move, the old Canadian Tire stuff was wobbly while all of my IKEA stuff is still solid, even though I was feeling less patient last time I moved it and had a "if it doesn't survive, so be it" attitude.

Though note that I do tend to avoid the bottom tier IKEA stuff, since some of it does look pretty short term.

Ironically, the building on the right is not from forgetting their place in the fast food chain. Rather, it's from remembering and embracing their real place in the chain. McDonalds isn't a fast food company; it's a real estate company. That's where their real money is made. They build restaurants in high traffic areas with growing economies. They make some money from food sales, but the real long-term profits are from value of the land and the market value of the building.

The reason that all restaurants have become so bland and boring is that in the drive to pursue efficiency above all else, fast food companies have started optimizing their buildings for resale value. A building with really distinctive architecture - like an old Pizza Hut - doesn't have good resale value. You either keep using it as a Pizza Hut, or you rent it out for a greatly reduced rent.

A McDonalds that is just a big bland box has more book value than a McDonalds that has a play place. Very few potential renters want a play place or the architecture to accommodate one. If McDonalds needs to close one of their restaurants and rent out or sell the old building, one without a play place will hold its value better.

McDonalds is a real estate company, not a burger company. That's finally shown up in their actual architectural design.