Thread by @homemadeguitars

Have you noticed mostly the Administration isn't referring to an "infrastructure" plan.
It's a Jobs plan.
Bless his heart, Joe Biden is an honest-to-god Democrat. Build stuff, hire people to build it, get everyone out of the dumps, catch up on their bills.
Half of me approves.

2. There are well meaning people who sincerely believe that humankind can uphold our current style of living / interacting with the ecosystem indefinitely if we get rid of fossil fuels.
I disagree, but neither position, mine nor theirs, can be proven. The future is like that.

3. If those people are right, then Joe is right, and whatever you call his plan it is a good one.
All those redneck assholes would be a lot easier to deal with if they were knocking down a fat paycheck working their asses off in the weather, building stuff.
They'd have money and

4. they'd be too tired to parade around in their arms and armor.
Because he's Joe, and she's Kamala, not just the redneck assholes will get jobs. There will be plenty to go around. Life will be better, in the short run for sure, if Joe gets his bill passed.

5. If they're all wrong and I'm right, and he ought to be hiring everybody to tear up highways and airports instead of building them, life will still get better in the short run.
Nothing like a huge public works project to get the economy buzzing.

6. Old folks like me remember the Interstate Highway System project. They passed the enabling law when I was 9 and built it until I was about 30.
Yeah, the 60s and 70s were prosperous. We were doing the largest public works project in world history. Nobody worried about jobs.

7. Biden has another, successor, largest public works project in world history on the books, and if he gets it the general prosperity of the non-bazillionaire classes of all colors will get better.
I would make a sizeable wager on that statement.

8. I don't care who tells you otherwise, nobody has a plan to significantly reduce global carbon emissions until the whole dog and pony show goes over the cliff.
After that the survivors, if any, won't be a significant source of atmospheric carbon for a long time if ever again.

9. I would put them all to work picking up plastic, and tearing up non-critical pavement and planting it with locally appropriate photosynthesizing, ideally food-bearing, plants.

10. I'll give you an example of a jobs program I would do here.
My program would be, I would sell the county's giant John Deere tractor with the space program based robot arm on it, and I would employ rednecks to do all the work it does, and do it better.
Take ten or twenty fokes

11. One thing this tractor does is mow roadside trees. Savagely, brutally, tears branches off leaving twisted injured tree flesh hanging out to its predators.
The idea is, you've got to keep the trees from growing up in the wires or branches out across the roadway.
So one guy,

12. I would guess, reasonably conservatively, that they've got a quarter million dollars in that thing.
My little 28 hp high tech property mower cost me over $30k. That John Deere tractor was at least $100 grand. The hydraulic robot arm was another. The implements it works, 50.

13. Some of my readers know what a brush hog is. For everyone else, picture a regular homeowner's old fashioned walking lawn mower. That deck, with a motor on top and a spinning blade under it.
Know, you take off the handles, and you make the deck, instead of 20" wide, about 8'

14. It's got this humongous steel blade about as thick as your thumb, sharpened on the leading edge, eight feet long, spinning at about 700 rpm. And it just rips branches off trees like a lawnmower cuts grass, only cruder.

15. This thing is crude, but it's fast. One guy drives it, down the country road, and he butchers the treeline clear back to the fence. No bird nests. Clean. Uglier than a mud fence.
Emits carbon. You can hear the damn thing half a mile down the road.
Do you know what noise is?

16. Noise is energy. Noise is a wave of energy in the level our ears evolved to detect.
Waste energy.
We emit carbon with the specific outcome of making that fucking racket.
Probably of all the carbon that comes out of that machine, not 5% specifically gets applied to the job.

17. We could hire workers. Send them out in crews. Instruct them to prune the trees in such a way that the needs of traffic and the electric utility are met. Maintain as much beneficial cover as possible. Work carefully, there's no hurry. And pay them a decent wage.

18. You could do this whole thing with an animal drawn wagon, horse, mule, donkey, bovine. The animal could obtain fuel while working.
Have the crew gather trash along the way. Put it in the wagon.
You could take this reasoning up and down every road in the United States.

19. The only resource which we cannot exhaust is humanpower. Human power is directly proportional to population. No matter how many people there are, there is never more necessary work than all the people can do.
The necessary is more-or-less proportional too.

20. Don't bother to tell me. I know.
It's a matter of value. What we value.
Mighty damn windy today. High energy atmosphere.
I spent much of the day emitting carbon. Two round trips to the gas station for feed for the tractors, then several hours mowing.
Ventrac pulled up lame.

21. We made it back to the barn, though. She needs maybe a fuel filter, probly air filter pretty pollen-ey. Cooling system plugged up once with pollen, but that's easy field maintenance.
Your power source makes demands on you. Living or dead.
Later.

PS. Up there in 17, when I said, hire workers... No chain saws. At 73 I can trim and fell trees with a hand powered saw. Hire people who can do that.