San Francisco: “Hey, housing is way too expensive. Do you think we should change our laws? Maybe keep some of the safety rules but loosen up some other regulations? Maybe we could copy the rules from some place with high safety standards but also cheap housing?”
Also San Francisco: “Pffft lol no, what kind of nerd would do that?”
London: “Hold my pint and watch this.”
One of the weirdest policy proposals is where you put an expiration date on cash, to encourage spending.
ooh I’ve played with that one, it also fits well with some basic income proposals
inflation
All the kool kids nowadays are talking about negative interest rates.
They’re not yet talking about forming quasi-autonomous state agencies that compete for assignment of implementing government programs, with contracts that can be renewed, but
Shhhh, they aren’t supposed to know about it yet. I only know because I’m from the future.
Anonymous asked:
xhxhxhx answered:
no person is illegal, anon
In a dystopian future where the government regulates the choice of preferences for new moral agents at time of creation, genderfluid robot Optimum 7 has been declared illegal by the Turing Police. Can she survive the death of her creator, the elusive, elite transhuman Strayan Shtpost Hacker @argumate?
Google DeepMind Films presents…
Sharkpost 7: Parkour Or Die
Pineapple on Pizza Forever
That’s basically just secret police
of a totally ordinary sort
that then indulge in kickbacks and protection rackets
Yeah, I realized I forgot to tag that #half shtpost, as I wasn’t being entirely serious. It’s a bit of wishful thinking.
The thing is, I don’t think we adequately police the police. We need cop cops. Metacops, if you will.
The disutility of a crime can be modeled as the risk of getting caught times the penalty for getting caught. Thus, a crime with a 5% chance of getting caught, times a 20 year sentence as penalty, is then modeled with an effective disutility of a one year sentence.
However, people tend to time discount and so on, so you might not get much more out of a 40 sentence than you would out of a 20 year sentence. They’re both “a long time.” This means that you can get more oomph out of increasing the capture & conviction rate.
Regular people, despite not being police, commit crimes for some reason. Cops, who we send to increase the chances of catching them, also commit crimes. However, since they’re the ones that we typically send to stop crimes, it’s harder to deal with this, especially when prosecutors have to work with the same police to prosecute normal cases, and thus can’t afford to anger the larger police force.
So we should have a dedicated force to investigate, police, and prosecute police misconduct. “Sting operations all the way down,” so to speak. Of course, we’ll need to have someone keep an eye on them, too.
…but won’t that result in endless layers of bureaucracy?
Not necessarily.
Just as we only need some limited factor number of police for a given population size, we only need some limited number of metan-cops to police the cops.
We can model the required number of layers of metan-cops as logcop_ratio(num_cops). With a cop_ratio of 2, for instance, our total number of all metan-cops is roughly the same as our total number of non-meta cops. A more reasonable cop_ratio of 10-20 gets us a more affordable ~5-11% for a city with 10,000 cops.
The purpose of each layer is to increase the uncertainty of successfully getting away with a crime at the layer below through arrest and conviction through multiple means, including informants, patrols, sting operations, reports of suspicious activity, investigations, etc.
This would be in addition to other means, such as introducing randomness to make various forms of corruption more difficult, moving people around to prevent building up loyalty between layers, etc. We want any corrupt personnel to always have to act very carefully and in the face of a great deal of uncertainty, as anyone they are interacting with could be one of our meta-cops.
We’d have to trim some of the other laws before we enact this, though, or else be careful just what policies we’re enforcing. Some laws currently not being enforced should just not exist, and we don’t actually want them enforced.
Tags Now:
#the iron hand - the State
#the invisible fist - Capitalism
#the red hammer - Communism
#thx xhxhxhx - you know who you are @xhxhxhx
#chronofelony - time travel
#mitigated future - futurism
#art+#oc - hand-made, free-range, gluten-free, organic, locally-sourced PNGs
#shtpost - quality, 100% serious post, always repost this
#politics - elaborate joke post, never repost this
#trump cw - self-filter tag for anti-memeist bigots who are prejudiced against our first Meme-American President due to the orange color of his skin
#discourse preview 2019 - retrocausal posts from the New Mexico Timeline
#nationalism - posts banned under the 2089 Human Dignity Act of the Earth Sphere Federation, filtering these is recommended for normies and anyone who isn’t a NatSep
#augmented reality break - (alternate (reality) break) tag intersection, but with coffee so it’s better and therefore augmented (like me)
Future Tags (Vegas Timeline):
#this week on woke or broke - exciting new youtube show in which contestants try to guess what is social justice orthodoxy and what was cooked up by the producers. failing contestants are fired from their jobs
#miti draws dallas - performance art piece in which thousands of teleoperated drones are released in a swarm over Dallas, Texas, and pictures of frightened and heavily-armed Texans are posted to Tumblr in five minute intervals
#super love love demon battle - SLLDB fandom drama. eventually boils over into discussion of the SLLDB fandom murders
#HobbesWasRight - series of articles laying out the philosophical groundwork for Googlezon Dynamics’ Leviathan Project and its benefits for the security of the state and the populace
#dogs - dog photos and canine cybernetic augmentations. also ferrets, to go with the ferret mistagging fad
#national technocracy - hypothetical point within the N-dimensional ideospace lattice originally theorized by RAND Geospatial Dynamics Working Group in the 1950s, generally summarized as “that thing that comes after prediction markets”, many researchers dispute whether it can actually exist. abandoned by Silicon Valley CEOs in favor of a system based on Facebook likes.
#dogfree - actual dog photos, just dog photos
Future Tags (Montana Timeline):
No tags for this timeline, possibly unstable. Radsuit suggested.
Everyone likes fast cars, but why is it that when I propose a new class of police “super interceptors” powered by retired attack helicopter turbines as the new primary response to illegal street racing, in order to boost advancement in the automotive industry, I’m the bad guy??
I’ve been seeing in professors the result of the cutoff and scoring obsession and weird focuses of the NIH grant system. If I were head of NIH, I would say “We’re obsessing about the scores of these grants to level that exceeds our ability to tell good research from bad. How bout we just take an amount of grants that’s 4x the amount we can fund, and just randomly draw ¼ of those.“
Also, when I am Comrade General Secretary of the Socialist States of America, that’s how I’m allocating capital.
> not assigning members of your government allocation funding blocks that they can bet on research outcomes
Bad post OP
mafia protection rackets are so infuriating, probably because all the incentives are to just pay up, which is how they work.
it’s so tempting to try and imagine impractical ways of breaking the system.
It always impresses me how these gangs can be “more powerful than the police” and operate with relative impunity even in first-world countries.
I mean, you’d think the way to beat them would be to tell the cops. And yet, the government, for all its power, is often not the biggest force, and not just in an “I can shoot you and they can get me afterwards but not stop me” sense.
And of course, the “people fled the country rather than testify” thing seems… Like something you have to have an answer to.
infuriating! I think it’s easier to stop drug smuggling than protection rackets, as that involves a physical object that has to be shipped around distributed and can be intercepted at various points in the process.
but protection rackets are just this diffuse cloud of seemingly unrelated activities; people talking to each other over here, money changing hands over there, the occasional shop burning down or dude getting whacked somewhere else.
since police can’t offer 24 hour protection for every single person in town, there is always going to be someone vulnerable to extortion, and the incentive is always going to be to pay a small fee rather than risk defying them.
maddening!
Secret police, but instead of enforcing ideological conformity to the Party, they attempt to catch politicians with kickbacks, investigate labor and environmental regulation violations, and crash protection rackets.
All the NTSB recommendations are technically trade offs that have costs; consider American Airlines Flight 191 which crashed on take off killing everyone on board and two people on the ground after an engine separated from the wing due to improper maintenance procedures had cracked the pylon.
While 273 people may have died, the improper shortcuts taken during engine maintenance saved 200 man hours per aircraft! Why, the meddling FAA banning this procedure may have done more harm than the original crash!
Nah it’s alright fam,
If we assume that the GDP per capita is $55,000, and that the typical passenger has 35 working years remaining, we can just have the state bill the company and its shareholders $525,525,000 and put them into debt bondage and sell off their assets if they are unwilling or unable to pay.
Now you may object to the state rolling around and charging huge sums of money as payment for accidental deaths, but I have it on good authority that everyone signed over their trusteeship to the state rather than get kicked into the ocean, entirely of their own free will. Quite remarkable, really. So I assure that this plan is entirely Capitalist.
It is a well-documented fact that by the age of 5 monolingual White children will have heard 30 million fewer words in languages other than English than bilingual children of color. In addition, they will have had a complete lack of exposure to the richness of non-standardized varieties of English that characterize the homes of many children of color. This language gap increases the longer these children are in school. The question is what causes this language gap and what can be done to address it?
The major cause of this language gap is the failure of monolingual White communities to successfully assimilate into the multilingual and multidialectal mainstream. The continued existence of White ethnic enclaves persists despite concerted efforts to integrate White communities into the multiracial mainstream since the 1960s. In these linguistically isolated enclaves it is possible to go for days without interacting with anybody who does not speak Standardized American English providing little incentive for their inhabitants to adapt to the multilingual and multidialectal nature of US society.
This linguistic isolation has a detrimental effect on the cognitive development of monolingual White children. This is because linguistically isolated households lack the rich translanguaging practices that are found in bilingual households and the elaborate style-shifting that occurs in bidialectal households. This leaves monolingual White children without a strong metalinguistic basis for language learning. As a result, many of these monolingual White children lack the school-readiness skills needed for foreign language learning and graduate from school having mastered nothing but Standardized American English leaving them ill-equipped to engage in intercultural communication.
Excerpt from a satirical blog post from The Educational Linguist that makes a good point about which language skills we value as a society and the problems with talking about a “language gap”.
(via lingrix)
[someone linked this to me]
Suppose we took this seriously - that we decided monolingual white children weren’t gaining a sufficient intuitive understanding of language as a generalized concept, because their households were too monolingual.
What, then, could be done about it?
Children across America are made to learn foreign languages throughout their schooling, but it rarely sticks. Why?
Insufficient density.
Quite simply, there just aren’t enough speakers of the language per population in a given area to support conversing with it regularly. It becomes useless, and the brain does what it always does with information that doesn’t get used - purge it.
Any response focused on a great diversity of languages, then, would be ineffective. There are simply too many different languages. If we limit instruction to only those languages with at least one million speakers, and keep children in school eight hours per day, each language will have just over one minute of instruction devoted to it.
To truly grasp the idea of language on a deeper conceptual level, fluency and depth of understanding would be required.
To create the number of speakers required to sustain fluency, then, we must pick one second language per geographic area, then make it mandatory in school.
I propose this be done at the regional level.
Mandarin Chinese or Japanese for the West Coast. German for the Midwest. French for the East Coast and New England. Spanish for the South and Southwest.
Not only will this bring about regional cultural differentiation which will increase the cultural diversity of America and support for later Regional Federalism (instrumental for unification with Canada and Mexico to form the North American Union and ensure continued dominance into the late 21st century), but it will add truly exciting new slang to the language.
Yes, the resulting drift will make old documents harder to understand, but the insistent descriptivists have already thrown that out the window as unimportant, so why stop there?
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.
