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See, that’s what the app is perfect for.

Sounds perfect Wahhhh, I don’t wanna
ranma-official
slartibartfastibast

Ross, buddy, Singapore is orders of magnitude more homogenous than the US. Of course healthcare will be cheaper there. Industrializing customizability is hard.

mitigatedchaos

Forget the fact that Singapore is something like 75% ethnic Chinese. The government there is just flat out more competent, responsive, and self-disciplined. You and I both know, Slart, that the Central Provident Fund (and its component healthcare programs) cannot exist in the United States of America because even if it weren’t shot down as evil anti-freedom paternalism, it would be raided for either tax cuts (Republicans) or social programs (Democrats) within ten years of its creation.

slartibartfastibast

That’s fair.

Hopefully we can automate medical specialist jobs soon.

mitigatedchaos

Look Slart, all I’m saying is that I should be made technocratic dictator of the North American Union. Then I can enact thousands of weird ideological trades and replace congress with a legislature made up of delegated voting think tanks that bet competitively on the outcomes of their laws to determine their funding.

It’ll be great.

ranma-official

Make America Confused Again

mitigatedchaos

Ranma m8 all I’m saying is that the RAND Corporation knew that the Iraq War wouldn’t go at all as well as planned, so an entire legislature composed of them and a bunch of other think tanks might reasonably outperform politicians.

Now I know what you’re thinking - Americans are too stupid to use a delegated voting system where the top 100 delegates by delegated vote count form the legislature, much less navigate a ballot of over 500 registered delegate candidate organizations - but I have an answer to this. The first page of the ballot will just have the top five by previous vote count in the last election times percentile standing in the legislative prediction market. They don’t need to know what that means, just click one of the five big buttons.

…Actually nevermind this will somehow get accused of racism within about five days of going into effect.

Source: slartibartfastibast politics shtpost mitigated future
slartibartfastibast
slartibartfastibast

Ross, buddy, Singapore is orders of magnitude more homogenous than the US. Of course healthcare will be cheaper there. Industrializing customizability is hard.

mitigatedchaos

Forget the fact that Singapore is something like 75% ethnic Chinese. The government there is just flat out more competent, responsive, and self-disciplined. You and I both know, Slart, that the Central Provident Fund (and its component healthcare programs) cannot exist in the United States of America because even if it weren’t shot down as evil anti-freedom paternalism, it would be raided for either tax cuts (Republicans) or social programs (Democrats) within ten years of its creation.

slartibartfastibast

That’s fair.

Hopefully we can automate medical specialist jobs soon.

mitigatedchaos

Look Slart, all I’m saying is that I should be made technocratic dictator of the North American Union. Then I can enact thousands of weird ideological trades and replace congress with a legislature made up of delegated voting think tanks that bet competitively on the outcomes of their laws to determine their funding.

It’ll be great.

slartibartfastibast

@mitigatedchaos/Kanye 2020

mitigatedchaos

You say that now, but once I enact 7-part Regional Federalism in order to ease the introduction of Mexico and Canada into the NAU, your opinion on Vice Director Kanye and I may change.

politics shtpost mitigated future
slartibartfastibast
slartibartfastibast

Ross, buddy, Singapore is orders of magnitude more homogenous than the US. Of course healthcare will be cheaper there. Industrializing customizability is hard.

mitigatedchaos

Forget the fact that Singapore is something like 75% ethnic Chinese. The government there is just flat out more competent, responsive, and self-disciplined. You and I both know, Slart, that the Central Provident Fund (and its component healthcare programs) cannot exist in the United States of America because even if it weren’t shot down as evil anti-freedom paternalism, it would be raided for either tax cuts (Republicans) or social programs (Democrats) within ten years of its creation.

slartibartfastibast

That’s fair.

Hopefully we can automate medical specialist jobs soon.

mitigatedchaos

Look Slart, all I’m saying is that I should be made technocratic dictator of the North American Union. Then I can enact thousands of weird ideological trades and replace congress with a legislature made up of delegated voting think tanks that bet competitively on the outcomes of their laws to determine their funding.

It’ll be great.

politics shtpost mitigated future
argumate
mitigatedchaos

Re: Not making refugees

I’m told Bush campaigned on not getting into as many wars. Obama, of course, campaigned on not getting into as many wars, though his not-wars still created more refugees. Trump campaigned on the Iraq War being a costly disaster, on not getting into a fight with Russia, on going up against ISIS militarily (which could just mean a return to Iraq, which would not really be a new war), and on not needlessly attempting to knock over strong men and replace them with democracy - thus implicitly against getting into as many wars.

So there is demand there among the American public for reducing the number of wars, but somehow the wars happen anyway. If the second part could be rectified, the number of wars could be successfully reduced.

argumate

what does America spend on defence, $600 billion a year?

I’ve seen costs for the Iraq war being bandied about in the trillions.

difficult to turn off the tap, I think.

mitigatedchaos

I’ve been infuriated by the shear cost of the Iraq War simply in economic terms since around 2008. Either they’re looters or they’re freakishly incompetent, and I don’t like either. I’m really hoping this whole Trump thing works out. He’s at least smart enough to realize that you can’t just export democracy to other countries like it was done to Japan - or that you have to actually stay there and make it stick, like Japan.

Of course if you actually notice that not all cultures can support democracy and that hey, you’re going to have to do some real proper imperialism to make it stick and overwrite non-trivial chunks of the local culture, that marks you as right-wing these days…

Maybe I am right wing now. I did, after all, say that if a Communist Revolution emerged, I’d have to back the Anti-Communists. (Struggle sessions and famines aren’t really my thing.)

Source: mitigatedchaos politics
argumate
slartibartfastibast

Ross, buddy, Singapore is orders of magnitude more homogenous than the US. Of course healthcare will be cheaper there. Industrializing customizability is hard.

mitigatedchaos

Forget the fact that Singapore is something like 75% ethnic Chinese. The government there is just flat out more competent, responsive, and self-disciplined. You and I both know, Slart, that the Central Provident Fund (and its component healthcare programs) cannot exist in the United States of America because even if it weren’t shot down as evil anti-freedom paternalism, it would be raided for either tax cuts (Republicans) or social programs (Democrats) within ten years of its creation.

argumate

Christopher Balding has described significant accounting weirdness around these funds, where the numbers just don’t add up:

http://www.baldingsworld.com/2015/09/09/a-brief-note-about-singapore/

I’m not qualified to investigate these claims (or indeed any claims) but given the level of corrupt investment money flowing from Malaysia and Singapore into Australia recently I would certainly not take any government figures for granted.

mitigatedchaos

Thank you for this information. The last time I read about this, it was just noticing the discrepancy between GIC and Temasek growth (7-16%) and the CPF payout (2.5-4%), making it seem that the Dark Open Secret was that the government bureaucrats were using the population’s savings for cheap capital which they could then out-earn on and give themselves handsome salaries. But if the actual growth is not that strong, it could be a big problem.

Source: slartibartfastibast politics
slartibartfastibast
slartibartfastibast

Ross, buddy, Singapore is orders of magnitude more homogenous than the US. Of course healthcare will be cheaper there. Industrializing customizability is hard.

mitigatedchaos

Forget the fact that Singapore is something like 75% ethnic Chinese. The government there is just flat out more competent, responsive, and self-disciplined. You and I both know, Slart, that the Central Provident Fund (and its component healthcare programs) cannot exist in the United States of America because even if it weren’t shot down as evil anti-freedom paternalism, it would be raided for either tax cuts (Republicans) or social programs (Democrats) within ten years of its creation.

Edit: The zoning laws aren’t going to be fixed. The law enforcement is not going to be fixed. We aren’t going to pay our politicians an amount which actually reflects how dangerous/important they are to the economy, and we’re going to get a higher minimum wage and higher unemployment and a trash fractional UBI rather than wage subsidies. Cities will go bankrupt and urban sprawl will drain our energy. Money for clean energy will be invested into solar walkways that don’t even work.

politics

Re: Not making refugees

I’m told Bush campaigned on not getting into as many wars. Obama, of course, campaigned on not getting into as many wars, though his not-wars still created more refugees. Trump campaigned on the Iraq War being a costly disaster, on not getting into a fight with Russia, on going up against ISIS militarily (which could just mean a return to Iraq, which would not really be a new war), and on not needlessly attempting to knock over strong men and replace them with democracy - thus implicitly against getting into as many wars.

So there is demand there among the American public for reducing the number of wars, but somehow the wars happen anyway. If the second part could be rectified, the number of wars could be successfully reduced.

politics
collapsedsquid
collapsedsquid

I was doing  semi deep dive into Orion’s Arm after @immanentizingeschatons reminded me of it, and it got me thinking about post-scarcity and politics.

Specifically, I was comparing it to some of the other post-scarcity settings I’ve seen, like Eclipse Phase, Mindjammer, and Nova Praxis.  One thing that all of these have in common is that the politics presented in the game seems off. 

Nova Praxis and Mindjammer to my mind don’t really have political conflict. They try to describe some of the political units, but they seem to be stereotypes masquerading as politics or and otherwise just poorly described.  Eclipse Phase and Orion’s Arm do have political units, but they’re fairly obviously based on the political viewpoints favored in the demographic and seem kind of goofy and impossible because of that.

And it strikes me that to some level this is an impossible problem.  If you think there won’t be real politics in the post-scarcity future, I’m going to very much doubt that. But if you think that you can predict the nature of political conflict in the post-scarcity future, I’m also going to very much doubt that. So, either way, you’re stuck with writing a political scene that’s weird.

mitigatedchaos

But really, can there truly be post-scarcity?  Maybe with magic violating conservation of matter-energy, but without it, someone is going to want to use the mass of your asteroid to build their habitat to replicate their ideology.  

mitigated future