Thursday, March 3, 2016

Because this has come up, a political post!

Because this has come up, a political post!

Some things I believe, and could have discussions regarding:

The first few are things we should do:
1. A minimum basic income to eliminate poverty without reducing the desire to produce wealth. That is, a major philosophical objection to government assistance is that it reduces the incentive to work. A MBI effectively gets around that, as living at the poverty line isn't fun. And if you do want to, more power to you. This also means you suddenly don't have nearly the same need for a minimum wage or a host of other economic controls. It also empowers women.

2. Single payer health care eliminates the major source of bankruptcies, and pools risk. Pooling risk is what government is all about.

3. Gaming is a Good Thing that can build empathy and make us better people.

4. Education should be free.  Student loans are bad.

Some government I think we could do with less of:
I. federal controls on wages (but not until a MBI is accomplished)
II. military
III. prisons, drug laws, and other ways we create a preschool to prison pipeline.

Some odd thoughts:
A. Lawyers, accountants, federal employees, stock brokers, and a bunch of other categories of employment are effectively societal overhead. Ideally, these would not exist. Note: my job is also societal overhead that ideally would not exist.

B. The world could be a much less violent place if we reached out with money and chocolate and MREs rather than hellfire missiles.

C. Government rules and laws should be as simple as possible, but no simpler. making laws more complicated in inherently undemocratic, disenfranchising, and probably exists to shield a privileged class.

These are things I believe, and are all open to debate, ridicule, and modification if there is a good argument to the contrary.

In fact, I welcome such debate. As hard as belief revision is, it is the only way we get closer to truth.

64 comments:

  1. Re: B. I had a really depressing (but informative) conversation once with an expert on government interventions in war-torn, failed-states sorts of situations. The gist of it went like this:

    Me: "Look, I don't think we should be sending weapons into a region where people are already fighting too much."
    Him: "So we just abandon those regions?"
    Me: "No! We can send, like, food ... help them establish the infrastructure for clean water."
    Him: "I thought you said you didn't want to send weapons."
    Me: "Food and water are not weapons."
    Him: "In a region where food and water are scarce, they absolutely ARE weapons. People will use them to gather followers around them, with the intention of creating something better ... and step one of that will be DEFENDING their better thing. In disrupted regions, there is no nice thing, NOTHING, you can give somebody that they will not turn to the cause of self-defense. It's Maslow's pyramid. The nice, industrial-age, entitled, calm, secure people you're imagining only occur in places where society hasn't collapsed."
    Me: "......"
    Him: "You ... you okay there?"
    Me: "....."

    It made me uncomfortably aware that some of the things I think of as unnecessary in a sufficiently civilized society (military, litigators, etc.) might be the necessary bulwarks that keep the society sufficiently civilized.

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  2. Tony Lower-Basch Sure. A question is: Do the hellfire missiles help at all? If all those do is maintain American supremacy and cost a lot of money, then let's think of a cheaper way.

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  3. Robert Bohl What parts can you not?

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  4. Really brief, I worry a minimum income wouldn't be a living wage. Or it would shortly become not a living wage.

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  5. I agree with nearly all of that. The one that I have a little trouble with is A. I can see all of those things reduced, especially if laws and taxes were streamlined, and the rise of automation (Yes automated Lawyers are a thing, I can link if needed.) but I don’t think a goal of elimination if realistic. Even if you only mean as employed by the federal government there will always need to be accountants to count our beans, and there will need to be lawyers in the mix. Federal employees… man that covers so many people, and so many different types of jobs. I can see reduction, but I cannot see it all as unnecessary.  The FDA, the EPA, the FBI… all do work that is important to our day to day lives (even if it seems over reaching at times.) 

    The only way I can see the elimination of stock brokers is if we no longer have stocks. Even if you completely automate this, and its plenty automated now, there will still be “stock brokers”. 

    So count me in if you are down for reduction of the redundant, wasteful and excessive, but I would need some convincing to believe that we could do totally  without all those. 

    (Plus if people are not employed in those ways, where does the employment shift to? I am not bringing this up because I want to keep waste because I don’t want unemployment, but sharp reductions require planning.)

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  6. Ryan Good - My divorce totally could have been automated.

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  7. Robert Bohl Well, sure. the MBI needs to be indexed to poverty. And the "bundle of goods" needs to be modified to keep up with the times. Currently, according to wikipedia (and from them, HSS), the poverty line in the US is 11,770. Call it 12k for sake of easy book keeping: That's $1,000 per adult per month. That's necessarily not a comfortable living, nor is it intended to do. It'll get a roof, food, and some clothes. Maybe a smart phone.

    But, agreed, keeping it indexed is super important.

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  8. And the formula for what's necessary is another huge black hole.

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  9. Ryan Good I worked at FDA for over 3 years. 

    When I say ideally, I don't mean tomorrow or in 20 years. I mean that every person who ahs one of those jobs full time is not doing something more productive -- we are using their labor to keep the backbone going, rather than letting them do something that creates more wealth.

    On stock brokers: Sure, you need some. We don't need high frequency trading. We don't need day trading to be a thing. For the overwhelming majority of us, what makes the most sense is index funds that automatically buy and sell stocks to represent the market as a whole. Brokers -- especially ones without fiduciary duty -- can do tremendous harm to their clients.

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  10. So if we have an MBI, how do we ensure that folks who choose to work to make money above that get paid fairly without a minimum wage? I mean, sure, in middle/upper class white-primary industries like tech, it might happen...but grocery store workers and gas station attendants already get fucked. How are we going to prevent employers from only paying them two dollars an hour or whatever because "they already have enough to live on"? (And before you suggest that they could just go let another job, let's talk about how wage theft is already a reality of the service industry and MBI without federal standards for wages will only exacerbate that for the reason listed above.)

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  11. Rowan Cota Interestingly enough, I've had that discussion with economists. Two of them, PhD and everything.

    With an MBI, the supply of labor (and, in particular, the supply of desperate labor) goes way down. Folks can tell an employer to go to hell without nearly as much concern for losing housing. They'd still be able to eat, and could still live without that job. Not well, but enough to pay rent.

    That is, the MBI allows those who do not want to work -- and who can live the life they want on less -- to do so. And that means the supply of labor drops.

    With that reduction in supply, the price of labor should go up. And that should happen without government controls on the price of labor.

    But, like I said, I'd only want to see movement towards (I) well after (1). Once we have a MBI in place, we can see empirically if the price of labor goes up. If it does, then the minimum wage becomes unimportant anyway -- which is what I expect.

    That is: First, do the MBI. Then, watch and see what happens to the price of labor. If it goes up, the minimum wage becomes redundant and can be ignored. If it does not, then absolutely keep the minimum wage and index it to inflation and poverty and make it automatic.

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  12. So it was a quick hit, but I think your post might benefit from including some of that nuance... ;)

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  13. http://blogs.wsj.com/cio/2015/03/25/lets-automate-all-the-lawyers/
    http://money.cnn.com/2014/03/28/technology/innovation/robot-lawyers/ 

    MBI- They have found that its actually cheaper in the long run to house the homeless, so maybe this sort of assistance would work out to be cheaper as well. The major issue with getting this enacted however is that people that are upper lower class and higher feel like they made it, and are making it, so if you can’t make it you are just lazy and you should not get any help. And it seems to make people crazy to think that someone might get some help without earning it. It’s these people that would fight like crazy against this sort of thing.

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  14. (I also have more thoughts about the interactions of MBI and minimum wage and wage theft and undocumented workers, but they will ALL have to wait until I'm not trying to write code for an imaginary bank.)

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  15. Ryan Good 

    Yeah. So, a couple of thoughts:
    1. Our laws are ridiculous complex, and are so for some good and not so good reasons. There's the historical necessity of making sausage -- but also, our laws are complicated so we can better protect moneyed interests. If an educated layperson can't understand a law, then it is too complicated. Hell, if I can violate a law that i am incapable of understanding, then there's been a pretty major failing of democracy.

    2. Hooray for robots. In general.

    3. On cheapness: it is astonishing, right? Between cities saving money by giving away houses to fix homelessness, and Give Directly just giving money to the poor and seeing changes for years after the intervention ... it is starting to look like giving money away empowers people. Who'd a thought.

    4. I agree, getting onto something like this will be way hard. It may not be practical in the political situation we find ourselves, as this is somewhere to the left of Bernie. Personally, I think we can sell it as a reduction in government, since this can let us consolidate a few government entities and require less overhead to administer. And no means testing, of course. Which also means those rich folk also get the MBI. Each month, a government check deposited to your account. I agree, selling that will be hard.

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  16. Rowan Cota Wasn't sure if anyone would read this, but yeah. Nuance is good. I welcome your thoughts when you can give them.

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  17. On Federal employees: I feel like no matter how good technology gets, I want humans in the government process. It's not an area I'd trust to give over wholly to machines.

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  18. Again... I agree with all of that... but comments anyhow. 

    Re Laws: You are right the laws are too complex, no argument there. I do think they should be slimmed down, and I do think that much of the complexity is to benefit those wealthy enough to pay lawyers to write these sorts of laws.  I think for the lay person automation will be a big help in understanding these things… until there is a law outlawing that sort of thing. It sort of reminds me of how the bible was only in Latin for so long. It locked the poor out and made them rely in the church. I think some of the complexity is for the same reasons. I also think that the law is meant to look scarier than it is, so that lay people avoid it.  Still I never see a time when we will not need any lawyers, if for nothing else we need them to write laws that make them less necessary, so ones without self interest, and we will need criminal lawyers… because crime. 

    MBI: Utah of all places has been doing good work with the homeless. It would be great to use them as an example, but then we get in to something that makes me sad. I am sure for some, you could show them numbers, and facts and examples of how helping the poor saves tax payers money, and they would still reject the idea because its counter to what they already believe. This would not be unlike the fight over Global Climate Change.

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  19. I can do this if it's not obnoxious for me to make lots of small comments on the main post. That ok, William Nichols?

    So as not to waste time, I also am not aware of any Fed regulation on wages other than minimum wage.

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  20. ...Law is complex because humanity is complex. Changing the law to protect the vulnerable instead of the wealthy isn't going to UNCOMPLICATE the law, it's going to add whole levels of nuance to it. And that's a GOOD thing. The law should be complicated so it can catch and protect as many victims of edge cases as it can.

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  21. Robert Bohl - I believe there are federal laws around wage equity and overtime wage as well, off hand.

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  22. Yeah I was going to say something like Rowan, only snarkier, so I'm glad she spoke up.

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  23. I wasn't aware of the wage equity one.

    Overtime is there, right. Thanks. Increasingly fewer jobs (especially middle class ones) get that, but it's there.

    Also, anti-wage-theft, but we'd want to keep that, right?

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  24. Oops, I'm done with the OP.

    Regarding your economists' point: the logic is there but I'm not sure I trust their "science's" predictability.

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  25. Robert Bohl - I know about wage equity because any time someone wants to tell me how feminist Obama is, they pull out this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lilly_Ledbetter_Fair_Pay_Act_of_2009

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  26. William:  I can play devil's advocate for Hellfire missiles, believe it or not.

    I'll preface it by saying that I really like state-building by means of water and food.  Non-kinetic ordnance, as the military puts it.  Having thought it through, I feel like I can come to grips with the idea that if we really dislike Warlord A, and we give Warlord B a big shipment of food with which to defeat him, Warlord B is going to use that food to recruit people with the express purpose of making sure that Warlord A's followers starve and die in misery.

    I can come to grips with it, knowing that it is very much not a cheerful vision of smiling faces, piously receiving food and therefore having no more need for conflict.  The food is a way that we make them capable of winning the conflict, because we like them better than their enemy.

    So, back to Hellfire missiles.  What if the enemy you really don't like is using armored vehicles to ride around a war-torn area with impunity, gunning down refugees?  There are other folks you'd like to see in power, but any non-kinetics you give them, these guys are just going to roll up, blow them up, take it away ... and we can't give them the ability to interdict that armored-cavalry because they don't have the infrastructure of spy-drones, air-superiority and intelligence fusion.

    But we have all of that.  We've got everything needed to simply remove those armored raiders from the equation, up to and including the missile that blows them apart.  Is the world better for the common, unarmed, people in the region before or after such a missile strike?  My intuition is that it's a short-term gain bought at the cost of long-term power vacuum, but sometimes that's a tight-rope that it makes sense to walk.

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  27. Rowan Cota  I'd love to hear examples. Saying it is so I don't find particularly compelling.

    And there's an obvious example case where we made a law simpler to protect edge cases: marriage.

    That is, before Oberfell, marriage was a gendered institution, and we had DOMA to keep it that way. After Oberfell, you can marry whatever adult you want. So, the law effectively got simpler, going from requiring gender to not. More or less, at least.

    That's an example of simplyfying a law to protect edge cases. I'd love to hear an example of complicating a law to protect edge cases.

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  28. Rowan Cota - I thought had had been blocked or something. How is implementation going? Do you know?

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  29. Okay, let's talk about sexual assault law, since that's an area in which I am aware of a LOT of edge case.

    Should the law address whether or not a woman was too drunk to consent? Should the law address if drugs were used? Should the law address if a child was raped by an adult? Should the law address whether the man who was assaulted was a suboordinate of the woman who assaulted him, which is why even though there was no force it was definitely assault? What if the victim was wearing tight pants? What if the victim sent a facebook message to the attacker the next day inviting them to a movie?

    Or do we just leave all that up to the jury's opinions?

    (Hint: There is a right answer here, backed up by numerous studies and statistics about how many people get convicted of rape and what their skin color is...)

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  30. Two thoughts.  First, do you desire single payer health care specifically, or just universal health care?  Single payer health care is just one system of universal health care.  It's not the only one used in countries that have successful universal health care systems, and it's not necessarily the best universal health care system either in general or for America specifically.  I (like most people) don't know enough about health policy to have a strong view on what system of universal health care would be best, and from conversations with some people who are into health policy I get the sense that many wonks do not think single payer would be the most effective choice for America.

    Second, courts (and thus lawyers) provide a non-violent system for settling disputes, even very severe and intractable ones.  I tend to think that this is a core function of society rather than societal overhead.  Of course, I'm biased on this point.

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  31. Robert Bohl - I don't know off hand.

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  32. Robert Bohl did you post comments? I see our back and forth, but not a bunch of comments on your OP or anywhere else ... what am i missing?

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  33. You're missing nothing, William. I asked for a permission it turned out I no longer needed.

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  34. Thank you William Nichols  and all for this topic and discussion. Its always a treat when you can have sane discussion on the internet.

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  35. Christopher Amherst Fascinating. So, I may have less empathy for a 25 year old male in grad school than ... anyone else in the world? That ... may actually make sense to me. Because that kid is a jerk and needs to grow up.

    Rowan Cota So, a personal rule I've developed over the years is to strive not to practice the Socratic method when it comes to sexual assault. I've never seen it end well.

    With that in mind: I feel like -- and perhaps I am wrong! -- that there is a maxim underlying all of these edge cases. That is, the same one. And the maxim is something like: The actions of the victim are immaterial to the severity of the assault. That is (and do tell me if I've gotten this wrong), that is ought not matter if a victim was drinking, recreationally using drugs, in short pants or naked in the streets. It doesn't matter if she goes to breakfast with him the next day. It doesn't matter if the gender is different from the one I have assigned, done because simplicity and perceived commonality.

    That is: there is no action by the victim that makes it OK, and the criminal justice system should not be allowed to use the actions of the victim to excuse the perpetrator.

    Neither the cops, nor anyone else should be able to bring these things into evidence; they are immaterial. Actually implementing that is hard hard hard, and maybe impossible. And, certainly not what we do today.

    My mother is a lawyer. When she first become a lawyer, she did family law. In particular, she tried to help women get away from abusive shitholes. Eventually, she stopped and went into state government. I remember one story, where an abused woman wanted to get all the money back she had paid my mother. Because, she went back to the guy so she didn't need the lawyer fees ... 

    That still makes me kind of sad.

    But, the point here is not to be right. The point is to come closer to truth, together. My instinct is those edge cases primarily fail due to reasons of victim blaming.

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  36. Now what if both people are too drunk to consent, and one victim feels assaulted?

    (If/when I can't hang in this convo I'll bow out, but in this limited space I am willing to play thought experiment for now.)

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  37. Rowan Cota Are you baiting me? That is, is there empirical evidence that you know about on this?

    Also, if we are going to go into the world where this could go down and the criminal justice system would take it seriously, then I need to also pretend that the criminal justice system is moral and just. That, somehow, sending someone through it will produce a world with, as the vlogbrothers would say, less world suck. For sake of argument, let's pretend it is run by shrinks who try to help you. This is not longer a matter of punishment, but of correcting antisocial traits that have lead to harm to others.

    If that's not the case, then avoid it like the plague. So, continuing with that pretense, we start with the premise that the actions of the victim are immaterial. Then, by definition, it does not matter that the drunkenness was both sided. It comes to drinking and then committing sexual violence.

    Which is not OK, and you get to go to the reprogramming tank. Which is a bit scary.

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  38. [ I'm heading out in a few minutes, folks. I'll leave this open. I'll monitor occasionally, and if it turns repugnant will close comments. Be good. ]

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  39. William Nichols - That is a case I recently listened to the non-victim half of. As in I am conveying something that happened in my real life. I promise it's not meant to be bait.

    And we're talking about human beings needing complex law BECAUSE human beings are incapable of perfect justice. THAT was my point. Law is complex because people are complex.

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  40. Could the thread maybe be a little less cred-checky? Could we all maybe agree that we're reasonable adults approaching a table from the perspective of knowledgeable adults?

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  41. (Just FYI for anyone who comes after, I am muting this thread because otherwise I will lose the rest of my day on it.)

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  42. Rowan Cota I agree that complex people need complex laws because how else to you cover all of the weasel stuff that people try to get by on the "technically not illegal". I still think there are a lot of cases were laws are needlessly long, complex and full of loophole and exceptions. Those are not things to cover the edge cases, those are so that important people (ie companies) can save money, make money, or avoid the need to follow the law.

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  43. What do you consider cred checking? I honestly can't say I noticed any on the first read through.

    As for the OP...
    2) I might alter this to just be "Some form of universal health care, but additionally the entire health care industry needs to be reformed"

    III) Again, the criminal justice system as a whole needs total overhaul

    For A B and C I feel that some level of all of them is necessary, but agree with the sentiment that reduction would be useful.

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  44. Remember: Just because you don't notice it doesn't mean it isn't there.

    “Interestingly enough, I’ve had that discussion with economists. Two of them, PhD and everything.” - sets up a credential and insinuates that the other party is less experienced without prior knowledge of the other party’s lived experience. Assumes superiority.

    “I’d love to hear examples. Saying it is so I don’t find particularly compelling” - puts the onus of education on the other party and insinuates lived experience is not or cannot be valid to the discussion at hand.

    “I’d love to hear an example…” - phrasing couched in the idea that such an example doesn’t exist, or, if it does, is so fringe that it shouldn’t matter. Assumes that fringe cases should be discarded or ignored because those people somehow have less validity to expect reasonable justice.

    “My mother is a lawyer.” - assumes relationship to someone with a law degree commutes knowledge of law above and beyond the lived experience of others in the conversation. (I happen to know Rowan worked as an office administrator for a non-profit dealing with various laws, followed by an office administrator for a law office for a number of years. You don’t know that. So throwing that into the ring feels like a really slimy attempt at silencing from a position of authority.)

    “Is there empirical evidence that you know about on this?” - again assumes the other speaker was operating from a position of inferior knowledge or hyperbole, argument from bad faith.

    And further, all of these instances were directed at the only woman in the thread. Men were treated with respect and assumption of basic knowledge necessary to argue in the space. Honestly, this thread reads as pretty extremely aggressive to women, as the language directed to her is coded with the assumption that her knowledge is either inferior or invalid, or she is ignored completely. You wonder why she peaced out? It’s because it was made VERY clear she isn’t welcome.

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  45. And that, folks, is how the Socratic method and discussions of sexual assault never go well together. Take people of good will, and put the conversation to a specific item that is intensely emotional, and arguments break down.

    For the record: Rowan Cota , you are entirely welcome here. You are asked questions not to suggest you do not have knowledge, but because you are the only one who does. Tony, Robert, a few others I know in person and have a good personal rapport with. I know where they are coming from, and often know what they mean much easier than I do you. Hence, questions.

    For everyone: This post, and the style of argument, is not about being right or wrong. It is not about sticking to an original position. It is about a search for truth, for better understanding. Point, counter point, counter counter point, until we all come to a newfound understanding and better relationship to the truth. This isn't about sticking to ones guns, or trying to find fault in the other.

    As such, keeping such strongly emotional topics as sexual assault x-carded is probably reasonable. If anyone wishes to have that conversation, we can do so, but in a less public setting.

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  46. Matt Johnson Hi! I don't think we know each other; Am I in your circles, or did you find this post through some other means?

    Thoughts:
    2) Sure. I used single-payer as a broad place holder, and where my thoughts currently were. No real disagreement that the health care industry is in need of additional overhaul, and that the key thing is not having insurance is awful.

    In particular, needing to go to an ER because an urgent care won't take you because you don't have insurance is ridiculous. Not being able to get a yearly physical because no insurance is atrocious. These items are fairly quick hit, and would do a lot of good.

    III. No doubt. The notion that incarcerating someone for their lives is somehow beneficial? I don't get it. This doesn't make any particular sense to me. Instead, counselling and rehabilitation to help people who have hurt others reintegrate into society and not be a jerkface anymore.

    A-C: Oh, sure. We need some laws. And we need some lawyers and stock brokers. And hellfire missiles may even have a place, as Tony Lower-Basch has pointed out. Much as a tweet contains a heck of a lot of overhead bundled up around the message, but we agree that the message is the important thing.

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  47. Rowan Cota I am very much interested in other areas where the laws complications are important to shield people. It seems like most of these need to exist due to systematic disenfranchisement and jerkface behavior. If we reform the prison complex to help create better people, have a minimum basic income such poverty is effectively eliminated, and have free health care for all -- in that world, then I think our laws can start to get a lot simpler.

    That is, I posit that a whole lot of our needed complications are because we have to struggle to eat and live. Because it is harder to get hired and live if you are of a disenfranchised population. If we can use the system to eliminate a lot of these problems, then -- maybe -- things get less complicated.

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  48. Sam Zeitlin Yeah, I want to eliminate medical bankrupcies and let everyone see a doctor when they are sick. Whatever system we do that, I am not sufficiently knowledgeable to have a real opinion. Whether we do that by letting anyone who wants to join medicare/medicaid, or offer a cheap (free?) government healthcare plan, I don't know.

    What I posit is that extended some measure of health care to everyone, we would reduce health care costs while improving outcomes.

    On courts and lawyers: Sure, we need some. I wonder how much of our civility is due to building a system around us where it is expected, and how much is caused by exporting the most violent members of our society.

    Fun story: there was an experiment performed in Chicago one summer. The idea was to figure out cheap ways to reduce crime. turns out, paying people not to commit crimes actually works, maybe. If you can identify the people most likely to be in violent altercations and then pay every week when they do not commit violence, then overall violence goes down.

    Because violence spreads like a disease, and getting rid of patient zero makes it all better. More or less.

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  49. William Nichols I believe It's because of our shared Mickey Schulz connection that I see your stuff pop up from time to time. Though now that I actually look at your profile I find it amusing that you went to CMU, as I currently work at Pitt.

    The paying people not to be violent thing is interesting. I really wonder how much crime would be reduced if people didn't feel pressure to just survive. There's no way it would drop to zero, I'm not that optimistic, but it just seems like there's a large swath of criminals that develop solely out of the need to provide food and shelter for themselves or their family.

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  50. I second your notion that getting people broad access to medicine will reduce overall medicine costs.  Frankly, if we could make checkups mandatory, that would reduce medicine costs as well.

    Preventive medicine is much cheaper than treating what it prevents.  Only treating people when they end up in the ER is the fiscal equivalent of only letting you bring your car in for repairs when it explodes ... but guaranteeing every possible effort to fix it, then.

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  51. Matt Johnson Cool, Mickey is awesome. I've added you to my outer circle.

    and yeah, you absolutely won't get zero crime. But, given the cost of incarceration, it ... might even be cheaper to just give people enough money to live?

    I don't know. That's admittedly out there, and I'd need to do actual research before I posit it.

    Tony Lower-Basch It might, though I am not a fan of making things mandatory. My desire for personal liberty cuts deep -- and even I only go see the doctor because I want my script. I've said as much "Look doc, I'm fat. We know that. My cholesterol is fine, so is my blood pressure. Now give me my meds, or I'll go to someone who will."

    Agreed on the absurdity of ER visits. I fear the ER for a variety of reasons, the most obvious being that I have no idea what it will cost.

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  52. Also: Tony Lower-Basch Fine: hellfire missiles may, in some cases, reduce world suck. :-P

    I'd still rather do nation building than nation destroying. But, it is sometimes impossible.

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  53. This shouldn’t counter what anyone has said, I am just adding a bit of what I learned to the convo. 

    A few people I know from NSDM talked with me about how hard it is make things better in Afghanistan. Prior to that talk I thought we could just build them some roads, and infrastructure and maintaining those things would provide jobs and start the recovery. During that talk, and a some reading I did after I learned that how hard it is to lift nations like that out of the world suck. Basically, you could build them whatever you wanted, you can even toss food and money at them, but unless you are willing to keep doing that for a long long time, it woke bring real change. 

    The reason it won’t bring real change is because their basic education level is so low. Most can’t read, or write. Written instructions, warning labels, and the like do not benefit them. You can train some of them, but when something happens and they leave the job or die, if you are not there to train the next guy many times no one else can train them either.  So it breaks down that the nation just doesn’t have the general education at this point to support modern infrastructure, or complex industry. 

    Afghanistan is sitting on a ton of lithium, but you would have to import the work force to get to it, and that wouldn’t help the average person living there in a meaningful way. And doing that is an issue because it’s become an unstable narco-state so no one that has the resources to import workers, and build the mines is willing to do that because who knows how long things could be stable enough to make it worth it. 

    This is part of the reason one of the first things we do when we start to train their police/military forces is that we get them in to the classroom and we teach them how to read and write. We give them an education that they have never had before. Sadly the turnover rate makes this really hard to do. 

    The only fix I can think of over there is wide spread education programs and billions of dollars pours in to the nation to promote that effort. Sadly with the opium trade, the Taliban being against such efforts and their current 13th century life style not really requiring a better education it would be a long hard and mostly unfruitful road.

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  54. Ryan Good: Unless we, as a nation, actually got it into our heads that our major economic and cultural bottleneck is that there are not enough people, locally and globally, with the resources and education to consume what we are producing.

    But frankly, that seems like a good case for "reasonable investment in people starts at home." I don't expect us to get there on foreign policy before a sea change in domestic.

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  55. Ryan Good Interesting. So, I suppose, one question becomes: Is there a discernible route from a violent feudal system to a less violent, educated democratic system with education and roads and enough food? Is it virtuous to push other societies in that direction? Is it selfish? Is there a way to measure these things?

    Those aren't easy questions. Nor are they meant to be answered. 

    Primarily, I think we veer to far towards the violent end of the spectrum.

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  56. I can only talk about Afghanistan, really, but there the issue is that there are billions of dollars to be had in the opium trade. The farmers that grow it see very, very little of it. However if they do all the right things for the people they are growing it for they may not be not be killed or have their family molested. We have tried to get them grow other crops, but the war lords are a bit more persuasive and really persistent… because you know… billions of dollars are to be had. So at this point the only way I could see changing things is to eliminate the war lords. But if you do that you need to also make sure new ones don’t move in, and you need to provide a new means of making a living. 

    Add in the remote nature of things out there, and the cost in lives and treasure and you start to wonder about why you are doing it. The reason the US is interested in doing it is not because we want to improve the lives of the poor. It’s because of the massive amount of money our opposition gets out of it. So since that is our priority, it’s easier to drop bombs. I am not saying the bombing is right, it’s just the least hard way to achieve goals. 

    I however do not think it really does achieve those goals, because I think it produces more people that want to kill us. I hope that someday we can show that like housing the homeless is cheaper than what we are doing now, the elevation of a people is cheaper and more effective in the long run than bombing them.  Its going to take both facts and a change of hearts and minds to see that change however.

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  57. > It’s because of the massive amount of money our opposition gets out of it. So since that is our priority, it’s easier to drop bombs. 

    Well, sure. I think we mostly know that: our foreign policy is not based on humanitarian concerns, but wouldn't it be nice if it was?

    I want to see what happens if we give out money and education to everyone, but I'm  not sure how we get there.

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  58. I suspect the answer, painful as it is to hear, to "How do we get there?" is "Excruciatingly slowly, over the course of generations."

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