“Faith, you need to get to the top of the Atrium. There’s a way out there.”
- Merc, probably
I long thought the City was modeled on Singapore.
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Ross, buddy, Singapore is orders of magnitude more homogenous than the US. Of course healthcare will be cheaper there. Industrializing customizability is hard.
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.
Ross, buddy, Singapore is orders of magnitude more homogenous than the US. Of course healthcare will be cheaper there. Industrializing customizability is hard.
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.
That’s fair.
Hopefully we can automate medical specialist jobs soon.
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.
Ross, buddy, Singapore is orders of magnitude more homogenous than the US. Of course healthcare will be cheaper there. Industrializing customizability is hard.
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.
That’s fair.
Hopefully we can automate medical specialist jobs soon.
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.
Make America Confused Again
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.
Ross, buddy, Singapore is orders of magnitude more homogenous than the US. Of course healthcare will be cheaper there. Industrializing customizability is hard.
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.
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.
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.
Ross, buddy, Singapore is orders of magnitude more homogenous than the US. Of course healthcare will be cheaper there. Industrializing customizability is hard.
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.
That’s fair.
Hopefully we can automate medical specialist jobs soon.
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.
@mitigatedchaos/Kanye 2020
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.
What price are you willing to pay to solve those problems, ideologically?
If it is necessary to become Singapore, are you willing to do this?
What do you mean by “become Singapore”?
For instance, though this is less Singaporean, suppose that the things social conservatives complain about are true (outside of LGBT), they just happen to apply mostly to lower-class communities, because upper-class communities can survive that level of dysfunction (thanks to money). What would you do?
Or for something more genuinely Singaporean, are you willing to have convicted vandals publicly caned? Are you willing to use conscription for young men? Will you allow schools to punish or exclude problem students?
As we all know, under the principles of Affirmative Action, Asians, particularly East Asians, are not only white, but whiter than white people, and may in fact be the whitest race in existence.
Thus it is entirely appropriate that the Korean Overwatch character D.Va should receive a skin inspired by an American con artist.
What if a (new) city kept all land as municipal property, but auctioned n-year ground leases. Furthermore, bids could have conditions on them, such as public availability of amenities like bathrooms, amount of commercial storefront space available, etc. Other parties, such as neighbouring leaseholders or residents, could contribute to bids that provided benefits to them, and avoid contributing to bids that were harmful, to help internalize those sorts of externalities.
To ensure compensation for improvements on the land, on lease expiry, run two sets of auctions, one with all bids conditional on demolishing the existing improvements, and the other without that restriction. The demolition-conditional amount goes to the city, and the difference between that and the most successful bid that doesn’t condition on demolition goes to the previous leaseholder.
I haven’t checked this for exploits, like, at all, and my intuition says there probably are some. Also, allowing conditional bids would end up being complex and combinatorial; I’m not volunteering to write the software for that sort of auction system. But it seems like it’s potentially neat.
centralised zoning by a non-state entity that owns all the land; and I heard a sound as of a million Libertarians screeching
Daily reminder that in the highly capitalist and efficient city-state of Singapore, over 80% of residents live in housing leased from the state.
Handful of ancaps following this blog despite the plan to transform America into a bigger and more heavily-armed Singapore - or because of the plan to transform America into a bigger and more heavily-armed Singapore?
SAN FRANCISCO—In an effort to reduce the number of unprovoked hostile communications on the social media platform, Twitter announced Monday that it had added a red X-mark feature verifying users who are in fact perfectly okay to harass. “This new verification system offers users a simple, efficient way to determine which accounts belong to total pieces of shit whom you should have no qualms about tormenting to your heart’s desire,” said spokesperson Elizabeth James, adding that the small red symbol signifies that Twitter has officially confirmed the identity of a loathsome person who deserves the worst abuse imaginable and who will deliberately have their Mute, Block, and Report options disabled. “When a user sees this symbol, they know they’re dealing with a real asshole who has richly earned whatever mistreatment they receive, including profanity, body-shaming, leaking of personal information, and relentless goading to commit suicide. It’s really just a helpful way of saying to our users, ‘This fuck has it coming, so do your worst with a clear conscience and without fear of having your account suspended.’” At press time, Twitter reassuredly clarified that the red X was just a suggestion and that all users could still be bullied with as little recourse as they are now.