I'm pretty sure that a good chunk of this article is generated by an LLM.

Governments try stuff like that pretty regularly (you can only buy certain things with food stamps, etc), but it's typically expensive to administer and inherently prone to abuse. Buy groceries with food stamps, sell groceries, buy drugs. On top of that, it's just inherently difficult to structure this in a way that's fair and useful to every person. If I inherited or built myself a nice rural home, I don't want a government-issue apartment - either instead or in addition to what I have. Do I get nothing? That's unfair. Do I get the stuff I don't want?

"Lump sum in cash" is the most flexible and equitable system. But then - and that's a major problem with UBI - you end up with people who spend it irresponsibly and then need help to survive. So you end up with UBI in addition to all the existing social safety nets.

I don't think capital has any special attachment to real estate specifically. It's just that we have policies that essentially require your money to be invested into something (because inflation); and we turned real estate into a safe investment asset through policies that create perpetual scarcity.

You can probably come up with policies that penalize real estate investments, but (a) it will just cause the investors to chase some other asset class, instead of redistributing wealth; (b) unless scarcity is addressed, it's unlikely that housing prices are going to drop. Landlords extract profits from the assets they hold, but they don't cause there to be fewer homes or apartments available.

> The most hated companies [...] Johnson & Johnson, 3M

You're living in a serious bubble if you think people hate the company they most readily associate with shampoo or scotch tape.

Almost all "most hated company" rankings can be broken into two categories: the ones many consumers had direct negative experiences with (Equifax, Comcast) and the ones they were told by the media they should be upset with (Anheuser-Busch).

For better or worse, government jobs are perceived as something you get for life. That was part of the appeal: yeah, the pay is less than in the private sector, but they're unlikely to fire you even if you're not good or if the role no longer makes sense.

But that aside: even if we want to alter the deal, there are good ways and bad ways to do this. Jobs are important because they are a big part of your life and because you need one to pay the bills. So you should try to avoid "haha so long" / "oops, clicked the wrong button, come back" kinds of situations.