100% renewables in 10 years

If you’ve been paying attention, you might see that utility-scale solar is less than $1.50 per watt, and that the MIT technology review is talking about the University of Minnesota’s Energy Transition Lab report (PDF) that starting in 2019, relatively expensive batteries for grid-scale energy storage will be cheaper than building a natural gas peaker plant.

Fueling up a delivery of 6KW of solar at the Freeborn County Co-op with farm-grown fuel

This also means that building a wind energy to ammonia plant is also likely to be substantially lower cost than building a natural gas peaker plant TODAY.

The problem, as I surmised 5 years ago when my partner Kim and I installed solar on her roof, is not technology. It’s financing. And unlike most politicians who mostly talk and act little, I am taking action. I am in negotiations to acquire the remaining stock of TenKSolar’s Apex solar modules, and if you want to vote with your money, put it here.

Vote for the only solar farmer on the ballot in 2017.

Link update

I’d like to write more in detail about this, however it seems more important to work on some other things today.  And please pass around that I’m looking for a personal assistant and campaign manager.

http://www.businessinsider.com/man-behind-hawaii-basic-income-bill-2017-7

https://www.mprnews.org/story/2017/07/18/aspen-stopping-violence-in-cities

https://harvardlawreview.org/2015/04/law-enforcements-warrior-problem/

And remember, in November, vote for the only candidate who has donated more than half a year of his time to writing code for a financial cryptography basic income program

Systemic class bailout

I’m riding in the car on my way back to Minneapolis tonight, and NPR is running a story about the south side of Chicago, and the sense of hopelessness being created both by a broken economic system, and a broken criminal justice system. If you can’t afford a lawyer, or afford bail money, you become a second class citizen. And how do we seriously consider “$15 now” to be anything other than a distraction from the reality of people shooting each other on the south side of Chicago, and our police shooting our citizens here in the Twin Cities.

There is story I’ve heard about the greatest nation in the world, one that was strong enough to to write on a statute in a harbor

“Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.”

What happened to this great nation? What does our statue of Liberty stand for, if she does not stand for the words on the very pedestal she stands on?

We all, who site in comfort, with our employer sponsored healthcare, safe in our homes and property recorded in Hennepin county government center, must make reparations to those who do not share our privilege. Yes I said it.

Reparations must be made

But to whom, might you ask? To every single one of us. The homeless under the bridge. The poor, the out of work, the unemployable. The addicted, the hopeless, the single parents.

Basic Income must be a Human right

and if you, the beneficiaries of our current economic system cannot figure out how to handle funding this voluntarily, then I will happily take your money developing, deploying, and implementing a financial cryptography instruments that give away money to everyone so everyone has money to buy the food that I grow.

Vote for the Farmer in November, and vote with your choice of money, starting today. Sign up for Grantcoin, or use hourdollars.

You don’t have to take my word for it that Basic Income is coming. But you might find I’m offering you a better deal than Silicon Valley will.

100% renewable in 10 years

Some data for tonights discussion:

Click to access 20×2020-AFN.pdf

Click to access Pay-It-Forward-Business.pdf

Minneapolis climate accords

I’d like to join the world community of leaders like Nicaragua and California that believe the Paris Climate accords do not go far enough. There is only one candidate running for Mayor of Minneapolis with both the financial motivation (farming), and engineering experience to give us 100% renewable energy in 10 years. And I’m not talking 10 years from now, I’m talking ten years from when I first made the statement.

Vote for the only candidate who can build our local crypto-finance economy, our local food system, and negotiate deals with farmers for baseload wind power, and rooftop solar to create new jobs in our city.

Vote for the local Fintech expert

From my work email today (yes, it’s the Sunday of a holiday weekend, and I’m working. Farmers, crypto-finance startups, and mayors don’t get any breaks. This is why you should hire, I mean vote for me in November)

Up for debate: Should Mac users get better rates on loans? The growth and development of FinTech may be inevitable, but its ability to produce more transparent markets that create greater wealth for more people is not. Aaron Klein, a fellow in Economic Studies and policy director at the Brookings Center on Regulation and Markets, looks at this FinTech conundrum by asking the question, “When two people apply for a credit card (for example), should it be legal to offer them different interest rates based solely on the fact of whether they are using a Mac or PC?” The nuances may surprise you. Klein’s article provides an overview of anti-discrimination lending regulations since the 1960s and concludes that FinTech will require that regulators rethink how they define and implement anti-discrimination laws. “Having an open and honest conversation about race, lending and financial technology is not easy, but it is necessary if we are to harness the best that FinTech has to offer,” he writes.

There several things in this quote above that should probably disturb you.

If you have not yet gotten the memo, Reparations are required for business (yes, you did hear me, a white 1% guy, actually seriously use that word).

Most organized leftist progressives, for the past couple decades, have been organizing around ‘big’. Big Labor unions. Big visions of government correcting past wrongs.

The problem now is how do you address when the government has become the establishment that has wronged us? Are we going to write another regulation to further entrench the blunt-force trauma of state power to dictate morality?

Here’s what the state can do. The state can, while it still has said power, use it’s near monopoly power on the issuance of money to make reparations for past unjustice to EVERYONE, regardless of race, creed, color, history, orientation, or income.

This is not just a progressive moral issue. It’s critical for any libertarian-leaning small business owner if they want to stay relevant before another wave of technologically automated giants come rolling through and put another half of them out of business.

We need Reparations to EVERYONE for all the wrongs that have been committed by our established power structures, and the wrongs they will continue to do. The only check and balance against unchecked power is to demand that a basic income is a fundamental right of all sentient beings.

Otherwise, if you are going to speak of Reparations, how do you decide who is most harmed? What other alternatives do we have to equitably distribute wealth than to simply just distribute it equally to each one of us.

Or do you want our corporate sponsored political system to decide who’s more worthy?

Red states burning

Red states burning

Politics turning

Why should we care

In our comfortable urban spot

of a ranch in kansas

and people we are not?

---

We should care, for while some food grows on trees, we are not planting them in Hiawatha park. A large portion of our plate comes from places we forgot.

Remember the Farmer on your vote and in your thoughts.

The farmers & Greens are our only hope

The more I read about the fascist takeover of Germany, and how places where farmers and labor stood together to create a strong Nordic social democracy, the more I think we need a new political party. Or maybe, since yesterday I heard some good things from two Green Party City Council candidates, there is hope.

But it’s not going to be easy. Our biggest challenge, in my opinion, is not the ‘alt-right’, but the organized elite left-wing. Have you heard of the phrase ‘non-profit industrial complex’? If you’ve ever been around Minneapolis politics, you’ll see a whole lot of career politicians who move from one non-profit gig to consulting to government and then back again. These folks are well-educated, well-respected, and, I believe, honestly well-intentioned.

They are, due to unconscious bias, far more dangerous than the open right-wing fascists. You see it in the politics in Minneapolis in the belief that only a card carrying lifetime democratic party member can be a serious candidate. I am a serious candidate, and so is everyone else who has taken the time to gather signatures or pay the fee to be on the ballot. The more of us there are on the ballot for Mayor, City Council, and all the other ranked choice voting elections, the more you know the political process is working, and that you have a real voice.

There are two hopes we have. The urban farmers in this town, and the Green party, which is well organized with serious candidates. Our state has a strong history of Nordic socialism where Farmers and Workers with middle class allies held off the fascist advances in their home countries, and the immigrants from these places created the Farmer-Labor party.

I’m asking for your help over the next year. The vote is important, and I’d be quite happy if you vote for me in your top three ranked choice voting. But what I really need your help with is a change in your money, for this is the source of real political power. I am the only candidate with a copyright notice in a cryptocurrency supporting a basic income guarantee. Use the money the Grantcoin foundation made with a goal of building a new financial system with built in wealth redistribution. Use Hourdollars. Barter some time.

Or as I suggested last election cycle,
Pay your taxes with vegetables.

Mincome is inevitable

When members of one party make destroying my family’s financial security a central plank of their platform, hatred comes real fucking easy.

Unlike · Reply · 3 · 11 hrs

The ACA’s regulations and Medicaid expansion are the basis for our current, and previously projected though now uncertain, level of security, yes. Disabled kids aren’t cheap to raise.

Unlike · Reply · 3 · 10 hrs

This, my friends, is why the Republican party is the walking dead. They have created mortal enemies who will never forget the angry campaign rhetoric used to attack Obamacare, and the name Barack Hussein Obama will go down in history as the first great US leader to move us toward a Mincome (basic income), and universal health care state.

The opposition to these things just does not seem to understand the fundamental economics going on due to their unconscious bias against social collectivism.

There are many things that have been clearly demonstrated in which groups using coordinated collective action absolutely destroy short-term profit driven and authoritarian structures.

What happened to Germany and Japan once the sleeping giant in the Americas decided it was time to go to War?

The Republicans, in their claims of fighting a war against the ever expanding powers of the state have awoken many forces for collective action. Now they are fighting not just the state, but most of their political support base which is, or will be in need of these social programs.

There might be one way out for Republicans, but they will have to throw this anti-collectivist rhetoric under the bus, and start talking about how a guaranteed minimum income (or basic income guarantee) is good for tax reform, how it’s good for business, how it’s good for industry. And most importantly, throw any of the elitists who are afraid of taxes and ‘the dole’ to the rabid wolves they have created who will not rest until their families are secure.

Basic income and Mincome are invevitable, says the farmer.

Vote for farmer.

Vote for your future.

Vote for Mayor Troy.

308 days to Basic Income

The basic income already exists, and a small percentage of residents of Minneapolis already receive it. Passive income from capital assets that you inherited is a form of basic income, and we should be thinking much more critically about this. We could, if we chose, under my 100% renewable in 10 years plan decide, as a city, to issue municipal bonds at a low interest rate to finance construction, ownership, and operations of wind turbines under the Minnesota Flip model, and then distribute the revenue from the renewable energy capital assets to every resident of the city of Minneapolis, much like the Alaska Permanent Fund.

Or, we could, as I’ve proposed before, put solar over the interstate highways, and use that capital asset. Both of these are long-term energy-generating capital assets, that, when combined with low-cost municipal bond issues, can generate a return for the city far beyond anything the private sector (or Washington politicians) can hope to offer.

Maybe we can up our game, and instead of a new local fortune 500 company about every two years, we can go for one every year with a UBI for all our residents.