tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-55101672439996086172024-03-13T21:21:29.479-07:00A Particle of ThoughtEvery idea I believe is worth spreading.ananiashttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08090478687630964605noreply@blogger.comBlogger28125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5510167243999608617.post-37109636784304739932011-02-14T22:28:00.000-08:002011-02-14T22:34:09.245-08:00A Better Solution than Budget CuttingPresident Obama's proposed that we cut roughly one trillion dollars of spending each year from the federal budget. That's going to cause an enormous amount of pain for honest people just barely making ends meet, as well as exacerbate our already painfully slow economic recovery. There is a much better solution to our problems and it amazes me that our leaders are unable to see it.<br /><br />The black market or <span style="font-style:italic;">underground economy</span> is estimated to be larger than a trillion dollars; possibly as much as double that much (eight to ten percent of our gross domestic product--and even larger in most other nations). Now suppose we could heavily tax that activity. Then we wouldn't have to reduce spending as much, and could make crime a lot less profitable as well. It has all sorts of nice side effects too, like creating a huge disincentive to illegal immigration, all forms of vice, and even theft. Right now, a dollar stolen will buy more goods than a dollar earned honestly. That's a terrible state of affairs. Why don't we reverse that and make sure that a dollar earned buys more than one that is stolen?<br /><br />It's relatively easy to do because there is nothing you can do with money (no matter how you get it) except to eventually spend it. Even putting it into the bank, or stock market, is a form of spending it. And if you don't spend it, it will evaporate slowly anyhow--we call that process inflation.<br /><br />One way to accomplish this is to create a new kind of tax that only applies to money earned via the black market. There are a lot of different ways to do that. The easiest is probably a very high national sales tax, like 100%. It's easy because we already have the infrastructure at almost every point of sale to calculate it. Suppose that for every dollar of income that you reported, the government gave you a dollar's worth of national sales tax credit. Then no one who could report their income would ever have to pay that sales tax because having the dollar to spend also meant they'd have a dollar of credit too. But people working here illegally, or acquiring their income in ways that cannot be reported would not have the credit. Thus criminals would effectively be taxed at the rate of 50%--higher than anyone earning their money legally.<br /><br />There are even better ways too, but they're not as easy to implement. The best way I can imagine wouldn't just solve the problem of taxing the black market, but would also protect us from exploitation by the people we do business with, help our doctors maintain our health, protect us from identity theft, and give us all a whole new source of revenue by allowing us to sell our consumption data (rather than allow banks and credit card companies to sell it without our consent and keep the proceeds themselves.) Effectively it's a <span style="font-style:italic;">universal transactor</span> which is an entity that stands between us and the people we do business with. Only the universal transactor would actually know who we are. We pay it, then it pays our creditors ensuring that they cannot lose or sell information about us.ananiashttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08090478687630964605noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5510167243999608617.post-43284482994476410922011-02-12T19:54:00.000-08:002011-02-13T03:36:51.837-08:00Is a Democratic Government good enough for Egyptians?They deserve better than a new group of rulers--no matter how well meaning those leaders might start out being. They've proven they are a people ready and worthy of going beyond government as we know it. They have demonstrated the will and wisdom to upstage government completely--to organize themselves more cleverly than merely another electorate; they seem destined to become the world's first Meta-Government. And the leading software developers and information scientists of this world should rise to the occasion and develop the technology to enable that to happen.<br /><br />Representative government is obsolete today. It was never a good solution because there is no way to concentrate power into an individual or small group of people without creating an irresistible target for corruptive influences. Our own brains are proof that such concentrations of power are not necessary--that good leadership, and wise decisions, can emerge only from distributed mechanisms. It's time we create the infrastructure that can transcend the frailty of anointed individuals to empower self organizing groups--to focus and harvest the collective acumen of the entire electorate directly.<br /><br />It isn't a good government that makes a nation great--but a wise and competent electorate. And if America proves anything at all, it's that the more cleverly government is constrained, the more the electorate is allowed to atrophy. Today the electorate in America is almost totally worthless. The fact that a completely ignorant imbecile like Sarah Palin can actually be taken seriously by a substantial number of Americans is proof of that. And we have many dozens of leaders that are nearly that stupid. Egypt's electorate is as great as it is today precisely because it had such a corrupt government for so long.<br /><br />There is no free lunch. Real freedom doesn't emerge from laws or documents or the genius of social engineers. It is a by-product of personal responsibility--of our own competence and accountability as individuals. And there is no other way to achieve it. That's ultimately why there's no simple way to delegate our political capital. That is why we can never really forgo the responsibility to achieve an understanding of our role in society and how our choices in life affect our whole world. <br /><br />That is why I believe the question really isn't what sort of democracy would be best for Egypt, but rather what sort of network would most effectively allow these remarkable people to govern themselves; to wisely process the events, news, and daily challenges they face into the agenda that their public servants are directed to implement.<br /><br />Egyptians have proven their greatness as wise, patient, and very determined people. I hope they will not forgo the opportunity they have now to permanently protect themselves from the exploitation of tyrants by building the most important pyramid their culture has ever produced--one that brings their collective political capital to a fine point, and that illuminates the way for all of the world's people to take back our planet from the corrupt entities, institutions, and industries that presently only exploit us.ananiashttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08090478687630964605noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5510167243999608617.post-30326708119117579822011-02-11T14:27:00.000-08:002011-02-11T14:29:05.042-08:00Egyptians Score a Huge Victory for All HumanityIt's difficult to express how totally awed I am by what has taken place over the last three weeks. Every nation in the world should be flying the Egyptian flag today, because every person on earth will be the beneficiary of the great courage and fantastic integrity of the Egyptian people. We all owe these brave and wonderful people a great debt of gratitude and our unbridled respect for what they have accomplished through their sheer will, ingenuity, and unfailing commitment. They are true heroes, not just of Egypt but of oppressed and exploited peoples everywhere--from the truly clueless peasants of North Korea to the willfully thoughtless lumpen of America--too ignorant to even realize they're prisoners of a deceitful ideology and corrupt leadership.<br /><br />I hope President Obama will not obstruct the process of unraveling the crimes and thievery of the Mubarak administration in order to spare America the embarrassment it fully deserves for it's long history of supporting such a brutal and oppressive dictator. Hosni's thoughtless and condescending remarks over the last few weeks and his brutal tactics in trying to oppress the peaceful protest of his people must stand in stark contrast to our words and deeds or we risk being rightfully condemned as accomplices.<br /><br />The deceitful and underhanded foreign policy and politics of yesteryear simply isn't appropriate in the world of today. It's time for the free nations of the world to set high standards for themselves--and to live up to them. We have probably never had a better opportunity to come clean once and for all, and to begin a new foreign policy that places the dignity of all the world's people above even our own sovereignty as a nation. For the latter really is both evil and contemptuous if it comes at the expense of the former.<br /><br />I believe the wisest move America could make over the next few months is to honor this great achievement of the Egyptian people with the commitment to build a sovereign Egyptian city here in America. Not just to celebrate Egypt for such a truly magnificent and humane achievement, but as a symbol of the most genuine and beautiful characteristic of our species--our collective quest for justice, dignity, and a parity of opportunity for all mankind. I think we should commit 100 square miles of America, and the money it takes to build a city of a million people as a tribute to this event, and as an invitation to Egyptians to build a showcase city here in America. I see it as a wise means to jumpstart both of our economies and to broach a whole new strategy for knitting together the world's great cultures into a more robust commitment to the fair self-governance of all peoples.ananiashttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08090478687630964605noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5510167243999608617.post-84042894611569688972009-10-04T10:25:00.000-07:002009-10-04T10:44:46.516-07:00Inverting the homunculus<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px; "><div style="text-align: center;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">What would our world look like if we believed our soul was distributed amongst everyone except us?</span></i></div><div><br /></div>I blame an artifact of our evolution for most of our problems.<i> (It's certainly preferable to an incompetent deity!) </i>We have brains designed to outwit our surroundings, not to understand them. Thankfully it just so happens that a little understanding is actually necessary to outwit things or we'd probably be completely clueless and live by our urges alone. (e.g. George Bush)<div><br /></div><div>Unfortunately, one of the things we're designed to cleverly outwit is ourselves, and that seems to be what most gets in the way of being open minded and receptive to even those perspectives that are antithetical to our internal model of reality. We just can't see what we're not actually looking for. And we see all too well whatever it is we are looking for (<i>sometimes even if it isn't there.</i>) Having <a href="http://www.good.is/" title="An interesting site I joined today that inspired this essay.">good</a><i> </i>senses helps some, but the real problem is more structural and systemic. True objectivity is a fantastically unnatural act.</div><div><br /></div><div>Even when our systems fail, we're still very hard pressed to discover what's wrong by any means other than looking for a particular problem. Prisoners of our own dogma, we would indeed be doomed to generate nothing but heat were it not for the feedback that eventually becomes impossible for even us to miss. And that's why I have hope that we're in the beginnings of an inverted revolution; a reinvention of society that starts from the top down like a wave and reorganizes all of mankind around a completely new economic paradigm.</div><div><br /></div><div>Another quirk of our design seems to guarantee this will happen; we behave a bit like fermions in that no two of us can share the same model of reality (occupy the same intellectual space) at the same time. Maybe it's only because that space is so large. Or maybe it's because we're so small. But it does suggest that we're likely to try everything, steal and improve what we can't invent ourselves, and eventually stumble onto sustainable economies. They are almost certain to be sustainable because they unite humanity into a collective struggle against it's real enemy--entropy--rather than each other.</div><div><br /></div><div>It might be as easy as eliminating the externalities that prevent our free market system from achieving sustainability. Suppose that in order to consume more than one share of the earth's resources in a given month that you had to buy that excess from those who must then have used less--at market prices. I don't believe they'd sell for less than they needed to achieve an adequate standard of living. Nor do I believe they'd be able to hold out for much more than that since someone would be willing to settle for less in that case.</div><div><br /></div><div>That one change seems to trigger a cascade of changes that address a great many of our most serious problems. If people didn't need to work to subsist there would be a sort of selective pressure favoring those business models which tended to create jobs people actually enjoyed. We might even see the emergence of a completely different type of business model--where the employees actually paid for the privilege of getting to do their jobs (but of course shared the resulting profits as well.)</div><div><br /></div><div>It might even lead to a gradual inversion of our very perspective on wealth, leaving us to measure our own worth in terms of how extensively we enriched and empowered everyone else. My guess is that exploring that enormous space is simply a lot more fun than the tiny sphere centered around ourselves.</div></span>ananiashttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08090478687630964605noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5510167243999608617.post-50340088906838059262009-09-30T09:11:00.001-07:002009-10-12T08:18:37.410-07:00How to make a public servantPoliticians have outlived their usefulness. In a way, they became victims of their own success. The process of getting elected forces them to spend a great deal of their time focused on raising enough money to either get or keep their jobs. It also compromises their ability to remain objective and impartial.<br /><br />I don't blame the politicians as much as I do the electorate we never even had. When our nation was founded, and only white landowning males voted, that tiny electorate more or less understood the issues facing their leadership, and were thus more competent to evaluate the candidates. Banking relied on trust and personal integrity, not credit scores. That select group of people knew and depended on many others, making it likely they'd know candidates personally or have a close associate who did. And even they were hard pressed to do much better than we can today.<br /><br />Extremely few people are even capable of having much of an appreciation of what our government is and does today. Let alone what it should be doing, or which candidate is more likely to be effective. Our elections reflect this fact and are nothing more than marketing campaigns funded by the very people we don't want to have anything to do with our leadership--wealthy special interests. We can never have any real confidence in how any freshman will behave. And all we know about the rest is that everyone else they do business with pays them a lot more than we do as their employers.<br /><br />I think we can simultaneously both fix the electorate (render it genuinely effective at identifying representative candidates) and make it possible for honest very ordinary people to successfully run for high office without having to raise any money. And we can do all of that without any changes to our present government. All we need is a means to make our political capital more tangible. We're much better at getting the most for our money than we are at spending our vote. (Murphy's Law guarantees that if we're capable of doing something wisely, and our stupidity doesn't kill us first, then we'll eventually find it by process of elimination. <span style="font-style:italic;">So we have that going for us</span>.)<br /><br />I don't know where it will happen, or exactly how, but I do see a most likely scenario that follows as a natural consequence of the present state of our world. I think it will begin in a small city, from an attempt save money by replacing their existing information systems with internet based services that do a far better job for less. These services, having been created by <a href="http://www.publicstuff.net/index-3.html">speculative developers</a> competing to most empower city management, will be designed to harvest the insight of that community's electorate because that feature is likely to be regarded as useful to purchasers of such software and very cheap to provide by developers, (but wasn't even remotely justifiable prior to the internet, at any cost. The <a href="http://www.opengovernment.org/">Open Government</a> directive changes this by creating the funds that motivate the developers.)<br /><br />Primary schools are likely to take advantage of this new opportunity to teach civics, and more children will become aware of the power of their parents' political capital, and the opportunities that exist to deploy it. Likewise, noteworthy members of the community with hopes of becoming council members, or simply a whole lot to say to their leadership, will become prominent in discussions of the issues at the city's web site. In that sort of environment it won't be long before a developer invents a virtual currency to represent our vote, and provides an interface like a shopping mall, where you browse through the issues facing your city council, and spend your political capital on the issues you care about. Everyone would get the same income, but it would evaporate rapidly from your account (just like real political capital you don't use does) which encourages you to spend it continuously or lose it. Kids will thus get the both the knowledge and the means to make their parents more civic minded.<br /><br />In such an environment anyone with genuinely good ideas and insight about their community and its problems would quickly become visible and receive the encouragement and endorsements they need to run for office without needing to compromise their integrity by selling access to themselves for campaign donations. The campaigns themselves would most likely be more about reviewing their performance as evangelists over the period between elections rather than about their character, experience, or agenda. It becomes a way to vet our political leadership by watching them lobby us to spend our political capital as they suggest. By showing people that by not participating their political capital evaporates into the accounts of those who do, they will be more motivated to participate.<br /><br />The software would most likely evolve to better incorporate the role of political evangelist. It might involve giving up your political capital to buy a seat in a virtual city council at the site. They might be graded on how closely their recommendations reflect the way the community actually spent it's political capital, with the lowest scores periodically being kicked back into being voters and freeing up those slots for others. In this way the virtual council would end up filled with those most effective at educating and involving the public in civic affairs. As the real city council watches this process it would be made more aware of the zeitgeist and exposed to every good idea to come out of their electorate.<br /><br />I see this process as inevitable. Especially because of what's going on in our own government these days. Right now the folks who actually staff our government are busy trying to implement the letter and spirit of Obama's <a href="http://www.whitehouse.gov/open/">Open Government</a> initiative. That's what someone like me can join <a href="http://govloop.com/">govloop</a> to participate. The TV news doesn't talk about this stuff. It's the most publicly empowering modification of governance in the history of mankind--far more than simply getting a vote, this is enfranchisement in true spirit--where a child's wisdom can touch the mind of The President in only the time it takes to traverse the machinery we're creating to recognize it.<br /><div><br /></div><div>I guess the reason that I'm so sure this is going to happen is because I can imagine the alternative our government must be aware of: that such a site might evolve outside of and completely independently of government. If that happened they'd face a meta-government with more genuine political power, and most likely composed of more people than their own population. And that's why our own government is looking for ways to engage and involve us. And why can be certain that we'll find out how to make a public servant.</div>ananiashttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08090478687630964605noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5510167243999608617.post-28404496961003830772009-09-24T16:09:00.000-07:002009-09-29T12:31:06.737-07:00Modeling capitalism on evolution<div>About a week ago, I received a YouTube personal message from someone in Bahai following the exchange below:</div><div><br /></div><div><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_eNHbm0wWxG4/Srv_h7BHohI/AAAAAAAAAC4/p8yBkRkaN-E/s1600-h/YTcomment.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 383px; height: 229px;" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_eNHbm0wWxG4/Srv_h7BHohI/AAAAAAAAAC4/p8yBkRkaN-E/s400/YTcomment.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5385178737694712338" /><br /></a></div><div><div style="text-align: center;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:x-small;"><b><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pg53UJk2ilI" title="The video that the comments above are in response to">Pt 1 Questions & Answers With ZEITGEIST creator Peter Joseph,</a></b></span></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:x-small;"><b><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pg53UJk2ilI">and director of addendum</a></b></span></div></div><div><br /></div><div><b>The message:</b></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"></span></div><blockquote><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">Interesting... You seem to know more about economics than I do. Aside from all the flawed policies of all the worlds goverments towards these issues there is the added deliberate "economic manipulation". Its almost like "America" doesn't want third world countries to develop. Anyway its a long topic of which I wouldn't mind sharing links on the subject matter as you seem to be as interested as I am.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">I do think however that these problems are no more caused by "economic complications" than by sheer greed by a few confederates, no different from the thug on the street snatching a purse only this happens in board rooms and and the act is explained away as "company profit gains" instead of pure immoral and reckless behaviour. It has become acceptable because we were taught by TV, college, and the like that profit is all that really matters.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">I've lived in Africa. My uncle was a farmer there and he had to close down his farm because South Africa was subsidizing certain farms that produce good all Corp foods from the wonder-havens such as spar. The country where I lived hardly manages to produce its own food now and I foresee a grim future if ever its food imports are threatened.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">I dont blame the cooperates alone and I dont believe in conspiracies, there are enough (actually way more than enough) economists and financial analysts in the world to create models, and simulations with computers, to find economic structures that would eliminate imbalances and pull the rug from under the feet of poverty for all time. This model would, of course, have to be dynamic and capable of evolving otherwise it would be as useless as the one we have now.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">I am a Bahai, and as a Bahai this is one of the things that we are trying to do, of course this would first mean that greed would have to be removed otherwise the system would be doomed to fail. The challenge now (I love the way he put it in his movie) is meet--the people of all the world must unite, be educated--in solving the worlds problems together, discuss, forget religious differences, partisan politics, power grabbing, materialism, and all the things that inhibit us collectively from reaching a social enlightenment the Buddha would marvel at.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">On a final note I know this is long sorry. There is this note in the bible that says in paraphrase (Jesus shall in those days dwell on earth). Christians hold this to mean that the historical figure shall descend from heaven and dwell among men. I think it means that society shall have the individual capacity to realise truth for themselves and they shall dwell with truth and truth with them. Truth (not meaning the dogmatic views held by certain Christians of today) but scientific, philosophical, spiritual realization, like the fruit of all knowledge, shall be like a flower in humanities hand.</span></div></blockquote><div><b>My reply:</b></div><div><br /></div><div>I haven't studied economics, but I'm old enough to know a little about a lot of easily understood things. I think we have poverty for a very simple reason: Our global economy is backwards. We are paid to work, when it would be wiser to arrange things so that we had to pay for the privilege of working. And we pay nothing for the very real negative impact each of us has on everyone else each time we consume something, go anywhere, or do pretty much anything. If we were not allowed to do that--to secretly steal from each other because the price we paid for things incorporated a payment to be distributed to everyone else--then there could be no poverty. The simple act of consuming far less than an equal share of our world's resources would simultaneously increase that person's income to above poverty level. There is simply no way for the wealthy to consume such a disproportionately large portion of the world's resources without an enormous hidden subsidy to make that possible.</div><div><br /></div><div>None of us pay the full price for the products and services we consume, and because of this, the more you consume the greater the subsidy that you enjoy. I see this as the reason for nearly all of our waste because it is the hidden subsidy that makes it waste in the first place. When it becomes cheaper to destructively harvest a resource from the environment than it is to recover that same resource from the waste stream the reason is always the same: the true owners of the resource, humanity, are not being paid for what is essentially the spending of the integrity of our shared biosphere to lower the cost of that input.</div><div><br /></div><div>The other problem with our version of capitalism is that the more successfully it works, the more rapidly it raises productivity. But the faster productivity rises, the harder it becomes to avoid a falling level of employment simply because less workers are needed to produce the same number of goods and workers can not be redeployed like capital can--there is a long lag time for them to be retrained for some other role in a newer industry. Even with adequate savings, a rising level of unemployment creates a vicious circle by lowering demand, causing more workers to be shed, and so on. I think real economists call this "the business cycle." I'm more knowledgeable about simple things--so I call it what it looks like to me--the unavoidable chaos introduced in any system that misuses positive feedback loops--like the vicious circle plaguing our implementation of capitalism. (Outside of rapid amplifications, like explosions, such things have a limited utility because they're so hopelessly hard to control.) The important thing to notice is that it doesn't take even one evil actor to create quite a lot of trauma. Why? Because the trauma is coming from the people doing the most good! The ones raising the level of productivity the fastest and most efficiently.</div><div><br /></div><div><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">Please understand that I'm talking about normal capitalism that we've more or less had for the past century or so. The stuff that's gone on in the last few years was a Krebs cycle of legalized fraud: buying insurance (which they call credit default swaps) from each other (which they call reputable institutions) to improve the quality of unrecoverable loan packages (which they had lots of confidence building names for, like CDOs.) so that they could be repackaged yet again. Investors diffuse in at every point in the cycle and the fee's fly out, like the enzymes of some sinister metabolism, to seek out and bind to the next politician--to potentially open up yet another pathway for exploitation. The mechanism harvests a great deal more of the "free equity" that investors contain than any prior strategy so it was very popular. The fix is to simply remove all of the mitochondria from all of those bankers. That should stop it. Of course, that would take ages even with the enormous and very motivated pool of free labor available for the task. So we'd better get started.</span></i></div><div><br /></div><div>People point to precisely this reason to condemn capitalism itself when it is only our subpar implementation that needs fixing. The wisdom of capitalism is genuine because it's lifted right out of nature. We know it can work like a charm because a much better implementation of capitalism created us from little more than a muddy mess and eons of bad weather. That's actually what capitalism should be a model of: evolution by natural selection. So why did we fuck up copying it in such a plainly foolish way as to engineer evil directly into it? The only reason I can find is because of our faith in god. That's what stops us from seeing the wisdom of a system that asks no one to work. It requires a fundamental shift in what you're willing to have faith in: The fruits of billions of years of evolution embodied in every human being, or a clumsy cognitive utility knife that helped our distant ancestors fashion explanations for the bumps in their nights.</div><div><br /></div><div>Guess what happens if you try to build a world on the sincerity of fables? People get hurt. Science doesn't work because smart people thought of it, but because much smarter people can't yet break it. Economics doesn't work well because no one is willing to fix the most broken parts of it because to do so requires such a radical change--literally turning it upside down in a way. It's political suicide to even think such a thing.</div><div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><i>My advice to all people who would put their faith in transcendental things rather than themselves is to find some living person you honestly believe is wiser than you and put your faith in them instead. Find a mentor and beg for mentence. Or delegate your decisions to them. There's just no way you won't be better off. We are the only ones who can make ourselves happy. But this is never a personal journey. Or a magical one. Even the great Newton had to be laborious hoisted up the shoulders of those giants by the mundane exertions of everyone else. And still he was tediously stolid in all the meetings!</i></span></div><div><br /></div><div>The morally righteous sorts are so blinded by the offense to their sense of decency or godliness involved in literally paying someone who doesn't wish to work for nothing more than staying out of trouble that it completely stops them from examining the strategy any farther. It is almost equivalent to suggesting that we outlaw work. They believe so few people would choose to work that the few who might could never feed us all. But this really can't happen for a bunch of reasons. We can't actually give people their full share because it would be way too much. They'll never get more than is necessary to create the parity of opportunity we believe all humans have an intrinsic right to: an amount sufficient for a large majority of them to eventually find productive employment. We already produce much more than it takes to do that for every person on earth.</div><div><br /></div><div>The irony is that there is not a single cent of theft in this strategy, (but there is trillions of dollars of it in the economy we have now.) There is no transfer of wealth from a working Peter to pay a Paul who choses to spend his life playing while on the public dole. Paul is only spending the exact same income that Peter gets for <i>free</i> as well: one share of the dollar value of the calculated <i>negative impact</i> of all humanity. I actually think such a system would stymie Paul's sort of economic disenfranchisement. Without the stigma of contempt and sense of worthlessness that comes from having to beg for sustenance, Paul is far more likely to eventually discover something that stirs his passions. Lots of people who thought they hated work don't seem to last very long after they retire. Work really isn't about money and never was. It's what a human simply must do occasionally to sustain their sense of self-worth. Work is the original mind-altering drug that makes us think more highly of ourselves. The odds that large numbers of us could easily live without it are zero. We might work a hell of a lot less than we do now, on average. But that's pretty much unavoidable if productivity continues to rise and population doesn't keep pace no matter what we do.</div><div><br /></div><div>This simple change, from being paid to work, to a system where we pay for the privilege of working has consequences that address the major problems facing modern corporations in a most elegant way: by perfectly aligning the interests of all parties in an enterprise; employees, employer, <i>and everyone else</i>. The very concept of being an employee disappears--labor isn't bought, jobs are sold. Unions become superfluous. The very nature of entrepreneurship changes from trying to buy enough land, labor, and capital to generate an even larger revenue, to designing a compelling enough enterprise to cause a group of workers and investors to adopt it. The profit it generates just isn't likely to be as important to them. Doing something fantastic or fun or beneficial is. Their business model still has to work. But it doesn't have to make any profit and might even sustain small losses every single year without ever going bankrupt. Money is intangible and not terribly easy to spend wisely. But the reward of doing something that makes you feel good about yourself couldn't be more tangible, moving, or addictive.</div><div><br /></div><div>This is the most crucial property of this whole strategy and explains why this approach promises to be so wholesome. Workers won't wish to be part of an enterprise that basically just makes tchotchkes for nitwits, or offer services you're better off without. A lot of crime and vice will disappear because it will no longer be a person's only option. The underground economy would suffer the most. The religious industry should be the most interesting, because we'll finally find out if hardship sells god. In a world where there is nothing to stop you from dedicating your life to your church I'll bet it looses some appeal. But maybe I'm just dead wrong and huge numbers of people will leave work to dedicate their time to various charities. But they won't be making soup or sheltering the homeless. They might become educators. How bad could that be?</div><div><br /></div><div>You might be wondering how we get there from here. Get rid of the minimum wage and start redressing the externality associated with using the world's resources as I described above is all it will take. As we gradually increase the value attributed to the resources used each year, the business models that depend on cheap resources will no longer work. The prices of things we don't really need will rise as the prices for things like food, energy, health care, and shelter fall.</div><div><br /></div><div>Things that are enormously wasteful, but very convenient will be the luxuries we probably loose first, like lots of packaging. Shipping will decline because the economies of scale achieved through centralized manufacture and distribution are probably only reflections of the subsidy presently enjoyed by shipping firms who don't have to pay us back for their enormous environmental footprint. But the point is that we can make this change very gradual and even backup when we need to if we find ourselves going too fast. The value we choose to assign to each <i>unit of resource</i> is completely arbitrary, and can be chosen to be just enough to fund a minimalist lifestyle for those that choose not to work.</div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><object width="446" height="326"><param name="movie" value="http://video.ted.com/assets/player/swf/EmbedPlayer.swf"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true" /><param name="wmode" value="transparent"></param><param name="bgColor" value="#ffffff"></param> <param name="flashvars" value="vu=http://video.ted.com/talks/dynamic/DanielPink_2009G-medium.flv&su=http://images.ted.com/images/ted/tedindex/embed-posters/DanielPink-2009G.embed_thumbnail.jpg&vw=432&vh=240&ap=0&ti=618&introDuration=16500&adDuration=4000&postAdDuration=2000&adKeys=talk=dan_pink_on_motivation;year=2009;theme=speaking_at_tedglobal2009;theme=not_business_as_usual;theme=the_creative_spark;theme=new_on_ted_com;event=TEDGlobal+2009;&preAdTag=tconf.ted/embed;tile=1;sz=512x288;" /><embed src="http://video.ted.com/assets/player/swf/EmbedPlayer.swf" pluginspace="http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" wmode="transparent" bgColor="#ffffff" width="446" height="326" allowFullScreen="true" flashvars="vu=http://video.ted.com/talks/dynamic/DanielPink_2009G-medium.flv&su=http://images.ted.com/images/ted/tedindex/embed-posters/DanielPink-2009G.embed_thumbnail.jpg&vw=432&vh=240&ap=0&ti=618&introDuration=16500&adDuration=4000&postAdDuration=2000&adKeys=talk=dan_pink_on_motivation;year=2009;theme=speaking_at_tedglobal2009;theme=not_business_as_usual;theme=the_creative_spark;theme=new_on_ted_com;event=TEDGlobal+2009;"></embed></object>ananiashttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08090478687630964605noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5510167243999608617.post-13927659740769119842009-08-27T12:48:00.000-07:002009-08-27T13:33:04.488-07:00Picking up your own footprints<ul><li>We don't want to rob Peter to pay Paul.</li><li>We don't want to see Paul without food, clothing, shelter, and now health care apparently. (<i>I suppose a job will be next.</i>)</li><li>We especially don't want to reward laziness, recklessness, or in any way remove Paul's intrinsic responsibility to take care of his own.</li></ul>On it's own, this poses quite a dilemma. Obviously we're willing to borrow enough from Peter to ensure Paul enjoys a parity of opportunity--a more than fair chance to discover a self-sustaining role in our society. This is justified as simply maximizing Paul's potential to become a productive member of society. We can even calculate the minimum amount we should be willing to invest (<i>the loan amount that would be fairly repaid by the average person's share of GDP over their lifetime</i>.)<br /><br />Also obvious is the fact that Paul is unlikely to simply die without the basics, but will obtain them via some means that creates victims out of some of the rest of us. This seems equally irresponsible because it effectively dumps what is a problem facing all of society onto the handful of people who end up being victims (typically the most vulnerable among us.)<br /><br />Even worse, it undermines our ability to do justice at all. If you force someone to steal in order to survive, and treat them as you do someone who steals out of greed, then all you've really accomplished is to tarnish the credibility of society itself. It actually forces us take the law into our own hands. (<i>I think it might explain why people reach for a gun for protection before an exit strategy. Hostility may be a natural reaction to a needlessly unjust world. I know it makes me mad.</i>)<br /><br />While at the same time, we're looking for a way to make it harder to put a carbon dioxide molecule into the air, or to use water, energy, or any resource wastefully. We've invented some ad hoc strategies to deal with it, from tiered rates to all manner of politically charged allocation formula. But there's one strategy no one seems to mention which is odd because it seems the most obvious, most fair, and offers the most benefits.<br /><br />Suppose we considered the pollution absorbing capacity of our biosphere to be something that we all owned equal shares in. If you used more than your share of any resource you would essentially be buying up someone else's share of that resource in the course of doing so. The reason to do this isn't because it elegantly solves the problem of funding the Paul's that can't cut it. <b>The reason to do this is because it is necessary to be fair</b>. We really do all share the air we breathe; the quality of our environment is a resource people are free to spend more than their equal share of without actually redressing the miniscule loss everyone else experiences as a consequence. This approach kills a whole flock of birds--not just the too poor and the too rich. (<i>Another example of this is the airwaves. We are the only reason they have value; that is why we each deserve an equal share of the revenue generated by leasing them.</i>)<br /><br />A feedback mechanism is necessary to create the selective pressure--the economic opportunity--to motivate discoveries of less impactive more mutualist lifestyles, products, and social structures. It places every economic entity, from giant multi-national to the lowliest citizen (<i>I'm sure we must have one by now</i>) in touch with their own footprint and with a perfectly equivalent incentive to reduce it. And it does so without taking a single dollar out of the private sector--although in practice it will appear to be a tax, it honestly isn't. Every penny is returned.<br /><br />Creating an income stream for everyone in the world in this way has some pretty nifty side effects. (<i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">Note that revenue generated by polluting the atmosphere in this scheme rightfully belongs to all people, not just Americans. But the revenue generated by most other things, from water to the airwaves, public lands, etc. belongs almost exclusively to Americans.</span></i>) This will at least partially subsidize foreign aid (<i>admittedly less than 1% of our budget, but every little bit helps.</i>) It proves we're serious about being accountable for our behavior as global citizens. It earns us the respect of individuals worldwide who will immediately grasp the fairness of it and put pressure other all government to copy the policy. It even promises more tools to both document human morbidity, mortality, and rights violations data; and to prevent it.<br /><br />Having a lifelong steady income stream that's inversely proportional to the impact of your lifestyle will have a vastly more dramatic effect on waste than higher prices via new taxes could. This is because there is a psychological incentive created by the awareness of where you stand with respect to average that will motivate people to <i>beat the system</i> by using less than their fair share and generating income from the scheme. People will not consume significantly less, just more wisely because for the first time there is a feedback loop they directly experience. The costs they cannot control today because they are collective costs to our whole society become direct costs they can and will control effortlessly. It even allows the wealthy to better enjoy their wealth knowing they are fairly redressing their huge footprint in doing so.<br /><br />No other approach could be as easily or painlessly phased in. This is because the amount these shares trade at is completely arbitrary and can be very gradually adjusted to create as much or little economic pressure as we like. Some will liken it to a wealth transfer scheme--because it will indeed result in a higher level of taxes for those who consume more resources and a lower level for those who consume less. But it has nothing to do with how wealthy they might be.<br /><br />I could list a lot more wonderful synergies this approach promises--from the means to make criminals fund their own incarceration, to better access for all to higher education. But this essay is already too long. And I never even got to the reason that's most important to me personally (an all too common predicament for Asperger victims:) <i><b>it is an essential part of any society that wishes to allow its citizens to treat their neighbors with genuine respect.</b></i>ananiashttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08090478687630964605noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5510167243999608617.post-54897538375685917162009-08-16T05:41:00.000-07:002009-08-16T06:10:51.414-07:00Religion could be our best inventionI believe religion is robbed of almost all of its utility by a single mistake made by its proponents: <span style="font-style:italic;">Their assertion that it's true.</span> Without that mistake it is an invitation to contemplate a genuinely fair and just world. A challenge for our species, the starting point in understanding the evolution of our values—the basis of our concepts of justice, fairness, freedom, and responsibility. And a single thread linking the very spirt of our species from distant past to uncertain future.<br /><br />This single mistake prevents religion from becoming a wonderful and useful tool to induce cooperation, kindness, and thoughtfulness throughout mankind. <i>Even worse, it turns religion into it's own opposite, and history is littered with the horrible consequences that prove this</i>. Searching for the god that we know doesn't exist is a pretty good description of what the most basic sciences are trying to do. That statement is almost flatly nonsensical, but I get the feeling from my study of science that almost all scientists are atheists, yet also can't help but have some notion of an underlying order and deep intelligence because the sheer beauty and outrageous elegance of our universe just seems to imply it. They look for beautiful and elegant theories rather than simply trying to fit the data for this reason. They aren't satisfied with today's standard model partly because it isn't as beautiful as they'd expected it to be.<br /><br />Correct that single mistake and religion becomes a true and beautiful part of science. The study of human values, passions, and the search for that which is sacred by its nature <i>(which I would argue is actually law, and only law. But that's off the point.)</i> We need a god like we need the square root of negative one. But there is no number, either positive, zero, or negative, that when multiplied by itself gives negative one. Nonetheless, just by claiming there is such a beast, and using it, we can correctly solve a vast panoply of hard problems that could not be understood without that screwy figment of our imagination. <i>That is real magic.</i> The magic of imagination can have a power which is very real and tangible, and not the least bit impaired by our knowledge that it's only a metaphysical device, not a physical reality. Just because something is admittedly imaginary doesn't seem to limit it's utility—quite the contrary. Maybe you have to be imaginary to accomplish supernatural feats. Obviously nothing real could. Why can't imaginary things be useful, powerful, and worthy of knowing well? It isn't really possible to know something powerful very well without worshipping it in the most sincere sense.<br /><br />Without the single mistaken claim, the shift moves from trying to know god, to trying to discover godliness. That's a crucial difference. We know what the former approach leads to. But consider how useful the search for godliness is, for it puts us in the position of having to think about creating a just and fair society. It lures us to see the consequences of our actions, evaluate the impact we have on each other, our children's future, etc. It leads us to forms of cooperation, measurement, and fairness. <i>It forces religion into the very role it had originally intended to achieve: the most competent and genuine technology for discovering a very meaningful, fulfilling, and enjoyable lifestyle.</i> And it gets there honestly—by making a legitimate science out of measuring a myriad of the most important things that are presently poorly or haphazardly measured, like human happiness, the quality of relationships, the environment created for children, etc.<br /><br />By searching for godliness, instead of trying to better know the god of our ancestors, we're more apt to become better ourselves at noticing mutualistic solutions to problems rather than self-centered ones. Instead of teaching people that god wants them to love their neighbors, it asks us how we might engineer our society so that there is no need to ask. So that the very geometry of our economy and social structures make our utility to each other readily apparent—filled our lives with opportunities to cooperate rather than compete as it does now.<br /><br />Converting religions into different approaches to a search for the mostly godly ways we can imagine would probably offend some of its adherents, but I think most would be deeply intrigued. If the utility really does come from faith, then it doesn't really matter whether god is real or not. <i>Placebos are better than drugs if they work</i>. A god that we know is imaginary, actually can be all of the things we assume God is. A faith that there is a means to empower every human born with the capacity to achieve a oneness of heart and spirit with the rest of humanity is worth working towards. Why not take it more seriously? Why not approach the challenge as we do everything else we're serious about accomplishing, using every tool and technique we've discovered in carefully measured and directed searching?<br /><br />It really is impossible not to sin—not to have any negative impact on those around you, for example. What matters in that case is whether we'll take the steps to deal with it. If religion was a search for the economy that best redressed the intrinsic consequences of our choices, both positive and negative, then how could it lead us anywhere but towards the deepest mutualism, most symbiotic products, lifestyles, and perspectives. How could it leave us with anything but love and respect for each other, as well as for the imaginary god we realize is worth serving, and finally know why.ananiashttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08090478687630964605noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5510167243999608617.post-61628804999126428832009-08-05T00:08:00.000-07:002009-08-07T11:15:14.814-07:00Property impairment poker<div style="text-align: left;">I've been trying to find ways to better illustrate an alternative approach to taxation when one popped up on television: my city is beginning another round of what appears to be a game of <i>property impairment poker</i>. It consists of picking the winning hand of property rights rhetoric to determine whether to issue another <a href="#cup4" title="related info about these permits">Conditional Use Permit</a>. This time the unit is in a <a href="http://local.yahoo.com/info-20554671-bahia-vista-owners-association-incorporated-avalon?csz=Avalon%2C+CA+90704" title="Bahia Vista homeowners association">condominium complex</a> where nearly two thirds of the units already have permits.</div><blockquote><div style="text-align: left;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">Like many cities in America, we broadcast our city council meetings so that residents can watch from home. Because Avalon is so small, it's easy to just walk up there and join the meeting if you see something you want to comment on. So when no one seemed to have a straightforward way to reach a decision, I decided to walk in and offer a rather rambling and fragmented summary of what I explain below.</span></i></div></blockquote><div><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_eNHbm0wWxG4/SnlKWLiuMuI/AAAAAAAAACw/5PDCbee2ra8/s1600-h/avalon+city+council.jpg" style="text-decoration: none;"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 122px;" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_eNHbm0wWxG4/SnlKWLiuMuI/AAAAAAAAACw/5PDCbee2ra8/s320/avalon+city+council.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5366402175904658146" /></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'lucida grande';"><div style="text-align: center;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">Avalon's city council reviews each player's </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">hand</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"> (</span><a href="http://ecatalina.com/city-council-8-4-09-video.html" title="Avalon's August 4th, 2008 council meeting, I'm up at 105"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">seek-able video</span></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">)</span></div></span></div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div>It's an interesting issue to me because it represents an opportunity to use the tax code to fairly resolve a conflict of interests between neighbors in a community. It is to everyone's benefit that all property be as useful as possible because that maximizes its value. In a resort community, like Avalon, this means a substantial fraction of residential properties are vacation homes owned by people who use them infrequently and rent them out like timeshares between those visits.</div><div><br /></div><div>At the same time there are others who live here year round. Obviously the folks who come here to vacation are, well, on vacation. They're apt to party rather late into the night, wake up early to fish or hike, and generate a far greater disturbance than any normal use of that residence would. That's the conflict; allowing one person to use their property in a commercial way has an unavoidable <a href="#cup1" title="my case for this effect">consequence</a> for nearby residents. Not letting them use it that way isn't fair either.</div><div><br /></div><div>Our state government did what I think is the right thing to address this issue. It granted each city the power to decide whether or not any particular residential unit is suitable for <a href="#cup2" title="more about what is presently done to address this">this sort of</a> commercial use and allows that use to be taxed. These two powers give a city government the means to regulate this sector of its economy.</div><div><br /></div><div>Prior to our electronic age, it would have been too expensive to employ the people necessary to measure the impact that this policy has on our community. Each event is a tiny inconvenience for very few people, the overhead of even reporting it is in most cases more of a hassle than the event itself. But that is no longer true. Pressing a single button on your phone and going back to sleep isn't much to ask. Nor is emailing a cell phone photo of some minor vandalism, trash, or other nuisance. Especially when you know its because your city is trying to measure the impact that their policies are having on you so they can pay you back for it.</div><div><br /></div><div>The <i>Transient Occupancy Tax</i> (TOT) is intended to repay the community for the additional costs it incurs from a more commercial use of its residential property. Part of doing that must include some redress of the additional cost to residents, not just their city. I can think of no other way that genuinely treats both forms of residential property rights (income generation and use as a residence) equally. Even if we assume we'll never be able to do an adequate job of resolving the conflict between residents and permit holders, this step is still necessary to avoid the exact situation we find ourselves in now--facing yet another contest with no real basis for evaluating whether a <a href="#cup3" title="more on this in the notes below">permit</a> should be granted or refused.</div><div><br /></div><div>If the city commits itself to using a portion of the TOT to measure and redress the actual impact the permitted units are having on residents then there is no reason why permits could not be issued by a completely automated process that didn't require anyone to judge a particular application. The map created by measuring the impact these units have will answer that question for us. It will tell us if there are any critical densities (where the impact starts to scale nonlinearly with the number of permits, peaks, or even declines.)</div><div><br /></div><div>Keeping track of these incidents and analyzing them periodically will allow us to estimate the true cost in dollars experienced by the residents most disturbed by these units and provide for repaying them. Whenever that cost is <i>less</i> than what the TOT generates to repay the neighbors, a permit should be granted. And wherever it is <i>more</i> the city should refuse the permit, but add the application to a list of those pending, and inform the applicant that they will be issued as soon as the TOT can be raised enough to fairly compensate the community.</div><div><br /></div><div>This approach gives the city council a fine degree of control over the sector without having to address the individual applications. The smaller the fraction of TOT they allocate to redressing its impact on residents, the fewer units will qualify for permits, the less revenue the city will receive from the TOT, and the less incentive managers have to police their clients. Conversely, allocating more to repay the residents would have an inverse effect, enabling more properties to qualify, increasing the incentive managers had to rent only to responsible clients, and increasing the revenue raised by the city.</div><div><br /></div><div>But best of all, this mechanism allows the city to automatically monitor all such units and maintain a map anyone can view to see the data. Such a map will give the homeowners associations and managers a greater incentive to become fiercely intolerant of rowdy clients and the basis to compete with each other more vigorously because such a clear measure of their performance is visible for all to see. Finally, it will create an objective basis for revoking permits that consistently generate the highest payments to neighbors. Perhaps all such permits should come with expiration dates or need periodic extensions.</div><div><br /></div><div><hr /><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:large;"><div style="text-align: center;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms', -webkit-fantasy;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style=" ;font-family:'trebuchet ms', fantasy;">Additional Comments, Notes, and Links to related information</span></div></span></div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';"><a name="cup1"></a><b>The impact on neighbors</b></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms', fantasy;"><b><br /></b></span></div><div>It seems unreasonable to expect residents to just endure this trauma. Yet it must be what we expect because we have no mechanism to redress such minor injustices as being repeatedly disturbed at odd hours by partying vacationers. But why not? Because when it happens frequently enough it can become a significant but difficult to quantify impairment of a residence. The only remedy, not issuing a permit, is too severe as well.</div><div><br /></div><div><i>This predicament effectively bars residents from any meaningful civil remedy and is the sort of needless systemic injustice that does a great deal more harm than we can notice.</i> Until you experience a repeated inconvenience like this first hand it is difficult to appreciate how much stress, frustration, and anxiety it can add to one's life. But much worse than that is the way it undermines our expectations of and respect for justice and our community itself. It diminishes our interest in even looking for genuine solutions to other problems too because so much about our infrastructure is unjust it hardly seems worth fixing tiny parts of it. And it makes adversarial relationships between residents and owners more likely simply because we neglected to redress the civil as well as civic externalities with our TOT. This is an extremely expensive and socially dysfunctional <i>dis-ease</i> to accept for lack of the small amount of prevention it would take to fix it.</div><div><br /></div><div>The bottom line is that to deny someone a permit may potentially cost the applicant thousands of dollars a year in lost income. While to grant one may potentially cost their neighbors a nuisance that has a very difficult to quantify cost that is easily undervalued. I think both of these options are simply unacceptably unfair and we must develop the means to better understand what effect this use of property has on all members of our community.</div><div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';"><a name="cup2"></a><b>What is being done isn't enough</b></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms', fantasy;"><b><br /></b></span></div><div>There is no doubt that the managers do their best to mitigate these problems by educating their clientele, posting rules, inviting complaints, and issuing 24 hour response numbers to residents. They live here too, and the sort of clients that are rowdy do more damage than they're worth in revenue, so they have similar interests in avoiding these problems. But none of these things compensate the folks for being repeatedly disturbed. <i>Instead, those nearby residents are effectively drafted into doing surveillance service for the managers; forced to notify the managers when unruly clients break their rules if they want anything done about it.</i> This is unreasonable to ask of someone in a residential neighborhood or housing unit--mainly because our local government could fix the problem with something like the mechanism I'm proposing.</div><div><br /></div><div>Suppose a thoughtful management company wanted to simply share a small fraction of the rental income from each unit with the neighbors as an acknowledgement of the impact and a sort of payment for their unavoidable role in helping to police them. I'm guessing a lot of us, and perhaps some of the the city council, would actually misinterpret that as a bribe. Or at least be deeply skeptical of their motives. It would most likely seem wasteful to their property owners and disadvantage that management company in competing for properties to manage. It is really only our local government itself that can mitigate the inevitable impairment the various properties experience as a consequence of its policies. Forcing the handful of residents most inconvenienced by this to suffer so that all of us can enjoy a larger economy is exactly the kind of thing our government is supposed to prevent. A just society would either fix or abolish it.</div><div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';"><a name="cup3"></a><b>Our goal is a parity of opportunity</b></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms', fantasy;"><b><br /></b></span></div><div>Suppose the city set aside a tiny portion of the Transient Occupancy Taxes collected to create both a more compelling incentive for managers to avoid the complaints, and a resource that can pay residents for the damages incurred.<b> </b> All the city needs is a <i>data gathering</i> answering machine or web site to log the complaints. At the end of each year the city council could review a summary of the events recorded that year and come up with fees for each type of incident that would redirect some portion of the refund due managers to those injured neighbors.</div><div><br /></div><div>The whole purpose of the TOT is to redress the extra costs the commercial use of residential property imposes on the city, but it does nothing to redress similar costs faced by the nearby residents. The very purpose of government is to protect our rights. The means to do so is available and the consequences of not doing so seem very significant:</div><div><ul><li>an unavoidable nuisance befalls a very few members of our community</li><li>a great deal of our city council and staff's time is consumed to evaluate each application</li><li>a capricious, complicated, and expensive process awaits property owners seeking permits.</li></ul></div><div>By setting aside a small portion of the TOT revenue to use as I describe, the city ensures it will collect the data needed to craft sensible and mechanical guidelines for evaluating permit requests. It gives the city a measure of the impact of different concentrations of transient housing, permits a more objective evaluation of the performance of management firms, and generates a map of the units most affected. These are the tools needed to craft a fair and objective mechanism to resolve these conflicts in property rights.</div><div><br /></div><div>I'll bet the size of the cheque that affected residents end up receiving isn't as important as the knowledge that our city is tracking their complaints. Even if it was only a letter summarizing the impact on that resident and how it compares to the average it would go a long way towards making them feel heard, acknowledged, and offer hope that a fairer solution is in the works.</div><div><br /></div><div>We should have a strategy that promises to get continuously better at mitigating the impact over the long term. We must convince residents that we are seriously committed to engineering solutions that protect all of our rights as efficiently and effectively as possible. Over a ten year period, I believe this approach will lead us to a permanent, simple, and extremely fair infrastructure for everyone involved. I'm only 54. But I've already noticed that people make a lot more progress when they cooperate rather than compete. Wise leadership finds a way to get everyone on the same team fighting the same enemy--in this case its the injustice. I believe this approach better aligns the interests of both the residents and managers.</div><div><br /></div><div><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal; "><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';"><b>Are there any reasonable objections?</b></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms', fantasy;"><b><br /></b></span></div></span></b></div><div>In a discussion of this issue with someone after the meeting, he made the point that someone would have no recourse in dealing with a neighbor who's young children create a similar noise problem much more frequently. <i>(I should note that his kids can scream at a pitch and volume that would easily drown out a smoke detector.)</i> I don't regard this as a reasonable challenge for a number of reasons. Most notably that the TOT exposure is in addition to the normal noise of living in a small community of very densely packed housing.</div><div><br /></div><div>But that example seems particularly inappropriate because children represent a tremendous positive externality as well--they are our future and, whether we realize, acknowledge, or even resent it--we are all part of their education. Thus we have a <i>completely natural obligation</i> to all children as a consequence of being adult human beings and that includes dealing patiently with issues like the noise they make. Even in the case of a recklessly inconsiderate adult neighbor, the <i>common</i> challenge we all face as members of a community to find ways to get along well with our neighbors seems incomparable to the <i>uncommon</i> burden of being forced to simply accept the consequences of the commercialization of adjacent housing.</div><div><br /></div><div>His other objection was that it would encourage people to complain just for the compensation, and over issues they would otherwise not have considered a nuisance. I suspect this is true to some extent but would both fall off rapidly with time, and tend to reveal the unreasonable residents rather than become an intractable problem. <i>(The city could discourage them by adopting a policy that penalized false reports by withholding the funds that person would have earned for their legitimate complaints.)</i> I think there are also many people who don't bother to complain now because they don't like being nuisances themselves, and it doesn't really help--the noise generated by a security response might even extend the duration of a disturbance, and will almost certainly anger the visitors being interrupted and increase the potential for vandalism. A phone number where residents could leave a message (or send an email, text, or photo from a phone) without having to notify the managements security would give the city a much better idea of exactly how much impact the transient rentals are having on residents, as well as the tools needed to effectively redress that impact.</div><div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';"><a name="cup4"></a><b>Related Information</b></span></div><div><ul><li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';"><a href="http://cityofavalon.com/" title="The city's official web page">City of Avalon</a></span></span></li><li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms', -webkit-fantasy;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><a href="http://ecatalina.com/video.html" title="eCatalina's video library">Council Meetings and other videos</a></span></span></li><li><a href="http://www.cipoa.com/" title="For the perspective and testimonials of CUP owners"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';">Catalina Island Property Owners Association</span></span></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';"> (CIPOA)</span></span></li><li><a href="http://www.catalinavacations.com/" title="A rental property management company serving Avalon"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';">Catalina Island Vacation Rentals, Inc.</span></span></a></li><li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';"><a href="http://www.catalinagetawayrentals.com/" title="Another rental property management company serving Avalon">Catalina Getaway Rentals</a></span></span></li><li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms', fantasy;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><a href="http://www.tripadvisor.com/VacationRentals-g102873-Reviews-Catalina_Island_California-Vacation_Rentals.html" title="A general purpose rental finder and review source">tripadvisor</a> (reviews of vacation rentals)</span></span></li><li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'trebuchet ms';">California Revenue and Taxation Code <a href="http://law.justia.com/california/codes/rtc/7280-7283.51.html" title="The official guidelines for transient occupancy taxes">Sections 7280-7283.51</a></span></span></li></ul></div>ananiashttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08090478687630964605noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5510167243999608617.post-84557879283373912782009-07-23T10:30:00.000-07:002009-07-23T14:42:53.326-07:00Using taxes to earn respect<div>Taxation is the single most tangible aspect of government in most of our lives. Is it any wonder we've got a love-hate relationship with our nation--loving the theory while hating the implementation? It seems insane to me because it appears so needless and harms us so much. We have the know how to reverse that merely by tweaking the geometry of our economy. Today we tax productivity the most, and consumption the least, but why? <i>Because by doing so we are throwing away the most powerful tool we have for evolving a more robust society. And by so recklessly and unfairly levying taxes we are needlessly alienating our own citizens and hindering the growth of our own economy and prosperity.</i></div><div><br /></div><div>Taxes are disincentives. They can't help but be discouraging. Given this single fact doesn't it suggest we should tax those things with large positive externalities (like productivity) less at the expense of taxing those things that have large negative externalities (like crime) more? The very success of our society completely depends on our governments ability to define and maintain a suitable marketplace, or foundation, for us to develop commerce. This is an essential part of any serious attempt to do that. <b>I want our leadership to connect the process of paying taxes to a new mechanism designed to protect our privacy and create a new income stream for us.</b> Because it is necessary and because it is fair.</div><div><br /></div><div>Taxing crime and our underground economy are easy things to accomplish in our modern world. Most of us both receive and spend most of the money we ever control electronically. The system we use today gives the banks and merchants a great deal of information about us that they can and do use to look for ways to motivate us to spend more, at best. The steps our government has taken to protect us from this exploitation are so pathetically inept they do little but add insult to injury.</div><div><br /></div><div><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:large;">Defending our privacy and property</span></b></div><div><br /></div><div>But suppose our government allowed us to keep that information to ourselves. Suppose an agency of the government effectively stood between you and every entity you do business with. The seller gets no information from you other than what they actually need (usually just the fact that you paid,) and a code that identifies the transaction for all time. You get all of the information in a form that is completely accurate and verifiably unalterable after the fact. Rather than become a source of income for merchants, that information, or parts of it, can be sold by you in an open market of entities doing market research currently with information they purchase from merchants and banks, or by your doctor to get a sense of your lifestyle, recent travels, or other relevant data. And you also get a credit rating that is calculated by the government to open standards that academia can continuously critique and refine.</div><div><br /></div><div>Why should our government do this? Because only it can. Because only it is in a position to craft legislation that defines such an organization in a way that convinces us it can't be abused, even by our own government. Only it can declare such a payment scheme as legal tender. And only it has the responsibility to protect our property as citizens in the first place. It currently fails badly at this, if not in a technical sense, at least in spirit. We constantly fall prey to the present accumulation of information about us by private enterprises with nothing but lip service paid to redress it. Creating an artifact to represent us in commerce is a simple, cheap, and very robust way to fix that problem immediately. It does more as well, from protecting us from pricing errors and shoddy merchants, to giving us a lot of insight on whether warranty coverage is worth buying, for example.</div><div><br /></div><div><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:large;">Constructive taxation</span></b></div><div><br /></div><div>It's one of the reasons I think <a href="http://ananiasacts.blogspot.com/2009/07/who-we-should-tax-first.html">taxing the black market</a> is such a good idea, because to do it requires that a number of other protections, like the above, be engineered into the economy all of which promise to leave us with significantly less overhead by adding a lot of negative and positive feedback in logical ways. By taking this approach to taxation we can vastly simplify the overhead necessary to pay for things (for both seller and buyer) while ensuring better information is collected and that no party (buyer, seller, or government) can be as easily defrauded or exploited.</div><div><br /></div><div>I've mentioned several things in this blog that have this property, like our medical records, that are handled somewhat recklessly today for mostly historical reasons. This is a mechanism similar to the <a href="http://ananiasacts.blogspot.com/2009/06/single-transactor-system.html">universal health care transactor</a> I proposed to protect and maintain the privacy and integrity of our medical records and reduce the overhead of providing medical care. Throwing in our consumption data benefits everyone significantly. It gives medical researchers more information to look for correlations between lifestyle and health. It makes the information we have to sell more valuable to scientists, market researchers, and most of all us.</div><div><br /></div><div>You might wonder why I'm so anxious to associate taxation with protecting your privacy. <b>It's because I believe it's the right place to begin reforming the very soul of taxation--how we experience it.</b> I want it to become something we take great pride in and feel wonderful about paying. I think the government should be giving us awards each time we achieve a new milestone in overall taxes paid. Starting with something as simple as a t-shirt proclaiming that a grateful nation thanks you for your first $10,000 contribution, to an annual parade for whomever manages to pay the most taxes concluding with an honorary dinner at The White House. I think there should be an academic industry that studies nothing but the externalities created by the way our taxes are apportioned and how perfectly they are collected, and a department of government independent of all the others for adjusting the tax code to match spending. It is an inherent conflict of interest to allow the people deciding what and how to spend to also decide where to get the funds. That seems unwise because it can only pollute the perspective they need to objectively decide what and how to spend. Only an independent and transparent agency is fit to determine how to most fairly levy the tax burden. It's an ongoing academic issue that can only be refined via careful study.</div><div><br /></div><div><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:large;">A bill for services</span></b></div><div><br /></div><div><b>The deep fix for taxation is to transform it from a vague cloud that funds government into a bundle of connections that link benefits with the party enjoying them in ways we can explore and verify.</b> This gives us so much more than the mere ability to feel better about paying them--it helps us make lifestyle choices and craft enterprises that are more inherently synergistic. It creates a whole new way to address issues like health care, social security, and welfare. It also forces government to come clean about how it uses it's non-tax revenue (which is probably a lot more than you might expect, easily more than $500/person/year today.)</div><div><br /></div><div>The synergies go on. When all of these things are combined new opportunities are created. For example, with this approach the income from things like leasing the nations airwaves would ultimately become a credit in our tax accounts. For a minor it can do nothing but accumulate while compounding interest. This is an asset the state could use to fund incarceration of that individual should it become necessary, or to recover damages. Or it could fund a zero interest loan for education or to buy a home. It's a better way to incentivize good behavior from citizens; a carrot instead of a stick. It if was never allowed to go higher than what it would cost to purchase an insurance policy that covered your potential future liability to society, then it would become a source of income fastest to those of us who didn't get into trouble. And protect society from the cost of dealing with those that do.</div><div><br /></div><div><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:large;">Engendering love with respect</span></b></div><div><br /></div><div>When it is possible to see exactly how our taxes are apportioned, managed, and spent--in great detail--we will be a position to feel better about paying them. When we can see that the apportionment has been carefully crafted to be <i>as fair as we're capable of achieving</i> then I believe people will honestly feel good about paying them. And when we experience taxation via a mechanism that is creating an income stream for us and protecting our privacy, then I think we'll actually look forward to it as a sort of score--or measure of our value to those who don't know us.</div><div><br /></div><div>I believe a government that defines itself as being <i>of the people, by the people, and for the people</i> would realize that making all taxes voluntary is a relatively easy way to ensure that happens. And such a government would look for a way to make paying most taxes<i> collectively voluntary</i> simply because it realized that any government that isn't loved enough by its own citizens to compel them to pay for it really shouldn't last. This is a step towards unwinding the very need for as much government as we have now because it embeds some of the function of government into the process of just doing business.</div>ananiashttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08090478687630964605noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5510167243999608617.post-19857240147551364792009-07-18T19:51:00.000-07:002009-07-18T19:59:04.671-07:00Cornering rascals<div>I wish President Obama would realize that he needs to look for better ways to motivate congress. He needs to make it easier for us to directly pressure our legislature. Take health care for example. Congress's vested interest is to structure all legislation to best suit the industries that most support them. These are the ones that generate the most profits and will always be things like financial services, or insurance, and never things like health care.</div><div><br /></div><div>To overcome this tendency Obama must find a very straightforward way to measure their performance. In the case of health care reform this seems easy. Ask the <a href="http://www.gao.gov/recovery/bimonthly/index.php">GAO</a> for a pie chart that shows all of the things health care dollars are spent on; from doctors, nurses, and hospital administrators, to marketers, insurance brokers, financial analysts, lawyers, and lobbyists. Color every slice with either blue or red depending on whether it represents an activity that actually delivers health care. Put in on a prominent web site with the simple promise to veto any legislation that does not leave us with a significantly smaller red area--at least 25% smaller.</div><div><br /></div><div>Directly below it there should be two pie charts, one for each party, that represent how the allocation would change under the solutions they're each proposing (according to the GAO.) That would leave them with few options but to look for ways to outdo each other cutting the fat out of health care infrastructure or risk being replaced by people from the other team in the upcoming election. He should make it easy for us to email our representatives to let them know we're watching them via the web page and do indeed intend to replace them if they lose the contest.</div><div><br /></div><div>And he should advertise the site relentlessly begging us to let them know that this new mechanism is going to be steadily refined and gradually evolve into something that enables citizens to more objectively measure the performance of their elected representatives and find out what they are presently working on. He should challenge congress to do the same thing to him as well; find ways to objectively record the alternatives he faced for each choice made.</div><div><br /></div><div>Finally, don't clutter any site with a lot of distractions, like ads, pleas for campaign contributions, links to irrelevant affiliates or party propaganda, etc. Keep it simple, bipartisan, and deeply focused on the specific major issues presently before congress. If you give the American people a tight enough set of reins, I'm almost certain we could get some useful work out of those unbroken beasts on the hill.</div>ananiashttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08090478687630964605noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5510167243999608617.post-54876972618214496582009-07-16T23:38:00.000-07:002009-07-17T05:57:18.826-07:00Let's call it The Civilitary<div>Every year there are natural disasters and accidents all over our world that do more damage to lives and property than any other kind of external threat. Yet we spend a tiny fraction of what we spend on the military to mitigate that far greater exposure. And many of those lives are lost simply because we cannot respond massively enough, quickly enough, or lack the logistics, technology, or equipment necessary to prevent it.</div><div><br /></div><div>At the same time we have a world of nations growing ever more intwined and interdependent economically after having emerged from a long competitive adolescence of imperialism, nationalism, and xenophobia. They seem today more like a group of young adults impatient to thrive. There is a lot of rivalry, past grudges, and ideological bickering still going on, but its as if they've realized the only lasting way to settle their differences is to prepare to make some compromises and work them out. Fighting terrorism is police work; it should never be perceived as war because that legitimizes it as a tactic when it is nothing but a heinous crime. (If you hadn't noticed, the bushwhack blowback boondoggle backfired. Badly.)</div><div><br /></div><div>We are presently looking for clever ways to collectively rid ourselves of the most aggressive and indiscriminate weapons because they honestly have no real utility for any nation anymore. (It may only be because killing enemies indiscriminately loses some appeal when they become customers, but lets count our lucky stars no matter what the reason!)</div><div><br /></div><div>The first generation of kids to have grown up with the internet are starting to emerge into to a world with far less respect for the ideological baggage of their cultures. They see a world filled with avenues for creativity, enterprise, and discovery rather than sufficient reasons for conflict or hatred.</div><div><br /></div><div>And we have a military-industrial complex that represents an enormously valuable intellectual property--a highly organized, coordinated, and deeply empowered team that could build a lot more than weapons. They could apply that expertise to engineering ways to save lives just as easily as take them. Well, okay, so maybe it's not just as easy. They'll still rise to the challenge and we'll have a more valuable <i>MIC</i> after they've mastered engineering things like levees that can be setup in minutes, spill containment and recovery systems, emergency structure reinforcement, massive rescue/evacuation and temporary housing deployment, mine collapse recovery equipment, etc. Whatever they can imagine that would be useful to save lives or property.</div><div><br /></div><div>We should be looking for ways to create more meaningful connections between the people of all these nations and I started this blog by noting one of them: the need for an <a href="http://ananiasacts.blogspot.com/2009/06/our-response-to-iranian-election-crisis.html">independent international organization</a> to hold all <i>free</i> elections. (I think we need it here in America just as much as Iran apparently does--I'm not convinced our elections are completely kosher.) And if we're going to build an organization that we trust enough to conduct our elections, doesn't it make sense to add emergency response and recovery as well?</div><div><br /></div><div>The world as a whole can afford a far better response capability than any single nation. There is no easier time to overcome one's prejudices than during an emergency when something clicks and people instantly morph into something more like ants--willing to give their all to work together with someone they despised just a moment earlier. It's an amazing thing, an emergency. Because a bond formed that way doesn't break very easily. The respect earned in those moments seems to permanently undermine the ability to restore any prior alienation.</div><div><br /></div><div>There has never been a time better suited to form an organization like the civilitary I'm trying to describe here. A sort of mirror image of the military. Instead of a bunch of competing enterprises looking for the best ways to defeat each other, they are one cooperating team of people independent of all nations and looking to protect mankind as a whole. I imagine it would be more rigorous, lower paying, and even riskier than a military career. Because we won't need a lot to attract people. A civilitary would most likely become the most sought after employment there is because of the enormous honor that serving in and later being a veteran of it would convey. If there is honor in being willing to die to defend your nation by preparing and standing ready to fight its human enemies, there must be more in taking the same steps to defend all nations and people against the many natural enemies our world periodically manufactures. I'm betting that engineering better ways to save lives is just a lot more fun than looking for more efficient ways to destroy them.</div><div><br /></div><div>I see it as an enterprise designed to train and deploy some fraction of the world's young adults for two to six years after high school, keeping the best of them for permanent roles. For them it's an unbelievable chance to travel around the world, get to know many cultures from the perspective of an ambassador of aid, form lasting ties with other young people from all over the world, and learn skills that will remain useful all their lives. For the rest of us it's a better solution to a threat we all face every day. We benefit the most by having a lot more response for the same or lower cost. We benefit from the cross pollination of perspectives, ideas, and cultures that the returning veterans will bring back with them. There will be more marriages between peoples from different nations, and a steadily growing awareness of the entire community of mankind by all nations. It would be a large step towards engineering a new world order that finds cooperation enormously easier than conflict.</div><div><br /></div><div>Lastly, it generates a deep and meaningful hope across mankind just by proposing it. And at a time when such a jolt would do a lot all by itself to stimulate the world's gloomy economies and spark a more intense flame to illuminate other opportunities to engineer peace. It would be many months before talks could even begin to flesh out the form and legal status of such an organization. And many years before all the treaties and physical infrastructure necessary to deploy it could be ready. But from day one the economic impact would kick in, from simply uplifting the spirits of everyone on earth, to mobilizing the entire world's current rescue and recovery infrastructure into studying how to make such a transition. And periodic stories of the progress would renew that optimism throughout its development.</div><div><br /></div><div>The crisis in Iran proved something fundamental has already changed about our world--those lines you see on the map are beginning to fade. The vast bulk of humanity is growing weary of all the many ways our ancestors found to artificially divide us. They can see we're all the same. We all just want the opportunity to live in peace and pursue our dreams. Let's seize the genuine reasons we have to work together by more aggressively developing them.</div>ananiashttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08090478687630964605noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5510167243999608617.post-2212909714060147062009-07-16T12:36:00.000-07:002009-08-04T10:11:24.184-07:00My mother's main meme<div><blockquote>“<i>Everything brings about its own opposite</i>”</blockquote></div><div>That single idea pretty much sums up my mother's entire philosophy. I was about six or seven when I first heard it, and had no idea what the hell it could mean. But there was definitely something very special about that particular bit of knowledge and somehow that was communicated to me by the way she said it. I can't remember how I knew it was enormously real and significant to her, like a treasure. I just did.</div><br /><div><table class="image"><tbody></tbody><caption align="bottom" class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">Her home always has fresh flowers.</caption><tbody><tr><td><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_eNHbm0wWxG4/SmEXOm8Z2BI/AAAAAAAAACQ/7Ol_1-SQH6E/s1600-h/P1010010.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 300px; height: 400px;" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_eNHbm0wWxG4/SmEXOm8Z2BI/AAAAAAAAACQ/7Ol_1-SQH6E/s400/P1010010.jpg" border="0" alt="Sixteen pink roses on the end of a single stem all in bloom simultaneously." id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5359590571287107602" /></a></td></tr></tbody></table><br /></div><div>I remember how much it bothered me though. How can you get anywhere if everything you head towards leaves you somewhere you didn't want to go? It seemed so unfair and irrational for the world to be this way. How could my mother drop a bomb like this so casually? I'm sure I didn't know about the word cryptic at that age, but I can still remember the resentment created by feeling short changed by all of her explanations. I could tell this bothered her more than me too. Sometimes I think my mother's greatest burden is that she knows so much more than she knows how to say.</div><div><br /></div><div>She said it so often too, offered usually as an answer to some question I'd asked that most parents answered with <i>god only knows</i>. I did like her answer better than what essentially means <i>don't bother asking because no one will ever know</i>. And my interpretation of what it meant gradually took shape--it was a template that I could use to explain many things; like a <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NAND_logic">NAND gate</a> for the phenomenological.</div><div><br /></div><div>I noticed the process at work almost everywhere I looked for it. From our perspective, we own our stuff and totally control it. But from our stuff's perspective, it owns us in more or less the same way. We'll do what we must to clean, maintain, house, protect, and utilize our stuff all on its terms. Likewise, <i>and far more sobering to contemplate,</i> with what we think we know. It seems to own us far more than we own it--it shapes the way we see things, what we'll choose to do, what will be interesting to us, all sorts of things. We are, in a very real way, the unwitting robots of whatever knowledge has taken up residence in our brains.</div><div><br /></div><div>It is probably going to take many months or years of blogging to fully reveal the enormous impact those six words had on my life. That poem on the right was written in my late teens. But I didn't even see the connection when I wrote it. The meme had already buried itself so deeply in my consciousness that I didn't even notice the way it was organizing all the knowledge in my head. Or how it had drifted to accommodate everything I had learned. Today it's more like a loose sort of faith that most things really are deeply entangled with their opposites, and that looking for those relationships is usually a fruitful approach for understanding something well enough to model in your minds' eye. It is the most useful heuristic I know.</div><div><br /></div><div><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_eNHbm0wWxG4/SmEsTOvEaFI/AAAAAAAAACo/7XIxEaYBUmI/s1600-h/P1010115.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 200px; height: 150px;" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_eNHbm0wWxG4/SmEsTOvEaFI/AAAAAAAAACo/7XIxEaYBUmI/s200/P1010115.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5359613740432255058" /></a>But there was something even more wonderful and beautiful hidden unstated in that screwball meme and reflected in everything my mother did. Its the premise that explanations for everything exist and merely need to be discovered or deduced. And that they are fully understandable and very worthy of trying to understand. It more or less forces you to be as objectively observant as you can be. It's a lot easier to have the courage to keep looking for something very hard to find if you're absolutely certain it must be there. Just ask the folks at <a href="http://public.web.cern.ch/public/en/About/Mission-en.html">CERN</a>.</div><div><br /></div><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_eNHbm0wWxG4/SmEmyMwWW6I/AAAAAAAAACg/hdC9c6GQTGc/s1600-h/P5010652.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 240px;" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_eNHbm0wWxG4/SmEmyMwWW6I/AAAAAAAAACg/hdC9c6GQTGc/s320/P5010652.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5359607675406932898" /></a><div>I started this essay hoping to explain how to leverage the utility of a mechanism that taxes the underground economy into a gentle selective pressure that leaves everyone more predisposed to find an attractive productive niche for themselves in society, but ended up only explaining how my mom's main meme made me. (<i>They're probably opposites somehow!)</i></div><div><br /></div><div>I guess I must think you're entitled to know a lot more about me if I'm expecting you to take such unusual suggestions seriously. Her name is Elliette by the way. Most people know of her from the dresses she designed and manufactured for many years mostly under the <b>Miss Elliette</b> label. A <a href="http://www.google.com/search?q=Miss+Elliette">Google search</a> produced 3,640 references. If you ever need either a tomato, or a picture of a tomato, she's the lady to ask.</div><div><br /></div><div>After writing this, I asked her for some photos to put in it, and she balked out of modesty. Then, she sent me the photos above, pointing out how rare it is to have a single stem with sixteen roses all blooming simultaneously. Most of our ensuing conversation was about the flowers and tomatoes, and whether I could use the photo from the cover of her autobiography. I thought it better suited to a wikipedia entry about her company, which I plan to do when I get the facts and photos rounded up. Then yesterday someone else wrote about my mother in their <a href="http://horiwood.com/2009/08/02/the-best-tomatoes-in-la-home-grown-by-my-favorite-lady-of-fashion-in-beverly-hills-90210/">blog</a>. So I thought I should post this one now, rather than wait for a more typical photo of her since he's posted one.</div>ananiashttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08090478687630964605noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5510167243999608617.post-87174264872615435732009-07-15T23:03:00.000-07:002009-07-16T08:34:43.179-07:00Who we should tax first<div>Whomever said macroscopic things can't be entangled hasn't looked at our tax code. It is so ludicrously complex that it actually achieved independent conscious self awareness some years ago and the best we can do now is actually just fight with it. It wins every time too.</div><div><br /></div><div>Yet despite all that, and the best intentions of our wisest leadership under advisement from our finest minds over a period of many decades and we haven't even begun to tax that which is arguably the most important thing to tax. (I want to say <i>you're kidding me</i> but I'm the one writing this.) I want to scream it in their ears: <i><b>THE BLACK MARKET</b>. Tax that for a change.</i></div><div><br /></div><div>The Economist calculates that the world underground economy is worth $9 trillion, which is about 20% of the total. In 2000, the National Center for Policy Analysis (NCPA) estimated roughly one per dozen Americans earned a substantial part of their income underground. And that means we're each taxed about 9% more than we would be if those deadbeats just paid up.</div><div><br /></div><div>Well, I'd like to find a way to make crime pay. At least its taxes. And I think tax avoiders should be taxed at an even higher rate than voluntary taxpayers (seeing as they're criminals and we should probably try to discourage them.) Now you might think that if we do find a clever way to tax them they'll just start using a different currency or some commodity or other means of exchanging value to avoid the tax, after all, they're criminals. But that has fairly high costs and additional risks. As long as our <i>constructive tax</i> is somewhat less than that, they'll accept it as the cost of doing business and we'll have created an environment less favorable to underground economic activity without needing anything fancier than a little economic geometry.</div><div><br /></div><div>We have the technology and infrastructure already to support what is effectively an unreported income tax. Your assets are linked to your identity where the IRS maintains on oversimplified bank account for you. When you report enough income to leave you with three dollars, after the government takes their cut, it adds one dollar to your tax account. That account is used solely to pay the new unreported income tax which is a 33% tax on purchases. This all happens automatically for credit or debit card users. But even if you forget your wallet, and have to pay cash, the receipt would enable you to recover that money at a web site, even if you had to earn more income legitimately first before you could do so.</div><div><br /></div><div>The intent isn't to punish, merely to impose a fairly high tax on the underground economy which should lead to a lot less of it, and we won't have to be doubly injured by it, since it's at least paying something significant.</div><div><br /></div><div>Tourists, and anyone else not subject to US tax code would actually benefit as well because a more formal mechanism would be created to recover all their sales taxes as well as the new unreported income tax from their purchases. For those here illegally however life gets a whole lot more expensive.</div><div><br /></div><div>Now why is our government even thinking about taxing its honest citizens more when it hasn't even begun to tax the dishonest ones? Is this really such a radical idea? <i>Stuff like this makes me wonder if I really might be just plain crazy because it all seems to doable, reasonable, and wholly constructive to me. What stops stuff like this from happening?</i></div>ananiashttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08090478687630964605noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5510167243999608617.post-58602873788321488952009-07-14T23:56:00.000-07:002009-07-15T11:22:12.584-07:0025 Miles off the Coast of Indifference<div>If you haven't noticed already, I'm somewhat prone to spontaneous outbreaks of thoughtful musings about our nation, culture, and species. On one such occasion quite some time ago I must have emailed our state Senator, Barbara Boxer, because I received a letter from her office last Friday, July 10th informing me that a representative from her office would be in <a href="http://cityofavalon.com/">Avalon</a> and available for me to see between 11:00 and 12:30 today (Wednesday, July 15th.)</div><div><br /></div><div>I couldn't even remember what I'd complained about before, and don't even know if I have any basis for considering myself a part of the community just because I live in it. I don't get a paycheck from any employer here, nor own any part of any enterprise here, nor does any member of my family. I do own the home I'm living in. And am building another I hope to live in some day. (I was creamed by the collapse more than most so that's become a real challenge.) I have helped, or tried to, a few members of the community here with advice and loans and consider myself friends with many people here.</div><div><br /></div><div>Plus Avalon is an unusual place. Many of the locals have been here for literally generations. (You'd think they were shooting for speciation.) One company,<a href="http://www.visitcatalinaisland.com/"> The Santa Catalina Island Company</a>, dominates the community of Avalon because it owns most of the useful property in it (as well as every bit of the island that is not part of the <a href="http://www.catalinaconservancy.org/">Conservancy</a>.) Most of the residents seem to have a love-hate relationship with SCICO (pronounced <i>the island company</i>.) I think the love part comes from the fact that this would just be a rock without the Wrigley family wealth to keep it operating with losses year after year and it really is a beautiful place to wake up every day. I think the hate part comes from the fact that the Wrigley family wealth doesn't leak out a bit faster.</div><div><br /></div><div>It is therefore with some trepidation that I share the following letter I plan to give the representative from Senator Boxer's office later today because I don't really have standing to raise these issues. But I know people that do, and feel that someone should speak out about these issues because they really do affect us all. Even people who've never heard of Avalon or <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santa_Catalina_Island,_California">Santa Catalina Island</a>.</div><div><br /></div><div></div><blockquote><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana, fantasy;"><div>Greetings,</div><div><br /></div><div>I come before you today as a citizen of a community in economic crisis. Over the five years that I've lived here I've come to see why. Avalon suffers from a lack of the very lifeblood of capitalism--the opportunity to generate the goodwill value that is the hallmark of every successful enterprise.</div><div><br /></div><div>I believe this often unnoticed aspect of our capitalistic system is what makes a community special to the people who own and work in these enterprises. Without that chance, people living here really don't have the control over their destiny necessary to plan and invest in their community wholeheartedly. Instead of being owners of their community, they are forced to be more adversarial; doing their best to get what they can each month because next month may never come. (When a large fraction of your population has an exit strategy it is a sign that your community may have a systemic problem. Or an active volcano.)</div><div><br /></div><div>I am not trying to imply anything about the Santa Catalina Island Company (SCICO) except that by owning most of the commercial property it is difficult for them to avoid creating this situation. I know there are businesses here that are difficult or impossible to sell simply because they have no lease. I know the terms vary, and there are some leases, but it is usually just an initial lease for enough time to recoup construction costs. Most of the longstanding business seem to be month to month.</div><div><br /></div><div>A consequence is that most of the employees work for a company they aren't quite as free to openly criticize as our national ideals suggest they should be. And a great many others work for companies that depend on friendly relations with SCICO in lieu of a lease. None of them are here with me today, but I know of some that wish they could be. It simply isn't worth risking their business, or jobs, or working environment to complain about because they don't see a remedy.</div><div><br /></div><div>I want to make it clear that I've never even heard a rumor that SCICO abuses or does anything that might be considered exploitive of their enormous political and economic power here. I do not see them as villains in anything but the unavoidable consequences of their heritage and size. Avalon is like a lifeboat designed for 24 people. You could accommodate one or more people that weighed two to four times average by leaving some of the seats empty and balancing the load. But one person that weighs 10 to 20 times average renders the entire lifeboat unusable by everyone else regardless of how accommodating that huge person is struggling to be.</div><div><br /></div><div>A few years ago the Justice Department attempted to get Vons to sell the smaller of their two locations here because it determined they were exploiting the community. Vons has that monopoly still because no one could compete without having the other location and necessary other infrastructure it takes to operate both. I remember this well because I was part of a group bidding for the site to open a competing market. SCICO wasn't interested in selling the land, just a 6 year lease that would have made it difficult just to recoup the cost of redeveloping the site from a run down annex type location to a full market. The only reason we were even considering it was because we felt connected enough in the community to make up for the inherent disadvantages of competing with such a large and well established market.</div><div><br /></div><div>I believe the Justice Department missed the forest for the tree. The only reason Vons has no competition is because only SCICO owns enough commercial property to host a market large enough to compete with Vons and they aren't presently looking to fill any of that property with a market. If the commercial property was more widely owned then the use it was put to would better serve the community rather than the very gradually evolving agenda of SCICO.</div><div><br /></div><div>I don't particularly like the remedies that government has for situations like this. But I believe the damage is real and quite serious. It undermines the will of the citizens of Avalon to develop a plan for their collective future. It limits the opportunities Avalon offers for entrepreneurs to create new businesses and develop a more diverse economy here. It makes our town less attractive to the most empowered and capable of people because there are such limited opportunities to deploy their talents. As they leave, our schools lose the parents with the most resources and time to participate in the educational process. Our children lose the role models most likely to inspire them to appreciate the utility of knowledge, attitude, and determination.</div><div><br /></div><div>There is no good reason for this to be the case. The inherent potential of Avalon to become a profitable place to live and work, and an extremely attractive community to raise a family is enormous. We are so close to so many people who would appreciate a simpler lifestyle, not even needing a car, a healthier environment, and vastly more time to spend doing wholesome things together with their families. The internet has created many opportunities to earn a good living working from home. Many of those individuals would choose to live here if we hadn't passed that critical threshold where the infrastructure becomes a deciding factor. The school simply has too few children of upper and middle class families for most parents in that category to feel comfortable. I know of two cases specifically where it was exactly this issue that prevented one family from moving here and was a big factor in motivating another to leave.</div><div><br /></div><div>An in depth study of our economy would reveal many of these externalities and explain why Avalon falls so far short of its potential to enjoy a vibrant growing prosperity. Being so isolated we are well suited to be carefully studied and could become a useful laboratory for exploring alternative strategies for everything from primary education to best incentivizing greener lifestyles and preventative medicine.</div><div><br /></div><div>I believe our state and nation is facing many challenges but they all boil down to a single fundamental reality: our greatness as a society flows from our ability to harvest more of the competitive productive spirit of our humanity than other nations can from their humanity. We know that arming our children with the best education we can, the freedom to follow their passions, and the opportunity to keep their wealth is all it takes to end up with highly motivated and empowered citizens doing wonderful things for each other. Avalon is a place where all parts of that process can be carefully studied and where ways to improve, better incentivize, or even more wisely use taxes and subsidies can be explored and measured. I believe a very small project for California or America would yield enormous benefits for all of humanity by revealing more cost effective ways to better empower people to breath life into their dreams. I think it would help us develop better ways to measure both the positive and negative externalities of all enterprises and thereby reveal more elegant strategies to encourage the positives and avoid the negatives in communities all across our nation.</div></span></div><div></div></blockquote><div><br /></div>ananiashttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08090478687630964605noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5510167243999608617.post-26553527589432551472009-07-09T13:40:00.001-07:002009-07-11T12:04:17.908-07:00Our biggest mistake<div><div>Whenever I try to reason out why something that seems crazy to me is as it is, I always end up concluding that something very fundamental about my perspective is different. Thus the challenge I face in trying to explain a suggestion is actually to coax the reader to share that perspective, if only for a moment.</div><div><br /></div><div>An example of this is noticing that any genuine health care industry's most fundamental goal would be to put itself out of business--render the administration of health care honestly obsolete. Even if that end is never reached, it suggests that the best measure of a health care industry is how few people need any health care. To me, that suggests I should compare it to the way we deal with fire.<i> (I posted a </i><a href="http://ananiasacts.blogspot.com/2009/06/single-transactor-system.html"><i>reform strategy</i></a><i> earlier.)</i></div><div><br /></div><div>The only real difference between the two industries is that you are unlikely to ever have a health condition that seriously threatens your entire community. Whereas the opposite is true for fires. You're very unlikely to have one that does not threaten everyone else as well. Too bad for all of us I suppose because if we viewed health care as we do fire, we'd have no doubt discovered enormous numbers of preventative measures we could deploy to mitigate the need for emergency response.</div><div><br /></div><div>Because of the difference we can easily see why we have basically a socialistic approach to fire (where the state pays for fighting them and forces compliance in safety measures from us.) Private companies compete to sell us compliance, insure any loses, but also have a conflict of interest in that an opportunity is created for them to lobby government to adopt standards that may be more about generating business for them than making our lives safer from fire.</div><div><br /></div><div>Because of the similarities, we already incorporate part of health care, emergency response, into fire departments. The logistics involved in having more than one coordinated entity to cover an area make response any other way simply impractical. A fringe benefit is that you can get a pretty accurate idea of what it costs to provide that part of health care per person per year. There are about <a href="http://www05.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=paramedic">201,200 paramedics</a> earning a median wage of $28,400 to cover roughly 300 million Americans. It comes to $19 each, but just pays the salaries. So the per person per year cost of the 911 based emergency health care response is about fifty bucks.</div><div><br /></div><div>How is this paid for now? Haphazardly probably best describes it. And very unfairly considering that everyone in a community enjoys exactly the same coverage whether they pay anything for it or not. Its just another tiny cut in the flesh of our credibility as a society, no big deal on its own. <i>But these cuts are everywhere, and they're remarkably easy to fix, completely needless artifacts of a legacy predating computers that should now yield to a better mechanism that leaves us more connected to reality.</i></div><div><br /></div><div>We can fix only what we can see is broken. By burying the costs of things in layers or mixing them together we undermine our own ability to address them. We disconnect our ability to see our own role in creating them. We make it harder to discover relationships between things. A better idea of the true cost of health care would leave us more motivated and better able to discover and evaluate preventative measures.</div><div><br /></div><div><b>But worst of all we undermine our own ability to have respect for our society!</b> We have allowed the infrastructure of our lives to become opaque and arcane and no longer respect or even trust it. This seems to do everything from allowing people to rationalize criminal behavior to avoid paying all their taxes. It's just incredibly dumb to accept this situation for lack of fixing such amazing simple problems--like letting people actually see an itemized bill for the things our society does for us we might not even notice.</div><div><br /></div><div>If our government honestly wanted to become better at governing us well, wouldn't their highest priority be to ensure the electorate had enough education, knowledge, and information to choose the best representation and most competent peers and successors? To me that means giving us a map of our economy, looking for ways to educate us on the reasons things cost what they do, on how our choices affect those costs, and what opportunities there are to avoid them. We need the information necessary to better connect the choices we make to the actual price we, as individuals, pay for them. Not doing that is our biggest mistake because it costs us the very selective pressure that would enable us to make the sort of choices that leave us most empowered, free, and striving towards the goals that enchant rather than simply sustain us.</div></div>ananiashttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08090478687630964605noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5510167243999608617.post-14625336947785767182009-07-07T13:20:00.000-07:002009-07-07T13:31:21.115-07:00What makes a pack leader?<div>Mutually assured destruction is back in the news. I don't know if that's the best way to insure we aren't attacked with <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weapon_of_mass_destruction">WMD</a>s (ensuring the rest of the world knows that we could retaliate.) Mainly because I think the most likely attack is from people so hopelessly delusional they'd actually welcome the retaliation believing it to be a prophesy.</div><div><br /></div><div>And I do see what I think is a much better way to protect our nation from WMDs of all kinds. It's basically the opposite strategy--get so close to your enemies that they can't use WMDs without unacceptable collateral damage. And, as a nation, we are more uniquely suited to accomplish this than any other. By a long ways. I see this strategy as a way to leverage an enormous yet under-appreciated asset into a fuel that rockets us upwards in the hearts of all humanity.</div><div><br /></div><div>We have tens of thousands to millions of people who've recently immigrated from almost every other nation and that have ties to extended families and still speak the language. Suppose we decided to expand the foreign embassies in America into sovereign foreign cities. I realize that it is a radical idea. But why is it unreasonable?</div><div><br /></div><div>We are uniquely situated right now--with the collapse of the housing market and millions of empty bank owned homes rotting away to create such places cheaply. If, for example, we took a few square miles of Stockton, California (where the housing market is abysmal) and handed it over to a european nation inviting them to build a showcase city that will be their sovereign land for at least a century or two what effect would it have on us?</div><div><br /></div><div>All I can see are enormously positive consequences. From an immediate reversal on the direction of property values in Stockton, to a whole new economic sector for the US economy. I can't see any friendly foreign nations turning down the opportunity to expand their markets here more effectively, or promote tourism to their nation by showcasing the best of their culture here. The really wise ones will insist on a trade--that we do the same thing there. But most nations are far more xenophobic than we are, and their people will be a much harder sell than ours.</div><div><br /></div><div>If America was peppered with foreign cities how much better would our industries become at designing and marketing products and services with worldwide appeal? How much wiser and more worldly will Americans themselves become with so much more potential exposure to foreign peoples, cultures, and products? What happens to the job market for Americans when employers from all over the world can hire them without them having to leave America? What happens to the theory that we're an imperialist nation when we voluntarily do exactly the opposite--giving our land to some other nation with an invitation to become a neighbor?</div><div><br /></div><div>Every nation claims to want world peace. But if they really meant it, why don't they take the sort of steps that would force it? This is such a step. It makes disagreement between nations with foreign cities much more difficult. Fighting just isn't as much of an option any longer. Other mechanisms, like the courts, legislature, and vote will emerge to take its place.</div><div><br /></div><div>I want America to shine so brightly in the hearts of other peoples that they simply cannot miss the deep beauty of our approach to government. That our nation is all about not imposing a religion, perspective, or even much of a nationality on people, but rather doing everything we can to leave ourselves free to live as we wish. Americans are so free they sometimes join the enemy in conflicts. It's not hard for them to do. I hope it stays that way too--the freedom to express our hatred for our own government is the most important one we have.</div><div><br /></div><div>Think of it as the opposite of the Bush Doctrine. A way to get closer to other nations to undermine any future potential for conflict. (I'd often get ideas by working out the opposite of what I'd see Bush do. But I actually got this one watching the Berlin Wall come down and realizing that the same effect might be used to undermine dysfunctional governments in other nations with the expats we already have here--like Iran.)</div><div><br /></div><div>I can think of no better way to ensure America has a leading role in the league of nations for the foreseeable future, secure a larger set of opportunities for our people, or better prepare ourselves to achieve the highest standard of living in an ever more competitive world. Let us once again breech the barriers of tradition to brave a promising new frontier. It's our heritage to do so.</div>ananiashttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08090478687630964605noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5510167243999608617.post-72630016199338836802009-07-06T12:36:00.000-07:002009-07-06T12:58:02.790-07:00'Technically just' is an oxymoron<div>What's the difference between a fine and a fee? If the answer is that the former is intended to punish, and the latter is just a price, then how could any fine punish people equally? We aren't equally wealthy, so the punishment from a given fine will be unreasonably small for an exceptionally wealthy person, and unreasonably large for an exceptionally poor one. This is a glaring injustice that undermines our respect for law itself.</div><div><br /></div><div>You might counter this argument with the reasoning that perhaps the fine is simply to redress the damage done to the community by the infraction and thus does equate to a fixed cost which becomes the fine. There might be some cases where this is true, but it would have to be the exception because, for example, most of the infractions I can think of are crimes that don't so much harm the community, as they do particular people in it. Like parking in a handicapped spot, or fire zone. It also makes one wonder why we'd call that an infraction instead of just a service provided for a fee. If there is no punishment then why call it a crime?</div><div><br /></div><div>And you might feel that all of this is much ado about nothing. You might be right. I disagree and see it more as the death of a thousand tiny cuts. No single defect in our laws undermines our respect, but collectively they seem to be doing just that. From a <a href="http://www.ivanhoffman.com/respect.html">five year old essay</a> by an intellectual property attorney on the public's ambivalent attitude towards IP to a <a href="http://tpmcafe.talkingpointsmemo.com/2009/01/26/respect_for_law_and_the_constitution_is_also_good/">recent essay</a> from an ex deputy attorney general on the dysfunctional perspective of legal advisors at the highest levels of leadership the message is the same; I'd call it <i>jurisprudential liquefaction</i>. It really is akin to the evaporation of the very soul of our nation--what made America most endearing to a fairness hungry world.</div><div><br /></div><div>Law works only because we respect it. The kind of respect we have for what we consider sacred--not just essential, but irresistibly attractive, awe inspiring, and deeply cherished. The machinery we can build to enforce law will never amount to more than a selective pressure to evolve better criminals. That's just a consequence of the geometry of our reality. Nature will engineer something to fill every niche. (To really be rid of something you have to destroy the environment that it is suited to fill.)</div><div><br /></div><div>We must love our law for what it genuinely is--the embodiment of justice, the fastener necessary to build enterprise, and the test to which we subject all policy. It must strive above all else to be fair in the sincerest sense we are capable of imagining and measuring. <i>Law, and every shred of the infrastructure involved in enforcing it, must earn that admiration by being honestly worthy of it.</i></div><div><br /></div><div>And that's why I started with something so seemingly trivial--because what makes it seem so trivial is only our attitude towards the injustice. Our laws are the true religion of our nation and it really is our faith in them that bring us the gifts of freedom and prosperity. It's too easy to lose respect and too hard to earn it to be so reckless with something so precious.</div><div><br /></div><div>Especially when it is so easily fixed. There are other nations that deploy more equitable mechanisms to levy fines (for example Finland's day fines scale by income.) There are policies we could adopt that would require us to craft laws with more care, reengineer any that are not or can not be reasonably well enforced, and even ways to force a rethink in strategy periodically by requiring laws on vice, for example, to have expiration dates. It took a private attorney to force the justice department to use the new technologies of DNA testing to check prior convictions for serious crimes and that resulted in the release of many people that had been wrongly convicted an spent many years in prison, some even scheduled to be executed. This should be deeply embarrassing to our nation and infuriating to citizens. Can't the folks who work at the justice department read the name on the building? What do they reckon it means? Just ice?</div><div><br /></div><div>Perhaps we should start with a better map of our laws that depicts everything we know and can measure about them; the socioeconomic background and reasoning behind them, the measured impact after enactment, the ongoing costs/benefits of enforcement, the case histories of their application, and our discussions about them. A resource that would help us all better see and understand the role law plays in our lives, how it is created and maintained, and why it so deserves our gratitude and respect. It's a lot easier to respect something when you can actually see and touch the sense of it.</div><div><br /></div>ananiashttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08090478687630964605noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5510167243999608617.post-33964906452249239042009-07-05T20:17:00.000-07:002009-07-05T20:22:50.652-07:00My America, the body of an enchanting meme<div>I've always thought a lot about truth, justice, and the American way. But not because I'm a fan of superman. Because I'm a human being and can't help but find those things sacred. Even a crook has a code of honor. That emotional reward is most likely why we have minds designed to cooperate, master a language, and outwit the various things in our world. Discovering truth feels so good because it leaves us better at working out the consequences of some hypothetical we're contemplating. Our sense of justice is no different, complicated by the fact that fairness isn't as easy to test as truth. And I love the American way most of all. I didn't know why as clearly for much of my life, but I do now. It's because for me, America stood for nothing so much as a deliberate effort to make those metaphysical ideas more robust and tangible than even we are. America was the flesh and bones of justice itself.</div><div><br /></div><div>America to me seemed more like a process than a place--we were a nation of immigrants from all over the world. It was the very formula for fairness; the honest desire to create the most liberating and genuine parity of opportunity that the best and brightest of us could engineer. It seemed so incredibly ingenious, like life itself--create an environment suitable for useful things to grow and thrive and they will. We call those things enterprises. They combine land, labor, and capital to create profit using a recipe called a business model that is really just the DNA of the enterprise. Those recipes that generated the most profit per unit of input were the basis for the next enterprises that emerged. How could a system like this possibly fail?</div><div><br /></div><div>What gets in the way of living up to our principles? In a word, I think it's design. We aren't sufficiently wary of our own designs. Good design just doesn't come from a conscious deliberate attempt to build something, but from creating the environment where what you want can evolve and will be best suited, and then waiting for it to show up. If you take the former approach, you're constantly trying to shore up a poor design. But with the latter, you're constantly getting closer to an environment that permits nothing else. It's a fundamental shift in perspective that sees human force as the most expensive and therefore worst solution to any problem and gravity as the cheapest and best. Don't look for a law to prohibit what you should be trying to use geometry to leave impossible or never worthwhile. Does it strike anyone else as curious that punishment is such an obvious solution to humans while utterly absent anywhere else in nature?</div><div><br /></div><div>Laws, and the infrastructure needed to enforce, adjudicated, and punish the condemned is often more expensive than the actual damage done by the injustice all that infrastructure is intended to dissuade. In my reality, that's a red flag that something more fundamental might be broken. Like our perspective on what crime really is. And that's what I needed all this context to get to and what I'll write about next because one the greatest problems I see facing our world is that when law was spun off from religion, the geometry of those memes didn't allow sacred respect to go with it. For law is little without the respect that makes obeying it pleasurable. And threats are the very poorest way to motivate behavior working only when the consequences are perfectly predictable and utterly unavoidable. When it's less than that we call it a challenge. And that's one of the main things that makes us so remarkable to begin with--the love of challenge.</div>ananiashttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08090478687630964605noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5510167243999608617.post-22614734909157685292009-07-04T16:15:00.000-07:002009-07-04T17:23:04.326-07:00Reinventing the political campaign<div><div><div>The total amount spent by political lobbyists per capita last year in the USA was about eleven dollars. So how come special interests have so much more influence with leadership than the people they're supposed to serve anyways? Should we spend twelve dollars to bribe them back? For just two dollars per month we could utterly overwhelm the private interests if it weren't for just one thing; We couldn't agree on what to tell them to do. We need a community mind and that begins with a community brain.</div><div><br /></div><div><b>A neural network for a city</b></div><div><br /></div><div>Suppose a small community was looking for ways to invigorate their economy and create a greater sense of their shared purpose among residents. (Shouldn't this go without saying?) But instead of relying on themselves, they decide to look for a way to get the community itself to self-organize around the powers and functions of their city government--to reinvent their electorate. Their goal is to create a parallel virtual city council that they can use as a resource in making the decisions that face them. Their idea is that by having a vote from the community, and discussions about each issue, their eventual decisions can only be better informed, while also leaving each voter with more context to evaluate their performance and grateful to be a part of the process.</div><div><br /></div><div><b>Connecting the senses and muscles</b></div><div><br /></div><div>Using free tools and web resources they put all of the non-confidential information they can about their city into a site available to all members of the community. They establish a small fund, say $5/resident, to encourage the development of software that presents the data in ways the users find useful (which developers split according to how much their software gets used.) The data is stuff like the budget, infrastructure maps, codes and ordinances, maintenance schedules, issues to be addressed by the council and the reports or other information related to those issues. Everything the city isn't obligated to keep confidential and that would be useful to voters playing the role of council members.</div><div><br /></div><div><b>Processing the sensory input</b></div><div><br /></div><div>To encourage participation by people in the community they organize the site to provide two different roles for users. They can be either virtual council members, or city evangelists. The latter is for those folks who believe they have a vision for their community and should probably be running things already. Their job is is evangelize the issues presently facing the community, help users explore the available data, learn more abut the community, and explain their own positions and policy goals. They are people hoping to one day serve on the city council (if they aren't doing so already) and see this as an opportunity to campaign for that position by explaining how they would approach present day issues.</div><div><br /></div><div><i>(It's campaigning via a demonstration. The site creates only a few slots for each public office and city evangelists must win their slot by bidding for it with real money in a Dutch auction. Instead of spending what they would to campaign in traditional ways, they buy a slot on the site for a lot less and get a chance to better prove their competency and much more exposure. Besides, that money goes into a pool that becomes the political capital spent by the voters and can be earned back.)</i></div><div><br /></div><div>Everyone else joins for free and becomes a virtual council member earning a monthly virtual income of political capital. They can spend it on the site to support or oppose the issues they care about. The city evangelists earn a share of what is spent in accordance with whatever position they've been advocating on each issue. In other words they earn political capital by convincing the virtual council members to spend it the way they recommend, which they then spend to advocate their position on upcoming issues (which is then redistributed as share income to the virtual council next month.) This structure is intended to gradually concentrate political capital into the hands of those city evangelists who best represent the wishes of the community.</div><div><br /></div><div><b>Enabling the phenomenon of emergence</b></div><div><br /></div><div>I've left out the details and some important points about the site to focus on the strategy and goals. The hope is to do the minimum sufficient to get it started, and then let the community itself take over the evolution of the specific mechanisms that emerge to best harvest their political will and insight. My belief is that we might stumble onto an infrastructure that does a far better job deploying our collective resources simply because our behavior, wants, and expectations have changed to suit the realities of what we learn by virtue of participating and being so much more aware of present conditions and what can be done theoretically.</div><div><br /></div><div>I'm hoping it results in a rudimentary community mind. In a genuine sense. No one of us will feel any differently but something will be very different. Our city should function in a way that exhibits an ever growing self awareness and intelligence that emerges from no one of us so much as it does from the political technology we've created to empower and guide us wisely.</div></div></div>ananiashttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08090478687630964605noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5510167243999608617.post-66316463248206326132009-07-03T17:28:00.000-07:002009-07-03T17:40:01.578-07:00Where fools rush in<div>To be a doctor, lawyer, or engineer you must be accredited. We have an infrastructure to ensure each person entitled to practice a profession with potentially significant consequence to their clients or the public has been trained and become demonstrably competent to do the work they've chosen.</div><div><br /></div><div>But for the very most important jobs of all--the ones with the greatest consequences for the largest number of people--we have no such requirement. We don't even require any competence from the people who decide who should fill those jobs either, or even take note of the reasoning behind their choice. And we don't have any kind of apprenticeship or training program for those elected. They simply go from being ordinary people to extraordinarily powerful people in the blink of an oath. If you didn't know the reasons for this, wouldn't you consider it strangely reckless, at the very least? Why is it so much harder to be entrusted with a planeload of people than an entire nation full?</div><div><br /></div><div>I don't think it matters why this is the case. What matters is that it is hard to believe anyone considers the system we have to be better than simply randomly selecting all political candidates from a list of landowners. At least they would be politically debt free. I also don't believe that even if we had a convincingly better mechanism for filing those jobs, that it would be possible to adopt if it required anything other than very minor changes to our current government. People are too frightened of any change to something they understand very poorly.</div><div><br /></div><div>So changing who is eligible for office is too hard, as is changing who is eligible to vote for them. But we can do something to enforce a training period ourselves using the web and nothing more than a bit of clever software and the motivation to use it.</div><div><br /></div><div>I wanted to explain my motivation for making this suggestion first, to avoid a lengthy introduction when I go into the details in the next post. I'll simply tell you now that it involves making something we don't typically notice much a whole lot more tangible--our political capital. It is something we've had since our nation was born but don't think much about until we're angry about how some politician has decided to spend it. I'd like to see us harness some of its energy for ourselves on the way there.</div>ananiashttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08090478687630964605noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5510167243999608617.post-58951056781082781722009-07-02T14:10:00.000-07:002009-07-02T21:54:07.082-07:00Our real Independence Day<div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;">The odd thing about my last few posts is that I'm not terribly interested in health care--it became important only because its sucking up so much of our GDP that it has become a drain on what I care most passionately about-- </span><i><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;">ensuring our nation offers the greatest depth, breadth, and parity of opportunity of any--by as large a margin as possible.</span></b></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"> This is, in my opinion, the most important issue simply because no matter how efficient we get, everything still costs money. And it's that unmatchable opportunity that draws the best, brightest, and most driven to build their enterprises here, and make the ones we have better.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><br /></span></div><div><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;">Today is actually our 233rd anniversary, not the fourth.</span></b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"> That's just the day we celebrate it. I remember when America was a very deeply loved nation. When I felt incredibly lucky to have been born an American. Other nations seemed like propeller planes while America was a jetliner. I remember thinking, or being taught/indoctrinated to find the reason for this in our constitution and form of government. The sociopolitical landscape that our nation established was just a lot easier to build robust enterprises on.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;">At least in theory. In practice it looked more like an old boy network. Perhaps in a room with bigger windows. I've always tried to put my finger on why our government is so gimcracky. I think the weak link is actually us. The founding fathers created some great roles. But they did a piss poor job of working out how to fill them in my opinion.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;">The basic idea is good--let the people decide. But it seems to go straight downhill from there in practice. With so many issues to understand to even comprehend the proposed alternative strategies to our problems we're left with little but the gut feeling we get watching the people we elect to guide us act out roles. Amidst a din of spin from pundits.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;">Of all the things I can think of that would enable our nation, and ourselves, to once again leap frog the rest of the world in the race to create the most personally liberating and empowering society it is a minor change in the way we vote that seems to offer the most bang for the buck. I'll try to explain one way I think we might vet leadership far more effectively tomorrow.</span></div>ananiashttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08090478687630964605noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5510167243999608617.post-34086321575916898562009-07-01T15:16:00.000-07:002009-08-18T12:25:47.254-07:00Putting some soul into health care<div>My previous three posts have all been about health care. I'ld like to briefly summarize them here and then finish. In the first one I define a governmental agency, like the National Institute of Health, that would act as a transactor for every payment that can be considered a health care expense or a purchase of health care insurance and why I think it is such a wise approach to health care reform. In the second one I outline how that change would affect the basic components of our present health care system and better motivate them to focus on on their specific role, and not just any old way they might increase profits. (And assumed that the present practice of allowing employers to pay the health care expenses of their employees with pre-tax dollars was on its way out.)</div><div><br /></div><div>In the third one, the previous post, I brought your attention to a particular node or place in cyberspace that would hold all of your medical information and suggested it should exist inside the transactor's databases because that is the most private information about us and that should be very important to our government to protect. The goal is to create an environment where that node actually becomes a personal life advocate for us. A sort of virtual personal assistant that remembers everything about us, has a nearly perfect knowledge of our health history, diet, habits, and myriads of other information that it can use to detect the sorts of things that correlate with opportunities for preventative medicine and make us aware of those choices.</div><div><br /></div><div><b>Building a soul for ourselves in cyberspace</b></div><div><br /></div><div>Health isn't just being physically fit. It's being educated enough to at least make informed health choices. It's having the infrastructure a person needs to function. Those things are just forms of preventative medicine. The <i>real</i> medicine we'd need by neglecting them is more expensive than the non-medical preventative <i>medicine</i> we need to treat them. If citizens are so important to their governments, how is it no government has even thought to create a computer program that looks for the people it can easily find, would benefit from help, and that it can easily afford to help? That's what this is. Nothing more than a task running on some server in cyberspace with no more to do than be there for you. It's job is to keep you as happy and healthy as you, and it, can figure out how to do.</div><div><br /></div><div>Think of it as a crude attempt to create a soul for humanity designed to help us be us. We create this computer program that knows a lot about everyone, and uses that information to help us make wiser decisions. If, for example, your behavior changed in some way that correlated well with people who later had a medical problem, this little advocate will make you aware of it. Have a pain you don't understand? It might save you a visit to the doctor or direct the ambulance to where you're lying. If you wanted to change something about yourself, it could be of help since it could look for what worked for others like you that wanted the same thing and got there. If you wanted to learn something, same deal. It will be capable of whatever we are clever enough to teach it. As computers grow in power and software in sophistication I wouldn't be surprised if it renders the field of psychology utterly obsolete in just a few years by doing a much better job of helping us see ourselves clearly and make the changes we want.</div><div><br /></div><div>The idea is to create a focal point, like the iPhone did, where everyone is invited to deploy their solution to help us be better people (or get more out of the device). Does this imply that I consider people devices? Yes, I suppose it does. Why is that a problem? Doesn't an actor want to get the most out of their instrument? I'm not suggesting we look for ways for others to get more out of you. Just how we can enable you to get the most out of you. No one is going to use an iPhone application that they find annoying. It's the same thing here. If the sort of software that emerges from a system like this was a nuisance, who would use it? Okay, I suppose masochists would love it. But they can almost certainly find devices already that are better suited to amuse them.</div><div><br /></div><div><b>Creating the incentive to empower us</b></div><div><br /></div><div>Like the iPhone, I'm advocating a standardized forum where anyone can deploy software they believe would be useful helping people become better. We will be the ones to decide how we interact with the data made available this way, and the developers of the software we choose to use will be paid a tiny amount per user by the transactor. The first applications will most likely be electronic patient advocates that help people avoid treatment mistakes (like taking a drug while you are using a different drug that is incompatible,) follow progress, and be sources of information, encouragement, and a connection to supporters. But I would expect lots of stuff to emerge, from software that helps kids do well in school or learn an instrument, to ones that teach adults how to eat more wisely or cope with tragedy.</div><div><br /></div><div>I see these things as going a long way to lowering the level of overall uncertainty and stress in our lives. I think collectively they'd lead to substantially lower health care costs and healthier longer lives for most people. I also think they would push many other boundaries that limit the opportunities that appear to us and thereby increase the growth rate of our economy.</div><div><br /></div><div>But most importantly, I see this as a solution we can adopt very quickly and without undue immediate impact (other than starting to phase out employer paid health care.) We can even delay the flow of insurance premiums through the provider to give that industry time to come up with standardized contracts, computer procedures and the other infrastructure needed for a smooth transition. The providers should be routed that way as quickly as possible because there is simply no reason not to. The limiting factor there is to standardize the format of medical information and design and deploy equipment well suited for error-proof collection and delivery of it. All of that should happen regardless of what we do because we need that information for so many things--from better evaluating the efficacy of treatments to the competency of practitioners.</div><div><br /></div><div>I should also note that I've pretty much avoided any discussion of funding mainly because this suggestion is actually independent of how health care costs are ultimately reckoned with. This is just about how we might get the most out of whatever we do decide to spend.</div>ananiashttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08090478687630964605noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5510167243999608617.post-56256975949569559142009-06-30T16:25:00.000-07:002009-06-30T19:20:34.140-07:00Resistance is meaninglessness<div>The most useful things I know of are all actually just tokens for metaphysical entities. Like words, formulas, money, contracts, and yeah, I suppose, even people. And although every bit of their utility never leaves the metaphysical realm, they don't become very usable until they have a functioning physical form.</div><div><br /></div><div>A meme isn't even knowable by it's holder until we have a word or phrase that can adequately contain it. A fact about the structure of our world isn't all that much more tangible even after we've outfitted it with a perfectly tailored formula. It can take a great deal of training just to see a blurred image of it. And cash seems more real to us that the real things we trade it for that seem mostly fake! This should amaze us.</div><div><br /></div><div>Contracts can actually be too real. And people aren't just real, their physical manifestation can even be nice, naughty, or <i>if you're really lucky</i>, both. My only point in all of this is to illustrate what wonderful things can happen when something metaphysical somehow gets inside a body that suits it. Because I think that trick might just lead us to a great deal more than cheaper health care.</div><div><br /></div><div>So I've long wondered what metaphysical concept, property, or idea could be embodied into a tangible entity whose presence in our environment would just naturally lead to our becoming deeply enfranchised. <i>(Whenever I ask my <a href="http://allynbryan.blogspot.com/">wife</a> something like this she looks at me or responds like I've been caught preparing to torture her. It's not easy to discuss this stuff.)</i></div><div><br /></div><div>I stumbled onto what I think might be a solution when I was looking at what a mess my room had become and wishing I had a copy of me to do all the things I didn't feel like doing but knew I should do. I know I could tell the clone what it ought to be doing and that it would agree because it could see I had much more important things to do. But by that point I didn't want my clone to do any work because I wanted his complete attention while I explained what seemed like a clever way to solve the problem I mentioned above. Besides, if my room wasn't such a mess I wouldn't have stumbled in the first place.</div><div><br /></div><div><b>Competing with your virtual clone</b></div><div><br /></div><div>I realized that if we are all better at telling ourselves what to do than we are at doing it ourselves, then maybe, <i>if we could make a virtual copy of ourselves more tangible</i>, we could use it to improve ourselves. It could be a very natural, private, and compelling process--if the only way to endow my avatar with a property was to achieve it in real life then I might be onto something. And I started to look for ways that might work.</div><div><br /></div><div>Then I noticed that my soul is already in cyberspace (well, bits of it), why not just make it official as a tangible presence for ourselves by pulling those bits together? We can do that to some extent already at sites like facebook and youtube, but I'm picturing a node, or URI, that's connected in various ways to a great deal more. The safest node in cyberspace is the one that represents us in the <a href="http://ananiasacts.blogspot.com/2009/06/single-transactor-system.html">universal health care transactor</a> I described earlier. </div><div><br /></div><div>You can't secure liberties without robustly engineering them into the fabric of society. You already have lots of nodes that represent you in cyberspace. I'm not too happy about that. In fact, you might say I'm sort of ticked off that our government is so careless about defending our privacy and the integrity of our identity. Just because it's more intangible than I am doesn't mean it's not rather important to me. And just because the bits of your soul are presently scattered about cyberspace doesn't mean that a clever piece of software can't box them together faster than you can say 'unholy packet.'</div><div><br /></div><div>Giving our souls an address in cyberspace is the best way to ensure our government puts protecting them above even us. We just have to ensure that if they fail there is no longer a way for them to collect our taxes. It's the ultimate identity protector because it need never share anything the identifier doesn't have a need to know. If the software running the database is open source, and can be proven by anyone to be correct, and the mechanisms is uses to protect us from even the most sophisticated attempts of our own government to get at it are verifiably robust, I believe we will be a lot better off than if we leave things to our leadership to work out. This is a technology that needs to emerge from academia fully tested and ready for governments to deploy or be left out of a new economic reality.</div><div><br /></div><div>I guess I never got to what I promised in the prior post--a mechanism whereby we encourage ourselves to make wiser health care choices. <i>Whoops</i>. Maybe I'll make it there with the next one. Right now I'd like to bite something resembling food.</div>ananiashttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08090478687630964605noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5510167243999608617.post-89114400752836867422009-06-29T19:58:00.000-07:002009-06-30T09:30:56.556-07:00Consequences of a single health care transactor<div><div>In my <a href="http://ananiasacts.blogspot.com/2009/06/heart-of-machine.html">first post</a> I talked about creating a selective pressure that could direct progress by narrowing economic opportunities to be mostly in the direction we want our economy to evolve. This is the sort of thing I was talking about. Finding ways that don't so much change things as they are now, but undermine their ability to grow in any direction besides improving. Here's how I think the <a href="http://ananiasacts.blogspot.com/2009/06/single-transactor-system.html">single transactor system</a> I describe in my previous post would affect our nation:</div><div><br /></div><div><b>Fewer Health Care Lawyers.</b></div><div><br /></div><div>The impact on of a single transactor system on everyone in the health care industry that doesn't actually provide health care is not good. The lawyers will most likely have less work because patients wont be suing insurers for coverage that can no longer be denied or delayed.<i> (Obviously proving fraud on the part of the insured is important if it took place and the system must be designed to allow that to happen without simultaneously giving insurers access to enough information to cherry pick who they cover.)</i> Less malpractice suits are likely too, because the transactor will have a lot more data and better tools to discover subpar providers quickly. Less contracts will be needed since the transactor will have standardized ones.</div><div><br /></div><div><b>Less marketing and administrating. No sales force.</b></div><div><br /></div><div>Marketing departments and advertisers will have less work since health insurance will be as generic as we can make it. A lot less clerks, accountants, and secretaries are likely to be needed since the transactor is handling all health care payments electronically. The sales forces aren't needed at all since health insurance could only be purchased via the transactor.</div><div><br /></div><div><i>(This process of creative destruction is a rough but necessary part of capitalism. These jobs are artifacts of the system we have now and would no longer add value to a single transactor system. I do believe there is some injustice in destroying these jobs because they only exist as a consequence of our governments willingness to ignore the payroll tax fraud implicit in employer provided jobs perks.)</i></div><div><br /></div><div><b>Wiser more competitive HMOs and Insurers.</b></div><div><br /></div><div>Not having a brand-able product to market will leave insurers with only three ways to compete; lowering overhead, earning a higher yield with premiums, or improving their ability to deploy preventative medicine effectively (so that it genuinely does save money by reducing a patients need for more expensive treatment later.) Of those, it is the last one that promises the most profit. <i>This tightly aligns the fortunes of both insurer and insured--they profit most by helping us stay as healthy as possible and via no other way.</i></div><div><br /></div><div>Perhaps our government should encourage this practice even more by offering some fraction of the savings generated by a breakthrough in preventative medicine as a reward to the discoverers. I would prefer this to the patent mechanism we use now, for health care technologies, because it promises the most rapid deployment, avoids a great many costs, and can generate the same or even better financial rewards for the discoverer genuinely commensurate with the utility of their invention.</div><div><br /></div><div><b>A national health care database.</b></div><div><br /></div><div>A universal health care transactor will create more jobs than it will destroy. Jobs for people to build and maintain the databases needed, design the most efficient and error-proof input and output equipment for providers, and create tools for allowing users to find the information they're looking for in the database.</div><div><br /></div><div>It offers more opportunities for entrepreneurs to create insurance, medical products, drugs, and information processing technologies for the heath care marketplace formed by a common transactor. This is because a very accurate idea of how much of a market exists can be purchased enabling a more competent and believable business plan to be developed.</div><div><br /></div><div>It might fund itself. The transactor would have a lot of information of great value to insurers, researchers, and entrepreneurs and can be carefully regulated to protect the public and the intellectual property of its clients. If we are clever enough, we might make health care solutions as easy to discover, deploy, and profit from, as iPhone applications are today. But every one of these jobs will share the property that they are directly involved in improving the quality, access, or affordability of health care. Contrast that with the system we have now, where most of the profit comes from passing on costs to the insured if at all possible, or by marketing coverage more effectively.</div><div><br /></div><div><b>Trading your lifestyle data for health care coverage.</b></div><div><br /></div><div>Suppose you were able to collect a great deal of data about what you consume, when and how long you sleep, where you go, and what sort of exercise you get. A transactor is in the unique position of making that safe to do (best protecting the information from government and industry) while allowing you to profit from anonymized access to it. This kind of data will enable the most comprehensive understanding of any relationships that exist between lifestyle choices, health care needs, and effective preventative measures. It will help patients by giving their health care providers a better window into a patients health than even the patient themselves could deliver. And regardless of whether they are conscious at the time.</div><div><br /></div><div>I think the best way to protect our privacy is to create a single regulated mechanism for collecting information about us and make it illegal for anyone else to maintain certain kinds of information about people. <i>(They must use the regulated mechanism to both store and retrieve that sort of information when they have a legitimate use for it. This would apply to all government agencies as well.)</i> This may seem backwards to many people--actually creating a formal way to store everything about us in order to protect us from exploitation by entities with exactly that information. I think this belief is naive. The information exists and is collectible today by pretty much anyone with the desire to do so. We're constantly reading about this or that database of credit card customers, patients, or credit union members being stolen and exposing those people to identity theft or other fraud. By requiring those companies to use a common, heavily regulated and protected store for that kind of information we can better protect it and improve the accuracy too. This is a threat I think we had better face head on and very seriously.</div><div><br /></div><div>Right now companies that collect data about us are free to sell it. That's the source of a lot of the unsolicited invitations you get. That can't happen if we switch to a common store. Instead you'll browse a web site that shows you the list of outstanding offers to buy anonymized access to your data and can pick which, if any, you'd like to indulge. There will even be studies you can be paid to participate in that ask you to change something about your lifestyle for a test period because researchers have the ability to verify that you did. This should dramatically reduce the cost and improve the accuracy of a great many kinds of clinical trials.</div><div><br /></div><div>All of these things work together to lower health care costs and protect our privacy. I believe they would improve our health care system a lot all by themselves. But there is one more minor change I'll propose in the next post that should do a lot more. And it consists of how we might better connect what we pay for the choices we make in life to the true cost those choices have on us and others.</div></div>ananiashttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08090478687630964605noreply@blogger.com0